For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In December of that same year, they turned around and they closed Fairlong and the Atlanta Bakery. We lost 1,000 members in the past five members year. To a negotiation this year, they want to change our half-care, work schedules, and the effect of how we are able to attain overtime. Changing the eight-hour workday to a 12-hour, where you don't pay overtime for working We wanted to change our half-care. We said that we have 100% left care, but we're not acknowledged as a fact. Over the four to five years that I've been here, we have made concessions and given up raises in order to help pay for what would be the premiums buying charges. And they insist that we are not paying anything. They want to change our work reach from eight hours to 12 hours, and effectively, whereas nine after eight hours, we receive overtime. And we would be working 12 hours every time we work However, that's split the cost out. Changing the overtime rates now that I have to work 40 hours before I need to eligible for overtime. All of these are drastic changes, and it has been calculated that with this new AWS alternative work schedule they want us to work, we were actually losing almost $30,000 for summer budget. Thank us for being asked to give back, back to our health care, for being asked to give back with respect to our overtime, and we're also being asked to give up our weekends. Because of the workers that the company is able to pay out so much to the shareholders. So if we are going to allow the company to make all this money, make billions of dollars per quarter, and give all this money to shareholders, then why are we not able to have a livable wage where we can maintain ourselves, sustain ourselves as human beings?


So thank you very much. I hope the session goes well, because today everything that could have happened happened. So I actually had to redo the entire presentation, but it's OK. I mean, we are good to go, so I'm happy about that. So let's start with the presentation. And yes, framework agnostic REST API testing. And the title actually said only testing, but I'm also going to add the development. A little bit about me. You can hear a different accent. That's because I'm from Mexico. I live in Switzerland. I work for a company called Carcune, and I'm a Java champion. And this photo actually summarized what I like to do. I like to travel or use to travel a lot around the world. Conferences or conferences, in this case, this was Jane Crete. So that's something I really, really like to do. When I create an assertion, there are several motivations for why I want to present something. And most of the times is because I'm formed of some tools. And we are developers, so we are as good as our tools are. And not only that, we can learn new tools. But how proficient we are, it's going to be decisive on how fast, how good can we deliver, or even enjoying the development process. So these are the tools I'm going to present. Yes, I usually do this session with test containers. And I will describe why, because that's also one of my most favorite tools ever. In this case, it's only going to be Wiremock. And you will notice that that's also one of the tools that I have closer to my heart. That's just sure. I'm going to talk about Open API and a little bit of Swagger. So and some interesting thing to notice. I only or most of the time, I talked about open source software, because I think open source is really, really important for all of us. So as I said, the tools that I'm going to present, they are brilliant for REST APIs. Not only that, and you will see why I also in love with these tools, because they are polyphasetic. Well, in case of Wiremock, it's very polyphasetic. The orders are totally only brilliant in the REST API world. So why am I doing this? Why REST APIs? I mean, there are so many incredible topics that we can be leveraging right now. Why REST APIs? Well, as we have seen, we have gone into the micro serverless function different versions. So it is important that we notice that even though it's not the only way of communication, REST APIs are very typical. And we will see them in most places. And this is something interesting. The REST APIs can be consumed internally and externally, or they can be public. For example, in this site that I found, there are several ones that are repositories or catalogs of public available REST APIs. They are cataloging almost 24,000 REST APIs. So they are there. We're going to work with them. There are several solutions. For example, if you are in the AWS environment, there are some already infrastructure, the API gateway, their own testing capabilities. But remember what I said in the title, I wanted to have something that is agnostic. As I said to you, this is the second time I'm creating the slides. So there was a huge bunch of slides about why you are not using other tools. For example, Pact, for example, a Spring has its own set of tools for creating the REST API and by contract. Well, I'm comparing versions. I'm comparing maturity. I'm comparing. And the most important part is still agnostic. It is still, for example, for Pact. It's easy if you want to create consumer-driven contract tests. If you have your Pact file, you can distribute it among your development teams. And that is perfect. But what is the assumption here? The assumption is that everybody is using Pact. Now, when we talked about microservices, we already said they are loosely coupled. We don't have any knowledge about the services. And that's OK. But that's also something that we have to think about of the development teams. Sometimes we don't know what they are using for documenting. Sometimes we cannot assume things. So for me, using OpenAPI and WireMock, it's good. And you will see why it's amazing. But let's say conservatively, it's good because I'm not using or I'm not doing any assumptions. The next topic that I really want to talk on most of my sessions have something like this. It's about design. And why do I talk about design? Because we are not the best ones of doing that. So when we're talking about creating APIs, it's not this. You can see that sometimes we jumped the gun. Sometimes we start in the different order that we're supposed to be doing things. So as I said, introduce a new concept that it's increasing the usage of press APIs. Then use some of the not so great practices that we are used in our industry. And then develop and test different versions, different environment, heterogeneous machines. And this is the part where I always said, I like these tools for two reasons. One is for development. And the second one is for testing. They were born in testing. But for development, they are also interesting because I can have a very light development environment without footstrapping a huge amount of services because they run great in the cloud. But they may not run so well on my laptop. Anyway, let's continue. So we do have sometimes issues with the order that we create things. But if we start in the right order where we design and document, and then publish, and then have it as a contract to other teams, internal consumers, and external consumers, then one of the tools, if you haven't used it already, I suggest you to have a look. It's an open API specification, the 310. Actually, the latest release was in February this year. And if you start using it, there is a huge amount of tools that can be, you can leverage here. So have a look. And one thing that I already want to tell you is there is a lot of parsers, validations, libraries for testing in different languages. You can generate code, clients, servers, so