Well, I will ask you some questions today about familiar topics like digital transformation. But if that's okay with you, I was reading some of your previous interviews and I found some topics quite interesting and I wanted to ask you a bit more about those and some of your experiences. Sure, sure. Ask me anything. If I don't know, I'll just say I don't know. Also, you mentioned that you want to reuse some of those materials.  That's fantastic. Thank you very much. It's always good to ask so that you know what's being done with the data, I guess. Yes. Okay, so just to start off on familiar ground, I think intelligent automation and digital transformation are becoming increasingly more apparent on the global agenda. A lot of people are talking about it in private companies, the public sector increasingly as you know and also in the social sector. When we look at Taiwan, there seems to be quite a unique way of approaching digital transformation. We see collaboration with the social sector more. As you said as well, there's trust in the public, from the government, in the first instance to start with. And also there's a lot of knowledge when it comes to technology itself through the background that you have and some of the specialists that work with you. Can you tell me a bit more about that and why Taiwan is so unique in a way and its approach? Yeah, sure. So I don't think Taiwan is particularly unique, unique because we also learn from our international counterparts. We learn from the civic tech communities, for example, we collaborate regularly with Code for Japan, which is a GovZero-like community in Japan and also South Korea. The community here have run hackathons in Okinawa, which is the midpoint between the South Korea and Japan and Taiwanese communities being a kind of midpoint island with its own culture and civilization and that. And so I think we're part of this larger ecosystem of civic technologists. I think the unique thing, if any, in Taiwan is that we see democracy itself as a social technology that you can also tinker, that you can also innovate. And I think that's because we don't have a long tradition of democracy. We literally fought for democracy, my parents' generation, grandparents' generation fought for it, so that our generation, we are in our 30s, are the first generation that can grow up with the freedom of expression of the press and so on. So for all of us, this is all very new. And because it's very new, we learned to build democracy when there's already where I went, when there's already internet-based technologies. So we're not limited by the traditional customs or norms around physical, physics technologies, that is to say, the attenuation of sound in a large town hall limits the number of people who can speak and listen at the same time. We start off with the technology that enables millions of people to listen at one another deeply. And that, I think, formed a more participatory culture of everybody who think about how to make democracy better. Can't just contribute and make democracy better. They don't have to wait for a representative to re-present them. OK. And just to sort of set that in time, would that have been round about the 90s when the Wilderly movement happened? That's exactly right. Before which there was still martial law, right? The martial law extended all the way to the late 80s, and we did not have the first presidential election until 1996. And so there was a decade of grassroots movements, communities of practice, the social sector building the legitimacy until the presidential election, where the elections start to come by the president themselves and the premier that they appoint. But always the social sector has had higher legitimacy. And still enjoy higher legitimacy than our administration. OK, I find that quite interesting. So I'm originally from Romania. And Romania had a revolution in 1989 where it switched from a communist regime to democracy. And it's quite interesting because in Romania, the switch was quite sudden in a way, and the technologies that perhaps were in place in Taiwan and developing didn't have an incubation phase, if you will. So for me, as a Romanian national, it's quite interesting to sort of look at the lack of the incubation phase versus having the incubation phase and how that developed in the social sector. In Taiwan, there was no revolution to speak of. It's an evolution. It's a peaceful, calm revolution, if you will, that did not end in bloodshed in any kind.  That is to say, there's more than 20 national languages in Taiwan and no one dominates the other ones. And people kind of live in a live and let live kind of way because there was no revolutions during our democratization. Yes, I was reading about that a bit. And it seems, as you say, that there was an evolution and that the values that people had towards free speech, culture and the importance of the social sector almost organically fell into place in a way. Even though there were movements proposing changes, there was also a reception for them. There was also an open-mindedness to them. OK, so you agree? OK, OK, I've done my reading. Yeah, that's right, excellent research. And I wanted to ask you, actually, what your opinion is on the form that took as the sunflower movement happened? I found a paragraph from an interview quite interesting where you were describing that technology was actively used to create an intra-network of people being present there. And that seems as though technology had a more significant impact than before. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Definitely, definitely. But first of all, I would say that digital technology was purely a assistive role in the sunflower occupy, mostly it's social technology. That is to say, for example, the daily broadcasted readings of previous days, consensus, and political responses from all the stakeholder groups in the occupied parliament by the student leaders. That's like a ritual that they do every morning. Or the physical placement of the 20 or so NGOs around the occupied parliament, including the three neutrals, the people who are there to protect the human rights, the pro bono lawyers, and the people who are there, the pro bono medical staff to protect everybody's health, as well as the communication experts, including but not limited to the e-forum or the dub zero and so on, that are there to protect everybody's right to communication. And these are the kind of fabric that weaves a open space in which that people can freely deliberate all the different aspects of the cross-strait service-trade agreement or the CSSTA. Unlike many other occupiers, we're like a single focal point. The sunflower is very focused on the CSSTA and its social impact. So after three weeks, there was a set of very firm consensus for demand, not one less. And the head of the MP eventually agreed on those four demands so the occupied was a success. And it was a demonstration that shows people that it is possible with the recommendation of social technology facilitation and deliberation for half a million people on the street and many more online to agree in a rough consensus about a very large CSSTA agreement as scope. And so I think that's why the cabinet then decided to learn this art of facilitated listening to skill rather than seeing the protesters as purely protesters. They see it as a demo, people who demonstrate a newer way of policymaking. OK, so what I'm hearing is that there wasn't the othering that you see happening with so many other. Exactly, yeah. Excellent interpretation. Yes. Thank you. With so many other movements. Also, when you were mentioning the fact that there were 20 NGOs involved and different stakeholders, that sounds like there was quite a complex approach there. Did this evolve from the previous events? Yes, so it was informed by many other events. The wild strawberry, the wild lily, is always wild something. I wonder why it's not called wild sunflower. Maybe too many syllables. But anyway, so well, some flowers are already wild anyway. So what I'm trying to get at is that it's a network of practice communities that each of those NGOs all have, as I said, in the since the late 80s when they started building legitimacy. So each of them have their own network of people who care about such aspects. So to talk about the impact of CSSTA on cybersecurity, on human rights violations, on labor conditions, on environmental protection, on the freedom of the press, and so on. Each have its own NGO to take care of that particular aspect. And so yes, it is a larger network of communications. And for sunflower movement, it's just that it, like a rolling snowball, gets much more people who are just part-time involvement, not full-time dedicated social movement people, to get into the habit of listening to those different NGOs. But the root of the solidarity is already there. OK. When would you say that the root of solidarity became part of Taiwanese culture? Is it thousands of years old? Can you tell, can you identify something that's related to it? Yeah, sure. Well, if you want to go way back, of course, the Out of Taiwan hypothesis says that the whole Polynesian-Australian culture was from the Taiwanese indigenous people. And indeed, many of those cultures are still around. And even people who are from New Zealand, like the Mali, still visit Taiwan to celebrate their shared cultural identity. And so that part has always been part of Taiwan. And because Taiwan is layers upon layers of cultures, of waves, of waves, of immigrations, it's by necessity that people rely on social sector instead of a large federal government of sorts, because we're a bunch of islands and any nearest continent is actually quite far away with no advanced seafaring technology. And so people relied on each other much more. There's already many prototypes of co-op-like movement in Taiwan. So even after the end of the Japanese colonial rule, there's still a lot of social fabric that connects those co-op-like structures together. And although many of them did get suppressed during the Junkhead Shack Nationalist rule, it was still, I would say, that the credit union movements, the co-op movement, the other movement still have a very firm share of mind for like a better sum in the ordinary Taiwanese citizens who do not, frankly speaking, trust that much any bureaucratic structure. Okay, so there are some technology theorists that state that technology amplifies some of the social values and norms of the people creating the technology and designing that technology. Can you tell me a bit more about your thoughts on that? Sure. In Taiwan, we insist that broadband access is a human right. And behind that was the decades of policy that