Coming up on DTNs, Zoom wants to sell its video conferencing tech to others, HP's latest salvo in the battle for the creative computing class and Microsoft's data on the coming hybrid workplace. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us once again, host of AVXL, Patrick Norton is back on the show. How's it going, Patrick? It's going extremely well. Metaphysical conversations and philosophy aside. Oh, indeed, we were just having those sorts of things about Jack Dorsey's 2.9 million sale of his first tweet. We were also talking about our favorite backup drives and tacos. Get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A fire at a factory owned by a subsidiary of auto chipmaker Rene says electronics looks to worsen the ongoing semiconductor shortage with the company predicting at least a month to resume operations. Two thirds of the chips made at the factory were automotive chips. U.S. Representative Dave Siciline told Axios that a house judiciary subcommittee on antitrust plans to create a series of smaller antitrust bills targeting major technology companies. Saying the number could be 10 or more. He said the approach would let more bipartisan support happen on targeted issues and would make it harder for large tech companies to coordinate on lobbying against one larger antitrust bill. Bydance's new first games unit acquired the Shanghai based gaming studio Monton, Muntan technology makers of the MOBA mobile legends and a deal that Reuters sources say is worth $4 billion. Bydance reportedly outbid 10 cents, which makes competing MOBAs honor of Kings and leagues of legends. Senior advisor to President Trump Jason Miller told Fox News that the former president will return to social media in quote about two or three months with quote his own platform. Miller predicted the platform will attract tens of millions of users but said President Trump is conducting meetings with several companies about the platform indicating it is still in the planning stages. The South Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo sources say that negotiations for LG to sell its phone business to a group including Volkswagen have failed to reach a deal. LG has reportedly shelved a planned first half rollout of new smartphones and may shutter the business entirely. Maybe they should just make their phone business an NFT. Yeah, you could get $2.9 million. All right, let's talk a little more about HomePods. Little news around HomePods. Bloomberg and iFixit confirmed that the HomePod mini includes an inactive temperature and humidity sensor buried in the bottom edge of the case. That's why iFixit missed it on the first round because it's in the case facing out near the power cable. Mark Gurman sources say Apple considered using the sensor to connect with smart thermostats as well as automatically triggering other actions. They could still do that with a firmware update. Gurman sources also say that Apple has been developing new speakers with screens and cameras but that no launch is imminent. Ooh, the Apple Echo show. Yes, the Apple HomePod show. Something like that, yeah. E-Show, iShow, the iShow. Listen, somebody please tell me why I should not be more enraged that there is a sensor buried in the HomePod mini that might... I've seen a lot of rage. Oh, I've seen a lot of rage. Yeah, from people saying this is exactly what they do. Here they go again.  It's like temperature and humidity. Okay. Well, sure. That is a privacy point, I guess. If you don't want to ever be able to share that with anybody or have it reported. I'm going to sell it to Big Weather. Exactly. It's just one of those things where it's like, I don't know. Is this the sort of thing that is so upsetting, especially because, listen, so Apple's just continuing the HomePod. HomePod mini has been selling pretty well. They're all in on that. The idea that it would be able to connect to a smart thermostat or, I don't know, some other way that, you know, might be able to measure the humidity in your house. That all makes sense to me. I just don't know why people are so up in arms about something where... I guess it's the hidden quality of it. Yeah, it's a thing they didn't tell us about in a smart speaker, which there's just kind of a general aura of those things. They're always spying on you. They're always spying on you. Here they go again. Smart speakers. I mean, the rage is thin. Given that you're not going to find out about it until there's... Maybe they're going to do an update. They're going to bring a feature. There's going to be 2,000 pages of lawyer-generated boilerplate that you're going to agree to. They're probably going to do anonymized... Can we anonymously browse your... People are looking for reasons to rage. And given, you know, most of the people buying this are so deep in the Apple ecosystem. Apple pretty much knows everywhere they go do think... Anonymized in the most part. You know, maybe less anonymized than others. But the idea of getting... I don't know. It seems real slim to get raged about. Yeah. Because the other alternatives... This is akin to Bluetooth... There being a Bluetooth radio in the iPod Touch before they had Bluetooth support for the iPod Touch. And then later, they did a firmware update. Suddenly the iPod Touch could support Bluetooth. I fully expect them at some point to push a firmware update to the HomePod Mini and be like, oh, HomeKit now supports, you know, different room temperatures with your thermostat thanks to this sensor. Your Ecobee can use your HomePod Mini as a remote sensor. Because I was literally thinking if they told people the sensors were there, there would be outrage that the sensors weren't doing anything useful from the moment they bought them. I know. Yeah. That's another way to look at this is, oh, cool. Will the HomePod Mini soon be able to work with my Ecobee? That would be great. I'm more enraged. On Snobo S-Cast this week, I thought Brother Tech had a great analysis of the fact that HomePod being phased out, granted it was a bit of a failure, might be an indication that Apple is ready to put out a new product. Because that's what happens with Macs when a Mac stops selling. It usually means, ah, they've got a new model in the works. So I was more outraged with German sources saying that no new launch of a new speaker is imminent. I'm like, oh, man, I would have thought that this would be the perfect time. We're expecting an April announcement now, since it doesn't look like there's going to be one in March. I don't know. The new HomePod Mini with a screen, that's actually more interesting to me than any of this stuff. The HomePod Hub or something like that. Something like that. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's perfect for Apple. Agreed. Well, Zoom will begin selling access to its API for companies to embed video calling into their own products. The service will use Zoom's technology, but not carry any Zoom branding. Companies pay .0035 cents per minute after the first 10,000 minutes of use per month. It's not that much, but would add up, obviously. This could lead a healthcare provider to add video calling to its app or a social media company to embed live streaming. Companies could integrate Zoom previously, but the Zoom brand remained in those integrations. So this will put Zoom in competition with similar offerings from Amazon and Twilio. This comes as a broader effort to unify the company's developer initiatives. There's now a central hub for developer resources at developer.zoom.us, and the company's also launching a new dashboard with more detail to analytics and usage statistics. So yeah, everybody's expecting video conferencing to decline a little bit as people start going back into the office. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. So Zoom trying to get ahead of that and say, okay, what other revenue streams can we have going in? And this is them doing what Amazon did with AWS. We had to build this provider for us to do Amazon.com. Let's try to make money off of it, and it worked great. I'm not saying it's going to work great for Zoom, but this is Zoom trying to do the same thing. We built a platform for video conferencing. So now let's take that platform that we've been using and license it out to others so that they can put it, you know, your bank can put it in an app so you could Zoom conference with tech support, stuff like that.  It has become that, yeah. It has become that, and it's not because it's the best product. It's certainly the best product for some people, and I got no problem with Zoom, but every time someone says, oh, let's get on a Zoom call, I'm like, well, for our purposes, is that the best? Here are some other options. Certain other platforms will allow me, as a podcast producer, to download a WAV file, for example, rather than the crappier MP3 file. There are lots of options, but Zoom has become the household name. That is what people equate what we have been doing, you know, whether it's kids at school or people who are unable to go to the office to be doing, and so it makes sense that the company is expanding on that success. I think something to think about here is, I mean, you want to talk about stepping in dog group and finding a bag of gold. So, you know, the quote on this is the founder and chief executive officer, Eric Juan. In fiscal year 2021, we significantly scaled our business to provide critical communications and collaborative services right in response to the pandemic. So just to put this into perspective, they made $623 million in 2019. They made $2.65 billion in 2020. Huge scale in business, which means a huge scale in infrastructure, which means the nightmare for this crew is assuming they didn't run everything on Amazon Web Services, you know what I mean, where they're doing it, where they're paying for it to use somebody else at services, assuming they invested a lot of this, they want to keep that hardware running. I would like if Zoom maybe did some things to improve the interface, the user experience, the audio quality and the ability to attach something other than a webcam to it, but I have my own particular access to grind with almost every video conferencing platform I've used, especially Skype, which we're on right now. But Spotify had a good year. Netflix had a great year, but probably the best year of all, it's like way over something nuts, like 370% revenue increase over the previous year in the fourth quarter. This is nuts. And so they probably have staggering amounts of money invested in all of this infrastructure, which they're a little worried about, given what's happening in our next story. Yeah, yeah. Before we get there though, I do want to point out that back in December, Zoom signed a multi-year contract with AWS. They basically run on AWS Oracle and some of their own stuff, so... Oh, that's funny. So it's, I think your point is still well-made, even if it's not their own hardware that they're running on, is they built a system. You know, they spent a lot of money creating a system that works at a high capacity. They want to keep that capacity up. You're absolutely right. But to your point, we are headed back into the office. Microsoft will start a limited reopening of its own headquarters in Redmond and Seattle on March 29th. This comes as stage four of Microsoft's six-stage reopening plan, the soft reopening. Though offices are reopening, Microsoft isn't ready to just get back to businesses usual, considering working from home part-time as standard. To that effect, company also released its work trend index report. This isn't just about Microsoft. This is about everybody. They studied 30,000 people across 31 countries, along with using data from Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn. The study found that 73% of respondents want to continue with flexible remote work. They want the option to work from home sometimes. Hybrid work seems to be the order of the day because 67% want more in-person time with work teams. Comparing February 2020 with February 2021, self-reported productivity remained the same. Didn't go down, didn't go up. But Microsoft found that the intensity of work increased significantly. Time in Microsoft teams increased two and a half times. Average meeting times increased 28%. If you thought that wasn't possible, well, it happened. That's exacerbated by the fact that 62% of meetings weren't planned. They were ad hoc. Hey, can you jump on teams for a second? We need to talk about this. 54% of employees feel overworked as a result of all of this. Generation Z was found to struggle the most with engaging in meetings and calls in the past year. However, the switch to remote work has opened up jobs to new applicants. An analysis of the LinkedIn economic graph shows that women, Gen Z, and those without a graduate degree are most likely to apply for remote jobs, and there were a lot more of those jobs for them to apply for. But there's also a worker disconnect. 