many, many, many things. And it is a standard. So this is the Swagger Editor because Swagger was one of the companies that started with the Open API Foundation. So they have really nice tools. So this is a way to see and sometimes to test or provide to your consumers an easy way to test a little bit, to test in terms of to use and to document and reuse some of these endpoints or rest APIs. Now, this will go super fast. And I will first go through the slides and then we'll jump into the demo because everything that you see here in the slides runs. And you will see why I'm in love with Wiremock. So Wiremock, it's very, very robust and has been among us since 2011. So it's a very well-established tool. And for example, you can run it in standalone. That's the first thing that people sometimes are surprised. You can start recording using it as a proxy and record and replay some of the mappings. You can use handlebar templates to create responses. I will explain why I like it so much later on once you have seen all the capabilities. So how do we add mappings? Very, very easy mappings. So actually, I'm going to wait me a second. I'm going to jump directly. I hope you're still watching me. Oh, my goodness. Wait a second. So I want to share you as soon as I get there. Perfect. Sorry. I'm going to share my entire screen now. And you will see me briefly. I hope not a lot. OK. And let me try to make this bigger. I hope you will see it correctly. So what I'm doing is starting the Wiremok in the standalone version, the latest version. And I'm actually able to look at this. Sorry. Can you increase the font size, please? So if you know what I'm going to do, just share my screen, this screen. Wait me a second. So I'm going to share only this screen. Yes. I hope it's better. Now it's better. Not much. Not much. Can you increase the font size? This particular one, you don't have to see that well. But I promise the other ones and the slides will be available. So this is only just for you to see the capabilities. So let me view. Let me view and make text thicker. OK. OK. Probably that's better, isn't it? Yeah, much better. OK. So what I'm doing is only creating what corals some request directly to my local host AT-AT where I'm running my wire mock standalone server. And what I'm doing is passing a request and response and then only requesting with that specific endpoint that I just created. So I can create really simple ones. This one is going to return a JSON response. So for example, what I'm doing here is saying whenever you get the URL, get JSON with the method get. You will return to 100 and you're going to return as JSON this on conferences. So we do the request and there they are. So now I have to go really fast. My Andres, if interesting fact about my life, my husband, it's also a developer. So he's like, you present a lot of examples about wire mock. And I'm like, it's because I love it. I love it and I really love it and it's super powerful. So what are we doing here? We are using a URL path pattern. So I'm saying that whenever you get a slash get and whatever you pass that it's small cases and tests, you're going to return here is with a pattern. So I'm creating whatever. And now if I use full test, there it is. So we can have patterns in the URL too. Now, what happens if I want to pass specific patterns in the body of the request? Well, you can also do that here. What I'm saying is that when you get a post method in this URL and you have to wait for the total result is four, otherwise this is not going to work. So and there it is. I received that 200, so it was okay. Perfect. So get a post. You can do all the methods that you want. Now, this is going to be a little bit more complex, but again, super interesting. So what I'm doing here is using our request model. So with a response template, this is the part where I was saying that we're going to start using a template with handlebars. So when I get the get multi-query, I'm going to pass as the body here. And this is the important part. The request query things. And see how I'm using it. The first, the second to last element in whatever I pass as a query and the last element on the request. So if I pass this request, the first element is one because it stinks, one, ah, this is important. I'm escaping this because I'm using C shell. Don't ask, I, for, it's very useful most of the time. Second to last is going to be two and thanks the last element is going to be three. If I were to pass only two elements, then the first one is one. The second to last is one because I only have two elements and the last element, it's two. So if I were to pass a new one, and this is why I usually copy paste because when I'm nervous, I type so slow. So now if I pass that and it was totally incorrect, as I told you, one character and I'm doing it incorrectly. So the first element, it's one. The second to last is three and the last is four. So as you can see, they are very, very, where it allows this kind of stomach really easily. And it also provides functionality for other kind of functions. For example, date, date and time. So what I'm doing now is passing in the body then now as in now, the Java now. So if I now curl the date, it is now. What a surprise, now it's now. Okay, so let's continue. Now I'm going to use offset. It has tons, tons, tons of different functions. Actually, I will return to the presentation to show you because in the slides, I put most of the functions that you can pass. And so you have a taste of what it can do. So in this case, I'm using the offset with one gear. So yes, it's now, but it's 2022. So I hope things will be better there. Okay, so now we have seen time, date. Let's see another one that I also find very appealing, which is the random values. So in this case, we're creating a random value of 27 characters. Alphabetic and it's going to be in upper cases. And in the URL random, if I call it, bear the yard.  And you get the idea. So these are all the functions that we can use. We can also use integers, decimals. So let me clear it again. Now we're getting an integer we can say from five to nine. So we have the lower and the upper and I only get eight, seven. So of course, this is not going to be very surprising because the limits that I put are very restrictive. You can use math, math one plus two by module, et cetera, et cetera. Let's see another one that is really interesting. So what happens if I want to use regular expressions? Well, you can use regular expressions. Again, Excel, this looks so horrible. This is because I have to copy and paste from CShell. So in the documentation and I have notes there, you don't have to do that, but let's say, let's see. Now if I do a curl passing as the payload in the body as the nation, the regular expression, it's only letting it pass the small lower little strings. Lower little strings, well, yes. And not the number, it's if I pass the nation 2021, it only returns the nation. What else? You can part it like parts. Once you have the regular expression in the request body, you can get this specific chance that you are interested on. And another example. Yes, I get too excited with Wiremog. I know, I know, bear with me. So what happens, what other thing that we can do and it's really interesting, we can delay. So the Wiremog allows you to have this stopping with different delays and you can have fixed delay, you can have distribution type of delay to make it more random if you want. Oh, let me, let's create it again. And let's get it, it was, it will eventually come, eventually, it can be logarithmic, it can be uniform. The other one that we can also do is chunk variable delay. And I actually