basically says that whenever we roll out new communication infrastructure, we need to begin in the lowest resource places. That is to say, there's a very strong, egalitarian approach when it comes to healthcare, which is single payer and universal coverage and education. These two areas Taiwanese people believe in the not only equal opportunity, but actually all the newest ideas are to be prototyped in the places that are suffering the most, empowering people closest to the pain. And this is, I think, a very long tradition, certainly before I was born, that people have already considered this way of thinking. Partly that was because the constitution of the current governments in Taiwan came from Dr. Sanya Sen, who is a student of thought leaders like Henry George, who is a social thinker that is neither left or right. The George's School believes in using the market in a pro-social manner, so that while maximizing people's individual preferences, it also enabled the social technologies to design mechanism that furthers everybody else's maximal welfare. And this mechanism design, school of thought, is written in the constitution and it specifically said that co-op structures are to be encouraged in a mechanism design. Thinking need to be applied to, for example, collective ownership of land and things like that to maximize its use by market mechanism while feedbacking the social preferences to how people allocate their thoughts and things like that, their votes and things like that. And so we introduced novel ways of decision-making almost as part of our culture when there's a new voting system like quadratic voting which is applied directly to our presidential hackathon. And you can see the same with participatory budgeting and many other people's democracy, new thoughts and new mechanisms. Okay, that's very interesting. So there are some views on technology as being let's say critical realist where technology is objective and we have our own personal experience that shapes how we see technology. And there are also some emerging trends in the West that look at post-humanist technology, if you will, where the individual is no longer the center of the discussion. And so some of the questions arising from that are over time how does technology shape the individual, if you will. So with the context you've just described, how do you think that happens? Well, soap is a technology, right? And that is what we rely on nowadays. And as I mentioned, voting is a technology while writing systems are technologies. So the human civilization has been defined by technologies and it's not a new thing. What is a new thing is that the human condition is now increasingly being shaped by those technologies that represent ourselves, that we are essentially avatars.  And this really makes it much harder for each individual to have a good kind of bargaining power or even a sense of bargaining power. This is like on the cusp of the industrialization where individual workers have no way to negotiate with the capitalist on the working conditions because individually they have much less political power and financial power and other mobilization power. It's not until the invention of cooperatives and unions do the workers now have a way, both legally and part of the social norm, to negotiate as a social sector. And so what we are now seeing very similar things happening in controllership over data, in personal data protection, in privacy, in getting accountable reading of the decision that affects us and things like that. And the more that people insist on the social sector norms, the more the technologies like us will develop in a pro-social way. And the less people are insisting on those norms and then of course the surveillance state or the surveillance capitalism will then just harvest people's data if not other parts. Okay, so there are a few elements in there and I'm trying to think of which one to start with. Yes. So for example, what comes to mind as I listened to you is the difference in between some of the approaches we've seen in Taiwan where we have trust from the government first into citizens and working from the low level first to the immediate experience we have now in parts of the West, where we have the concept of digital participation and bringing that from governments, from public sector authorities to citizens. It seems as though there is more of an evolution towards participation and the social sector as well but it can take a while to actually get there. Do you see a bridge or steps that can be taken to bridge that gap? Definitely, I mean, the rapid responses that we're now seeing because of coronavirus of the daily press briefings, that's a really good start. If you add a daily press briefing through live stream and working with the journalists with the hotline that everybody can call if they have something new idea to contribute. That's using just very ancient technology. That's just radio, television and telephone. But with that, you can build a rapid response system that makes the trust to the citizens apparent that any new idea just become a policy that gets amplified to the society. And we see many, because of coronavirus, many jurisdictions start taking this really into account and expanding their core centers as well as nationalizing some parts of the broadcasting channels for those sort of communications. And this is just a social innovation that's very old using very old technology but that demonstratively adds people's willingness to participate in the counter coronavirus ways. Of course, we see masks for all where people are shown how to reuse their t-shirts and things like that to weave their own mask and to remind themselves not to touch their face and wash their hands properly. Again, that's social technology. And so all of this, I think because of coronavirus, are seeing a renewed interest in how to get the science out, get the ideas of how to protect ourselves and also the basic epidemiology findings out in a way that's maximally funny in how we call it humor over rumor. If we can make humorous way to deliver these things and everybody can think of even more humorous ways to remind each other to keep physical distance and wash hands properly and so on. And so I think this is not just Taiwan. Everybody is now well-motivated to reduce the R-node number of the virus while increasing the R-number of the social innovations of basic transmission rate of ideas. I also found it quite interesting when you were discussing about the role of the public sector servant and some of the changes you've noticed in the policy change, allowing junior and younger public sector workers to express their ideas more freely, especially when using a pseudonym and in a sort of private forum, if you will. Well, not private, the go forum. It's recognized when the idea turns into reality. It's just they remain pseudonymous during this incubation period to absorb the risk. Oh, I see, yes. So you were saying you were demonstrating it and you would sort of take the risk as the demonstrator but they could then express the idea and then perhaps take credit later on. I know that there was the discussion that it's not something that is potentially such a problem in the West. I do find it quite rare still to see in the West public sector workers like myself that openly work in the public service but also get involved in other projects. So for example, as I'm working for the university, maybe I'm doing a teaching assistant job. I'm speaking to you and things like that but it's not, I don't see a lot of overt activity from junior public service workers. Why do you think they're such a difference? I think in older democracies and republics, the people who are interested in public service need to understand the context of the public service and they need to dedicate a lot of years to learn the proper kind of tradition in order to function well. And that's as opposed to people who are interested in design thinking in agile technologies and making a lot of novel ideas in a very rapid iteration cycle that tend to be a different sort of people majoring in different things in the universities. But in Taiwan, there's no legacy to speak of and so the same generation of people are essentially all slushies, right? We need to figure out how democracy works while we're also figuring out how to make personal computers work or how the web works or how social media works.  And in 2014, the sunflower movement also showed that if you major in the humanities, if you are a social worker, basically all works a lot of life can offer their personal experiences and that's very meaningful to add to the quality of the deliberation. And then it attracts people who are even of even softer skills to join the public service. So like in 2013, a year before sunflower movement, if you ask a random person majoring in social work or majoring in other people care skills, like what are your prospects of your participating public policymaking? They will also tell you like it's not like business, but after 2014 became very cool to share what they have to say. And I think the political climate really changed because of the Occupy movement. Okay, and you also said very cool. So I'm changing the direction of the discussion a little bit. Sometimes when events happen and when cultures change, we start to see changes in various places in that society. We have the zeitgeist, if you will, of what's happening there. And sometimes that manifests itself in art and in other media. In preparing for this conversation, I discussed with someone close to me actually, and we thought that perhaps when something becomes profound enough and important enough to a person, that person is able to express it creatively and in an art form like you do with your manifesto, for example. Do you see versions of these changes in other places in society, such as in art or spirituality or other media? Definitely, definitely. I'll share with you something that just went online yesterday. It's a hip hop group called, so here, where they just took one of my interviews with Japanese media and remixed it as what they call the civil rap science. So you can pursue this later, but basically, it's just taking the words that I've been sharing with you, some of the words that I've also shared with other press. And so this is their lyrics translated to English and they basically reuse parts of my conversation with the journalists, like location independence, like social sector, the civic sector. We should own the data, building data collation and data collaboratives. And Henry George, there's Republic of Citizens and we're not transforming into digital. We're amplifying the analog process so it reaches more people. And