46% say their employer does not help with remote work expenses. 37% say their company is asking too much of them right now, given the situation. And if you feel satisfied and thriving, you're probably a millennial or Gen X male. If you feel like you're just surviving or struggling, according to this survey anyway, Gen Z, a woman, or a frontline worker. So we are now headed into the second grade experiment. At this time last year, on this very show, we were talking about, oh my gosh, so many people are going to have to work from home. This is a big experiment. We're going to find out all these things about what works from work from home and what doesn't. And now we're about to begin another new experiment, which is, well, we figured out what works for work from home. So we're going to let people continue to do that some of the time. But we want to bring them back into the office some of the time. So the experiment for 2021 is hybrid. Nobody's ever done it at this scale. It's all the same things we said last year. Nobody's ever done hybrid at this scale. We'll find out, does it really work? Is it good to have people working in the office sometimes and working from home the rest of the time? What works about it? What does it work? The rules, et cetera. You know, some of the numbers that you mentioned, Tom, one that stuck out to me was meeting times increasing 20%. Wow. Like everyone's just having more meetings. No. Well, it's sort of like, remember when we were all in an office and Patrick might say to me, Sarah, do you have a second?  Was that a meeting? No, not really. It was just sort of, that's what happens all the time when you're in an office with people that you are working with and collaborating with. Well, you can't do that when everybody's at home. So this whole hybrid thing to me is what I think is going to be the most interesting part about it is, and we've touched on this on the show before, is which people who are not there, you know, on any given day where there might be a few people, key members of your team that are in the office and you're not because you're on your own schedule that have, you know, a pow-wow of sorts, a meeting of sorts and you're not involved or it's too hard to get you involved and that affects your work going forward. So, I mean, it's interesting looking at this because I was reading an article last week like Target's given up 30% of its office space in, I want to say, downtown Minneapolis. I've had neighbors around here in St. Louis, where they were basically like, well, productivity's up and everybody's happy, but I think our manager misses being able to seize domain at their desks in front of him. So they're coming back into the office. I can't imagine. So Gen Z, that's like 96-ish. People are in there like just at home. 24 and younger usually around there. Yes. I can't imagine. As somebody who, you know, is a Gen X male and has dealt with a lot of office situations and is used to dealing with new situations, like I've been in some insane online meetings in the last year and I can't imagine what it would be like in your first job dealing with, you know, all of these people.  Do I say something? I mean, what a nightmare because all the things you learn in an office, you're not learning remotely. And it's, I will say, one of the big messes I worked with with one organization last year where some people emailed, some people used the chat in Google, some people used proprietary, like, you know, somebody used a secure chat line, some people occasionally phoned, and then there were two different video messaging systems being used. And it was a nightmare because person A would text you, but the other person, or not text, would text you in Gmail, then you would have to contact somebody else and, like, signal. And it's messy. I cannot, and this was maybe with a group of 10 people, and it was a nightmare. I cannot imagine what it's like for an organization the size of Microsoft. It's going to be really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Microsoft, in its article, talking a lot about the hardware you need, of course, you know, multiple screens to have the people who aren't in, be present in the same rooms as the people who are in. So if you want to get ahead of the game right now, start your medium think piece on the asymmetry of the hybrid workplace. That is one of the first ones I expect to see, is, you know, how people who are working from home in the hybrid workplace are left out of meetings because the people in the office can easier interact. It's definitely coming. We're going to get that kind of stuff. Hey, folks, join in the conversation in our Discord. We're all in the same level playing field there. You can join it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. HP refreshed the Envy X360 15 laptop. That's their 15-inch laptop. Now starts at $900 if you want an Intel 11th gen core processor or a little cheaper $750 if you want the AMD Ryzen 7 processors. Both 15-inch models weigh in at 1.8 kilograms. Come with a magnetic active pen. You want to do a little art. Offer optional 4K OLED displays. There's also a 17.3-inch HP Envy 17 with Intel 11th gen processors. That one has options for up to a terabyte drive and 32 gigabytes of RAM. That one also starts at $999. All three of these laptops include a 19% larger touchpad than the previous gen. Optional NVIDIA MX450 graphics available for pre-order now shipping in April. And HP pushing that creator line also announced the HP 930 Creator wireless mouse has created right in the name seven programmable buttons, 12-week battery life, pairs up to three devices. It's a nice mouse. $90, chip in later this spring. HP told Therat.com, quote, the HP Envy X360 15 and HP Envy 17 are designed for the way creators are working now, giving people the freedom to create and stay connected from anywhere. These are nice incremental upgrades of the HP Envy line for sure. I don't think there's any debating that. But we're really seeing, you know, the war for the mind of the creator. If you're the creator class, they want your money, whether they be Apple, HP, Intel, or somebody else, right, Patrick? Well, you know, I think they want the influencer class more than the actual creators, maybe. Wow, because one brings the other. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, okay, first up, Apple's really interesting because of their move to their own processors and the staggering performance bump that brings, like I'm actually thinking about going back to Apple, which is something I never thought I'd say.  You know, that's like one more than most of, I think, the mice I've seen out there. Multiple mouse attachments is not, you know, that unusual, like two computers. I want to see AMD produce more mobile parts and have them more available because of the really incredible performance on that. The other thing is, you know, we were talking earlier, Good Day Internet, is look, if you've got $500 to $700 for a laptop, it's kind of amazing how much, you know, if you shop carefully, it's kind of amazing how much performance you're getting at this point. You know, if you, for everybody who's not, say, editing massive video files or working with staggeringly large static files, almost any laptop at this point is going to give you an excellent experience for day-to-day work. You know, it's also kind of crazy looking at these, somebody actually really pushing a 17-inch laptop because that's something that people, everybody did because there was always a market for that, but it's kind of funny to have that being like, forget about your desktop, look at our great big screen on this laptop. And by the way, you're going to have to buy a new laptop bag for that because it's not going to fit in anything you own currently, which sounds silly until you're carrying a $3,000 laptop that actually literally won't fit in any bag you own and you're terrified to leave the house with it, which kind of defeats the purpose of having your fantastic mobile environment. They look nice though. Oh, I also have to, I should say that I have to disclose I was a host of an HP data-sized events in the recent past, so don't believe anything I say about HP because they paid me money from an entire laptop. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, the 17-inch thing is, it's kind of funny that forum factor coming back around. I had a 17-inch MacBook Pro back in, I don't know, 2011? Yeah, something like that. And at the time, I was doing some video editing, so I was like, this is great. Like, this is my main computer. This is what I'm going to use. This is the best screen and power that I need. But Patrick, you're right. It was actually very specific about what I could put that in because it was huge. I actually still have it, it's around here somewhere. But yeah, to just sort of be like, yeah, 17 inches, most people don't have ways to be portable with something that's supposed to be portable, and that's the whole selling point about it is that it's portable. It's big. I'm giggling because I had an uncle who is six foot four and probably a little bit maybe even wider than I am in the shoulders. And I was like, you don't want that laptop. It's too big. And he got it. And like, three months later, it was like, I see what you mean about the big laptops. I'm now envisioning you with a backpack sticking out of either side of your shoulders because the laptop screen is so big. Yeah. I mean, I had to use it recently because my old MacBook Pro had died. And I was like, well, it still works. But oh my God, I can't believe this form factor was something that I was using all this time. Well, the preservation group Hidden Palace, have you heard of them, has obtained 752 PS2 games, prototypes and demos from not only collectors, but also shutter developers and defunct media outlets as part of a project deluge initiative. God of War two. Katamari, Demacy. Katamari, Domacy. Domacy. Okami and the Ratchet and Clank series all there along with E3 demos like Shadow of the Colossus and some rough alpha games for titles like Def Jam, Fight for New York and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. Hidden Palace says it's checked for differences from retail versions and to make sure that the prototypes will run in emulators. Yeah, this is a history project. This is if you want to see, if you're like into the special features, if you want to see what it was like before it was released, what are some of the things they tried and didn't work or got rid of? This is a treasure trove of that kind of thing. Patrick, you had a really good comparison to music for this. Yeah, I was like, this is like when you buy that reissue of an album and they have the demos and the alternate takes. And if the artist really despises you a bunch of remixes of it. So I was laughing because, you know, as again, we're talking about good day internet. It's, you know, a lot of these are final, they're featuring complete. They probably won't run. There's already issues with the PS2 only emulator only being in about 90%. So it's really, it's like, oh, so that's what that sounded like before we went in the studio. Why? And for good day internet. For good day internet listeners. My drive just finished copying over in case you were wondering. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Javon in Jamaica who has more ideas about what we should do with our DTNS meets twist. That's the Speak in Science crossover show that's coming up in April. Javon says, how about the question of when we will be able to download edible fast food? Javon says, I want to download and eat a pizza. Can't be difficult if we perfect teleportation, right? Or should we be making more intelligent machine robots or should we be making ourselves more intelligent? For example, let's inject nanoparticles into our own bodies. Enhanced physical, mental, social, health abilities. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. So don't forget we're doing a crossover with this week in Science, April 17th at 7 p.m. eastern time. More details to follow. But what do you want us to talk about with Dr. Kiki and Blair and Justin and me and Sarah and Roger? So keep those emails coming. Thank you, Javon. That's a good one. Indeed. And if you have any other questions, comments, ideas, thoughts about anything that we talk about in any of our shows, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also, I'd like to shout out patrons from all over the world. To them, they include DeGrascia A. Daniels, Dustin Campbell and Andrew Bradley. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Joshua Tunt, who just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, new boss. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us today. Patrick, what's been going on at AVXL? Oh, we're talking about subwifers and some of the craziness with home theater and audio and the nightmare of well, just a lot of active noise cancelling headphones are awful. And I got a favor to ask everybody out there. If you've got a tech question, not just a home theater question, do me a favor tweet at Patrick Norton, because I'm looking for some tech questions. All right, very exciting. Hey folks, if you speak Spanish or you know somebody who speaks Spanish and you would like some tech headlines in Spanish, we have a show for you. Dano 5 minutos y te daremos las noticias mas importantes en el mundo de la tecnología. O te devolvemos tu dinero. Escucha, noticias de tecnología express disponible en español. You can find it at dailytechnusho.com slash n-t-x. We're live Monday through Friday on this show at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnusho.com slash live and guess what? We're going to do this all again tomorrow. I'll be back with Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


Well, thank you all for coming in. With the second oldest population in the nation, 45% of Brahmans are either retired or about to retire. As we know, many of them do so elsewhere. I'm sure each of us in this room have heard from people who tell us they just simply cannot afford to retire here in Vermont. Many of them leave the state, and those who stay are burdened with the increasing cost of living while on fixed incomes. They deserve, as much as anyone else, to live with the dignity of a retirement they earn through a lifetime of work. Part of what's made us so uncompetitive with other states is Vermont was only one of a handful of states to fully tax the federal tax proportion of Social Security benefits. In my budget address in January, I asked the legislature to join me in changing that. And I'm very pleased to be here today to report that together we did just that. Working with the legislature, AARP, and many others, we were able to eliminate the income tax on Social Security benefits for low and moderate income Vermonters. Mr. Sandsom will go into more detail shortly. But this new exemption saves about $37,000, low and moderate income Vermonters, about $5 million this year. And that will continue to grow. For folks on a fixed income, these savings each year will make a difference. But we have more work to do to seek tax relief and make Vermont more affordable for retirees and all Vermonters. I want to thank the administration Secretary Suzanne Young, Finance Commissioner Adam Gresham, and Commissioner Sandsom and their entire team for their hard work. I also want to thank the legislature, the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, for their work to strengthen my original proposal so we can implement a full exemption for some this year. And I'm pleased to have here today Senator McDonald and Senator Sussi, as well as representatives Ansel, Baser, McFawn, Sullivan, Turner, Wright, Meyers, and Shaw here today. Did I miss anyone? Great. And to AARP, we're pleased to have Greg Marshall on. Marshall Dunn and his colleagues here as well. Thank you for your support and for ensuring you understand the impact of this tax on your members. While we have much more work to do, this relief, coupled with the Working Family Taxpayer Protection Act, provided $30 million in income tax relief. Additionally, we ensure two consecutive years without raising a single tax or fee in the general fund and level property tax rates for residential payers. With that, we were able to take critical steps to helping Vermonters keep more of what they earn and move up the economic ladder. As we continue to work to make Vermont more affordable, grow the economy, and protect the most vulnerable, these steps help us move closer to each one of those goals. I'll now invite AARP State Director Greg Marshall Dunn to say a few words on behalf of AARP. Thank you, Greg. Thanks, Governor. Probably won't surprise you that no issue, federal or state, is more important to AARP than protecting the financial security of older Americans. And social security is a critical component in that financial safety net. Social security provides a basic foundation of income security for over 143,000 Vermont retirees and their families. Seven out of 10 Vermont social security beneficiaries rely on that money as a primary source of their income. Over the past year, we've heard from many older Vermonters who are struggling to make ends meet, and the income they get from social security is absolutely critical lifeline for them. While much of this work in this area has been done at the federal level, the practice of state taxing Vermonters and their benefits clearly needed to be addressed. When we launched an effort in a campaign here in the State House with our members across the state to ask them to contact the governor and their state legislators to let them know how strong they felt about this issue. While the session did last a little longer than I think most people thought it might, we did get it done. We're really happy to be here today to celebrate this accomplishment on behalf of the 37,000 or so low and moderate income Vermonters and retirees who are going to benefit from this new law. Vermont was really only one of a few states that saw tax social security benefits at the income threshold set by the federal government way back in 1984. When the median income of Vermonters was significantly lower, so as a result, the number of Vermonters paying taxes under social security benefits had more than doubled over the past 34 years. The measure fixes this outdated structure and boosts the household budgets for thousands of old Vermonters. Finally, I'd just like to thank Governor Scott and all the legislators that are involved in this. We met with Representative Wright and Representative Ansel many, many months ago and started talking about this issue at a time where I think a lot of people look around and see not a lot getting done in Washington, not a lot of bipartisan cooperation on important issues. It's a very exciting day at AARP and AARP members to see that happening here in Vermont. When we were thrilled to see Democrats and Republicans work together with the governor to get this done, we're really proud to be here today. Thank you. Thanks. Cost answer and commissioner of taxes and I just want to get into some of the details of how this exemption works and what it affects. And before that, I just do want to thank our members of my team that are here today, Andrew Stein, Doug Farnum, Lynette Kemp is here from our office and Deborah Carroll and all of them had a hand in designing this exemption and helping work with legislators and the administration to get this to fruition. Before we get too much into the exemption, it's important in Vermont and what was passed and the brutal impact is important to understand what Greg alluded to a little bit, which is how taxability of social security benefits works at the federal level and how prior to this year it worked in Vermont and only three other states that failed to provide any additional exemptions. But at the federal level, social security benefits depending on your income are taxed up to 85% of them are taxed down to zero depending on your income. But the thresholds to have it completely not taxed at the federal level are quite low, around $30,000 of combined income for married, finally, jointly. Vermont's always, again with those other three states, has always been linked in such a way that if it's taxable at the federal level or whatever portion of your social security benefits or taxable at the federal level flows through and became taxable in Vermont. That now changes because we've expanded that exemption quite a bit. So now the way it'll work is that that taxable portion comes through and goes through a Vermont-based calculation to see if all or some of it is additionally exempt from tax in Vermont. So what I hear a lot about as a CTA and being staying close to the tax preparer community are a lot of anecdotes and stories about the tax competitiveness and the advice that sometimes as faithful Vermonters, these preparers, pains them to give advice to think about moving or going to that second home and making that permanent residence out of state or even moving to a different state where the children are perhaps be closer to the kids and grandkids and to have one more factor in that decision be the fact that there are great tax advantages of doing that has not been good for Vermont as far as tax competitiveness. So along with other things that were in the Working Family Protection Act, this does assist in our tax competitiveness. As we've heard about 145,000 Vermonters receive Social Security benefits. 