Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers Policest in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Kimpanya. Today is April 26th. We are somewhere around the 100th day of Donald Trump's presidency for whatever that is. It's been fascinating, really going back more months than just, you know, the 100 days or three months or so that it's been. Going back to election day and what started on election day with Women's March and with all of the resistance groups, from Women's March to J-20 to People Power. On Hawaii here, we have Windward Resistance. There are so many groups that have gotten together or that have organized themselves in opposition to Donald Trump and all of his, I guess, intentions, at the very least. Part of that, though, is also what our party structure is. And, yeah, a little bit about what happened last year between Democrat Party and Republican Party and all that. Yeah, we have a problem as far as the Democratic Party was concerned. But that's kind of how things go. There are cycles of things. And whatever the perfect storm was that created Donald Trump as president, that happened. And now there's a lot of things going on, including investigations, FBI investigations into everything that may have happened and what transpired and connections to Russia and so forth. So, okay, there's a lot going on there. But what everything comes down to in the end is how we organize, how we come together, and why we come together. Each set of ideals gets identified and grouped. And sometimes you've got various aspects of what you agree on and you decide, okay, you know, what most of what I agree with belongs with the Democratic Party. Or most of what I agree with belongs with the or agrees with the Republican Party. And therefore, you will choose a side in our two-party system primarily that we have. And let's remember, we actually have more than two parties out there. We just really only ever mostly get Democrats or Republicans elected. It becomes a stronger base that way. But as a result of that, we have a wide range of ideas within the Democratic Party. And this is nationally and even more especially so locally. Here in Hawaii, there's the Big Tent Theory that we currently have. And there's an article in midweek, actually today, by former Governor Ben Cayetano talking about that and whether that's a good idea or whether we should change that. I think that would be an interesting read. So I would recommend that. But that's how we get here. Now in Hawaii, most of our legislators are Democrats or have become Democrats. And some of them were Republicans before and have become Democrats. We have one of those cases coming up soon. We had all likelihood with Representative Beth Bukamoto, who was a Republican. She's become an independent because of her opposition to Donald Trump because he's been recognized as an international misogynist at the moment. So she came in opposition to that. So her party, her Republican Party, beat her up for that. And it was awful. It was wrong. I don't agree with what they did and how they did it. It's not my party, but I still don't agree with how they did that. They basically excommunicated her and made her feel not welcome. So she left the party. And she's now currently an independent. It is widely known and expected that she's going to request to become a member of the Democratic Party. Okay, there's a process for that. And it'll be interesting how that comes together. Historically, the Democratic Party has pretty much allowed everybody in that wanted to be in. That's the Big Tent idea. So we've got our values and our principles that are out there in our platform and in our resolutions and things that we do that define who we are as Democrats. And what the process includes, as far as representative Fukumoto coming over and becoming a Democrat, the process includes her having to request it officially and then go through a questioning process and she has to sign off on our platform and agree to support the platform. That will most likely happen and it will be administered through the Oahu County Committee. This is all a transition to what we're going to discuss for the rest of this show, which is the Oahu County Committee. Just this last weekend on April 22nd held its annual convention. So it was the Democratic Party of Hawaii, Oahu County Committee Convention. That convention, it was organized. We do it every year, as mentioned. It was organized about two and a half months ago. We created the rules or the executive committee and the convention committee got together and they created the standing rules for what was going to happen, how it was going to happen, and how things were going to operate, what was going to be included, how it was going to be included, what the agenda was going to be, who the speakers were going to be, and how it was going to come together. So we're going to do, for the rest of the show, like I said, we're going to do a bit of a recap of that convention and some of the process and really what happens in that. So first of all, in order to participate in the Oahu County Convention, it's the Democratic Party of Hawaii, Oahu County Committee Convention. In order to participate, you have to first be a Democrat. So you have to be a registered Democrat, which means you have to fill out the paperwork. You can do it online or you can get the piece of paper and you submit it to the headquarters and they say, okay great, thank you, you're welcome, you're now a Democrat. And then in order to then take the next step to be a member or to participate in this convention, you then have to become a delegate. To become a delegate, there are several ways that you can do that. To become a delegate, you can either be a current or former elected official. So whether it is a governor, former governor, current sitting legislators and some past legislators, the current chair of the party and past chairs of the party and of the county and so forth, the most recent past chair. They get to be delegates. In addition to that, you've got the rest of the party structure, which includes the executive committee from the committee level. Anyway, the executive committee at the county level, you've got the region chairs. Region chairs actually are not delegates automatically. Then you have your district chairs and the district chairs are all of the house districts. So we've got on this island, we've got our house districts throughout the entire island with all of our legislators, house of representatives, all of the district. So each of those districts has a counterpart within the Democratic Party and representation within there. So you have a district chair that runs and organizes that district. Inside of that district, you've got precincts where you've got precinct presidents and vice presidents and so forth. And that is the basic structure. There's a bit more to it. That's the basic structure of what a district looks like within the precincts. All of those people that become elected, elected by the people who show up to these meetings and show up to these conventions and so forth, get to be delegates except for the region chairs. Region chairs can become a delegate through other means. So once you've gone through that process, each district gets 24 delegates. So across the entire island, each district gets 24 delegates. From there, you get all of your precinct presidents, your district chairs and so forth. And then you get at large. So once you get past the elected seats within the party, there's at large. And depending upon the number of precincts that you have, the number of people that you have in those precincts is how many, once you get to 24, in order to get to 24, it's how many at large you may have. So the goal is 24 per district. So there, you've done it. You've become a delegate, which means you also have to register for, sign up for and pay for the convention as well. Great. You've done all that. You've paid the money this year. It was $40 in advance or $50 a day of.  You get to show up. There's two things you get to show up for. You get to show up for the convention committee meetings, which is where we go through all of our different committees, from rules committee to platform committee to resolution committee to affirmative action committee and go through and there are meetings to discuss what is to be, what the agenda is for each of those or if there are rule changes or if there are platform changes or what resolutions we want to bring as a party. And all of those get discussed. At that meeting, well, that meeting took place this year, not this last Saturday, but the Saturday before. We all got together at Farrington High School and we all had our meetings. I had the fortune of being the co-chair of the rules committee. So we went through and we sat down. We had about 30 people and we all discussed the platform. In advance to that, people came up with ideas and suggested changes or additions to our rules. So using, and this is another important thing, all of these meetings and all of these processes, when we are having our meetings and conventions, utilize Robert's rules of order and how we proceed and how we administer and operate. So we had our convention meetings. Through the process, we had in our rules committee meeting, we had five or six different rule changes or rule additions. And this includes, so you have to take a look at our bylaws. You can go to the website and take a look and pull up the bylaws and say, okay, here are the bylaws. The bylaws are the rules, how we operate, how we really do the business of the party. And that includes things such as, to some extent, behavior and comportment to some extent. I wanted to make sure that we are acting with Aloha. In other ways, it's saying, well, okay, this is who can run for this chair position or who can run for those positions or what the requirements are in order to be able to run for an elected office within the party and so forth. So a lot of the rules about how we are who we are and who is eligible and so forth. So one of the rules that was posed to change started off with saying, well, you know, we should require and many of you may remember from last year there was much to do, perhaps about nothing in the end about a certain member of the party who on the national stage did something that was inappropriate and was not by many people's opinions, representing Hawaii and the Aloha Spearing at the national stage at the convention. And as a result of that, a lot of people wanted there to be a code of conduct and then want us to include some form of code of conduct. So that was discussed. We got to discuss that. We got to debate that. There was a sentence or two. There was some language that was posed in order to cover that. What can we do? What can we do to make sure that we understand that as representing the party from Hawaii, we expect you to behave in a certain way. So that was part of the discussion. We went back and forth in different diverse different ways. And in the end, as the co-chair, myself and Limo Mekan got to be co-chairs, we oversaw the conversation and made sure that we had a good discussion about it. And then everybody voted on it. That particular language did not pass. People didn't like the idea of having to put these rules in. Because what does that mean? What does it mean if we start to put these rules in? How do we begin to interpret behavior? Was this good behavior or bad behavior? And does that mean that you get kicked out of the party? And so there are concerns. Okay, that was the debate. It was interesting. That was one of them. Another one that I thought was very interesting was brought up. This one was specifically with regards to a member of the party and their eligibility to run for county chair. The rule change that was being proposed was to say that no member or any member that is running for county chair should not be allowed to be or become a paid registered lobbyist while running for or becoming county chair. Only that rule. So in some ways that can kind of make some sense. Well, okay, well, we don't want a paid registered lobbyist to be in a position of power within a party because credibility concerns and so forth. Okay, well, again, that opened up a huge, huge debate that lasted a lot longer than every other debate at that meeting and then also at the convention this last Saturday. And that that we changed the language, there were suggestions of well, what if we add, you know, disclosing that you're this or what if we you know, change it completely or some people just were completely against it because well, there are many entities that are many registered lobbyists who are 100% in agreement with what our party platform is. So we don't want to exclude them. So okay, it became a question of inclusion and exclusion to a certain extent. But remember, this is just for the chair. So a leadership role, one of the primary leadership roles within the county. So it was very fascinating was interesting how that whole debate came through we did come up with some final language that was agreed upon so that we can move it forward to the convention for next week. So that one, it passed with some language out of our committee. So we're gonna take a quick break right now and we're gonna go back and we're gonna talk about what happened then and a bit about more about what the convention is. So thank you for joining us. This is think tech wise movers shakers and reformers politics and Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Kompanya. See you in one minute. Hawaii is my mainland here on think tech Hawaii every Friday at 3pm. We address issues and importance for those of us who live here on the most isolated land mass on the planet. Please come join me Fridays at 3pm. Mahalo. Hi, I'm Nicole Alexander Enos, and I was born three weeks ago. Congratulations on being there for me for some of the few weeks of my life. I'm starting a new show The Millennial Mind every Wednesday at 2pm for the month of April, where we'll go over some of the reasons why millennials are some of the most anxious and frustrated people at the moment. Welcome back to think tech Hawaii is movers, shakers and reformers politics and Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Kompanya. Thank you for joining us again today. So okay, I go back to what we were just discussing. We had this big proposed rule change that passed out of our committee, our rules committee, and it was a rule change saying that we should not allow a person, a member of the party who is going to run for county chair to be or to become a paid registered lobbyist. It passed after much discussion, much debate and much disagreement about a lot of different pieces of it. It passed, which means it got to be posed with the rest of the report from that committee at the convention, the county convention the following week.  