going to return to the screen to the presentation, bear with me again. You know, frustrated by your windows. So I'm going to share it again. Okay, let's share the entire window. Why not? Wait a second, start a window and yes, you will see. So as I said, the standalone, we enabled the local response templating. I didn't show how to record with a proxy, but I can do it at the end if we have time. I wanted to show you like where is the nature. So this is already the example that we were looking into and with some of the modification, but this is the important part. So this is what I wanted you to see. So we have time and date offset. We can send different time zones like Australia, Sydney with a different format. We can send it in Epoch, we can send it in Unix, the random string. We can send it with a different length, different type. So as you can see, it's very, very, very polyphasitic. Integers, we have decimals. You can specify the lower value, the upper value. As I said, mathematical functions and the regular expressions. As I mentioned, you can set the regular expression to extract into the request body and you extract it in a specific pattern and then you can write down that pattern as you want. And this is what we were looking at into the fixed delayed responses with the distribution. This, the one that we created was a log normal distribution with those values. You can have the uniform, the log roll normal. You can get the chunk delayed to mock really slow networks. So you can say, oh, send it in chunks and five chunks with a different duration. And not only that, and this is something that I also like, simulating folds. So you can say that you have a mild form response chunk or all this kind of folds. So, and the other one that is really, really important as we are requesting different endpoints where Mock is checking how close we were into the specific mapping that we had and it also keeps track. We can identify the request. So we can also check if we have been calling once, twice, more than once. So it's really, really interesting and powerful. Again, something that I will show you right now is that all these mappings, the information that I created with curl, that is horrible. I know, but I wanted to copy and paste really fast are being recorded. So at the end of the day, you will have two directories. One with the files and the other one with the request. And in the request, I will show you how do they look. So you can reset, delete them. And whenever you start your Mock standalone drawer, it will actually check what you have in this directories and use them. So the admin API, so you have an idea of what you can do is create a new one, delete all, reset, persist. Buy ID, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing that I didn't mention and I didn't have enough time or I didn't want to use enough time for where I'm up because rest assured it's also very, very powerful is the scenarios. So to make this even more powerful is to create the steps the first time that you request to a specific endpoint, you get an answer. The second time that you request to the same endpoint you get another answer. And this is a step-wise response. So this is what it's known as in this scenario. Okay, so something really interesting. If you are using Chrome as your developer development the browser, as I do, there is an extension that is really quite nice. I'm going to demo it right about now before we jump into that. Let's see here. Let me make this huge. So well, not huge because then I lose that with me a second. So this is, this are my mappings as you remember I was playing like crazy showing you the different with curl and I was connecting to my standalone Wiremock server. So here they are. And you can see exactly what I did with curl. You can see it here. So you can create or did something. So it's a really, really, really nice addition to your Chrome developer, to your Chrome extensions. So let's go back and this is the directory. Almost the same directory where actually the same directory where I'm running my Wiremock jar. So if I use three, let me get it super big and let me increase the size. If I use three, you will see that I have what I told you, the files and the mappings. So, but you see that I have so little of them and in the, in my Chrome version, I have to nail that better. Sorry, you are like my, okay. Sorry. So what you see here, I have more mappings defined that the ones that I have in their directory. The reason of that is because I haven't persisted everything, just check. And now I'm missing my, let's go back. So if I want to persist all the ones that I have in memory, I only need to call something that really looks as, let me see, finally. And then if we now do again the three, you will see that I have more. And what I wanted you to see was not only that, by list. So what happens if I open one of the mappings? See there, I have the get date, get date offset. It's created with a different identifier, there are requests or the stopings that I was creating. So as you can see, why I like Warmog so much. Because if for some reason you are the backend development team and you're from them, the development team really needs to completely work as sync with you. Instead of telling them download this version and story this is here is a jar. Here's are my two directories. There are plain text files and you can run your own mock as simple as that. And it's plain text so if they want to, they want to create something weird or different, they can do it. They can even play with the delay distribution to generate their own faults if they don't want it. So as you can see, Warmog for me, it's not only for testing but it also helps us developers and the different teams to be more productive. So let's go back. What happens if we are not a curl fan and we are also not fans of Atom, we are Java developers. So what do we do? Before I jump into the Java part in the few minutes that I have left, let me talk about another tool that I love, it's rest assured. Why do I love it? Because it brings the expressiveness of Gruby for parsing JSON into the testing arena and it is fantastic. So let's go with the coding part of this. View, let me open. This is the Warmog. Let's increase the size, let's increase this. So, okay, perfect. First, super interesting thing for you is Excel is going to use Gruby, the version 309, and it's going to use the Gruby console.  Let me tell you why I do this because there is a reason for that. And the reason, as soon as we find my window, let me increase this.  That's my aim. Usually I can make it happen. Sometimes I cannot. So let's start from the beginning. So we're going to show, I'm going to show you how to use Warmog, the unit five, and the latest version of rest assured. So we're going to clean nothing under the sleeves. What I'm going to do is to start a Warmog server. We are going to create a very, very small JSON object. And we're going to create two endpoints and one is 200, the other one is 204, and we are going to assert things. So now if I execute this Gruby script, we can see that there is zero failures. And I'm happy. And we're running in the port, well, 190. So the wording in the slides were because I'm faking the server with Warmog. I'm faking the client with rest assured. What am I testing? Well, I'm testing that this is super simple to do. I'm showing you how you can fake both things. Usually you shouldn't do it at the same time as I'm doing here, but you get the idea. So this was the like, hello world. I will create only, most of them I test here to keep it inside the Gruby console, a hello world, maybe a little bit beyond the hello world. Here, I also created, let me first run it. So we see that I don't have any failures. It was reasonably fast. What I'm doing here is I'm creating a stop for this URL, JSONPET, with that UUID, it's going to return. And this is important part. It is going to return a file inside, well, that is contained in the pet.json inside of my folder resources. So I'm checking that it's actually happening, that I'm changing my stop, and then looking that I'm really doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Well, as I said, I'm faking everything here, but at least I'm consistently faking. So how am I in time? It's done, I hope we have a still time because I almost there. So again. Well, it's not here, but I am here. So what depends what you wanna share?  