80,000 of those receive or pay some type of tax at the federal and state level on those Social Security benefits. So about 65,000 are already fully exempt due to the federal calculation. Of the 80,000 that are paying some tax at the federal and state level in Vermont, this will affect, you heard 37,000, almost 40,000 Vermonters or half of Vermonters that are paying Vermonting contacts will pay zero or a portion where we'll have the taxable portion of that be zero to some percentage. So maybe we'll get some benefit from this. Average benefit across that whole population of about 40,000 is $125. The benefit among those that are under the thresholds which I'll go into in a minute can be upwards of $400. And we ran a couple scenarios where folks, Vermont taxable income could go almost a half from like $1,200, not taxable income, sorry, that Vermont tax could go almost a half from about $1,200 to closer to $600 because taking full advantage of this additional exemption. So very generally, married filing joint filers with adjusted gross income, $60,000 or below will no longer pay or have any taxable Social Security income in the Vermont calculation. That benefit phases out for married filing joint between $60,000 and $70,000 proportionally. So if you're halfway in that phase out at $65,000, 50% of your federally taxed Social Security will be exempt in Vermont. So the benefit stretches all the way up to $70,000 for married filing jointly. And then for single filers, everyone under $45,000 of adjusted gross income in the Vermont will have no taxable Social Security included in the Vermont calculation. And then there's the phase out between 45 and 55. So anyone single with $55,000 of adjusted gross income or less and anyone married filing jointly with $70,000 income or less is likely gonna get some benefit from this proposal. And yeah, I just wanted to emphasize again that this is not just retired income. This also affects all recipients of Social Security which includes disability and survivor benefits. So as you can hear from those thresholds, I just mentioned in the populations that this really does help with tax competitiveness, but also it's an aggressive proposal that really helps Vermont's vulnerable populations and helps folks that are struggling on a fixed income to keep more money in their pocket. So that concludes my comments. And I think we'll open up for questions. Sure, maybe if we have questions about this subject first. Sweet. What do you expect the immediate impact is gonna be on the seniors? They're gonna be able to either save more, spend more. What's the biggest benefit? Yeah, well whatever they choose to do with their money, there'll be more money in their pocket every single month than before. And I think that is something that's long overdue, particularly with a vulnerable population. And again, just give some more money to do whatever they need to do to take care of themselves and their households. Why did it take so long to see the situation? Well, it's a good question. I've heard over the last few years about this inequality among states. I chose to move forward on it because I thought they need to be more competitive. We were seeing a number of people, I believe, leaving the state for tax reasons and this was one of the, we didn't need to give them another reason to do so. So just a fairness issue and to make us more competitive with our other states and across the nation. Was this one of the easier asks and easier paths to sort of bipartisanship that you saw this year? Well, it is good news. And when we have bipartisan support, I believe that in the end, because we have surplus money, we have more money coming in that this made it easier and this was the year to do it. So I am very appreciative of the support from a bipartisan standpoint to accomplish this. And I believe that, again, this will be beneficial for all of our moderators as well as those who just seek to retire here and we need to keep them here. If I heard you correctly, you said the work through the session made it better, made the proposal better. What improved? Well, we were going to phase it in over a three-year period. The work of the legislature made it better. They were able to do the accelerating that and do it in one year. So that was the improvement. I believe that was the improvement that was made. Ty, was there anything else? That's it. It's the same administration proposal. They were just, it's effective. It's important to know it's effective now. That's effective in 2018. So to the question of what does it mean for Vermonters, Social Security does not withhold state taxes for the states. So many folks that are there in these income ranges and are primarily there in kind of Social Security, if they have a tax liability or having to pay estimated taxes. So one thing I'm glad you asked the question I forgot to mention is that folks that are working with a tax preparer or do their own estimates, they can wait and potentially get a bigger refund next spring, but they can also look at the estimates that they've been paying before the estimates and perhaps in some cases skip the last quarterly estimate or reduce their quarterly estimates to see more money in their pockets immediately. This change is effective, or is effective for tax year 2018 and also securing reported as of January 118 through the year. And Greg, is there anything else you'd like to add in terms of what the benefit is for the retirees over the, they do with the money, the extra money? I think, you know, much of what you said, Gavin, right?  And so it's an extra two, three, four, five, $800 a year to some people that may not sound like a lot, but the folks living on a fixed income, that's a significant amount of money. And that money is not, you know, it's not gonna go anywhere else, but into the well, you know, somebody's gonna be able to go out to dinner at a local restaurant. They'll spend money in their local communities more. This money is gonna stay in Vermont to spend here.  And we agree with the governor too. This was a pure issue of fairness. We didn't think this was fair at all. And I think that was recognized by both the legislature and the governor. I think it's one of the reasons why we're able to get to this job pretty quickly. If I recall correctly, you didn't actually sign the bill that this measure is contained. Correct. Is there any irony in you taking credit for it then? Well, listen, I don't think I took all the credit for it. I'm giving a lot of credit to the legislature. Couldn't do it alone, as you know. There's bipartisan support, which is important. But as you know, as I think most legislators would acknowledge, I thought the budget was good in a lot of ways. I disagreed with raising a tax in a year when we had a surplus. And that was the basic premise for my vetoing the bill on a couple of different occasions. But in the end, I believe that the meat of the budget itself had a lot of the proposals that I had initiated that we worked together on. So throughout all the drama, even though we had a lot of drama throughout the legislative session towards the end, again, I think that there's a lot of good that came out of it. And we need to acknowledge that. You proposed this social security adjustment. Has this been, and maybe this question for her, President Vancell, has this been discussed in past sessions? Has this been thought about in the year? Yeah, we started looking at it last year, actually. And with this, I think what really happened is the federal tax changes gave us an opportunity to restructure our income tax bill. And so we were thrilled when the administration came in with this proposal and included the social security exemption as well. So we've been looking at it for a couple of years and suddenly we have the opportunity to do it. That's great. Thank you. Any other questions? You're one of four governors that didn't sign the letter recommending the President's nominee for the Supreme Court. Were you asked to sign it in decline or were you not going to ask? This is the part where we're doing it. Is there any more to the answer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you're welcome to say this first. I'm just being here. Is there some representative of a non-partisan audience? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pull it out of the line. Yeah. Yeah. Fire. That's fine. I'm sure you have a hard night. You're right. Clear the run. I'm sure you have a hard night. As I recall, I believe we were asked, that I was asked to sign on the letter from my standpoint as I said last night. I don't want to rubber stamp anyone. I don't know much about the nominee. I believe that there have been a letter asking for a fair and open hearing on the confirmation I would sign it. But to blindly rubber stamp someone that I don't know a lot about, I didn't think it would do great justice to anyone. So I decided not to sign on until I learned more. Senator Leahy is seeking, I guess, about a million documents from the nominee's time working in the White House. Is that something that you think should be reviewed? Well, again, I believe that this nominee should be created just like any other nominee, fully vetted. I believe that there should be those hearings and ask all those important questions. I mean, this is Supreme Court's significant. In many different ways, so I think we need to learn as much about the candidates as possible. And who asked you about the letter? Was it the White House or was it, you know, I get a GA or I can find that out, but I don't know at this point in time. I just don't recall. The Vice Chair of the Republican Party, the State Republican Party, put out a tweet basically criticizing him for not signing the letter. I won't ask you to comment on a tweet, but I will ask, you know, is there a distance between you and the party? And is that a concern to you going into the elections? Well, obviously, you know, I don't want to disagree with the party, but I have to do what I think is right for Vermont and for myself. And again, without knowing the nominee, without doing my homework and looking at the credentials and so forth, I just don't feel as though I can blindly rubbish the nominee of any sort. I don't believe, I'm not sure that anyone should do that, but they chose to go forward with the letter. Just to be clear, you're not saying you opposed the nominee, you're saying you haven't? I haven't said that, because yeah, I don't know much about the nominee. I haven't done much in terms of my homework and trying to research that, but I'm sure it will all come out in the Senate operation hearings. There are some reports out there that are changing your social media policy after taking some criticism for blocking users. Can you talk a little bit about that, why that's happening? Yeah, and I may have Rebecca come up and elaborate on that, but you know, we thought our policy was in terms of trying to