There's credentials committee. There's there's resolutions committee. And this is all this is like the business and the guts and the core and defining the values and principles and how we operate as a party. So that's why it's important to participate in that. So that we had those meetings. And so this one rule about being a registered lobbyist was in our report. So then we get to the convention. So everybody who registered and signed up and more people registered and signed up between last Saturday and the Saturday before this last Saturday. So a whole bunch of people showed up in the end. We had about 300. I think the number was 338 total people showed up to the convention. Not all of them were voting members. Some of them were observers. But in the end, 338 people there. So take a quick step back and say we have a total of about 26,000 registered Democrats on a Wahoo. 26,000 of the 26,000 registered Democrats on a Wahoo. 338 showed up to the convention. Well, there's a limited number of people can show up because of the 24 per district as I mentioned. So okay, we didn't hit that full capacity but became close. So okay, we have the convention now. So everybody shows up begins to show up. The convention was at the aloha stadium in the hospitality room. And it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of activity. A lot of people walking around talking a lot of things. A lot of issues being debated. And then, you know, factions coming together and discussing this, that or the other. Because I knew some, you know, all these people knew what was coming. Because all of our changes got posted. So people could see, oh, okay, that's what we're going to talk about. So the whole process begins with the registration. Everybody shows up. They get registered. Some people had to pay day of some people had already paid. Everybody gets a little voting card. It was an orange little voting card. Put your name on it. And then you go find a seat.   So you end up getting together with the people that you're used to working with. And then it begins. The meeting is kicked off and we start going through the credentials report. This is how many people showed up at 7 o'clock or at 8 o'clock when we gave this report. Okay, good. We have this many people to begin with. And then we start going through the business, which includes our committee reports. So as we go through this process, you know, each step of our agenda, we get through this and around about 9 o'clock, 9 30 or so, we got to the rules committee where we have to give our report. And our report included these five different sections. I think at the end it was four different sections to have some change or modification or addition. And it was posed we recommend from the committee that all of these be adopted. Well, out of that it was decided and this is what you can do. It was decided that one of them needed to be pulled out and discussed separately. See if you can guess which one that was. So of these, and I didn't go through all of them, but of these, most of them got voted on, one got pulled out. And then all the ones that were not pulled out were basically approved. So that passed. And then we got to talk about, and we spent an hour at this point and then another half hour at another point later discussing this one issue about the chair being a registered, a paid registered lobbyist. So again, discussion and debate going back and forth and back and forth. Who thought it was a good idea? Who thought it was a bad idea? And why? The ramifications of this are huge because for one thing from the Democratic Party perspective, unions play a big role in politics in general, let alone the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Hawaii. And rightly so. Unions are very important. They've done a lot of wonderful, great, amazing things for us. But unions technically are lobbyists. So that is therefore you can see that unions wouldn't necessarily want to be excluded from the chair role. Okay. And that was part of the debate. Other people got up and said, well you know what? Here's the problem with that is if we have someone who is a paid registered lobbyist and is in that seat, how do we know they're going to be fair? How do we know when it comes to some issues or other issues, they'll make sure that things get administered and that the process is handled fairly and evenly. And that's some of the concerns. And then other people say, well what about just the mere fact of influence? What if other groups out there say, hey you know what? There's a paid registered lobbyist who was in favor of this idea. And therefore the chair of this Democratic Party of Hawaii, Oahu County, is a paid registered lobbyist for this particular lobby firm, for this particular idea. So therefore as a result we have some sway over what policy gets passed. Those are the concerns. Those are the ramifications. So this got debated back and forth by everybody in the room. And then we hold votes. And then people have different changes. And then we hold votes. And how about this amendment? There were five or six different amendments to that language. It finally came down to the final amendment which was just say, okay we must just disclose. Let's disclose that they are a paid registered lobbyist. Or will or maybe come a paid registered lobbyist disclose that. And then therefore the body will be able to vote knowing ahead of time that that's who they are and what they are. Okay that was the final amendment. That amendment, this is extraordinary. That amendment failed by one vote. At that time the vote was 120, I believe it was 129 to 128. And that amendment failed. It was one vote. And that person who did that vote knows who that was. One vote made that amendment fail. So then there were no other amendments offered. So then we had to go back and we had to vote on just the language itself saying no not disclosure just no you're not allowed. And in order for that to pass we needed a two-thirds vote. Well we didn't get the two-thirds vote on that which meant that that language did not pass. So now in our Oahu County rules we did not pass the rule that said you cannot be a paid registered lobbyist. So that implies that it's very possible that the chair or someone running for the chair could be or could become a paid registered lobbyist. So just to give you an understanding of how these things come together and the debates and what gets resolved and what happens at these conventions and why these conventions are important. That's why I wanted to introduce this and walk you through this lengthy process. So sorry about all of that. But that's kind of how it all came together and everybody voted. Now that was that. That was those rules changes. Other things happen. Other very important things happen at this particular convention and happen at every convention is there are elections. At this particular convention we elected our new county chair. Our new county vice chair. Our new treasurer. Our vice treasurer. Our secretary and our vice secretary. And those all were elected positions. So we all voted we all as a group got to vote on all of those. That also becomes very contentious in different ways because everybody has different beliefs about you know who should do this and how things should be done and who we want our leaders to be and why and how.  And the treasurers got to give up and give a little speech. Because those were the contested races. The secretary and the vice secretary were not contested. No one was running against them. So they won by what's called acclimation. So they were in. So everyone else got to get up and got to give a little speech about why they felt you should vote for them. And it was all very interesting. It was all very exciting. Everybody got up and gave a little thing. But this is what it is. And then we got to vote. And you voted by everybody taking their card. Remember the little orange card I mentioned. And you have to all walk through a single file and it comes two lines. As you get there and you hand the card in and they mark it off that you voted once and you fill the form out. It's a signed ballot. It's not a secret ballot. And then you submit it. And then once everybody has gone through the committee, the elections committee, then goes through and adds up and tallies all of the votes. And then they come out and they tell us. Now in order to win one of these seats, you have to get more than 50% of the vote. A percent isn't accurate way of using it as been thoroughly explaining me by our by Bill Pughett, Dr. Bill Pughett. Thoroughly explained by our parliamentarian. You cannot do 50% of a person. So it's not about 50% but you have to have over 50% of the total delegates in order to win outright on the first ballot. So what happened was the first ballot, it didn't happen. We didn't get 50% on the first ballot for the chair. So there had to be a second ballot for that. Then we get to the vice chair. The vice chair, vice chair won outright, had more than the other two combined that were running against the vice chair. So that person won that on the first ballot. Then we get to the treasurer. Same thing. First time through, got all the votes needed, no second ballot.  So there were three people running for county chair. And the way that it works on the first ballot is if one of the three people does not get over 50%, then there has to be a second ballot. But the person who got the least number of votes gets excluded. So then the top two vote getters are what everybody votes for or who everybody votes for. And then everybody then goes back through. Well, not everybody stayed. Some people left after the first vote and that was that. So our actual total numbers decreased for the second ballot. But in the end, the second ballot came through and everybody voted and we ended up with our final chair. Our new current Oahu County chair is Mr. Rich Halverson. I believe he's a doctor. I'm not 100% certain of that. But Mr. Rich Halverson is a new Oahu County chair. Our new vice, our vice chair is the same vice chair that we had as Mr. Dylan Armstrong. Our new treasurer is Mr. Raphael Leonard. And then that we have the same. We had James Logue and Myra and Daniel Jacob all were in their roles. So that's the new leadership moving forward. So in future shows, and this show is going to come to an end now, so thank you so much for joining us. In future shows, I have invited Mr. Rich Halverson on the show and we're hoping to hear from him, hear what he wants to achieve as the leader of the county party and how he's going to coordinate with other groups, other entities. And we're looking forward to having that conversation. So I hope that insight into sort of the insight and kind of a recap for a Democratic Party convention, county convention. I hope it was helpful, it was informative. I hope it is something that can inspire you to be involved and engaged. Because as I like to say, your voice is our purpose and your action is our strength. So thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. See you next time.