these are some of the core ideas and they just wrote a rap, a hip hop to it and with experimental visuals using a, I think, machine learning to generate meaningful patterns based on those words and so on. And it was a hit, I think, a lot of people joined in the premiere, including me. And so it is really helping, I guess, the side guys to just experiment of how the traditional art and traditional art forms can help inform the social innovation processes and even the thing that I wear, as you can see with my Facebook avatar photo, is actually from the National Palace Museum, one of the most ancient Song Dynasty paintings. And that was then given new meanings and new forms as a sign for social innovation. This is my thank you note for Team Taiwan because everybody through a online data collaborative has dedicated a lot of medical masks to the international people in need and people can see in real time after every day who are the people who dedicated their uncollected facial mask quota into the world. And because we publish it as open data, so you can then see it's being amplified in other even more meaningful art forms like this is from a professional designer, Aaron Ye, that says, who can help? And then Taiwan, like walking out of a door providing safety and solidarity and that combines our previous Vice President and generous crash course on coronavirus on the timelines on the specific technologies that we're helping. And then you can see this humanitarian assistance which is reusing the data. And this is not government work. This is entirely crowdfunded by a bunch of artists and YouTubers and things like that. So I think definitely this is getting into a popular culture and it's very hip to contributing whichever art form you can to the public welfare as you see here. I'm just checking. Was it only 40 minutes that we have? So do we have five minutes left? Something like that, but because we started late, so if you don't mind me eating at the same time, we have maybe 10 minutes. Okay, I don't mind that at all. I had a chicken and egg question, although we've kind of approached it, but more for the enjoyment of the question itself. Is technology disruptive or are people disruptive? Definitely, I think it's people who disrupt. But people can use technology to be more disruptive. Technology is an amplifier. If you choose to disrupt, the technology can make you more disruptive or if you choose to create, to nurture, then the technology can also make it more nurturing. And so there is no technology that are neutral. You tend to gravitate to a technology that agree with your philosophy and this is the same with the society, with the social norms. Okay, and something that I noticed in these conversations is that we don't really hear so much about bias or bias reports when we get to the technology that's been used in the social sector. Can you tell me why that is? Yes, for example, the mass creationing map, one of the most celebrated piece of civic technology during the Taiwan response to the pandemic is a good example because it starts quite biased. The choose choice of map as a visualization to show you which pharmacy near you still have the mask.  This is obviously biased because people who don't have sight, who people with blindness cannot make use of this map that well. And the reason why the bias is not so much discussed is because this is open innovation. Anyone can take this and build a chatbot. And so people did that, actually on the very first day, noticing that people with blindness cannot feel the mask map. They just build a chatbot using the line system. Later on, people in Trent Micro, one of the leading antivirus company would contribute the voice assistant plugin and eventually Apple's theory team joined in. And so if you ask theory, where are the masks? They will just refer you to these voice enabled parts of the more than 100 tools. So if you begin with the idea of open innovation and the first movers do not preclude further possibilities from happening, then you don't need to worry that much about bias because people who are suffering from a disadvantage viewpoint can always find people who sympathize with them and then complete their piece of the puzzle without taking down anything before them. But if you do not have an open innovation, if you rely on traditional procurement rules, then of course you have to be very wary of bias because you cannot correct that course until one year later in the procurement cycle. Okay, yes. And the procurement cycle is always more complex and requires a slower moving ecosystem than perhaps collaboration. So innovation is social sector defining the spec and we in the public sector deliver our support. So there's a reverse procurement and it doesn't suffer from the same problem as the traditional way of PPP. Okay, and just finally, there was a question at some point about how you see things changing in the future. And one part of the answer you gave was related to how psychological proximity would be enhanced by the technologies we're using at the moment. Can you tell me a bit more about that in the context we've been discussing? Well, this is evident, right? If you are also, you know, having food as I'm having food now with more proximity than compared to if we meet face to face but each have to wear a mask and therefore cannot read each other's expressions. Here you go. So what we're trying to say is that the coronavirus not only let us see the possibility of a more environmental friendly lifestyle as everybody has been pointing out nowadays but also shows how social solidarity can be built by people in very different time zones with very different time life experiences. But we still enjoy, you know, warm water, I assume, or cold water and good food and also music like the rap I just shared you and also just the care that we put into the global health community. And those solidarity are from what we traditionally call a swift trust, right? We just trust each other to care about the same things and so we hop on Skype and have an interview and we agree to even record it and publish to YouTube or publish to say it as a transcript. And all this shows that we care about other people. We care not only about our own selfish interests but actually about the future generations including anyone who happened to read this transcript. And so this basically is a more sustainable way of looking at personal relationship with we join mostly communities of practice instead of communities of physical proximity then we bring the better part of ourselves out in more of our day-to-day communications. And I make an example of working in a public park, right?  So I feel people care about the society environment much more if I work in the open rather than if I work in isolated cubicles in a ministry or office. Okay. I think that pretty much answers all my questions and hopefully gives you a couple more minutes of eating without interruption as well. That's great, that's great. So would you prefer a transcript or a video published? I would be fine with both. To be honest, I will leave that decision. I'll just publish the video to YouTube and YouTube will make a caption for us. And if you see something wrong with the caption you can always contribute as a YouTube community member. Okay, certainly. Let's do that. Okay, cheers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Bye-bye.


Hey, everyone. Thank you for joining me today here at OpenJS. I hope all of you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy during these difficult times that we're in. My name is Sana Ajani, and I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft on the Visual Studio Code team. I'm really excited to be here today. I'm coming to you from New Jersey, from my high school bedroom. So today I'm going to be showing you some really awesome tips and tricks on how to be productive inside VS Code.  Please give us feedback. Tell us what you want to hear from VS Code, and let's get started. All right. Let's get started. Today we're going to spend most of the time inside the tool itself. This is going to be jam-packed with lots of VS Code goodness. I'll start with showing some small quality of life tips and tricks, and then I'll go into showing a demo of some of the latest GitHub integration that we've added. Then finally, I'll do an overview of what remote development is, and I'll show a demo of one of the extensions. So the very first tip is VS Code insiders. You'll notice I have two versions of VS Code on my desktop here, and I'm using the one with the green icon or the VS Code insiders build. This is the one our team uses to actually work on VS Code. So it's straight from master, you're going to be using the hottest bits. If you use insiders, you get a lot of the latest features that are still in preview or things that we're experimenting with that we would like feedback on. And if you find a bug or an issue and you report it, we can typically get that fixed within a day or two. So it's a really fast turnaround. You can have both installed side by side, the stable version and insiders. They are isolated from each other, and you can go to code.visualstudio.com slash insiders to install it. Now let's go on to the next part of customizing the editor. I think the best part of VS Code is that it is extensible and flexible to however you like to code or whatever your productivity workflow or style is with extensions and settings, even the layout. There is just so much ways to customize VS Code. So my VS Code will look different from your VS Code, and that's totally fine, right? We want VS Code to work the way that all developers work. So some of the most important shortcuts and things to remember, the first one is the command palette. So every action that you do in VS Code can basically be mapped to a command. If you are on Windows, it's control shift P, or if you're on a Mac, it's command shift P, or you can use F1. So if I do this, this opens up the command palette. So if you're ever wondering, hey, I wonder how to open this part or I wonder if VS Code can do this. You can search for something that you want to do and it'll typically show up in here. Extensions can also contribute command to this. So for instance, you see I have a bunch that are from this GitHub issues extension, or I can just type things in. So if I want to see all the Git related things I can do, there's a whole bunch of commands that you can access from the command palette. The next pro tip is the settings. So this is going to be control comma or command comma. So if I do this, this will open up my settings editor. There are two settings editors in VS Code, both a UI, which you're seeing right now, and a JSON. So if you prefer one or the