keep as open as possible, but you know, I don't tolerate that incivility and disrespectfulness, and I believe that we have also an obligation to make sure that we keep it clean in some respects. When there's racial bias and there's inflammatory remarks made about different categories of people, I believe that we want to be welcoming and opening to all, but when there's that much discourse and really hateful discourse, we felt that it was an obligation to mute that in some way. So we took what the ECLU has suggested, we're trying to change the policy, we unblocked all of those that we blocked, and we're starting over from scratch with the policy that we feel is more in line with what the ECLU would like, but again, as you know, with some of your social media and some of your responses, sometimes you can't tolerate that and we've chose not to tolerate some of them. The ECLU is saying that some of the people that were blocked, according to their reviews, it wasn't just people that were making hateful remarks, it was somebody who was just, they were post your political stances. Rebecca, you answered some of that, because I didn't see them all. So I'm not sure, I don't think it's review, I think it's anecdotal, they have received some anecdotal. Our policy has been, it's been outlined on our page, and just to be really clear, comments have only been deleted when they violated the policy, and the policy is based strictly on vulgarity, language, hate speech, things of that nature, not local viewpoint whatsoever, and they've only been blocked when they repeated the violated that policy. What we took back from the ECLU was that our policy could be more specific in the language, and that's what we're working to fine tune right now, and given that we are going to be more specific, we thought we'll start from scratch again, but it has been exclusively focused, and I would challenge any of you to go to any posts, even prior to the ECLU letter, and find the single post without counter opinions towards the governor on it. So it was not based on that whatsoever, it was exclusive to comments towards, and really focusing on attacks to other folks.  These are the comments that we're deleting, and again, as the governor said, his page is a page for all the monitors of all ages, and everyone should be able to be comfortable coming to the page, expressing constructive criticism, expressing unconstructive criticism in a way that isn't going to be harmful to our kids, setting an example for our kids, or offending entire groups of people with racial, homophobic, so there's an interest in gender individuals, this is what we've been focused on. So we'll fine tune the language to improve and make it more clear as to what's being, what we're moderating, and we'll start from scratch from there. So Rebecca, how close are you to finalizing that policy, because it seems like people have been unblocked now, and... So we won't be moving forward, nobody will be reblocked until we put forward the new policy. So we're still finalizing what that would constitute, what the, and I think we talked about, part of it was procedural, how we were communicating with and documenting that was part of the ACLU's concern, so as we're still finalizing those procedures, so until we have those procedures finalized, we're gonna leave everybody as they are. We do use, and this is something offered by Facebook, where you can put in a preventive filter, and that automatically hides comments. That's still in place, that's something, that's a feature offered by Facebook, it's clearly content neutral because it's just the language used. So is it gonna be like a Wild West until you finish this? Minus the profanity filter. So we do have a profanity filter so that those really bolder terms will be hidden until then, but we're close, we're close. We wanna communicate with the ACLU before we finalize and put the copy forward. You're still free to comment. Was that filter on before? Yes, so that was a majority of, I would say, what was getting hidden through the filter. Oh, so it was automated? A lot of it, no, I wouldn't say all of it, but the attacks on people that may not have used a preferred, but were personal attacks on individual commenters would have been an example of something that might have been deleted that wouldn't have been picked up by the filter. You can set up an uncensored channel. Governor, does it make you uncomfortable knowing that some of these things have to be censored as you're trying to balance First Amendment rights and protections? Absolutely, but at the same time, I've conducted my life, my political life, my business life in trying to treat people with respect and civility. I believe we have an obligation to do so and be as open as possible, but set conditions in order to do that and I think we have to be better role models. I think we have a set of examples and we certainly want to do so with our kids and those who are supposed to be looking up to us. So we have an obligation to be better people. Governor, what is the point of being a lawsuit like that with Paige Mayn or Marilyn in Kentucky? Is that what you're assuming about Facebook? Well, again, you know, we want to avoid any lawsuit if we can and we want to be honored the First Amendment and I believe in the First Amendment. So we're willing to work with them to do whatever we can to be as open as possible, but again, to have certain conditions where we expect people to act appropriately. Governor, kind of out of the blue question as we're in the middle of summer, but towards the end of the- I'm not used to that. Towards the end of the school year, I've always saw school safety assessments, grant applications are being reviewed now. Is that a conversation you see carrying over into the new school year and maybe even the legislative session? Yeah, I don't believe this is over. I mean, these were fairly small grants. We believe that they'll make a difference, but as we move forward, our task force will make recommendations as well as to what we can do to protect our kids and to protect those in a community atmosphere and to address mental health issues and the underlying anger that exists and the violence that exists in our society. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was more requests for dollars to make sure that people are safer. Are there any particular disparities that the assessments found that you hope to see addressed? Yeah, I haven't looked through the assessments and to see exactly what the awards are going to be and I will do so, but I don't believe that there were any surprises from my standpoint. Governor, I really brought up the surplus. Do you expect to see any kinds of surplus next year? These that continue and why are we around? Well, stay tuned. We have an emergency board meeting tomorrow and we'll be unveiling that request. We have the economists that have been focusing on that and we'll have some news tomorrow, but suffice it to say, I think it's positive news where we're seeing surpluses. We saw an unprecedented surplus for the first time quite a while in terms of our state revenues and we hope to see that continue if we focus on the economy and grow this economy and make the right investments who will continue to see growth. Have you reviewed the consensus forecast yet? I have reviewed part of it. Some of it isn't quite out yet and they're still working on it. Are you and or your team preparing for any sort of turn back in the economy in both the next year? At this point in time, obviously we'll watch revenues on a monthly basis to be sure if we're on solid ground. It's important to me as a fiscal conservative to make sure that we're spending beyond our means and we'll continue to do so. That's why it was so important. To me, to have a growth rate calculation where we're developing a budget that didn't grow faster than the economy or wages, so we made sure that we were able to live within those means and we did that in the last couple of years without raising any tax and fees for the general fund. So I believe we'll continue to do so and we'll watch and to see. I mean, it's certainly volatile on a national level. I don't know what effect tariffs will have. I don't know what effect the lack of a lack of agreement will have and certainly that Canada being their largest trading partner, we're paying attention. So you'll be monitoring, but have you seen anything that you think you should be planning for in terms of planning that? I have not, but we'll wait and see what the economists have to say tomorrow. I think that will be important. A consensus forecast is very important. What did you take from the morning consult poll that showed that your favorability to drop substantially in the last few months and was more or less in line with what the BPR Vermont PBS poll showed? Yeah, I can't say that I was surprised. You know, I feel it on a daily basis when I'm out in the public to be perfectly blunt. I was more surprised when they thought I was the fourth most popular governor in the nation. I didn't feel I was up to that level at that point in time, but this is a correction. This is, again, I'm not going to govern by polls, but I understand the disappointment. I understand the anger that's out there, but I'm going to continue to do what I feel is right for the right reasons that will benefit from ours. Do you think it's basically because of the gun legislation or do you think there's any carryover from the budget vetoes and the two years of likely standouts? I could probably add a few things to that as well. I think for the most part, I believe that it has to do as much with the gun legislation as anything else, but certainly there are plenty of other opportunities where I may have disappointed or angered a few other people along the way, but I'm going to continue to do what I think is right. For the moment at least, according to morning console, Democrats like to be more the Republicans. Is that a weird position at the end? Well, it is, except we're in Vermont and there are more Democrats in Vermont than Republicans, so I've been competing in stock our raising for three decades almost, and I've had my share of disappointments. I've been leading races where I've been through some stage of the race have been involved in some sort of maybe controversy, but the career and you just beginning it. So I'm going to continue this race, this competition and we'll see what happens in a year or so. Does it matter to you, the party label who supports you or the majority matters? Well, no, I mean, I'm a fiscal conservative and I've said before, I'm not going to apologize for being a fiscal conservative, but I'm a moderate in many ways as well and for those in a Republican party that are much more conservative than I am and some don't appreciate my moderate tendencies. So again, I think in the end, they will see the benefit of my fiscal stance in so many, many different ways.  I mean, there's so many things that we've done that I believe will have an effect on the long term, on the economy and on the lot and focusing on those issues and workforce development and the demographics is something that we're going to continue to struggle with, but again, I think they'll appreciate that the vast majority will appreciate the efforts in that regard. Thank you very much for coming in, I appreciate it.