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2021 tutorial. In this one, I'm going to show you how to crop video. And I'm going to show you two ways to do it, the official way and then the not so official way. They're both very, very effective. Let's get right into this. I've got some footage here on my timeline. First step is we want to go to the effects panel up here. And there we go. There's the effects panel. If you don't see it, just make sure there go to window. Make sure there's a check mark beside effects. Now type in crop. I know. Surprise, surprise, and drag and drop that onto the video. When you do that, nothing happens right away. When you go to the effect controls panel, you're going to see the crop option. This now allows us to do what we want to do. So if you want to crop the top and the bottom, let's say 10% off the bottom, we'll go to 10%. And then we'll crop 10% off the top. And there we go. We've got crops. You want to crop from the left. You want to crop from the right. I think you guys see the picture and you see the point. Let's just go ahead and reset that. So that is the first way to do it. I'm going to show you a cheating way in case you want to do it this way. But I don't recommend it necessarily. But click on the video. And instead of going to get a crop from the effects, just go here and grab one of these tools. Under opacity, you can actually draw wherever you want it to be cropped. So let's say I want to crop out. I don't know. I want to crop out. I don't know. Let's say this part here. I'm going to click on it. And again, this is just a loose. This isn't a great crop. But I just want that part. Yeah, of course I cropped out the part. That doesn't make sense. But that actually is cropped out. And if I could show you that because I want to invert the mask, you'll see here that this part is cropped out and the rest is not. Let's go ahead and get rid of that mask. I'll show you one more example. So I'll just go on opacity. This is for exact cropping. So if I wanted to crop out this part here, like just the timeline, I would just go quickly like this. And again, this is not perfect. Timeline is cropped out. Everything else is in. That's how you do it, guys. Thanks for watching. I got a ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned.


And Ajit Pai, this means war. We're not going to lie down and take it. We will fight you, Ajit. Long time viewers of the channel know that I have been talking about the importance of net neutrality since 2017. 2017, it's been a very long time. And after six years of covering this story fairly regularly and then providing you with updates time and again, I'm happy to report that we are actually on the cusp of a major victory. In fact, we're gonna win the war. We've won battles here and there, but we're about to take home the W entirely because as the New York Times reports, the Biden administration plans to bring back open internet rules that were enacted during the Obama administration and then repealed by the Trump administration. In a speech on Tuesday, Jessica Rosenwurzel, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission declared that the repeal in 2017 put the FCC on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of the public. In other words, Ajit Pai's pro-corporate legacy is going to be repealed in its entirety. This is very good news to say the least. And we haven't seen the actual proposal from Rosenwurzel yet, but this is a long time proponent of net neutrality. She supported it as an FCC commissioner under the Obama administration. And during Ajit Pai's reign of terror, she fought against him. But now she's gonna be able to cook up her own repeal of the repeal of net neutrality. And I am confident that whatever she produces, it's gonna be fantastic. So I'm not worried about that. But if you're wondering why it took so long, well it's because the FCC has been deadlocked with two Republicans and two Democrats. So that means anything that Jessica Rosenwurzel comes up with, well, there's gonna be a tie and nothing will get through. And on top of that, Senate Republicans have obstructed Biden's nominee for over a year. In fact, Biden's pro-net neutrality nominee, Gigi Sohn, was smeared in an astroturfed campaign, likely funded by internet service providers. And Republican senators also smeared her as a woke radical leftist. And unfortunately it worked. Now, once Joe Manchin announced that he would be siding with Republicans and voting against her, she realized that she effectively had no path towards confirmation and chose to withdraw her nomination. But on September 7th, we finally made some progress because Biden's new nominee, Anna Gomez, was confirmed as FCC commissioner. Meaning that Democrats now had a majority on the FCC to put forth policies that they can actually vote on and enact. Now, Anna Gomez has worked in both the public and private sector, and she was formerly a telecom attorney, much like a Jied Pi. But I think that her being from within the industry and also working in the public sector, she's worked with the FCC as well, probably eased Republican's fears and they voted for her. But unlike a Jied Pi, she actually does support net neutrality and all that matters is that she's gonna be that vote that we need to bring back net neutrality. And she is. And with her confirmation, the FCC is now in a position to roll back everything that a Jied Pi did. Now it's been a while since I've talked about net neutrality. So I do wanna take some time to explain what that means for people who are new to this issue because this is something that is very heavily propagandized and it's difficult to find trustworthy sources on this issue because the internet service providers have so much at stake and they spread so much disinformation to confuse people, but net neutrality for those unaware is a good thing. It is something that we need. Net neutrality requires internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to treat all web traffic equally, which means that Verizon, for example, can't throttle traffic to Netflix in order to get people to use their streaming service instead. It could potentially harm competition, but also it means that internet service providers aren't able to carve up the internet.  So they couldn't stream Netflix, for example. And the ultimate goal here was to basically turn the internet into cable TV, right? So they can just charge people more. It was a scam. It was all about internet service provider greed. And under Trump's FCC, under the leadership of a GPI, they made that legal. They made it so these internet service providers could do that. And with any regulatory changes, there's always a required period beforehand where the public is allowed to weigh in and comment on the changes, but the process under a GPI was deeply corrupt. The FCC's comment system was flooded with millions of fake comments and we later found out that these comments were being funded by broadband companies themselves who were also simultaneously heavily lobbying in favor of the repeal of net neutrality. And to make matters worse, a GPI's repeal of net neutrality tried to preempt state laws on the subject, which meant that if Utah, for example, tried to pass its own net neutrality law in defiance of the FCC, well, that law would be illegal automatically because that's what a GPI's repeal of net neutrality included. This was supported by state senators like Ted Cruz who wrote op-eds in favor of this. And at the same time, he also took a lot of money from internet service providers. But thankfully, a court struck down that provision, which was very, very bad news for internet service providers because that was the core of their repeal of net neutrality because state after state after state ended up passing their own net neutrality laws, states like Oregon, Washington, California, New York and others. And some of these states had net neutrality protections that were arguably stronger than the ones that were introduced under the Obama administration. And these state laws totally undermine the national net neutrality repeal put in place by the Trump administration because if you have all of these states, the most populous states like California and New York undermining the FCC with this appeal, well, obviously that's bad news for ISPs. It's gonna make it much more difficult for them to roll out these draconian changes that they initially planned to. But that's not to say that their repeal of net neutrality hasn't been damaging because it has. One example is the Santa Clara Fire Department in California being literally throttled by Verizon during a firefight until they paid the company double. And once they paid, the throttling was lifted, although not immediately. Now, Verizon claims that it was just a mistake and had nothing to do with net neutrality even though they've lobbied against it for years. But the Santa Clara Fire Department, on the other hand, wasn't buying it. And they then submitted that incident as evidence in a lawsuit against the FCC as a reason to reinstate net neutrality at the national level. But needless to say, California later passed their own net neutrality law once the preemption rule was struck down because, I mean, Verizon's greed literally endangered public safety. A lot of us anticipated these ISPs just carving up the internet. Nobody thought that they would do something that evil where they literally throttle firefighters during a firefight. And for those of you unaware, yes, they do need the internet so they can coordinate during large firefights. So this actually inhibited their ability to fight fires. So it goes to show you that net neutrality was far more important than any of us had imagined even. But now net neutrality is coming back. It's gonna return to all 50 states and I promise you internet service providers are not gonna be happy about this. And as a result, expect to see a major, major disinformation campaign, especially during that public comment period because if the ISPs spent millions funding tons of fake comments, then imagine what they're going to do when net neutrality is coming back. So we need to be prepared. And Evan Greer of Battle for the Net writes, very shortly we will update battleforthenet.com to make it super easy for ordinary internet users to submit official net neutrality comments to the FCC docket. We know the phony opposition and telecom lobbying is incoming. Time to make our voices heard again. And they are exactly correct. So even though we are on the cusp of victory, we can't give up and get complacent. We have to be very cognizant of the fact that there's gonna be some manipulation. There's gonna be a lot of propaganda, particularly from Fox News and Republican senators, some Democratic Party senators like Joe Manchin in particular who are funded by ISPs. But I'm gonna link you to the battle for the net website down below so you can also submit your own comment. And I would highly encourage you to do that. I think that we have to be active to make sure that we get these protections that we fought for now for years. And I would highly encourage you to follow battleforthenet because this is one of the best organizations when it comes to net neutrality and just internet openness in general. But I also wanna read you this statement by Demand Progress in full because I think that they put it best. And it's a really great summary if you wanna share this with your friends. Quote, we are thrilled that the FCC will finally be able to undo the damage done during the Trump administration under FCC, Chara G Pie and restore net neutrality. We applaud chair Jessica Rosenwurzel for recognizing the importance of strong open internet protections and her immediate use of the newly full commission to restore the agency's authority to oversee broadband providers under Title II. Giant corporations and their lobbyists blocked President Biden from filling the final FCC seat for more than two years. And they will try every trick to block or delay the agency from restoring net neutrality now. The commission must remain resolute and fully restore free and open internet protections to ensure broadband service providers like Comcast and Verizon treat all content equally. This means providers cannot censor content, create fast lanes for their own products, throttle traffic or block access to their competitors. American's internet experience should not be at the whims of corporate executives whose primary concerns are the pockets of their stakeholders in the corporation's bottom line. Very well said. So it's not over yet, obviously. We're going to have to strongly push back against anti-net neutrality talking points that we see from Republican politicians, right wing griptors and others, but make no mistake about it. This is a very, very positive move. And if you care about freedom on the internet, if you care about the internet being open for everyone and to everyone, then this is a really good day for you.