Okay, no, I'm going fast. Don't worry, I'm all there, all ready? Oh, so yeah, it's just three minutes. Sorry, then it's amazing. You should try it, take my word for it. The slides are going to be there. And if I didn't manage to convince you to take a look into Walmart, shame on me. And as see, it was the last one. Almost in time. Almost in time, thank you, Shell. It was groovy. Thank you. But it was amazing. I totally recommend you to use Walmart when you need to mock the real things and totally give a try to Walmart in Quarkis. Words like a term, especially when working with rest APIs. And as the Shell mentioned, if you need like to help your frontend colleagues or help your colleagues that are interacting with your APIs, definitely use a Walmart. Definitely use JUnit to test and unit test your work because the tested work works the best. And I need to thank you again. Do not forget to share all the good stuff, the repositories and everything with us because yeah, we are keen on trying things on our own and we do need to be like trying more with our Walmart. I didn't use some stuff with Walmart, the ones that you shared. And thank you again.


We can now share these repurposed garments because of that idea and these ladies with needy members of our society, some of our most vulnerable. To date we have supplied over 5,000 different items of clothing throughout Australia, parts of Asia and the Pacific. It's just such a joy to do it.


What I'm going to talk through today is around intelligent solutions with the focus on industry, around the vision versus current reality and really looking at how should we get from the current reality to that vision with a focus on high level decision making and an example I'll talk to is in the scheduling domain. So if we look at factories of the future there's a vision out there of totally automated factory robots doing everything even maintenance on each other and we are progressing towards that vision and factory data systems are getting better, factory automation is getting better but the current situation is we're in a transition phase, we're beginning to transform from human centered activities towards a more automated approach. But how long will this transition phase last? So if we look at how artificial intelligence is progressing, if we go back to 1980s deep blue created by IBM beat the world champion Gary Kasparov in chess. Now at this moment in time I certainly remember people thought artificial intelligence was going to take over the world in a very short time and that hasn't quite happened. If you look earlier this year AlphaGo created by Google DeepMind won a Go match against the world champion.  Now it's a much more complicated game than chess, it requires judgment and strategy and there's a lot more potential moves than there is in chess and from an artificial intelligence point of view this wasn't expected just yet, this was probably expected a couple of years out so from an AI point of view this was very good progress. However let me put on another house and say if I was an industry leader, if I'm a factory manager I could look at this progress and say 1987 you won a game of chess, 30 years later you won a more complicated game, it doesn't really take a box for me. So when you look at artificial intelligence solutions today, would a manager of a complex factory give complete control to algorithms? I think we'd all be agreed that the answer to that is no and even people who don't agree on anything else would probably say the answer to that is no. So the question that is algorithms capable of running a complex factory like when do we think that might happen or more importantly how do we think that might happen? So AI at the moment is successful but it's in bounded situations and what I'm really talking about today is how we can begin to use AI for higher level decisions, decisions where you require judgment, you require strategy, allowing for the fact that AI solutions today do not understand a lot of context and I think what we need to recognize also is that it's not going to be one giant step and we're not going to wake up someday and we suddenly have an algorithm that's this good that can control all our factory so we need to look at what are the steps we could do today, how do we start this journey and remembering that the goal is not perfection, the goal is that we are better than we were yesterday. So one potential improvement and I think this was referred to this morning is to treat human operators and automated systems not autonomously but as team members in what's known as a joint cognitive system so what you're trying to do here is move from a situation where you have a human who's utilizing technology but not really collaborating with technology to a situation where you pretty much have technology having a conversation with the human and a really good example of that is how sat nav systems are and we probably don't even think of how sat nav systems work but if you're anything like me you probably use the sat nav to get here today and you took it out of your pockets, you put in where you're going, it gave you a number of options and there was a default option which you probably chose and just yeah I'm grand with that and you selected but you were in control of what you did and after that if there was a crash or anything like there was in the m4 this morning if anyone was using it it gave you an alternative it said maybe you should go this way instead so it started suggesting it's continuously working in the background and suggesting updates for you at any point again you're still in control you can choose a different path you could decide to go a different way you could make a mistake and go a different way but it just keeps telling you from where you are now here's the best thing you can do and the culture around that is really interesting and actually quite important and something we need to get into industry so the culture around a sat nav systems is very much about the human being in control if you remember when sat nav systems came in first there were stories in the newspaper how people drove off a cliff following a sat nav system and no one went well I'm never using sat nav systems again that clearly doesn't work the culture was well what an idiot who'd follow a sat nav system all the way off a cliff that's just crazy so that culture of saying well actually you use an artificial intelligence algorithm it suggests a solution to you but you actually do apply a bit of human cop on at the end of that to make sure you have the right decision so decision making is it perfect can we expect perfect of course not and this is something about expectations especially in industrial solutions there's a feeling sometimes that just because the solution is automated it is perfect which is not true so this is around decision support about augmenting the human not replacing the human about helping them make the right decision and saying that there's a few bots here