Hi, and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. The question says, find the equation of square passing through points 1 minus 3, 4, 1 minus 5, 2, 1 minus 3, 0, and having it centered on the plane, x plus y plus z equals to 0. Now, begin with the solution. Let the equation of square be equation number 1 plus 2 w into 0. Now, this implies 1 e is equal to 0, d is equal to minus 10. This to minus 26, and from 4 we have in this equation. So we get minus. This implies a w is equal to minus 60, and this implies w is equal to equals to 4. 4v plus 4w equal to minus 2. So we have 4v minus 8 equals to 4. This implies 4v is equal to 12, and this implies v is equal to minus v minus w is equal to 0. From here, we can find the value of u, v is equal to 3, and w is equal to minus 2. This implies minus u minus 1 is equal to 0. This implies u is equal to minus 1. Now, to find the value of d, second equation, we have 2u minus 6p plus a w plus d equals to minus 26. u is equal to minus 1, v is equal to 3, and w is equal to minus 1x plus 2 into x to z plus 2 0. Or we can say that x square plus y is complete


housing, are we moving fast enough? Here in Community Matters on Think Tech, I'm Jay Fiedel and the handsome young man is Stanley Chang. You may call him Senator if you wish. And he's the Senator for District 9 in the Hawaii State Senate. Welcome to the show, Stanley. Thanks so much for having me again, Jay. We're going to talk about housing. Of course we're going to talk about housing. Housing is really, really important to keep our people here to make reasonable lives for them. And you know, over the past years since statehood seems to me we've lost a lot of ground on that. You are a beacon and a leading light in trying to come up with ideas and solutions and move the Senate and the state legislature and the governor through more enlightened approaches. And you've had tremendous experience running around and talking to people, hither and yon, including Singapore, where there's a very interesting creative housing program. So let's talk about the first thing is, what is the status? How are we doing? I mean, how many people are on the street and how many units of housing are being built right now to solve the problem? Well, unfortunately, Jay, we're not in good shape right now. As we all saw, even in the middle of the worst economic crisis, Hawaii is faced in generations and the highest unemployment rate in the nation during the pandemic. Housing prices in Hawaii did not stabilize. They did not go down. In fact, they skyrocket the upwards. And in three of the four counties of Hawaii, median home prices have exceeded $1.1 or even $1.2 million.  He was a state employee, a UH professor with one income. And he was able to buy a home, have two kids, put us through school, college, grad school, and then retire comfortably. Today, if I were to buy that same house that he bought back in 1983, it would take me over 30 years of my entire state salary. And obviously, it's just never going to happen for me. So we're starting out from a baseline where we have a very severe housing shortage, where housing starts, housing construction is stagnant. We may need about 10,000 units a year in order to bring prices down from the stratosphere. The reality is we're getting maybe one to 2,000 units a year. And this year, the legislative session appropriated some funds to take us maybe a couple thousand higher. But the reality is every year that we're building less than, say, 10,000 units a year is a year that we're falling behind. And so we've made progress, but there's still a very long way to go, Jay. Well, you know, looking at it from, say, let's zoom back. Let's zoom back to statehood. We should have seen this coming, or am I right? We should have seen that more people would be here, that we would not have diversification in any meaningful way. We wouldn't have high-paying jobs. And that we should have planned better, I would suggest to you. And the question is, what should we have done at statehood to avoid this problem, to avoid the increases in demand over supply? What could we, should we have done if we look at it from that point of view? That's a great question. And I think to answer it directly, I think what we could have done is to find a more sustainable way of producing housing year after year after year. So what ended up happening was that at the end of World War II, Hawaii transitioned rapidly away from a plantation-based economy and started to develop tourism and other industries that were concentrated in the cities, particularly Honolulu. And in that immediate post-war era, the, you know, if you look at, you know, books like Land and Power in Hawaii, what you saw was a real, a growth spurt in development. And the way that development happened was in a fairly laissez-faire environment, where developers would buy large chunks of land or already have large chunks of land and develop California-style suburban sprawl. This is the era of the Hawaii kais, you know, this is the era of the Kaneohe's, where most of the housing stock of Hawaii gets built for these returning GIs and for people who are employed in the tourism sector and the rapidly growing economy of Hawaii. Now, what happens is in the 1970s, there's a backlash to this uncontrolled development. And it's a backlash that's nationwide. It's not just here in Hawaii, but one of the major outgrowths of that backlash was the creation of the Land Use Commission and that's a level of state regulation that restricts the city from expanding, basically. And it was, I think, rooted in the positive intention of preserving agricultural conservation land, the native habitats of our endangered species, what makes Hawaii Hawaii. So I think it started with very noble intentions. And in fact, if you look at the statutes they passed, they did make the state responsible for producing enough housing supply to meet demand. They did not want to cut off the amount of housing supply created. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. And so in the year 1973, 74, in just a few short years in the middle of the 1970s, housing production per year crashed 90% and has never recovered. So today, we build less than one tenth of the housing that was built back in the 1970s per year. And I am not advocating for a return to that uncontrolled suburban sprawl California Houston style model of growth, but we do need to pick up that pace in terms of the number of units, 10,000 units a year. And unfortunately, the generation of the post-war era did not create a model that would be sustainable for decades to come. And that, I think, was one of the big mistakes of that era. Oh, yeah. And then of course, since that 1983 benchmark year you used for your father by his house, things have happened in the state. Can you describe what has exacerbated the problem in that period? So it's really quite simple, Jay. It's a simple issue of supply and demand. So every year, babies are born to local people. And every year, local people die. And so on average, about 18,000 people, local babies are born every year and about 10,000 people die in Hawaii every year. So that means there's net increase of 8,000 local people every year. Those 8,000 local people need homes. And we haven't even touched on the influx of residents from the mainland, from overseas and so on. We need to build for those 8,000 or we will fall behind. And the reality is we don't build for those people. We build maybe one or 2,000 units per year. So what happens to those other 6,000 or 7,000 people they leave? And who are the 1,000 to 2,000 people who get to stay the wealthiest? And if the market is only being supplied at one tenth the level needed to maintain health, then if I'm a developer and I'm not stupid, I'm going to build to the top one tenth of the market. Because every single year, there's demand for 10 times more. I'm going to, I want to maximize my profit. I'm going to build to the richest 10. And over the years, over the decades, this problem has gotten worse and worse and worse. Every single year, we have a deficit in terms of the number of homes needed versus the number of homes actually built until we end up today with such a severe housing shortage that for the last 5 straight years, we've had population decline. Where those young people are forced to leave, they cannot come back, they will never be able to afford a home in Hawaii again. And we're becoming the land of the very rich and no one else. And I think that's a real problem for our community. What happens in a society of the very rich and no one else? What happened? I think it means that we lose what makes Hawaii truly Hawaii. Now, we talked earlier about the native habitats and the agricultural land and the beautiful scenery and the vistas. We all cherish it. It does make Hawaii Hawaii. But I would say what makes Hawaii is the people. And if we have a Hawaii where all we have are the tech billionaires, the tech bros who are working remotely, and all of the local people who are born and raised here have to move to the mainland or elsewhere just to barely make ends meet. I think we've fundamentally lost Hawaii. I believe that every single local person and every single local family should have a home here. And one staggering statistic that I think gets talked about a lot is the reality that over half or over half now of all native Hawaiian people now live outside Hawaii. And I think obviously some have moved away by choice, but I think a great deal of them have moved away simply because they could not afford to live here in Hawaii. And I believe that every native Hawaiian person should be able to live in the homeland of their ancestors. So that's the fix we're in. What's the connection between... I know there's a lot of factors in play. This is a whole examination of our economy. But what's the connection between homelessness and a lack of housing? I mean, it seems like there are two problems, but maybe it's one. Yeah, so there's a direct relationship. We talked about the 8,000 new local people who are being born every year, of whom maybe the top one or 2,000 wealthiest are being housed by the existing private sector development market. The reality is most of the rest leave, but some are just not able to. And they're the ones who are forced into homelessness because they simply cannot afford rent. A few years ago, I met a family of three, a mom and dad and a nine-year-old daughter living in their van in Kapiolani Park. The mom and the dad both worked. In fact, the dad worked two jobs, and they simply could not make rent. And that's why they were living in their van. And it was a heartbreaking situation, but that's the reality we have. When we've been undersupplying the market for so long, we should not be surprised when the lower end of the social economic spectrum is squeezed out of housing altogether and onto the street. So we need to start by supplying the market with enough housing to meet demand, but we actually do need to take it a step further as well. Mental health services are on everyone's mind these days. And I think that's a crucial component because there are people who need help and who are just simply not in a place to be able to work and to afford rent on their own. They need help. And that's part of what some people call wraparound services, the social services, the social workers calling in, checking in, and so on to be able to have a pipeline so that if you are homeless or if you are at risk of becoming homeless, there will be services there to take care of. Yeah, we need that as a society and the community. But you mentioned that we have a lot of, you know, call them see-through apartments in Cacaaco, where nobody lives there. Very wealthy people own them. They use those retreats or flybys and so forth. They don't solve the housing problem at all. The problem, though, is that they're at a very high valuation. And the real estate community has done a great job in pushing the valuation, the appraisals up on this. Everything we do winds up pushing the values and therefore the prices of occupancy up on this. But they're there for the long term.  