I am a very happy Fedora user and I have been now since July-ish or so. It's been six or seven months since I switched to Fedora and I have no intentions of switching away and I've become a bit of a fanboy about it if you've followed my channel for any amount of time. I really like Fedora, but I'm not one of those guys who thinks Fedora is perfect, right? I don't think anything is perfect and I think that everything out there can stand to do a little bit better. So what I wanted to do today was talk about five things I think Fedora could do better. Now the first thing I want to say is that this is not the video that I planned on doing today. I was going to talk about Regolith. I've been working on Regolith for the last two days, but that video did not pan out. The way I wanted it to, that will hopefully be tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. I will have a whole rant on that video about why things don't work out as planned, but that's just kind of a side note. The second thing that I want to note is that some of the things that are on this list that I'm going to be talking about today are things that Fedora is aware of and that they're fixing. So the stuff that I'm going to be talking about, or at least a couple of things that I'm going to be talking about are going to be fixed in the future. So I'll point those out as we go along. So the first thing that Fedora could do better is that DNF is slow and this is one of those things that they're aware of and that they're working on. So DNF is the primary package manager for Fedora and in terms of syntax and needs of use, it's very good. It's one of the best package managers out there. I think it's on level with apt, but it is slow, right? Out of the box, especially on first launch of Fedora, it's phenomenally slow. Like it's really, really bad. If you've gone through and done some optimization for DNF enabled parallel downloads, it does get faster. So it's not slow all the time, but it is one of the slower package managers. I don't think it's as slow as zipper, but it is slow. Now, like I said, they are working on this supposedly either in the, one of the releases this year or next year, they're rewriting the entire back end of DNF and it's supposed to be faster. So this is something that is going to be fixed. But as of right now, DNF is one of the slower package managers. And that's definitely something that I'm glad that they're working on. So moving on to the next one. And this one is that the spins that Fedora has. So they have these things called spins. Basically they're alternate versions of Fedora and they come with different desktop environments and window managers. They have several over them and they're all really good, but they're not very promoted.  You'd think that it might be up here in the additions menu, but it's not. All you have are the official versions in the additions menu. But if you want to see the spins, you either have to know the URL or you have to scroll all the way down here to where they had this one brief mention of spins. Now that's probably enough, but I wish it was more prominent. I wish they were more proud of the fact that they have these spins and a little less pushy when it comes to the main one. Now I understand why they are this way. So this is not something that I expect them to change. I just wish that the spins was a little bit more prominent and that they let people know about them a little bit more. Because they are kind of buried just a little bit. So I wish the spins were more prominent. That's the second one. The third one on the list is that they are very passionate about their lack of non-free software in their repositories and in their distros. So when you download Fedora, you're not going to get the Nvidia drivers. You're not going to get anything that's proprietary and a lot of distributions do this, but on Fedora, which is a very mainstream distribution, it can be a little bit annoying. Not that those packages aren't available, but that they aren't there to begin with or that they aren't easily installable right from the go. Like if you have an Nvidia system, you have to mess around with the open source drivers until you get all the way installed, enable RPM Fusion and then install the Nvidia drivers. They really don't have a mechanism for getting you to that point. You have to know the process or Google the process in order to get there. And obviously the Nvidia drivers are the big thing, but there are other places where this becomes a hindrance. So recently they disabled several codecs inside of Fedora on AMD drivers, which means that there are certain situations where the video rendering and video encoding on your system will go much slower than it used to. And they did this for patent reasons, right? Because they're not interested in having that type of code in their system, right? And there's really nothing wrong with this. And I don't expect it to change, but this is definitely a downside of Fedora in that you would have you have to be very proactive in your own management of that type of software. You have to go out and search for it and get it onto your system yourself instead of ever relying on any mechanism from Fedora to do it for you. So it's not a great system, especially for new users, at least when it comes to things like drivers, all that stuff is going to be put on the responsibility of the user instead of the distro. Now, again, I understand why they do this, and I don't expect it to change, but it's still something that everyone should keep in mind when they decide to use Fedora, all that proprietary stuff is going to be stuff that you have to go out and get instead of having any mechanism to get it before or after immediately after install. So that's the third one. The fourth one is another one that they're planning on fixing or rectifying. And that is that FlatHub is not enabled by default. Now, originally, from my understanding, they chose not to enable FlatHub by default because there is proprietary software on FlatHub. And as we just talked about, they don't care for proprietary software. So they just ignored FlatHub and had the user enable if they wanted to use it. So if you aren't aware, Fedora uses FlatPak extensively. And that's not really all that surprising, giving that FlatPak and Fedora are very related projects, right? A lot of the developers who work on Fedora also work on FlatPaks and the surrounding ecosystems. So there's a lot of intermixing there. So Fedora uses FlatPaks by default, but all of the FlatPaks that you can install by default on Fedora all come from Fedora itself. There's no access to the primary repository of FlatPaks, which is called FlatHub, unless you enable it yourself. And that's the way it is right now. Like I said, they are fixing this supposedly in Fedora 38. FlatHub will be enabled by default. What I don't know is whether or not that's going to be filtered at all. So like they have that problem with proprietary software. I don't know if it's going, you're going to get the full breadth of FlatHub or if there's going to be filters on it. I don't know. It's possible they'll go either way. But it is good that they are rectifying this, because if you're going to rely on FlatPak, you're handicapping yourself by not allowing users to have immediate access to all that software, because FlatHub has a ton of applications and not having it by default is not a good thing, because it requires the user to know that FlatHub exists.  The last one is that a lot of software is just not available. So I honestly didn't think that this was that big of a deal up until like the last week or so. I've been using Fidora for quite a while now. And for the most part, any application that I need is either an RPM Fusion, the regular Fidora repositories or in FlatHub. That's basically still true. But the more obscure stuff, especially when you're dealing with like window managers and Waylon window managers in specific, you know, a lot of the stuff and dependencies that they need are just not there, which means you have to build the stuff yourself. And the problem with building the stuff yourself is that they all, the things that you need to build often have dependencies that are even more obscure than the things you're trying to build. And that means that you're probably going to have to build those dependencies as well. And it just, it's kind of a, it's a rigmarole. It's a very hard and very tedious process to have to go through these obscure things. Now, this is not going to be a problem for a lot of people. If you're just using mainstream software, you're going to have a grand time and you're going to be able to get any piece of software that you need from either FlatHub or the Fidora repositories or RPM Fusion. It's when you start exploring into the more esoteric stuff, like say for example, Hyperland, where you'll become, it's a little bit more of an issue. Now, there is a solution for this that they have. It's called Copper. And that's a AUR-like collection of repositories that has some of the more obscure libraries and stuff like that. But it's not as full as the AUR and the discovery is atrocious. Like it does have a search on it, but you have to, first of all, you have to know the exact package name to search or at least close. And the website is horrifically slow. It's like really, really bad. So discovery on Copper is not that great. And not everything is there anyways. So, and some of the stuff that is there is phenomenally old. So you may not be able to use it even if the thing you are looking for is there. Also, and this is another problem with Copper, is that they don't require descriptions. So a lot of the stuff that's been uploaded has been uploaded for quote-unquote personal use and they allow that. That's perfectly fine with their rules. But that means that the person who uploaded it doesn't have to put a description. They'd have no obligation to say what that package actually is. Even they don't even have to put the right name if they don't want to. They can do whatever they want. It's basically the wild, wild West. And if that's the way they wanna run it, it's fine, but it does make it really hard for users who come in after to kind of discover any packages that are on there for, especially when it comes to more obscure libraries, right? Obscure dependencies I should say, right? So that the idea behind Copper is to solve the problem and not enough software being available, but it's imperfect. So I hope that that is something that they continue to work on. Because honestly, I really do like the idea of Copper, even though it's a little bit too PPA for me. But it works fairly well when you discover something. So like for example, for ages, I3Gaps was not in the Fedora repositories. You'd have to go to Copper to get it. And I'm glad that that was there, right? That saved my bacon for ages over the last seven months. And now that I3Gaps has been merged into regular I3, it's not that big of a deal. But previously, I was very happy that Copper existed. I just wish that it was better. So those are the five things that I think that Fedora could do better. And like I said, two of them for sure, they are definitely working on. So I'm glad that that's happening.  I just wanted to point out a few things that I think that they could definitely do better. And I think that overall, they do a really good job of ensuring that their distribution just works very, very well. So good job, Fedora. Keep it up, guys. I'm gonna continue to be a big fanboy. That is it for this video. If you have comments on any of this stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linus Cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because we're all absolutely amazing without you. The challenge is to not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