30 to 35 minutes for the forums and I'm Ann Galloway I'm the founder and executive director of VT Digger in Montpelier, and I'm really happy to see you all here We have a Facebook live Stream going on we're also thankful that Orca is here to film the forum and we'll be posting the video later We have bagels from Myers and in Chittenden County, which are fantastic if you haven't had a chance to get one yet and there's coffee and This is sponsored by a Green State Gardener and We're very glad to have Gwynzakov with us to my right Tom little and Jake Perkinson all three of whom served on the Vermont advisory marijuana advisory commission and Jake and Tom were co-chairs so I'm going to do my best to Summarize a little bit about where we are because as you all know last year we passed a marijuana Legalization bill in the state of Vermont that allowed people to purchase a small amount of marijuana and To grow a couple of plants and now the legislature and the governor's office are considering a tax and regulation System which is I have to say pretty darn complicated if you look at the commission's report which came out in December It is even the executive summary runs to some pages so I think it's very clear that the folks who are on the commission are really making an effort to understand every facet of of tax and regulation and So where we are right now, I mean big picture There is being there is a tax being proposed by the Senate and Dick Sears committee That's a Senate judiciary He wants a 10% excise tax and an excise tax is a tax that's passed on to the consumer that you don't actually See then there's the sales tax which is 6% and most of these bills include a sales tax and Then Sam young Representative from Glover and the house actually he lives in Greensboro now. I'm sorry to correct that He has also proposed a bill that came out yesterday that would impose an 11% excise tax a 3% local option tax On top of a sales tax And then the the commission recommended a 26% excise tax. Is that right? Oh, 20% sorry. I got that wrong 20% so I Know that's a lot of numbers to absorb early in the morning But the point of all this is that it actually costs money to regulate a drug like marijuana and There are debates about how the drug should be regulated What law enforcement should be able to do should they be able to? Conduct roadside saliva testing that's something that commission felt strongly about And others have said it's not as important Dick Sears for example head of judiciary Really doesn't want to see a roadside saliva test Both Mitzi Johnson the house speaker and Governor Phil Scott are for a roadside saliva test Even though at this point really there is no Connection between THC levels and impairment that is reliable So there are questions about that from a scientific standpoint. There are drug recognition experts who are out there who You know work for police agencies that Recommend testing when someone appears to be impaired Boy, I'm rambling on I shouldn't have studied so much this morning Let's see what else One of the things that I found really interesting and I'm going to ask the panel about is the Substance Misuse Advisory Committee What that would look like and what it would mean for the state of Vermont? and you know how local municipalities would Would deal with the placement of retail facilities around the state So those are just a few of the things we're going to be talking about and as always I like to lead with reader questions Because our readers are really thoughtful and they ask great questions So I'm going to start with Deb Wolfe who emailed me the other day. She's from Middlesex and she worries about the placement of Retail marijuana shops near schools churches neighborhoods and playgrounds and I'm wondering if you all think that's an issue Well, it's it's certainly an issue not only for a policy decision on behalf of the state of Vermont, but there's also with everything involved in cannabis the overlay of federal law and the continuing federal prohibition and there are Increased penalties and specific legislation on the federal level Concerning drug activity in or around schools in the current medical marijuana program there is a prohibition on placing retail and cultivation facilities within I think it's a thousand yards of a child care center church school etc and Particularly with respect to child care Facilities if you look at the map of where they're located and you include home daycare It becomes extremely challenging to locate anything anywhere within a even a very small buffer zone so if that policy decision is is adopted and You have a continuing prohibition against the location of retail shops as an example You are going to have some challenges as far as location go I Think that you know the location of retail shops in particular we heard from the experts on the Commission from the Health and Education Committee were very adamant about the placement and availability of retail shops And so far as it's influence on the perceptions of youth Towards the use of cannabis So those are important policy considerations I personally think that absolutely there should be some consideration But again given the practical challenges when you pull in all the home daycares and so forth there may need to be some flexibility To actually provide spots where the retail activity can happen I would just add that under current statute. We have Our communities our towns in our cities Do cluster development sort of in our downtown area So it makes it even that much harder to locate these Facilities and areas that are suitable just because settlement patterns have to look a certain way so that thousand-foot buffers own as an extra layer on top of the layers of Our zoning bylaws generally saying they have to be Any development has to be in a downtown clustered area Great. Thank you Jeb Wolf also asks whether habitual heavy use of marijuana is Necessary in order to support a Marijuana industry here in Vermont and she worries about how that could impact young people The statistics that you often see cited are that a High percentage of the sales of regulated cannabis in states where it's it's licensed for retail sale A high percentage of the sales goes to a relatively small percentage of the population who are regular if not heavy users, so I think that's That's something to keep an eye on and then the the Education Prevention Committee And the rest of the Commission's work recommended a robust Gathering of information and statistics along about that and other things going back to the the local impact issue there's a threshold question that the Commission actually was not able to come to a complete consensus on and that is whether We Vermont in a regulated environment should be an opt-in or an opt-out state an opt-in would mean that Cannabis related businesses including retail sales would not happen in any town unless the town Affirmatively voted to allow that That's opt-in the opt-out model would be Towns would be given in a period of time in which to take a vote to opt out so that no Cannabis related businesses would be happening in that town Those are the two two models and As I said the consensus was we'd leave that to the General Assembly Nice punt on that one You know I so the next question is from Dave Crowley from Bennington, and this is directed at Jake He says that you argue that investing in additional law enforcement resources is a necessary step in rolling out a legal market Sighting California Mr. Perkinson makes the argument that an illegal cannabis market is still thriving because the state failed to make an investment and police Resources how do you compare the policing needs of California population? 