So much money went into it in the first place. And so even as we speak, Stanley, that is happening. Even as we speak, you know, that is standing in the way of doing affordable housing around the state. Do you agree with me that the development of these very expensive see-through apartments isn't really helping? As a matter of fact, it's making it more difficult as we speak. You know, Jay, that's one symptom that's very obvious in our structural under supply of the housing market. As we've discussed, because we only allow, you know, maybe one to 2,000 units to be built per year, private sector developers are going to build to the top one to 2,000 of the market, even though the demand might be 10,000 deep. As a result, they're building these very expensive units that are affordable only to the very rich of whom some might be local residents, but many of whom are not. And so I think the good news is that we can have our cake and eat it too. And I often use analogies here to explain what I'm talking about. So one analogy that I often use is that of school, public school and private school. Imagine what we currently have, the current private sector housing development model is pretty much like private school. It's for the few, it's very expensive, and it's out of reach for most local people. The answer is not forcing private schools to give scholarships, which is what a lot of essentially our housing policies are doing, forcing these private sector developers to sell below market units. The answer is to create public school, a large scale, low cost, mass option that allows every family to have access to a good quality education. Another analogy I use is like the car market. So right now, because we're only allowing a certain few number of units into the market, it's no surprise that the builders of those units are, they're basically selling Mercedes, right? And most people will never be able to afford a Mercedes. So the answer is not to ban Mercedes. The answer is to allow Toyota into the market as well too, to allow for a low cost mass option that takes care of the great majority. And I don't mind private schools operating, I don't mind Mercedes operating as long as there's a public school or a Toyota option that takes care of the needs of the great majority. Just for a moment, I mean, we're getting now to the core of what could happen, what may happen, what hopefully will happen. But I would like to make you king for a moment. And I'm going to give you all the power that a monarchy can provide. And I'm going to, I'm going to agree with you, there's a real problem. I agree with you that, you know, we need to take dramatic steps to correct the problem. And we should take those steps soon, because while we speak, we're losing ground. So if I make you the monarch, family, what do you do tomorrow, Thursday? What do you do to fix this in rapid order? You know, even a monarch would need time. So you know, this is, this is a plan that will take years to come to fruition. So let's start at the beginning. So like I said, we probably need about 10,000 units per year just to stay afloat. Okay, so how are we going to build those 10,000 units a year? Well, we have a couple of options. We can do it the way that we did back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, which is to allow private landowners to do whatever they want on their land, which is to build suburban sprawl on formerly agricultural and conservation land. And the reality is, I don't think the people of Hawaii want that. I don't think the voters of Hawaii want all the agricultural and conservation land to be paved over with suburban sprawl. Okay, so that leaves us with a high density model. All right, we have to build high density towers so that we don't just sprawl over the entire island. Okay, so how do we build those towers? Well, again, we have a choice to make. Do we build those towers through the private sector, such as what we've seen in Kakaako, a profit maximizing private sector that has the chance to make unlimited profits? And so we'll build to the very top of the market, including those who might not be resident homeowners but simply investors. I don't think people in Hawaii want that. I think people in Hawaii would prefer greater restrictions. They don't want empty, vacant, dark units. They want those units to actually be occupied by Hawaii residents who own no other real property, so they're not investors. All right, so that's one significant restriction. I think that they would want these units to be located on the rail line because they don't want 10,000 units a year dumping 10,000 or 20,000 new cars a year onto our already extremely congested highways. Okay, so then they have to go on the rail stations and be primarily reliant on walking and on public transportation. Well, guess what? The state is the largest landowner on the rail line and because the state is not a profit-making institution, doesn't need to charge more money than the cost of building these new units and it doesn't have an incentive to maximize its profit.  And the state is a large organization. It can facilitate the building of thousands of units a year, which even at a low subsidy level or a no subsidy level, you still need an organization with the substantial capacity to carry these large hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of construction, whether you finance it through bonds or other types of borrowing. And so what we've ended up at is basically the Singapore model, where the state takes state-owned lands, near rail stations, builds very high density, sells those units at cost to the local people as owner occupants, not as investors, and just doesn't stop building. And Jay, we do have enough land for that. If you look at the existing state portfolio of lands, we have lands for centuries worth of housing development if we're building at the right high level of density. It will take some getting used to. Now, the biggest, I think, change that people will have to accept is that we will no longer be building single family homes. Instead, our development will be clusters of high density towers. People won't be driving. They'll be living in, let me say, 100 towers, 200 towers at the Aloha Stadium site, each 50 stories tall. There won't be broad boulevards and huge setbacks. The streets and sidewalks will be narrow. There will be ground floor retail. There won't be setbacks at all. And they will be quite high density. So if you can think of, say, a Waikiki or a downtown Chinatown or a Ginza in Tokyo or a market street in San Francisco or a Greenwich Village in New York, it would be that really lively, pedestrian activated, walkable community that human beings had lived in for thousands of years before the advent of the automobile. And which many of our existing most beloved communities in the world today are still remnants of that pre-automotive age.  The government will provide a home for you. We will sell you a low cost home. Now, you will also be free to buy in the private market if you so desire, but we can all agree that the private market is not going to get any cheaper over the years. And so the private market would still exist, but public school would exist too in a manner of speaking. We'd have a low cost mass option for housing that would welcome all full-time residents of Hawaii, including as many of the native Hawaiian community, the diaspora that's around the world back home to Hawaii. And I think that would be, ultimately, if I had to discuss this vision or describe this vision in one sentence, it would be one job should be enough. If you're working a full-time job, you will have the means to live here, to have a home, to raise a family, and to have a good life. And I think that the lack of affordable housing is the single most important missing component from one job being enough. You talk about Manhattan, and I just came back from Manhattan. I came back from the, I'm sure you know the neighborhood, the West Village, which is, it's out of Peter Bruegel, you know, it's out of a lot of people in a small area, but with lots of services and goods and stores and community activities. It is a joy to watch this neighborhood. We could have neighborhoods like this. I don't know if Hawaii people realize how valuable life is in a neighborhood like this. You actually have friends that you stop and talk to on the street. You chitchat everybody.  We would benefit by that. There's nothing in, you know, the Hawaiian tradition that stands in the way of that. Everybody would love that. That's my perception of having just returned from New York. But the other thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, how far down the pike are we?  I might add that the only thing that really differentiates that picture from, you know, the realization of that picture under our existing system is bureaucracy, is the problem of getting permits. I remember Castle and Cook was building a project way out in Mililani. It took them decades to get all the permits then start construction. Then the same thing would happen with high density buildings the same way. And that the permits would take so long that it would be, you know, while we wait for the permits, our children are leaving town, you know, that sort of thing. And how do you fix that as monarch or otherwise? Yeah, so the good news is, Jay, that we do have significant progress to show after this legislative session. We passed a number of bills that would enable two key state agencies, the Hawaii Public Housing Authority and the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corporation, to build these units and to sell them. And so we have funding available to both of these agencies through bills that were passed this session, $300 million in the rental housing revolving fund that can be used for these types of leasehold units for HHFDC, $10 million to HPHA to start on its first project at the Mayor Wright site. And so because these bills passed, for the first time, I'm cautiously optimistic. The governor has the tools in the toolbox and all the governor needs to do is to pick them up and start working on them. So we have a gubernatorial election coming up this fall, as we all know. And I have confidence that the next governor will want to make a mark, will want to tackle this issue head on, and now finally has the tools in the toolbox to move the needle on it. You mentioned before the show that there were four significant bills. Have you covered them all or are there one or two more that you want to mention? Those are the main bills that I think take us the farthest. I think additional legislation will be needed in the future. One thing that I've been a proponent of that works in Singapore is an automatic savings program to help pay for your housing costs so that every working Singaporean has a nest egg ready for a down payment when the time comes. I think that would be a really great advance. And I think more flesh on these proposals, clearly restricting them to Hawaii residents or owner occupants and so on will be needed to improve them