Hey, hello, buddies. Thanks for watching. All right. I have 28 big money Bolo's coming your way. I am your featured reseller these items sold for $35 or more Looks like one item sold for 150 So I've got some good stuff here and we are gonna get started. All right, and these items were cross-posted to Poshmark and McCurry and They sold faster on eBay, which you know, that's typical eBay is like my number one for sure But I'll tell you what when those Mercari and Poshmark sales start flowing in I am so thankful for list perfectly because I Love cross-posting with list perfectly if you guys haven't checked that out. Definitely check it out I do have some videos on it. All right. The first item is this Barbie. It's a $38 I sold it for $38 in the buyer page shipping She is the special edition Barbie and the box is damaged But I still sold it for $38. I picked it up at a garage sale. It was a bulk buy of a bunch of Barbies I paid like four bucks for it Trying to see where the damage on the boxes I can't find it Anyway, moving on let's go to the next one the next item I sold are these little Bratz dolls. I sold these for $65 in the buyer page shipping So somebody messaged me and they're like I just want the clothes and I'm like like off the dolls I'm like and she was offering me the full asking price for just the clothes and I'm like I'm gonna take the clothes off and then I'm gonna sell the dolls, you know, like I'll do that I'll create a new listing and then I started trying to take the clothes off the dolls and I'm like forget it I'm not doing it. This is awful. Those dolls are so hard to dress So I just sold the whole thing for $65. It was not worth it. Sorry. You have to take it all for $65 buyer page shipping The next item I sold came out of my bulk buy I bought it on eBay to sell on eBay jewelry pickup Amazing 344 pounds of jewelry. Definitely go check out those videos I sold this one for $44 and the buyer page shipping.  This came from a garage sale. I don't know. I'm sorry. I think I Think this was a thrift store. I Think it was in I think I did a video on this.  I could be wrong But anyway, I probably had less than a dollar in it because I bought it and a bundle of stuff And I sold this for $39.60 in the buyer page shipping anything animated like this I typically pick up it usually has a pretty good return The next item is Amazing, okay, so I'm at a garage sale and I see this South Park snow globe and I'm like Okay, I five bucks. I'm gonna get that and I've looked it up and I could not believe the comps and then I saw that it was like an employee gift and only 250 were made and it even has this like little foggy spot Can you guys see it? So it probably was in the box and it was laying against it or laying on its side And you know how the bubble on the top anyway, I still sold it for a hundred and thirty two dollars and the buyer page shipping So that is a major Bolo You're probably not gonna find it because there were only 250 made but definitely look things up like this sometimes you're just like Shockingly surprised. So definitely a Bolo The next item I sold is this talking newborn Rudolph the red nose reindeer. He came from a garage sale I bought the whole table Of Christmas stuff and I'm gonna tell you like It was like a table full of Bolo's. I don't remember what I paid for it I didn't realize the items were gonna be such great Bolo's, but I have made so much money off that table It was really a good buy.  I'm gonna say I had a dollar or two in this The next item is this Mattel Barbie working it out doll with the cassette She sold for thirty nine dollars and sixty cents in the buyer paid shipping She was four bucks at that same garage sale where I got all the Barbies The next item is this Longenberger kitchen crock. I picked this up at a garage sale for two dollars The buyer paid shipping on this I took a best offer of forty. So it's a sage green color I pick up Longenberger pottery if I can get it cheap. I don't buy baskets I don't know if there's a market for that or not, but I do pretty well with the pottery The next item I sold is this I think it's upco because it's got the little circle on the back But it doesn't say upco So I wasn't sure so I just put a little question mark and somebody who collects upco is gonna know but I have sold some pumpkins like these and this is a ceramic ghost with the cutout face and I think you like put a candle in it and This came in a mystery box and I sold this for thirty eight dollars in the buyer paid shipping The next item I sold is this. Oh, I think it's pronounced Simigol Simigol Simigol the Lord of Rings movie. He's an action figure. The box was damaged I picked this up at a garage sale for two dollars and I sold it for eighty dollars in the buyer paid shipping So it's new old stock damaged box The next item my husband picked up at a garage sale for five dollars And he's like I remember you telling me about these and I'm like, okay Of course, he gets one that's brand new and sealed for five dollars And he took a best offer of a hundred dollars I would have held out for a hundred and fifty because you just can't find these sealed and brand new But he's like I paid five dollars for it. He's like take the offer. I'm like, okay So he sold it for a hundred and the buyer paid shipping the next item I picked this up at a thrift store for ten bucks and I Probably could have got a hundred and fifty for it So here I am like telling my husband wait for a hundred and fifty and I have this listed at two hundred and somebody offered me a hundred and I took it I was like I paid ten for it like they're offering me a hundred just take it but I put a YouTube video of how it worked down in the description of the video right here and if you guys go to my YouTube channel you can I have a video that shows you how to do this but This video had a bunch of views so it's obviously like a hard to find popular item So I took a best offer of a hundred dollars I believe it went to Canada if I remember correctly I could be wrong, but I was thinking it was an international sale So the buyer did pay the shipping and I sold it for a hundred The next item I sold is this ball main Paris perfume De Parfum from France and I sold this for a hundred and fifty dollars and the buyer paid shipping I think this one came from a thrift store. I pick up a perfume and stuff like that. I like selling it bread and butter I like the big money ones. I'll take whatever. I just like selling perfume. It's kind of like toys I like selling toys you find those things that you know make you happy and you just sell them and It changes from time to time, you know like sometimes I'm in the mood to do like toys sometimes it's Clothing hardly ever anymore. Anyway, sometimes I like doing Barbie stuff like this item. This is a tressy doll outfit I sold this for forty nine dollars and ninety nine cents. It came in a bulk buy of Barbie stuff that I picked up I think at a thrift store and yeah, this was a good one and the buyer paid shipping on that So it's this executive sweet jacket and skirt The next item I sold this one was very very very very very long tail I did pay five dollars for it at a garage sale I thought it was gonna sell faster it did sell and it sold for forty four dollars and the buyer paid the shipping So I did have a good return, but I did have to wait on the right buyer The next item Was a retail arbitrage item and I have another one listed if anybody wants to come take it off my hands and buy it up Please my links down below to all of my stores. You can find it there The other one I have I think has more of a cream look to it I picked this up at a discount store. I Can't remember what I paid for it. I want to say like 20 or 30 bucks I paid up for it because it retails for 248 and I took a best offer of $65 and the buyer paid shipping. It's a great watch. It's really big You can see right here. It's a big watch, but so I made my money back I made a little money, but I've had it a long time and I want to move the other one So if anyone's interested, please feel free to send me an offer The next item I sold is this universal studios monsters of the mummy toy. This was a garage sale fine I picked it up for around two bucks And I sold it for $70 and 40 cents in the buyer paid shipping So you guys knew old stock toys definitely almost always a win either bread and butter or big money The next item is this large jumbo Scooby-Doo that I picked up at a garage sale for 50 cents Yep, 50 cents, and I sold it for $80 in the buyer paid shipping and he sold fast The next item came from my I got it free garage sale video So I went to a garage sale. It was the end of the garage sale.  If you want to see what else I got go check out that video It's on my YouTube search. I think it says got it free or something like that And I guess I'm guessing I'll probably make between five hundred and a thousand dollars off of that free stuff It was just an amazing amazing It was good luck good luck on that one because um, I wasn't even like really I wasn't going to garage sales So somebody called me and said hey, there's a garage sale and I'm like, I don't know and then I was like I'll check it out. I can social distance where my mask everything was fine But yeah, awesome the next item. Whoops. I don't know why that's there. Okay. The next item is this Spirit Halloween techie toys floating monster crazy light-up face ghost Mystery box fine guys. I Was pretty excited about this one. I can't I don't remember. I think I did a video I think I have a video of this mystery box when I opened it up And I was like, ooh, this looks cool and I ended up selling this for a hundred dollars and the buyer paid shipping The next item I sold is this McFarland the walking dead Rick Grimes figure and Came from the garage sale where I got all those new old stock toys I paid three bucks for it and it sold for thirty seven dollars in the buyer paid shipping This mylar ribbon, I don't remember where I got it. I don't remember what I paid for it. It wasn't much I sold this for $45 in the buyer paid shipping it did take a while to sell. It was a little bit long tail, but Definitely definitely a bolo Okay, this new wave Huh, I'm missing an item That's on my sheet. Maybe that was what that happened with that one Okay, so this or I'll find it on another video. I have so many tabs pulled up this new wave I picked up at a garage sale for five dollars