other, you can change the shortcut. So if I search for settings, you can see here the setting for settings editor. So I have it set to the UI, but if you prefer JSON, you can do this. Go click that command, command comma, and it'll open up your settings editor in JSON. Also, while we're in settings, if you don't already have this turned on, you definitely must do this right now. Search for autosave. Autosave has literally saved lives. No joke. This is going to save your workflow. If you don't already have this turned on, there's different options that you can turn on. I have it on focus change. So if I switch editors or switch my window, this is what I prefer. But also if you're a JavaScript editor developer, sorry, another thing that might be useful for you instead of autosave is format on save. So you can have one or the other typically set. And this is if you're, you know, using something like prettier or some kind of formatter and you prefer to use this every time you save, it will just format everything with your prettier config. So this is really convenient for a lot of JavaScript developers. Let's go into some other quick keyboard shortcuts that are really going to help you when you're coding inside the editor. So I'm open up the markdown file of this copying line up and down. So this is a really good tip that I really like. So if you are using a Mac, it's going to be shift option up or down. So if I do this, I can actually take each line and just really easily move it to the right place. So this is a really easy and important tip that saved me a lot of time instead of copying and pasting. Another one is multiple cursors. This is awesome. This is going to save you so much time. So there's different ways to do this. The one that's easy to do, if you prefer using a mouse is option click. So I can actually place where I want the cursors to be in this one or you can use shift command L and this will actually highlight the same word every time it's found. So for instance, I can click on this and go shift command L and it'll highlight every instance of the word command or customize and then I can start working on it here. So there's different ways to use multiple cursors, but definitely use them in your workflow. It's very, very helpful. And now let's go into showing you how to customize your VS code layout. So first thing you can do is actually move around things in the activity bar and sidebar. A lot of people don't know you can do this. You can move icons around that you get from different extensions. You can right click and also hide different, you know, extensions icon so you can make your activity bar a little bit cleaner if you want. Same with the status bar. You can choose to hide the things or show things however you want. But one of the latest things that we've done inside VS code is actually help you customize your layout a little bit more. So if you do control or command tilde or sorry, back tick, this is going to open up a terminal. So we want to give you more freedom to be able to move things between the terminal and this sidebar over here. So when you have all this open, it can be a little bit much and maybe you want to move different views to different places based on your preferred workflow. So for instance, if I wanted to maybe take the search panel over here and move it into my bottom view, I can do that now. And now I get the same search functionality. Still works, still does the same thing it would if it was in the other place. And I can also do the vice versa. So if I want to maybe take the debug console here and maybe move it inside my debug view, I can do that too. It's really sweet. It's really easy, helps you really totally customize and take control of your editor and say maybe you are moving things around experimenting and maybe you maybe set something to a different location. You can just right click on the view and reset the location or you can search for the command reset view and it does the same thing. So now everything's back to where it was. Another pro tip is I've heard from a lot of users that they actually prefer this sidebar to be on the right side and not on the left side. So you can go to view appearance and you can move the sidebar to the right. And some people prefer this because when they actually toggle this, it will not actually move their code or their editor, but if it's on the right, if it's on the left side, it will. So I can move it back to the left and this actually moves your code, which it can be a little bit jarring. So these are some really quick and easy pro tips on customizing your editor, customizing your keyboard shortcuts, making use of them to really be productive inside VS Code. And next I'll go into showing some GitHub related features. All right, let's talk GitHub. So on the VS Code team, we want to make you as productive as possible. When we talk to developers, we often hear things like there's so much context switching. So for instance, when I move from all my tabs I have open on GitHub and back to my code, I lose track of a lot of things. I lose time, I lose focus. So we want to make the stuff that you do on GitHub closer to you inside your editor. We want to bring the outer loop, a lot of the collaboration, you know, documentation stuff that you do on GitHub closer to where you're actually writing your code so that there is less context switching. You're not jumping around as much and you can be more focused. And productive. So one of the extensions that you definitely need to have installed if you're working with GitHub in any capacity is the GitHub pull requests and issues extension. So I can search for it inside the extension marketplace. It's the one that's published by GitHub. So this lets you create and manage, comment on and merge pull requests from inside VS Code. And most recently we also added support to let you work with issues as well. So once you have this installed, it's going to contribute this icon to the activity bar and it's going to ask you to sign in. So you have to do that once. So now I'm going to open up a new window. So we wanted to make it really easy for anyone to get started with GitHub as well. So this is a totally empty project. It's an empty window. I'm going to clone a repository. So because I've signed in with the GitHub pull request extension, it's going to leverage that and let me clone from GitHub. So you can see here this populated a list of all the repos that are actually associated with me on my GitHub profile. This is really neat, really convenient for me to be able to just clone a repository. But I can also search for any, anything on GitHub. So for instance, if I wanted to maybe work on a React project, I could do that. I could just search for create react app. All right, let's clone that to my local machine. And you can see here VS code is doing that real quick. Let's open in a new window and I have it installed. Right. That was really easy. Normally with cloning something you have to go to GitHub, no, get the link. Bring it in your terminal. Do all that. So we want to make it super, super easy for you to get started. So if I open up my terminal, let's just check if everything worked out. All right. So VS code cloned it and set up my remotes for me over HTTPS. This is really easy. Great to get started with. Great to just do it from inside your editor if you want to. All right, I want to show some more really cool things. The GitHub extension lets you do inside VS code. So I've opened up a folder with a project I have called task runner.  So let's work on this and show off how to use the pull request and issues view. So I can go to this GitHub view over here and you can see I have two sections for my pull requests and issues. So I can click on this and it'll actually just show me all of the open PRs I have. And I can also have them in these specific categories with these specific filters. So we have one and I can open it up and view the description of this. And this view should look really similar to what it is on GitHub. You can check out the branch. We heard that this was something that a lot of developers didn't do as often as they wanted to because there's just so many commands with git fetch and git add. This just lets you check out the PR branch and test it out yourself. You can go into and view the actual diff. So this is really neat. Let's you view the diff. If I want to change how I view the diff, I can toggle the view from this split one to an inline, whatever you prefer. If I want to, I can add a comment. Looks good to me and just leave that and start a review or just add a single comment. And then I can also use different ways to merge the PR. So you can create a merge commit or you can use squash or rebase, whatever you prefer to do. So this is a really easy way to make collaboration and bring it back into the editor. If I wanted to, I can also assign reviewers that have worked in this repository with me or assign labels to this PR as well. I can also get really good integration with issues. So if you're working in a repository where you maybe track feature requests or bug fixes on issues, you can do that from inside the editor. So by default, there'll be two categories here listed. My issues that have been assigned to me and then issues that I've created. So if you want to customize this a bit further and actually keep track of more specific, maybe labels or more specific things that you've been like assigned with keywords, you can you can do that. So I'm going to click on this pencil here and it's going to open up the settings for this extension. And you can see here all the queries I'm using to populate this list. So for instance, if you prefer to keep track of issues with a certain keyword or the certain label, we can do that. So let's add one and maybe let's call it feature requests. And we can add the query. The query syntax is the same as the one as you would use on GitHub. And we've also added in a couple of these variables because we can do that now in VS code. So let's do the current repository that I own. This is my repository and I'm going to do the label feature request because that's what I use for incoming issues like that. And now I get that as well. So this is really all about making it really easy for you to see and keep track of and not lose all the different issues or things that have been assigned to you. So we can also just create issues and not just manage them from this extension. So if I go back to my read me, this is where I sort of keep track of all the upcoming to do is I have for my project. So let's add one here. Let's add a to do to get user tests running because I've been wanting to do that for a while. So the cool thing you see here is there was a light