39.5 million and 164,000 square miles with the policing needs of Vermont population 624,000 in 96 9600 square miles doesn't this make the case for a lower tax on cannabis? Obviously high taxes drive and sustain in the legal market Why is there this discriminatory and prejudiced branding of cannabis users as out of control people? And there are more comments, but I'm going to stop there Yeah, first I would say that it certainly is Valid and important to make distinctions between California and Vermont California obviously is the size of a small country and Vermont's the size of a mid-sized city so As far as the allocation of resources there are going to be differences and there will be differences in economies of scouts and the efficiency with which We can approach the issue Having said that I think that in analyzing the issue. It's not limited to California that my comments would be applicable to other States as well including Oregon Washington, Colorado Where they face the challenge of an existing market which has been operating outside of the law for over 60 years And trying to bring that within the purview of a regulated system Obviously, you know as the founding fathers said if people were angels, we wouldn't need government people aren't angels and You really need to pay close attention to how you're going to incentivize people who are currently operating outside of a legal regulated market to come into that market and so Obviously one Approach and really the main focus of the legalization push has been to provide a legal market in which they can operate however in the context of the United States of America where you will continue to have jurisdictions where there is a Prohibition there will be an incentive to To at least operate under Continue to operate illegally or to operate within a legalized system and and provide that product to Areas where it's not Permitted we saw an example of that in recently in Burlington where there was a shop selling Product produced from states where it is legal being sold in Vermont. So I Believe that you can't simply say now it's legal and expect everybody to come in and join the regulated system as long as there remains an incentive for people to operate outside that system and I think part of eliminating that incentive would require a robust enforcement mechanism to ensure that those bad actors that are not within the system Will have accountability and the threat of enforcement and really if you don't have that you're punishing the people that are Electing to operate within the regulated system, and I think that's the most unfair part about it And so I certainly appreciate the the comments and understand that there's a lot of emotions wrapped up in this The way that I look at it is really from a pragmatic standpoint of what is going to Bring the most amount of people into a regulated market and prevent the most amount of product from being Put out you know and being available in an illegal matter especially to minors I just wanted to add to that. Um, so every state that has legalized so far Has a very different law enforcement environment environment in general. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a town or city in almost any state that's legalized that doesn't have a police department or a Robust County sheriff in place that simply just doesn't exist in Vermont at the level In other states including all of the out west, but I'm also in Massachusetts and Maine so considerations for How a Community might be impacted whether it be a rural grow facility or a downtown retail operation Consideration of what kind of wrap around law enforcement is in existence is actually really important because it it simply might not be there at all Great. Thank you Rodgers from Colchester wants to know can the legislature assure us that smoking marijuana will not be in 20 or 10 or 20 years a major health Issue like cigarettes were in our right now No, I Think I would urge people to read the report from the Education and Prevention subcommittee that's incorporated into the Commission's overall report and The folks on that subcommittee are health and education professionals and also involved in prevention and treatment of Substance abuse Patients and families dealing with substance abuse. No, no, I don't think anyone can make a guarantee and if someone's looking for a guarantee They're there that we can't purport to do that and in fact, I think if you polled the the members of the Education and Prevention subcommittee, they'd say don't do it Yeah, and in fact that the Vermont Department of Health has compiled a health impact statement, which is extremely detailed about the existing Scientific research on cannabis, but the unfortunate part about you know trying to make Comments on what the health effects of cannabis are is the lack of scientific study or lack of studies that are Generally accepted in the scientific community and that has of course In what is in large part due to the fact of the federal prohibition and the lack of availability for cannabis? research opportunities throughout the United States that's beginning to change But yeah, I would echo that nobody can make any guarantees. We just we simply don't know What the long-term effects will be And and I'd add that the the governor's advisory commission was not asked to Give a recommendation or an opinion about whether Vermont should move to taxed and regulated retail sales we were asked if Before Vermont was going to make that decision before the decision makers are going to go there What would the Vermont version of that look like if you made that decision and that's really You know the governor and the legislators are the ones who have to decide whether Vermont should do that We were just saying if you if you make that choice, this is these are some guidelines you should follow Thank You Tom for clarifying that You know there there seem to be a lot of questions about the tax itself and the level that would be appropriate and William Magnus from Swanton Wants to know whether a 20% tax will perpetuate the black market Couldn't we just go with the sales tax? That's basically what he's saying And you do see these bills in the legislature that have a lower excise tax level I wondered if you could talk about why you all came up with 20% I think it's 20% in the in the right and the commission's report plus the 6% Sales tax plus in towns and cities where there's the local option tax It could be another another penny on the tax. That's kind of it's sort of in the middle of where other states have gone We kind of threw a dart in the in the middle of that It's it should be I think we've mentioned this before but it should be emphasized to for a state government to try to control and regulate and tax and license a Market that's in existence been existence for 60 plus years that's churning millions and millions of dollars worth of sales in Vermont is no small undertaking Regardless of how much money we spend on law enforcement that market it will be and in my opinion will be a Persistent and if he had a 3% sales tax on cannabis sales in Vermont I think the underground market would persist as well We've but we've read recently that the state of California is now considering lowering its excise tax to put more pressure on the underground market But I think the the the folks in Vermont and and who are at least as ingenious as those in California Who are who are who have been growing and processing and selling cannabis for decades are many of them are likely to try to continue that because