you guys five bucks. I looked up comps and I'm like, why is this five dollars? They're like, oh, we got it at our wedding. We never used it. I just want to get rid of it I'm like, I'll take that off your hands for five dollars new old stock never been used. I don't even know if it's considered old stock. I Sold that for eighty five dollars in the buyer paid shipping The next item is this Cleveland Browns Snap I'm sorry. It's a strap back hat. It is vintage Sorry, I'm sitting on my floor. So I have put a reception and it's really uncomfortable 50 cents at a garage sale and I sold it for best offer of $50 and the buyer paid the shipping The next item I sold is this Clarisonic facial cleansing set. I paid up for this Excuse me. I got it at a thrift store. It was $18. I thought it was all there and I got home and it wasn't So I was a little bit bummed about that because I probably could have got a hundred To a hundred and twenty five I think so I took I sold it for eighty five So 18 and 85 that's still good, but I was hoping for more so Anyway, alright the next item the next item is this dull house and I picked this up at a garage sale for ten dollars and I sold it for $50 and the buyer paid the shipping and There's actually two items That did not pull up in my tabs. I don't know what I did wrong. They disappeared So one of them was a clock my husband sold and one of them was a nativity Hmm, so I apologize. There were only actually 26 Bolo's in this video. So Whoopsie All right, you guys thanks for being here. Thanks for watching be sure to like comment subscribe and share and there's gonna be some videos Popping up here here here Here and subscribe here Be sure to subscribe if you haven't share this video with your friends anybody that you know That's a reseller that might like to learn It's a great way to learn throw this on while you're working and just learn away That's why I started the channel to learn So basically as I learn I'm helping everyone else learn so List perfectly should be popping up. Definitely check that video out if you haven't if you are only selling on what one platform I Say branch out because there's different buyers on different platforms and I've been really successful with posh mark and McCurry That's really where I put the work in to those two platforms. And of course, that's where I'm selling more eBay is my number one So if you're not selling on eBay, oh my goodness, definitely get on eBay I dabble and Etsy. I've actually had quite a few sales this week on Etsy more than normal I only have about a hundred and fifty two hundred something like that Items on Etsy and then I've got a handful and grailed and I just started Facebook So I don't know McCurry posh mark and eBay are my main three But if you want to try list perfectly, you can use coupon code Bolo buddies That's a referral coupon code that'll get you 30% off your first month. So check it out Let me know if you have questions down in the comments and as always. Thanks for watching. Have a great night Oh, and if you made it this far comment, I made it to the end of the video


on Reese yesterday and Reese does a good job as hands are coming to you, or hands are coming to him, he does a good job of engaging them and controlling them. So even if Tony was just reaching with his left hand, and I know that's his attack hand, or he's reaching with his right hand, I know that's his attack hand, just controlling that hand really frustrates a guy. Now, especially if we're trying to get to an underhook, and I'm clubbing and I'm trying to punch underhook, but he attacks my wrist as I'm coming in, or attacks it down here before I can underhook him. I don't have a good opportunity to hunt and get to my hook, all right? And the more I try to get to it, the more I kind of let this guy know, hey, I want this underhook real bad. Now, again, we just got to think about strategy here. If this guy thinks that I'm attacking a single way, he's only focused on getting his leg back, his head and hands in the way. So a lot of times, we're in this position, say I just, we just start with double inside times, no big deal, or maybe I'm inside outside here. I got inside with a back leg hand outside with my lead leg hand. I can just step and act like I'm reaching for a single right here. And then as he steps back home, I'm right into my hook, right into my backside collar again. Okay? So we're just going to go out. We're going to stay home and stay disciplined. We're going to close distance and get our hands on them, whether it's inside or outside. Then we're going to step and just hit a drive single. And as they step back and beat it, we're just going to come up to an underhook. Okay? So I'm going to stay home and close distance. I'm going to get my hands on them. Okay? I'm just going to step and reach for them right to my hook. Circle pull. Then I'm back into my attacks. Okay?  But if the guy's being real sticky with his hands and real troublesome there of us getting inside and getting into those pockets for an underhook, let's make him think about something else.  I'm going to stay home. Close distance. Let him reach first. You see what he did? As I'm closing distance here, I just stay home. His hands come up. Then I get what I want. Whatever I want. Close distance right here. I like stepping on my outside foot to really sell this single. And then as he steps back, I'm just coming up to my hook right here, circle to rotate. Then I go right back into my normal drive single if I want. I go double. I can go high crash. Stay home. Hands on. Single leg punch up. Right here. Right in my slip in. High crash. This is all the stuff we've been doing. Questions. So sell the single. Slide up. Punch the hook. Go. This.


Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight. The Bemidji Police Department is releasing more information regarding the gunshots that were fired about a block away from downtown Bemidji last night. The incident happened just before seven in the alley between America Avenue and Minnesota Avenue south of Ninth Street. Bemidji police officers in Beltrami County Sheriff's deputies were in the area and were able to respond quickly. At the scene they found an unoccupied van that had multiple bullet holes through the driver's side. The officers observed bullet holes in that van but nobody was around. They were able to locate the people that left that van in two separate houses just south of that location. They've had an opportunity to speak with those people and they continue to work on the case. Police say the incident appears to be isolated between two separate groups and there appears to be no threat to the general public. Right now they're asking anyone with information to come forward. We're hoping that someone that might have seen this happen is willing to come forward and provide us that information that we need maybe on this second vehicle that was involved. At this point we only know it was a second vehicle so if anyone has any information on that you know it's really important that people are willing to step up and provide that information you know you can provide information anonymously. That information would be a tremendous help to us to be able to figure out what happened here and further to help keep our neighborhood safe. No one was injured in that situation and there are no suspects in custody at the moment. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, let me wish you a happy new year. Vice President and I are very pleased to welcome you to our press conference. We'll now report on the outcome of today's meeting of the Governing Council. Based on our regular economic and monetary analysis, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged. We continue to expect them to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, we confirm that we will continue to make purchases under the asset purchase program at the current monthly pace of 80 billion euros until the end of March 2017 and that, from April 2017, our net asset purchases are intended to continue at a monthly pace of 60 billion euros until the end of December 2017 or beyond if necessary. And in any case, until the Governing Council sees a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation consistent with its inflation aim. The net purchases will be made alongside reinvestments of the principal payments from maturing securities purchased under the APP. The Governing Council today also decided on further details on how the euro system will buy assets with yields below the interest rate on the deposit facility under its public sector purchase program. These decisions will be published in a separate press release at 15.30-3.30 today. The monetary policy decisions taken in December 2016 have succeeded in preserving the very favorable financing conditions that are necessary to secure a sustained convergence of inflation rates towards levels below but close to 2 percent over the medium term. Borrowing conditions for firms and households continue to benefit from the pass-through of our measures. As expected, headline inflation has increased lately, largely owing to base effects in energy prices, but underlying inflation pressures remain subdued. The Governing Council will continue to look through changes in HICP inflation if judged to be transient and to have no implication for the medium-term outlook of price stability. A very substantial degree of monetary accommodation is needed for euro-era inflation pressures to build up and support headline inflation in the medium term. If warranted to achieve its objective, the Governing Council will act by using all the instruments available within its mandate. In particular, if the outlook becomes less favorable or if financial conditions become inconsistent with further progress towards a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation, we stand ready to increase our asset purchase program in terms of size and or duration. Let me now explain our assessment in greater detail, starting with the economic analysis. Euro-area real GDP increased by 0.3% quarter on quarter in the third quarter of 2016, after recording a similar pace of growth in the second quarter. Incoming data, notably survey results, point to somewhat stronger growth in the last quarter of 2016. Looking ahead, we expect the economic expansion to firm further. The pass-through of our monetary policy measures is supporting domestic demand and facilitating the ongoing deleveraging process. The very favorable financing conditions and improvements in corporate profitability continue to promote the recovery in investment. Moreover, sustained employment gains, which are also benefiting from past structural reforms, provide support for private consumption via increases in households' real disposable income. At the same time, there are signs of a somewhat stronger global recovery. However, economic growth in the Euro-area is expected to be dampened by a sluggish pace of implementation of structural reforms and remaining balance sheet adjustments in a number of sectors. The risks around in the Euro-area growth outlook remain tilted to the