in the future too. Okay, so we have the framework or we could even this session have a working framework and hopefully this will be a platform issue for the campaigns now to follow and that we will see commitment ultimately by the winning candidate for governor or lieutenant governor about housing, about these projects. What needs to happen? In other words, that governor hits the ground running as soon as he or she is elected. So what happens then? What does that governor do on day one to get this moving? So the first thing that governor needs to do is to agree that we need to build 10,000 units a year and once that happens, I think the rest will follow in pretty short order. I think the next step would have to be identifying the sites and then beginning the environmental review process to determine which of these sites are suitable or unsuitable for this type of high density development. I think the governor would then put out RFPs to contract with developers to on a fee basis or on a limited profit basis to start delivering these units, say putting out an RFP for 50 towers or parceling that out into 25 RFPs of two towers each and saying, okay, you have to build this many units. You can charge no more than X dollars. They have to be this minimum size. They have to have this many bedrooms and so on and just start putting out these contracts to bid and I think that there will be enough work for everybody to be busy for a very long time. And then in the meantime, you would open the sales for say the first unit. Maybe that's a HPHA tower at Mayor Wright Holes. I think a product, you know, a two bedroom condo selling for $400,000, which is kind of the range that we're talking about would be would fly off the shelves and there would be lines around the block for it, which would I think provide the political momentum necessary for a second project, a third project, a fourth project and so on. And so I think by the end of four years, you know, four years, it's not a long time, but it's also not a short time. I think by the end of four years, you'd really have a lot of momentum going to, you know, to scale this to the appropriate level that would actually end the housing shortage. You talk about Mayor Wright and I think of, you know, Chicago projects that are not really places you want to live. How do you make sure that these places are livable, that they're, they feel like middle class and not a Chicago project? How do you do that? Two main ways, Jay. The first is the way that you've already discussed the urban planning that you saw in the West Village of Manhattan. And actually, we don't have to go all the way to New York City. If you take a walk down the street in Waikiki, it could be late at night. You might be a visitor who speaks zero English, you might be an older person, a senior citizen, a retiree. Even, you know, a retired person who speaks zero English feels entirely safe walking down the street in Waikiki at 10 p.m. at night because there's so much pedestrian vibrancy. And the reason there's that pedestrian vibrancy is because of what we talked about earlier, not just high density, but also narrow streets and sidewalks, ground floor retail and no setbacks. That's what creates that incredible, you know, ground street level vibrancy. Because if someone snatches your purse, you scream and, you know, 200 people will immediately stop and see what's going on and apprehend the thief if there is one. So I think that's one. I think another critical piece is a piece that has been hiding in plain sight for a long time. So basically, all the housing that the government has built since probably the New Deal era in this country, so decade, 80 years for generations, we've had two components of government housing. One is a low subsidized price. The other is a low income resident. So the the reality is those two don't need to go together. We can have a low price, but not restrict the incomes of the residents. Because as we've seen with the New Deal era, the Great Society era of public housing in this country, those all had income restrictions, which meant concentrated poverty. And there were many social consequences of concentrated poverty, including cyclical poverty, drugs, gangs, so on. And so if you have a socio economically integrated unit, a building with people of all incomes, then we're really talking about a unit that doesn't that is more resistant to these social problems that developed with concentrated poverty. And I think once you put those two components together, walkability in the urban planning, as well as mixed income, a socially integrated community, I think that that's how you get a really successful neighborhood. And the West Village is actually a perfect example of that because the West Village, well, now it's quite expensive, but it hasn't always been. It was once a fairly affordable place to live. And but it was safe, it was successful. And that's why it attracted this concentration of the wealthy over the years. I'm so glad I asked you that question. And I love your answer. So, Bailey, I would like to offer our viewers a vision, an opportunity to examine neighborhoods in which this might happen, this magic might happen. And what comes to mind, aside from Mayor Wright, which it could be done, there's Mo'ila'ili, which is really old and it needs redevelopment, I think, maybe parts of Waikiki for the canal, maybe they could use that, you know, the old jungle, remember, the old jungle in Waikiki. We can't do much with Kakaako because it's going to be there for a while short of condemning it, which I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think Kakaako is really available for this, but what about Kalihi? People have been talking about redeveloping Kalihi for a long time. And there are other neighborhoods too, I'm sure you've looked at them, but can you give our viewers a vision of where this might happen? What neighborhoods might they see into the future where they might want to live in this kind of community that you were talking about with affordable housing? Right. So you already mentioned several of them. Remember, we are moving away from car-based transportation. We don't like cars, the emissions are changing our climate, the traffic is choking our roads and just eroding our quality of life. We want to move to a model that is primarily based on walking and also on public transportation, which means that we would be starting at the neighborhoods near the rail stations that are currently being built. You mentioned Kalihi, that's actually a great example of a neighborhood that has a lot of underutilized land that has rail stations in it where you could build very high density walkable communities where people would never need a car. And if you just keep following the railroad from Kalihi, if you go east towards Alamoana, I don't think that Kakaako is actually sort of a done deal. If you look at the location of the rail stations in Kakaako, there's still quite a lot of undeveloped land in the immediate surroundings of those rail stations. On Queen Street, for example. Exactly, J. And where we could start with a blank slate and really make those roads a lot narrower and make them a lot more walkable. And if you go in the other direction, you'll see communities like Waipahu, communities like Pearl City that are really car-centric today. But at least those parcels near the rail station really don't have to be. You could really have a much more walkable community. And the terminal on the west side of the rail line is actually at the largest state-owned parcel of them all, which is the UH West O'ahu parcel, which is, I think, 600 or even more than a thousand acres of state-owned land that's prime for development. Not all of which is needed for a university, obviously, but which I think much could be developed as a true second city that is walkable like a Ginza, like a Greenwich Village, like a London, and so on. And with hundreds of acres, you could put hundreds of thousands of housing units there. You could accommodate Hawaii's population growth for a thousand years to come on just that one parcel if you build at the right level of density. What about the stadium area? You mentioned that earlier. That's right. That's an example of a 98-acre parcel. It's directly on top of a rail station. It's slated for redevelopment. I think a lot of the models that have been previously been proposed with a retail-type situation supporting the operations of the stadium itself are no longer viable in the age of the pandemic, in the age of online retail. And I think that there are many successful examples all over the world, whether it's the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, whether it's the Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong, where a stadium itself would only need a very small footprint, and you can surround it with that type of high-density walkable development. And just on that one parcel alone, you could easily get 100,000 units of housing there and wipe out the housing demand of the state of Hawaii for 20 years on just one parcel. It's really quite extraordinary. And quite important. The whole thing is quite important. We really have to move down this path as soon as possible. We have to start getting it done, not only for the housing and to help the homeless, but also to give us confidence to keep our kids here and to know that we can. This is really one of the most important initiatives, if not the most important initiative for state government. And I hope, Stanley, you give me encouragement. You give me optimism, and I really appreciate talking to you about it. I'd like to follow it with you. And I hope you stay on it, because your vision, as and when it comes into a reality, will change the state in more ways than just brick and mortar, for sure. And I would urge you to stay on it for as long as it takes. I appreciate that, Jay. I really appreciate the chance to share our ideas on your ThinkTech program. I really think that the only way we're going to tackle this problem is by talking about solutions that actually will move the needle and not just band-aids here and there. And I think that, as you pointed out, this will mean significant changes for the whole state. And I think we need to really start talking about those implications sooner rather than later, because it will be a new social compact. And for me, I think the bottom line, Jay, the reason I'm so grateful for this opportunity is because this is a life and death matter. What we're saying right now to the vast majority of our students, let's say those graduating from our local high schools, is that it's great that you were born and educated and raised here, but now that you're an adult, you have to leave and you can't come back. Hawaii is not your home and will never be your home again. And that breaks my heart, Jay. I never want to say that or, in effect, do that to the future generations of Hawaii. I believe that everyone who was born and raised here deserves the opportunity to live in this incredible place, this magical, special place that we call Hawaii. And this is our chance to make that happen. So it will take some time. It will take some elbow grease. But if we make that happen, we will be able to assure a good life to every single future generation of local people to come, Jay. And that's incredibly exciting. So again, thank you for this opportunity. Senator Stanley Chang, thank you and thank you for your commitment to the issue and for your service to the community. We really appreciate it. Aloha. the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.