that's the business they're in now and to for them to Spend the money to get the license to upgrade and rent the space and go public just may be unattractive to them So I just think we need to be we go need the state needs to go into this with its eyes wide open just just a flesh out some of the logistics behind coming up with the 20% the the tax department worked with the joint physical office to come up with estimates about What tax what what amount of money would be required? Looking at what the expected sales in Vermont could be and then calculating the tax off of that and that's really what the analysis wasn't coming up with that 20% and That is I think that's actually slightly lower than the majority of states as far as a tax rate overall Some some states tax at the wholesale level some have other Means of taxation but at the end of the day, I think Vermont's 20% proposal would be on the lower side So I I feel that It's it's just important that to recognize that that that process was gone through under the assumption that It was going to fund the necessary programs that the committee that the Commission had deemed Appropriate in the event of a legalized market. So it wasn't that simply to fund the administrative agency, but also to fund the programs in the through the health department and through Educational facilities as well as the Department of Public Safety For roadway safety and so we tried to you know figure out what all the costs of that would be and come up with a Reasonable tax rate that would fund those and so they you know really it's sort of a philosophical shift where you're saying you know and and that's kind of what concerns me about the proposal just to have a Straight tax it goes into the general fund because then it goes in the general fund and it gets dissipated to whatever through the appropriations process and At that point you're not having direct accountability with respect to the effects of this particular product so we have an opportunity to have Everybody who's participating and chooses to participate in this market to bear the burden of what the effects of this are and I'm not saying the effects are necessarily negative, but there are effects. There are requirements to Regulation and so I I readily admit that that's a departure from What is typically the case, but I think that if we have this opportunity to do it You can step back in time and imagine what it would be like if that was the same philosophy applied to Licenses to drill for oil and where we'd be today So the opportunity to have sort of this anticipatory approach I think is a valuable one and one well worth exploring That's right the legislature could do something entirely different, but I doubt they would go there Just quickly before I go to Ken. I Took a few notes. I took the liberty of taking a few notes and the range is Oregon at 17 percent Massachusetts at 20 California at 27 Colorado at 30 in Washington State at 37 percent So 20 percent is even a little bit on the low side compared with other states that have implemented a tax and regulation system Can you have a question? Well, the the I'll say I'll offer a few a few comments in response There are people who are not consuming cannabis now because they they're not comfortable Not knowing what they're buying They want and they will feel more comfortable if they could go to a retail store Where the product has been? In a sense regulated by the state tested by the state tested for Pesticides and herbicides and for the potency of it so that they know what they're buying So that that provides a level of consumer protection that is presumably not available otherwise and Then there's the right by reference to the mention the the education and prevention efforts that the Commission is recommending to build stronger Education and prevention programs in Vermont particularly for the our younger our younger residents Yeah, I think I think that's right and those are those are contained in the Commission's report there's an outline specifically of what the anticipated cost of The programs recommended to be implemented are and again, you know, the youth programs are an important part of it I don't think that you can say that there's going to be no effect. There's clearly a Shift there's a shift that's going on already. Vermont has legalized cannabis and That causes a shift in perception. And so I think it is important to Give young people the tools to evaluate the effects that they might They might be exposed to The other thing I would mention is that the administration of it is is not free You know, the medical program has a budget of I think somewhere between three hundred and four hundred thousand dollars and they regulate five entities and so you know, I think that There is going to be a lot of costs associated with it is already has been Mentioned and you know having a laissez-faire is what we have now I'm not sure if the proposal is just to let it keep going and just not prosecute. I don't think that's a viable option And I don't think it's fair to people because there are effects. I don't think you can deny that, you know, any commercial activity has an effect And I think Vermont should definitely have the benefit of taxing that commercial activity and those taxes should go towards first and foremost addressing any effects that are caused by that activity could you all Recall for us how much revenue is anticipated from marijuana sales? overall the tax department worked with the legislature's Joint fiscal office looking at What's being recorded for revenue in the other states where it is licensed for retail sale we they Rated that to the Vermont population and market and came up with a low medium and high revenue estimate and those were As it rolled out and the low Estimate per year was in the range of 10 or 11 million dollars and the high was in the 20 million dollar range One of the tricks to the on the revenue side is when do you start collecting the revenue? and If you're trying to pay for the cost of the governmental infrastructure that's going to regulate it When how does that went? Do you what you may need before that you actually are regulating and taxing the sales? How do you how do you pull that one off? It's a chicken or egg problem, right I Suggest you may be able to bond in anticipation of the tax revenues because a lot of Many many if not all Vermont school districts and towns will borrow money in anticipation of property tax revenues In the slow times of the year and then pay back the bonds when the tax revenue comes in you could conceivably do something Like that the trouble there is is you keep bumping into this federal law prohibition And if you're bonding trying to issue a debt instrument like bonds that's sold in the public market It's regulated by the federal government. You run it you bump into a real problem there and that's Going back to our comments earlier about law enforcement. This is not only a robust Underground market. It's a cash market And the licensed version of it would also presumably be a largely cash for the time being And so the numbers that you're talking about sorry second, please the numbers you're talking about in terms of revenue They don't include Purchases by people from out of state who are visiting to ski or hike or whatever, right? It's just local Local use. Oh, they do take in. Okay. All right Okay, good. Um, we're taking questions not comments So if you can come up with a question, I'm gonna ask one now and then so Many people in the pro side of legalization. This is from Kim Hubbard and Jericho Okay, Kim, you want to go you want to ask your question good? Great, I'm glad you're here Many