downside and relate predominantly to global factors. According to Eurostat, Euro-area annual HICP inflation increased markedly from 0.6% in November 2016 to 1.1% in December. This reflected mainly a strong increase in annual energy inflation, while there are no signs yet of a convincing upward trend in underlying inflation. Looking ahead, on the basis of current oil futures prices, headline inflation is likely to pick up further in the near term, largely reflecting movements in the annual rate of change of energy prices. However, measures of underlying inflation are expected to rise more gradually over the medium term, supported by our monetary policy measures, the expected economic recovery, and the corresponding gradual absorption of slack. Turning to the monetary analysis, Broad Money M3 continues to expand at a robust pace with its annual rate of growth increasing to 4.8% in November 2016 up from 4.4% in October. As in previous months, annual growth in M3 was mainly supported by its most liquid components, with a narrow monetary aggregate M1 expanding at an annual rate of 8.7% in November up from 8% in October. Loan dynamics followed the path of gradual recovery, observed since the beginning of 2014. The annual growth rate of loans to non-financial corporations was 2.2% in November 2016, after 2.1% in the previous month. The annual growth rate of loans to households was 1.9% in November after 1.8% in October. Although developments in bank credit continue to reflect the lagged relationship with the business cycle, credit risk, and the ongoing adjustment of financial and non-financial sector balance sheets, the monetary policy measures put in place since June 2014 are significantly supporting borrowing conditions for firms and households, and thereby credit flows across the Euro area. The Euro area bank lending survey for the fourth quarter of 2016 indicates that credit standards for loans to enterprises are broadly stabilizing, while loan demand has continued to expand at a robust pace across all loan categories. To sum up, a cross-check of the outcome of the economic analysis with the signals coming from the monetary analysis confirmed the need for a continued, very substantial degree of monetary accommodation to secure a sustained return of inflation rates towards levels that are below but close to 2% without undue delay. Monetary policy is focused on maintaining price stability over the median term, and its accommodative stance supports economic activity. In order to rip the full benefits of our monetary policy measures, other policy areas must contribute much more decisively both at the national and at the European level. The implementation of structural reforms needs to be substantially stepped up to increase resilience, reduce structural unemployment, and boost investment productivity and potential output growth in the Euro area. Structural reforms are necessary in all Euro area countries. In particular, reforms are needed to improve the business environment, including the provision of inadequate public infrastructure. In addition, the enhancement of current investment initiatives, progress on the capital markets, union, and reforms that will improve the resolution of non-performing loans are a priority. Fiscal policies should also support the economic recovery while remaining in compliance with the fiscal rules of the European Union. Full and consistent implementation of the stability and growth pact over time and across countries remains crucial to ensure confidence in the fiscal framework. At the same time, it is essential that all countries intensify efforts towards achieving a more growth-friendly composition of fiscal policies. And we are now at your disposal for questions. Mr Ferris, please. Tom Ferris from the Wall Street Journal. Mr Draghi, you indicated that the ECB stands ready to do more if the outlook deteriorates. Is the ECB also ready to do less if it continues to outperform? I think last time you indicated this was a high-class problem. I just wondered if you had any update on that. The second question is on the U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. He's made some comments this week about the dollar that led to a fall in the dollar. And I wondered if you were worried about what this might mean in terms of a future currency war or perhaps about some of the other suggestions he's made about an increase in protectionism and how that might impact the eurozone. Thank you. Thank you.  The answer is yes. It still is a high-class problem. We haven't discussed it anyway. The second point, really, it's very early for us to comment on the to-be-President Trump statements. It's just early. The only thing that I can recall as far as exchange rates are concerned is that something that you heard me say many times, the exchange rates for us are not a target, but they are important for price stability and growth. And there is a very strong international consensus in the G20 and the G7 to refrain from competitive devaluations. So there is a whole protocol in the various statements by the G20 and the G7 that basically states how countries should behave with respect to exchange rates. Mr. Framke. Thank you very much. Andreas Framke from Reuters in Frankfurt. Two questions for you, Mr. Draghi. One on inflation again. In case it overshoots your target, for how long would you let it overshoot it?  And the second one on the Brexit front in her last speech, the British Prime Minister made clear that there will be a hard Brexit. What does it mean for the ECB and for your outlook on inflation on growth? This is clear now. Thank you. Thank you. So the answer to the first question lies in what we define as our objective. We define our objective, first of all, in medium term, over a medium term horizon. That's the relevant policy horizon. Second, it has to be a durable convergence, so it cannot be transient. Third, it has to be self-sustained. In other words, it has to stay there even when the extraordinary monetary policy support that we are providing today will not be there. And fourth, has to be defined for the whole of the eurozone. I think these are the four features that have always characterized our objective. On the second question, simply say again, it's too early to say. The final outcome of the negotiations will be very important. But also whether it will have economic consequences will depend on the shape of the outcome and the length of time it will take. And so it's too early to comment. Thank you. Mr. Jones? Claire Jones, Financial Times. Two questions if I may. We are now seeing quite sharp divergences between headline inflation rates in weaker member states and stronger parts of the region, such as Germany. How do you handle the communications and the policy challenges that this presents? And I think there's also some concerns that members of the council think there could be difficulties in finding enough bonds to buy under QE. And that could in effect limit your ability to hit your inflation target through the program as it now stands. If core inflation remains weak and you need to carry on buying in 2018 and even beyond that, how do you intend to do that given that there are these constraints in the assets that can be purchased under the program? Thank you. Thank you. Well, the answer to the second question is actually given by our decision in buying below the DFR rate at the short of maturity, the details of which will be released in the press statements I mentioned before. That has greatly enlarged the eligible universe and we are confident about the smooth implementation of our program. So we see actually no problems on that front. The whole strategy will be, as I said, delineated in the press statement, but we stand ready to upgrade the strategy or to revise the strategy as needed. Also, these purchases below the DFR rate, don't forget, will happen if needed, if they are required. Now, on the other point, it's too early to say, let me say one thing about the governing councilor today. The discussion was unanimous in looking back at the monetary policy decisions taken in December and stating that they were the right policy answer to the contingencies as viewed, as estimated in December. More generally, there was a sense of satisfaction towards the monetary policy stance that we have been pursuing now since 2014. It's increasingly clear that this policy stance had been successful. We've seen that since 2015, we had something, we had each and every quarter GDP growth between 0.3 and 0.6% quarter on quarter. We've seen that in December 2016, consumers' confidence is the highest since April 2015. The Economic Sentiment Index is the highest since March 2011. The PMI Composite Output Index is the highest since May 2011. Unemployment in November last year was 9.8%, the lowest since July 2009. So by and large, the Euro area has created 4.5 million jobs, million new jobs over the last three years. And more directly related to the question you asked, we've seen that the dispersion of the value-added growth across countries is at an all-time low since 1997. So that gives us a sense that if there are heterogeneities and there are indeed in the speed with which we are approaching our objective, they can be coped with. It gives us a sense that the recovery is resilient. At the same time, we see that inflation is mostly driven by energy prices, and we see the underlying inflation pressures remaining subdued and especially nominal wages growth remain subdued. On top of that, we see, as I mentioned in the introductory statement, the risks coming from the global uncertainty situation. Thank you. Ms Weisbach. Annette Weisbach with the CNBC. I have two questions, if I may as well. One is a little bit technical. So going forward, from April onwards, you're reducing the asset purchase to 60 billion Euro.  