bulb that popped up when I did the to do comment. So this will give me a suggestion to create an issue based on this to do comment trigger, but better yet, I can actually create the issue and also assign it to someone. So if I click on at, I get a list of all the people that have worked on my project with me and that are on this repo and I can assign it to someone. So let's assign it to me. This is something I've been wanting to do. And then let's create the issue. Get user tests running. Perfect. All right. And that's what I did. It created an issue over here. So if I hover over this, it gave me the issue number. I can click on it, go back to it on GitHub. And I can also view it now from the same view I saw earlier. So my issues, this is the new one assigned to me. It's ready for me to work on really convenient, really easy. I can click on this arrow and start working on it. So now you see, I have switched over to a new branch for me to work on this issue. And you can change these settings again from your settings on JSON. If you don't want to open up a new branch, you can do that. You can choose whatever you want. Say I made a quick change. Let's make the fix. I can go over to my source control view and it'll actually auto fill the commit message for me. And it'll close the issue when I check it in. So this is again, really sort of closing the loop. You can open up an issue, search through issues and then start working on them and just close them from inside VS code. No need for context switching. We're making it really easier to bring that outer developer loop closer to where you are writing your code. So install this extension today. It's really awesome, really convenient. And now I'm going to go into a demo of the remote containers extension. Let's talk remote development. So we started working on remote development extensions inside VS code about a year and a half ago. So well before the impacts of coronavirus and the work from home situation that many of us are in right now. Back then we were talking to lots of developers and seeing more and more of them developing remotely. We talked to companies that had like huge mono repos that maybe didn't even fit on a laptop. And so developers would just connect to a really huge dev VM and nothing was really on their local box. And they were able to just deploy changes and fixes with the VM in a couple of minutes. We've also seen more and more that data scientists are leveraging really specialized VMs that have lots of GPU so that they can run sessions on all their huge data sets and train all their data. So we see that remote development is now like the norm for many developers and especially given our remote work environments we're doing a lot of that now. So we saw that existing remote experiences for development weren't that great. Maybe you were using remote desktop which can be a bit laggy or you were SSHing into a VM and using the terminal and VIM. So we wanted to bring a better development experience to the remote environment that you were working in. So we created four key remote extensions to be able to work for different scenarios remote development inside a virtual machine inside a container inside WSL and most recently inside the browser. We wanted you to be able to develop in the context of the remote host but still have the richness of your VS code experience. So what we did was split the VS code into two components into a UI component which would run on your local machine and a server component which would let you edit and run and debug your code on the remote machine. Basically the VS code server can be run anywhere else and the remote extensions would let you communicate between VS code and the server. So I'm going to show you the remote containers extension and this lets you develop in Docker containers which if you really just think about is kind of like another VM. The power really comes from this ability to create an isolated reusable dev sandbox that you can reuse and share with others. All the remote extensions work in a similar way. So they will install this VS code server component in any one of these remote contexts. So we can search for this remote development extensions. So if you search for this you can see this extension pack which comes with all three the remote WSL containers and SSH and then you can separately search for the extension that lets you work inside the browser. So this is called Visual Studio Codespaces. I'm going to show off containers so when you have installed the extension pack it's going to contribute an icon to the very bottom of your window here and we're going to try a sample. So before I do this let's talk a little bit more about what is going to happen. If you like to dabble in projects you know that sometimes you have dependency conflicts different package versions different versions of node or for instance if you want to clone an open source project and contribute but you realize that to be able to build a project you need something like Rust or C++. I have no idea how to install any of that and to be honest I don't know if I want to because I feel like I'm going to mess up my machine or maybe install the wrong compiler or install the wrong package manager. This happens to a lot of us so we wanted to make that easier to work with the remote containers extension you need to have Docker installed and you see I already have it running. So let's open up my local terminal to see what I have on my machine right now open up my terminal let's type in to see what version of node we have I have an older version of node so let's use the remote containers extension to help us basically create a sandbox where I can use a specific version of my tools and not actually have to worry about messing anything up on my local machine. So I'm going to try a sample remote containers and I'm going to try the node sample. So this is going this is a set of repositories that we've already built for you just to try out what it's like to use this it's going to build an image but I already built it once so it's just going to connect to the container now. All right. So you see here that VS code pretty quickly connected to this container. You see on the bottom left here that I'm inside this dev container. So let's see what that really means. This terminal looks a little different. All right. It looks like I'm on a Linux terminal. I'm inside of a new environment. This is different from my local environment. I'm on a Mac right now. Let's see what version of node I have. All right. I have a updated version of node for me to use. So what happened? Instead of running on my local machine, I am now running inside this container. I'm running VS code inside this Docker container. If you're not familiar with Docker, it's a way for you to encapsulate environments from the OS down and it lets you build more specific things and layers on top of it. So the magic here is really inside this dev container. So I have this Docker file. This is not really standard Docker file. I'm not really doing anything fancy here. VS code also doesn't really interfere and get involved here. It's just telling Docker, hey, go build this and run the container. So once the container is building, then we're going to inject a version of the VS code server in the container, not the UI, just the VS code server, just the things that give you language support, debugging support, things like that. And now there's a connection between my local client that's running my UI. So you see here, I still have the same VS code theme I had on my local machine. So I'm running my UI locally, but I've connected to this container. So now the magic is in this dev container.json. This tells VS code how to set up my container for me to be able to develop like I do locally. So it's going to point it to the Docker file I want. And it's going to set settings. So I can choose that I want a bash terminal inside this environment, that I want these specific extensions. I have the ES lint extension installed. So you can see here, there's a difference between the extensions I have inside my container and inside my local computer. And I can also list ports to forward so that I can connect to them locally. So let's try running this. Let's just see what happens. This is a standard Express app. I'm going to open up the main file. This is just an Express app. You see, I still get a lot of the colorization.  I can get linting, I can get errors. This is all things that I can do. I can set breakpoints. So let's just run it at five, see what happens. Or it's running on this local address and I'm able to connect to it. Like how can I actually connect to this address from my, you know, local edge browser? Like this is the magic of remote development. You saw in the dev container that I set up the ports I wanted to forward. You know, containers are isolated. So if I wanted to access anything from inside the container, I needed to forward it so I can access it for my local host. So I didn't have to set up anything for this to work. Right, we are now in a specific environment for me with a specific version of my tools. I didn't have to set anything up besides installing the containers extension and having Docker installed. So this is really, really cool, right? Like think about all the cases of this could be used for. It's really great for onboarding people that are new to your team. So, you know, we all know adding a new engineer to our team is expensive. They spend two weeks trying to figure out how to set up their computer. You have to teach them how to run the build tools, show them really specific things to your team's environment. But instead, you can encode this all in a Docker file. You don't have to spend weeks reading through all the giant steps in your readme. You don't have to pollute your machine or install the wrong version of something. You just pull any project that has a dev container. So VS Code knows how to connect to it and you can just build and connect the container. You can also specify the VS Code setup inside a dev container. This is also really awesome for maybe the education scenario. Think about students learning to code in their first computer science class. So many of them get discouraged because they don't know how to, you know, install Java and the JDK and their IDE at home. But if you encapsulate all the dependencies and set up inside just a Docker container, that's all they need to know. So I really wanna thank everyone for joining us. This was an awesome, awesome event. I'm glad you were all here at OpenJS. So install the containers extension, install the GitHub extension, give us feedback on what else you wanna see from VS Code. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.


Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm your host, Kaylee Iakena, president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Today, my guest is Josh Montgomery. Josh lives on the Big Island and he operates Guardwell Farm, where his family grows world-class coffee. He's also a founding member of the Ohana Aina Association. That's an organization of advocates for home stays, farm stays, and transient rentals on Hawaii Island. Josh is going to join me in a moment to discuss the current state of short-term rentals on Hawaii Island. There are a lot of members now on the Hawaii County Council that are starting to look at a law possibly regulating short-term rentals, and many in the community are concerned about that law. I'm going to ask Josh to talk about that in a moment. Josh, I'm so glad that you're able to join me today and just appreciate the work that you're doing in the community. Welcome to the program. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here and happy to be representing the Big Island and talking about this issue. Tell me just a little bit about yourself, at least so that our viewers know who you are and what you do, and why in particular you're interested in short-term rentals. Sure, so I'm a recently retired Air Force Officer. I wrapped up 12 years in the Air Guard with the 291st out of Hila, Hawaii. Prior to during my career in the Guard, I'm also an entrepreneur. I founded an internet service provider in 2006 and then founded a company called Mycroft AI that builds an open alternative to Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant in 2015. We moved here to the Big Island in 2019 to start a coffee farm and have our kids attend high schools in one of the safest counties in the United States. You're quite an entrepreneur and a member of our community here in Hawaii. Tell me a little bit about what led you into getting involved as an activist with regard to short-term rental issues. Sure, so when we moved to the Big Island, we bought a small farm, five acres, and in order to make it sustainable from the standpoint of being able to make the mortgage and to afford to live in one of the most expensive markets in the United States, we took the home and divided it in half. So half of our home is a vacation rental, which we have guests in on a regular basis, and then we live in the other half of the home. And really that's the only way that our home is economically sustainable. And we're one of more than 7,000 families here on the Big Island that are in some sort of similar situation that make ends meet by renting a room or renting a portion of their home or renting an al-Hana to visitors to the island. Now that's very interesting because sometimes short-term rental is portrayed as being driven by an industry and corporations. But what you're talking about in your own case as well as many others on the Big Island is that this is something where local residents are able to have a means simply to make ends meet. Is that right? Very much so. The big platforms like VRBO and Airbnb are about customer discovery, right? They're the platforms that help to connect families that are renting a home with visitors who want to stay there. But they're not really what's behind the success of the industry. They do mark up the nightly rate, but a vast majority of the money that guests pay to come and stay in our homes goes to us and goes to the taxpayers. In fact, the taxpayers of Hawaii take home more money every night that my home is rented than Airbnb and VRBO. I see. Now, right now the Hawaii County Council is considering some additional regulations on short-term rentals. Can you explain to us what those proposals are and what kind of impact they might have? Sure. So Hawaii County passed an ordinance in 2018 that regulated absentee short-term vacation rent. So you could think of a rich person from the mainland who bought a home and wants to use it as an STPR 50 weeks a year and then only comes for two weeks a year. That type of activity has been regulated for nearly five years now. The new ordinance that they're proposing is targeted at people like me and my family and many of our friends, folks who rent a portion of their own home to visitors in order to make ends meet. So it's a very different part of the market. In our case, because it's a farm, the STPR plays a number of different roles, but one of those is agriculture. As if we run a coffee farm and each time we have a guest come and stay, we provide them with a free sample of our coffee. And as you know, Kona Coffee is the best coffee in the world according to many, many, many folks. And so they buy a pound when they're here and then many of them subscribe for a monthly shipment of coffee going forward. And so that vacation rental is for us, a sales channel for our crop, right? It's a revenue source that helps to make our farm sustainable. And then of course it's providing a service for guests who come to expect a different experience when they come and visit places like Hawaii. Many folks no longer want that upscale hotel experience. They want to stay in a home that has a kitchen and has a little bit more privacy that's maybe a little bit more affordable. And we're providing that service for visitors to the island. Now in its consideration of additional regulations, the county council is relying on a distinction between hosted rentals and unhosted rentals. Could you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, so the unhosted rentals are already regulated. So that's where there's an absentee owner. What they're targeting now is folks who live in that home or folks who might have a second home where they rent a portion of it to a family long-term and they have short-term guests also on that same property. And they've kind of justified the additional regulation by making the case that they'd had a bunch of complaints about the behavior of visitors in our communities. And the thing is with hosted rentals, visitors have a tendency to behave within the community standards, right? Because your host is staying on the site. And we know that because after they started discussing this ordinance, they actually gave us data on how many complaints they've had. And for hosted vacation rentals here on the big island, they had 65 complaints last year. And there were 1.69 million rental nights in that same year. So their complaint rate was 0.000062%. And yet that's a reason that they've given for regulating our businesses here on the big island. And when there's a host of other issues like that that have kind of come up during this process as unlike the absentee owners who aren't really here and part of the community, we as hosted rental operators have been able to organize and start to tell our story. For many of us, this is our livelihood. Well, that's fascinating, those statistics. It seems as though for hosted rentals, the complaint rate is exceedingly low. And as you point out, the host lives right there on the property so that the values and the standards of the community can readily be enforced and monitored. And aren't there laws already regarding noise and illegal parking and trash and so forth that could be enforced? Yeah, for the rare instance where there's a problem property, the county and the local government already have tools in place. And as I said, they already passed an ordinance in 2018 regulating unhosted rentals. As far as I know, they haven't even filled the enforcement positions for the first round. And so they still have open positions to enforce the rules for their existing legislation. And the other big thing that really has kind of come up is that the justification for the law, the justification for making these changes and targeting our families, has been affordable house. The idea that if we're hosting a visitor for a night that that's a long term unit that could be used to house a local family. And yet that was the same justification for the law that they passed in 2018. For short term vacation rentals. And if you look at the last five years, it's not as though that that legislation in any way increased the affordable housing stock in our community. And so between the complaints and the affordable housing issue, we're really struggling as a community to understand why this legislation is being brought to the fore. What is the problem that they're looking to solve? People as a result of the regulations that are being put in place. So they're going to require you to prove that all improvements to your home are permitted. They're going to require floor plans. They're going to require parking plans. They're requiring all these additional requirements, despite the fact that they haven't had any complaints. And because of that, many people aren't going to be able to jump through the hoops or people may have purchased a home that had unpermitted improvements before they bought it and might not be able to get all their paperwork in order. Those people are going to lose their livelihoods. And in some cases, you know, those folks are going to lose their homes. Right. And so that's a very significant impact. And so if the government is going to impact families in that way, they really need a strong justification for why they're going to put those laws in place. You know, when I joined the Air Force, I wrote a check to the federal government for an amount up to and including my life. It was a blank check. Right. Because the purpose that the Air Force serves is very, very important. And for me, I was willing to make those sacrifices to fulfill the government's purpose. In this case, the government is making the case that families should be making sacrifices in terms of their livelihoods and, you know, having to jump through all these hoops and hire lawyers and all these other things. But to what end? What is the public purpose that's serving? And I think that's where we're really struggling as a community to understand what's going on here in the big up. Well, you did mention housing and pointing out that short-term vacation rentals, at least hosted ones, don't seem to have much of a negative impact upon the locals being able to get housing. So what do you think is really driving this clamp down that is going to increase regulations? I don't want to put words in the mouth of the elected officials. I really don't know what's driving them. You know, my conversations with them have led me to believe that they have the best of intentions. But as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Right? You know, I think that maybe they do believe that it impacts affordable housing. And, you know, one of the things that we've asked them to do, and just recently, actually last week, we volunteered to pay $10,000 to this end, was to actually go conduct a study and see what the effects are. Because in our case, the only way we can afford our housing is through short-term vacation rentals. So that's an enabler of our affordable housing. And I know