people in the pro side of legalization seem to conflate legalization with commercialization Recently I was horrified by a Canadian advertisement marketing marijuana featuring children's voices a fundamental question for anyone making decisions regarding regulating marijuana is What are your intentions for regulating commercialization of products containing THC? Now you all have a whole section on advertising in your report, right? You want to talk about commercialization? Well, though the recommendations on commercial on advertising specifically Came both out of the tax and regulate subcommittee as well as the health and education subcommittee health and education I think had the more detailed Recommendations with respect to time and place of sales Limiting the placement of advertising so that the the medium could credibly be Argued to only have I think it should be legalized. I so I mean I Sometimes I make comments and people think that that's an argument for not legalizing my my position is it should be legalized But it should be done in a way that's responsible and that protects children and Public safety so the reality is any product can only grow if it has new customers and so you see in the tobacco industry and people may not like that analogy, but It's a good. It's a good example of a Industry that understands how to grow their market and you grow the market by being attractive to new customers and That means Trying to attract children and so I do believe that there should be a concerted effort to prevent that from happening We understand that that will be an incentive for any company If they're looking at their bottom line, they will want to have new customers The new customers are youth and so if we know that we can operate in a way that will hopefully address that ahead of time and Cut them up off at the past so to speak so those are the generalized recommendations with respect to to advertising and it really do Focus mostly on preventing youth access and incentivizing youth to use the product in terms of You know, I'll just Read from The report Limiting advertising can reduce youth initiation and overall use prohibiting self-service displays internet sales free samples mass media advertising and flavored products should be a part of any commercial cannabis regulation and Advertising restrictions should be implemented to which ensure that youth and young adults are not targeted By or exposed to cannabis advertising Advertising should be restricted from any area where youth could potentially be exposed now that all runs into some of our other illegal traditions in Vermont in this country concerning The First Amendment to the US Constitution, but there are clear limits to that in the in the commerce area And I mean specifically to your point about counteractive measures the proposal from the health and education subcommittee was to use funds from marijuana tech or cannabis taxation To fund a statewide program For education specifically directed at youth and I think the price tag for that was set at somewhere as eight million dollars so eight million yeah, and it was it was you know, so the the idea is to have a robust program and Obviously, there's also an ancillary Benefit in that you know the conversation about cannabis it wouldn't be restricted simply to that it would be about all substances and hopefully Also counteract some of the opioid issues that we have as well And so, you know it does present an opportunity I think to address a need that's not currently addressed with respect to substance abuse and funding programs for children and schools To address that issue Thank you. Well, it is now 848 and I think we've run out of time. It's been a great. Oh, we have one more question We have I think I think Those of us in our communities who feel strongly and then that on that theme should Ask their legislators not to enact a retail Regulated market. It's as simple as that. That is the question up on the hill here this this winner there's a Senate Finance Committee is taking testimony this afternoon on the tax and revenue side I think starting at 130 and the Senate Finance I know we have more questions and there was a question that I didn't get to on the list from a reader Who is concerned that? It's a different version of your question around First Amendment rights, but This person was worried about corporations really Selling a lot of marijuana in the state of Vermont and that there would be limitations put on local growers and And and I don't know if there maybe we could just wrap up with other questions, too What do you have? Yes, we absolutely looked at that. I think there's some important distinctions Well, first of all, I'll say just because it's done in alcohol doesn't mean that's the way to do it I think there's plenty of problems with the way alcohol is regulated and lots of things It could be addressed that are not being addressed And again, that was really the the Commission tried to find to try to come up with what would be the absolute best way to regulate this if we're Gonna if we're gonna legalize it So alcohol was certainly looked at I think one of the biggest challenges with respect to adopting a straight alcohol model is the fact that That the the legalization of alcohol has been decades and decades and decades We are in this transition period and I think the challenge would be again as I referenced before How do you bring these people that are currently participating in in an illegal market into the legal market? and I'm not sure that the That all the tools to do that are in the existing Alcohol regime, but I do think that's a good model. I think the Vermont model is fairly good where the state has a fairly tight regulatory Hold if you are gonna allow a substance You know again, it's not perfect, but It certainly prevents presents a model that that could be explored one more question right here And then it really is time to go the testimony from from law enforcement was Based on the presumption their presumption and that I think reasonably broadly shared that if Vermont Opens up cannabis sales to a retail Legal retail sales more cannabis will be consumed in Vermont than is being consumed now if you don't Buy into that then you can I can see you can say well We don't need any additional law enforcement resources if you think the more Cannabis is and byproducts are going to be used in Vermont then you might say we need to beef up law enforcement And I'd add it's not it's not just you know law enforcement when we talk about you know road Side issues, I mean these are we are you have concerns about illegal grow operations you have concerns about Public use You might have concerns with sort of ordinance enforcement There's been you know in other states there's odor. I mean it could be something so simple as odor complaints From you know neighbor to neighbor So it's not just One small part of enforcement it's sort of a quilt of issues that sort of pop up and Right and so whether or not There are current resources to compensate what might be coming down with the increase of use With no additional funding coming through or no additional taxing or resources or revenue That money would have to come from either the general fund for the troopers or it would have to come from Property taxes if you have a municipal department, so I think that's why it's important to sort of Be better prepared on the rollout and then it's easier to pull things back as things Move forward it's harder to get things implemented after the fact Well, thank you all for going to the weeds on weed and if you If you want to just come up after and ask your question that'd be great. Thank you so much