of thousands of other families that are enabled to live here because of the revenue driven from this industry. So from our perspective, you know, this industry drives affordable housing. It makes housing affordable for local families. You know, the flip side of the coin is people looking at and saying, oh, that ohana could be long-term housing. Now, that discounts the fact that many, many, many of these properties are in no way appropriate for long-term house. They don't have kitchens. They don't have adequate storage. They don't have, I mean, they're just not suited for long-term housing. But setting that aside, you know, it could be there. Go ahead. Let me just interject this and then let you continue. Sure. And if we're talking about hosted dwellings, then indeed, they may not be suitable for long-term rental because they may not be set up for multiple families. Is that right? Exactly. And the county, you know, both here and in Honolulu County, have taken extraordinary steps to keep people from putting in second kitchens and keep people from increasing the density of their housing. And so in many cases, the houses just aren't suitable for long-term housing. But the thing is, is that before I build a home on the big island of Hawaii, I have to go and do studies. I have to do environmental study. I have to do archaeological study. You know, if you're building a larger development, you have to do traffic studies and utility studies, right? You as a taxpayer, as an entrepreneur are required to jump through all of these hoops to prove that you're not going to have a negative impact on the local community. You know, local government in this case has taken none of those steps. They haven't done an independent study of, you know, does it enable affordable housing, or does it prevent it? Right? Well, we don't know because nobody's done their homework. And they haven't done the studies based on the outcome of the 2018 law, and yet they're proposing additional regulation today. And so what we've asked them to do is to go out and commission a study. The Ohana Aina Association has committed a $10,000 in matching funds to help to fund that study so that the county can go out and actually do homework and do research and find an academic and have it peer reviewed to determine what the impact actually is going to be before we take steps as a community to impose regulation and additional hoops that are 100% guarantee going to affect at least one family's livelihood and are going to cost at least one family a home. You know, county government, a lot of times they look at regulation and they say, oh, it's just a small thing, right? You just have to go and get your safety inspection, right?  It's not a big deal, right? But the thing is, when you're working two jobs, and you've got a kid who's in school, and you're taking care of your elder parent who might be suffering from dementia, right? And you're dealing with a car that broke down, and you're trying to, you know, do maintenance on your home, that one little additional hoop that the government's asking you to jump through can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. You just can't do it, right? And so the county asking folks to prove that they have permits for every improvement to their home, to provide floor plans for their home, to provide parking plans, you know, and these are businesses that are already completely legal and are already in operation for which they've had no complaints, right? Is just adding a little bit more burden, and I guarantee you of the 7,500 families here that depend on this income to make ends meet. Some of them, because of these hoops, are not going to be able to move forward that's going to impact their livelihoods and their quality of life. So we need a really compelling reason as a community to implement those regulations, and I just haven't seen those compelling reasons. What do members of the community say? Are people up in arms against short-term vacation rentals, or do you have support out there in the general community for hosted short-term vacation rentals? So for hosted rentals, you know, people really don't care.  Everyone does. And as long as they're not impacting the local neighborhood, it's not really an issue. And as we've shown from the complaint numbers here on Hawaii Island, it's not an issue. This appears to be a solution in search of a problem in our case. And, you know, to the credit of the officials involved, right? They started this process by presenting the legislation before they introduced it, by seeking community feedback, by holding information sessions. You know, they've been really good. And as near as I can tell, and I believe this strongly, they're operating with integrity and honesty. And so hopefully, they listened to the feedback that they're getting from the community, take a step back, conduct the same types of studies that they would expect from us if we were going to make a change to our community, and then based on the data and the real world information that they generate, develop public policy that serves the interests of the broader community. Instead of just waving our hands over our head and saying, affordable housing, like, how do we solve it? Well, you know, if they're really looking for a solution, the solution to not building enough housing, and I know that this is stunning, right? The solution to not building enough housing is build more housing. Pretty straightforward solution. And there are tons of contractors and builders out there that would love to build additional housing at a significant profit themselves, if the county would just get out of their way from a permitting and a studies and a regulatory perspective. And that's not just me saying that. That's the data saying there is one major city globally, one major city globally, that over the last 25 years has kept housing stock in line with housing demand, and that's Tokyo. And they did it by implementing by right permitting, where if the property is zoned multifamily, you can build multifamily, and you don't have to jump through five commissions and four neighborhood feedback sessions and all of these other groups. If it's zoned for it, you can build it. And as a result, their housing stock has kept up, their housing costs have stayed steady, and they're one of the only major cities globally that's been able to do it. Why don't we learn lessons from our neighbors in Tokyo and build adequate housing instead of trying to take housing from families who depend on it for their livelihood and sacrifice it on the altar of affordability? Josh, you're certainly on the same page as the Grassroot Institute, which has studied and publicized the Tokyo model, as well as the fact that really on the big island where you live, less than 3% of all the landmass is devoted to any kind of development or housing whatsoever. The vast majority of the landmass on your island is simply undeveloped whatsoever. Not that all of it is readily available for housing, but you certainly have enough land, so it's not the supply of land that's the problem. It's exactly what you pointed out earlier, the level of government regulation, which is, indeed, exceedingly high in Hawaii County when compared to counties across the nation. Yeah, and that's why Hawaii County is dead last. Dead last, like last of all counties in the entire country in housing starts. Dead last. When a developer has to wait two years to get a permit, he's going to take his money and make money elsewhere. It always fascinates me as we have these discussions about affordable housing. When I want to regulate the auto industry, for example, and you want to make cars safer and get more mileage and reduce carbon pollution and all these other things, one of the first people you would call would be an automaker. You'd pull all the automakers in and you'd have a conversation and you'd figure out a way to make things work. In the case of the auto industry, they settled on a subsidy, a $7,000 per vehicle subsidy to help them to convert to electricity. When it comes to affordable housing, the people who really need to be forefront are the builders. When you talk to builders, you just go talk to them, pick up the phone book and just start calling builders and ask them, why aren't you building more housing? 100% of them will come back and say regulation. It's regulation. To blame short-term vacation rentals for the housing crisis on the Big Island is really looking for a scapegoat rather than actually dealing with the real causes of the shortage of housing. Very much so. When doctors, and I wrote an open letter to the county commission last week offering $10,000 per study, one of the points I made is that when doctors take their oath, they make a commitment to first do no harm. They're experts and they have the patient's best interests in mind, but at the end of the day, before they do anything else, the goal is to not hurt the patient. It should be the same for legislation. When we look at legislation, regulation does have a place. I wouldn't want to live in a community that had no regulations about anything. Anarchy is, if you want anarchy, let go live in Somalia. But as we implement new laws, we need to look at it and say, who's going to be harmed by this? What are the unintended consequences of this? Should we do anything at all if it's going to hurt people unless we have a really compelling reason? In this case, there just isn't. As you go around the community and as you tell the story of what's going on right now, what are you letting people know about what they can do in order to change the minds of their public officials? Yeah. We're doing a couple of different things. We've got people writing emails and letters. We've had some of our community members who would really be impacted. One of the big constituencies that would be impacted by this is retirees. There's a whole group of retirees who bought property here on the big island that might have an ohana or a guest house that they count on that guest house income for their livelihood. This is their retirement plan. If the county makes that illegal, many of these people don't know what they're going to do. When you're 75 or 80 years old, there is no starting over. Those people are really in a bad place. We've had them recording testimonials and we've created some videos just really telling the story of the people that this will impact. Then we've encouraged Heather and Ashley, Heather Kimball and Ashley Kay to host listening sessions. I believe over the next several weeks, they're going to actually be hosting some listening sessions around the islands that we're going to facilitate so that they really can hear feedback from their constituents. I'm hopeful that they'll listen. Everything I've seen as I've been speaking to them indicates that they will. You can withdraw this or we've actually proposed an alternative bill that walks back a lot of these regulatory hoops and simply is a registration where you register and say, I'm running a vacation rental with this address. If there are any issues, this is who you call and you pay a small fee every year. Something like that we'd be very supportive of. It's the stuff that involves a planning department that's already two years behind on permits and makes all of it contingent on the opinion of an unelected bureaucrat. Those are the pieces that we're really concerned about and we've asked them to take out. We're trying to tell our story. We're trying to get the word out and we're trying to get folks to really communicate to the County Council exactly how this will impact their lives. That sounds great and I want to thank you for all that you're doing. If any of our viewers would like to get ahold of you or Ohana Aina Association, how can they do that? Sure thing. They can visit us at OhanaAinaAssociation.com. Just do a little bit of Google. Join our group. We're an advocacy group for everybody who's running vacation rentals on the island, whether they're hosted or unhosted. Our goal is to help tell the stories of the families that own and operate these and the employees who work for them. Our organization is rooted in the concepts of honesty and integrity and transparency or our core values. Either they can join the group if they have a vacation rental and they want to have somebody out there speaking for them or just register on our contact list and make sure that they're getting updates about the legislation. We'd love to hear more from them. Well, Josh, I want to thank you for being on the program today. Appreciate all that you're doing and wish you the very best. And viewers, do get ahold of Josh and the Ohana Aina Association. They're doing good work. And until next time, I'm Tilly Ikeena on Hawaii Together on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. We'll see you again. Aloha. Please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


So today people I bring you a complete guide on an amazing epic pistol called the quick draw. This mission reward is easily as unique as any legendary pistol in the game and with a few adjustments you can truly take advantage of this amazing little thing. Today I bring you a review of the pistol and I also bring you a zane build set up around this thing. How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and today I bring you another BF3 video. If you do enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. So the quick draw is another epic Jacobs pistol and like the P-shooter another one I have covered this thing is truly unique and it bears the question of why isn't this thing a legendary because it could indeed be a legendary. It's as unique as any legendary in the game. So this quick draw is obtained or rewarded from a side mission called the quick and the quickerer which you can do at any time you get to the stage of prestige in the other store campaign on bounty of blood. Now the full mission and so forth I will play at the end of the video if you do want to check that out. So looking at this pistol on paper we see damage wise it isn't too bad and that's wise either it isn't too bad. I mean I'd read through these all but to be honest they're all going to be amped anyway because of this weapon's speciality instantly reloads and damage buffed for a short duration after swapping weapons. So looking at this thing against the test dummy you can see normally nothing special added it's your everyday Jacobs pistol but using its special feature I've switched to this weapon and you get that amped damage this amped damage under my calculations is around that 130 mark and you get around three to four seconds to fire off those amped shots while they vanish. The thing is people using this was literally only one of the weapon within your load add a simple double tap of that change weapon button and those amped shots are back and it's literally within a blink of an eye so it's literally infinite amped shots of 100% extra damage from this weapon alone. I mean you could always do this weapon three times and use four at the same time and just switch between them all you'd never have to reload no would you ever lose those amped shots. Now I created a quick zane build for this weapon the only change I'd do is add that it's pissed grenade which I don't yet have on PC. The rest is completely fine and if you do want to copy the same build you can or quickly run you through it at the end of the video. I'm calling it the quick draw build obviously but the results are utterly crazy as you can see quite easily this thing is doing way over a million damage to that test dummy and let's face it this is without auto speed benefits which equal extra damage coming into play which you will see in the background footage now. This thing is absolutely unreal I can't remember the last pistol or last weapon I used which did this to these enemies in the slaughter shaft I mean it just absolutely melts them and I mean it's rare I create builds around weapons which is something I should indeed do more due to me knowing people like to mix things up take certain builds adjust and make them better out of the weapons in and this is something I do intend doing more so in the future but yeah the quick draw and epic weapon is quite capable of some crazy crazy things and for sure I feel would definitely add to your current build with 99% of builds out there if you like pistols go get this thing or if you want a simple well effective way in playing use the same build if you play zane and I'm pretty certain it will take you a long way on screen now I quickly run you through what you use on this build just if you do use this build swap out that grenade for the its piss after that you will see the mission to get this weapon if that interests you too but yeah my final thoughts on the quick draw it's an amazing pistol if you use right it won't be for everybody and I don't feel it will add to everyone's setup but most I think it will it's an epic which could quite easily be a legendary and in my opinion one of the best and most powerful pistols in the game if you use right and build up around this thing can't be touched on that note we have come to the end of the video if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out if you're new around here want to see more boylands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one the name's Josie I'm a coffin maker when one needs making these days though clientele are a bit thin on the ground or under the ground as it were it's the sheriff's old doulin van but fluster not now that he's gone to his suite everlast and I got in mind a foolproof plan head to the gambling hall sure is the dead last still where there's dice doulin ain't far behind the gambling hall where crooked folks played crooked games fault hunter knew that for better or worse they'd find trouble there that needed sorting that's how they met slim with his backside in the sand and beat half hollow fault hunter decided to lend a hand seeing as they were already in the neighborhood fellas are as loose as a news and twice as twisted they took my money and tossed me on my behind I'd avenge myself but I'm shooting hands about a steady as a snake with two rattles you've already got a gun that's great I'll teach you you got bullets too right my brother's pulled that one on me when they first taught me jeweling and I know just the place to practice follow me slim's daddy lightning Luke was something of a local legend when slim was born he was a spitting image now he's all grown except for the spine most everybody was tickled they could kick Luke's boy around but if anyone's got doulin in the blood it's slim sometimes I sneak back here to enjoy my drinks and solitude and safety there are some bottles lying about maybe you can show me some of that sharp shooting of yours I was the old wuffer I'll be honest with you I'm not really sure myself I just go with what feels right you know listen I'm gonna come right out and say it and I'm gonna be brutally savagely honest because I care about you and it's the only way you'll learn you're shooting could use some work but you did your best and you had fun and that's what matters wow that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me but what if drunk william shoots me wish I had some armor slim wasn't about to cross irons with a drunk william with nothing but stitches and sand to keep him standing bald hunter knew they'd have to find some protection for him if they wanted him to grow the stones for a duel the hole covers not the most hygienic armor but it keeps a man from getting extra hold I'm gonna go get ready for the duel before I forget all the training I could see me now fingers are all in fits I tell you ain't no turning back now I'll wait here while you go tell that no good low down lousy like with drunk william that I'm calling him out to duel drunk william like to think he was the toughest mother son this side of the same the type of fellow who'd chew the fleas off a scag and ask for seconds but someone needed to put him in his place which is to say in you should have seen the look on slim hi william you're drunk and guess my boy slim is waiting outside to julia if I were you I change into me brown britches use a laugh you tell him I'll be right out drunk william was ready for a fight nothing for the vault hunter to do but tell slam to get ready ready as he could get anyhow he's coming whatever happens I want you to know I'm proud of you you're basically my son at this point and I can't watch you die you hear me I've never felt better in all my years I was born for this I'm headed for glory wait my head my head's better than old Pete's domicile quick give me something for my skull cap old thinkerater my brains are locked up tighter than granny's pearls now I've really got a leg up on drunk william blam let's get the blast it bounty hunter you ring that bell over there so I know when I could finally kill this sloppy at soapy we drive the sound of the by and by me already drunk william well don't that beat all slam survived but only just and they only found his feet with the vault hunter's help kicks like a three heel hot day feel like there's lightning in my veins and thunder in my throat next time if someone's fool enough to take me on I'm gonna write my name in their blood ain't nobody gonna call me the son of lightning Luke no more y'all can call me slam thunder my boy that's boy I am so glad you survived I mean I never doubted you except for most of the time I known you oh there's a new killer in town y'all better believe it he survived get your coin and I can get to work building boxes well I don't know if doulin's gonna catch on like it used to but the more folks killing each other the better my business booms besides if this town's gonna survive we need the roughest rough next to know their way around the irons it's just survival of the fittest that's all till next time bounty hunter