Or are you planning on shutting down individual programs altogether? That would be the first, like, more technical question, as I was saying. And second one is how do you address German critics? It's getting louder and louder, I would say. With even Wolfgang Schraubler, the Minister of Finance, of course, stepping out and urging for a normalization of your policy, which is of course quite vocal. So what are you telling them? Thank you. The first question is we haven't discussed that. To the second question, actually, if you're referring to the very last statement by Minister Schraubler, he actually said that there are political problems in explaining the monetary policy stance of the ECB. So that is a very, I mean, a very understandable statement. And so what I would say is basically the same thing I've been saying now for a few months. It's low rates are necessary now to get higher rates in the future. The recovery of all of the eurozone is in the interest of everybody, including Germany. The German savers have benefited, not only as savers, but also as borrowers, as entrepreneurs, as workers, like all the other citizens of the eurozone. So we have to be patient. As recovery will firm up, real rates will go up. Having said that, since our last decisions in December, however, there is more room to diversify into the medium-long-term spectrum of the yield curve, gaining actually a better rate than the very short-term one. So that is, in a sense, if anything, what you would call the rate of return conditions have improved in the last month and a half. But really, an honest answer would be just be patient. As the recovery will firm up, real rates will go up as well. And this will happen for Germany and for other countries as well. Mr. Ewing. Thank you, Jack Ewing, from the New York Times. In his interview with the Bill Zeitung in the Times of London a few days ago, President Lenk Trump was asked about the euro, and he said, quote, keeping it together is not going to be as easy as people think. And I'm just wondering if you want to react to that statement, which doesn't sound like a real ringing endorsement of the euro, and also more generally, what would it mean for monetary policy if you have a president who's skeptical about the success of the common currency? Thank you. Thank you. I just won't make any comment on that. It's just too early. Let's see what are the real policies following these statements. I'd rather comment on policies and policy actions than just statements. Thank you. Mr. Daniels. Thank you, Harry Daniels from Life School News. Last month's decision to extend the purchase programme was met with a level of uncertainty by economists in the markets alike as to whether ECB is actually tapering or not. If we take it as red that this wasn't a tapering exercise, how would you communicate tapering the message? How would you get a message to cross when the time comes to taper? And was part of the reason for not labelling it tapering to do with the Fed's experience in the past and the tapering attempt we saw? Thank you. No, as I said last time, it wasn't tapering. We didn't discuss tapering last time. We didn't discuss tapering this time, by the way, or we didn't even discuss sort of high-class problems of the kind that I was asked before. The situation, but it is true that when, and if, well, I'm pretty sure that it will come, the time, and then we'll have to be, we will have to have a very deep and very careful discussion and analysis of the situation. But we are not there. Mr. Tric? Your Honor, Tric Politico. Mr. Draghi, I've got two questions for you. Number one, if you say that the Governing Council was unanimous in stating that the policies have been successful, does that mean that those Governing Council members who weren't willing to sign up to December's decision, as shown in the minutes, admitted that they were wrong? And my second question is on the banking troubles in Italy right now. What would you say to the assessment that you see somewhere that the process at the moment suggests that Bailin in Europe is dead? Well, the point, I mean, I just, we don't have sort of, how do you say it, public admissions of guilty Mao Chinese style as a way of working. We simply had a discussion and there was a general satisfaction that the policies working and that I gave you a few signs that it's working, a few data, but there are other data. For instance, the increase in the market-based expectations, as you've seen. The survey-based expectations measures also increased, although they're stable. It's interesting, they increase in the short term, but they're stable in the long term. So the risk of deflation, according to any measure, has largely disappeared. Financing conditions have improved. The lending rates for households and companies have declined significantly. The other thing, by the way, we pay a lot of attention because, exactly because of the question I had before about heterogeneity, diversity in the progress towards our objective. We pay a lot of attention also on the cross-country heterogeneity of loan rates, and that has gone down more generally, borrowing conditions for SMEs have improved. And even more interestingly, the balance sheet repair for no financial company has actually improved markedly over the last few months. In general, more specifically, the no financial corporation, no financial companies leverage has gone down. Also, all this says basically that the conditions for the transmission of our monetary policy have improved. But all this doesn't mean that we can sort of relax. And the Governing Council is aware that it will have to keep this present extraordinary monetary policy support as necessary to achieve our objective. And even though inflation has increased markedly, we know it's mostly driven by energy. And at this point in time, the Governing Council decided to look through it. Now, your question was, the bail-in is that? I frankly don't want to comment on that explicitly, but I can ask the vice president, who's responsible for financial stability, if he has comments on that statement, or whether it's true actually. No, I don't think so, because the present legislation that is in place is being applied in all its details. That's the straight and true answer. As you know, in the BRRD, there is in Article 32, No. 4, Item D, there are conditions safeguarding questions of financial stability that can be used. They are in the law. So they are in accordance with the rules that have been defined. Mr. Melli? Alessandro Melli of Insolventi Quattrore. Since your last press conference, when you said that you were confident that the Italian government will do the right thing to support the banking sector, the Italian government has actually approved the decree to support the banking sector with a package of about 20 billion euros. There was also a comment in the meantime from Minister Padwell saying that ECB supervision is too rigid. I wonder if you could give us an assessment of both the measures and the minister's comment. Unfortunately on neither. I cannot comment on either of the two questions. As you know, we have a strict separation principle, and I wouldn't ask my colleague Daniel Nui to comment on our monetary policy stance. Mr. Speciale? Alessandro Speciale, Bloomberg News. Mr. President, my first question is on the inflation outlook. How would you describe the balance of risks surrounding this outlook? And you cited before that the science in underlying inflation of a pickup are still very weak. You cited wages and so on. And just to cite a figure in Germany, unions are going into this year with demands of increases of 4.5% to 6%. Do you think this is a positive factor? Is it compatible with what you would describe as sustained inflation? Thank you. Thank you. Let me say about the inflation outlook. In December, headline inflation increased markedly because of base effects, but also because of higher oil prices, higher than expected. So the outlook for headline inflation over the next quarter, two quarters, maybe is higher than it was foreseen in the previous macroeconomic projections. The key question now is, what is the extent of second round effects coming from this higher inflation? And we'll certainly look at that with great attention. By the way, in so doing, we do exactly what we've done in the past when inflation was going down. And we'll ask ourselves the questions whether the four features of our convergence process towards our objective are actually satisfied, the ones I mentioned before. I don't want to enter into the issue whether nominal wages, higher nominal wages, certainly are positive from our viewpoint, but as you know, wages are being negotiated by the parts, by the social partners, and so the central bank doesn't have a say into this other than saying that a higher rate of growth of nominal wages certainly would move towards our objective of an inflation rate close but below 2%. However, we should also look at productivity, how productivity performs. And productivity performance in recent times has not been sustained. Thank you. Mr Barfield, please. Benoit Houssin for AFP News Agency. A quick follow-up on previous questions about inflation and critics in Germany. I'm just wondering how concerned are you about increasing discrepancies between inflation rates across the eurozone and how large a gap can the ECB tolerate? I know that the ECB is focused on the euro area as a whole, but what if the German inflation continues to rise strongly far beyond 2% while other areas remain very subdued? Do you see a point where the ECB would feel bound to act and does the ECB have instruments to tackle such an issue? Thank you. The answer to the question is no, because our objective is the inflation rate below but close to 2% for the whole of the eurozone. How likely, and that is in a sense the same answer I gave to the previous question, how likely is it going to be that these divergences will be unmanageable? We judge it not so likely. We think that these divergences will be managed. We've seen, if anything, all these divergences narrowing down over the last two, three years, and they will continue doing so. Thank you. My first one is a follow-up on the previous question in some respect. Do you think that there is a need to explain better to the German public and to the authorities that there is simply a need for inflation rates above 2% in Germany if the inflation rate for the euro area as a whole should return to the below but close to 2% target? And the second question is on your forward guidance. It says that the interest rates will stay at the current or lower level well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. Does that mean that you definitely exclude an interest rate hike before the asset purchases are terminated, or is there an option to increase these rates, for example, while QA is still going on? Thank you. Thank you. I think the important thing to explain is that the recovery of the whole of the eurozone is in the interest of the German citizens as well as in the interest, of course, of all the other citizens of the eurozone. That the present situation of very low or negative real rates will disappear as the recovery will come and will disappear faster as the recovery will come faster. So that I think is important. And second, it's also important to explain that the benefits have accrued to all citizens of the eurozone. Benefits coming from our monetary policy have accrued to all citizens of the eurozone including the German citizens. And you can see this no matter where you look at. Savors, borrowers, entrepreneurs, employees, workforce, and so on. On the second part, it's not been discussed. Philip Blackwell from Liseko Happy New Year from my side, Mr President. The expression too early is often used by you today and that applies certainly for tapering. You outlined that there was no discussion about this and when you have to make a decision, which is irreversible, you said before, to what extent the analysis of the overall situation of the eurozone could be overshadowed by some critical questions over some, for example, the sustainability of the Italian debt in a world without QE or other South European countries. On one side and maybe on the other side, the pressure from Germany, citizens to act rather sooner than later. Thank you. Thank you. The first question is we don't see any countries debt as being unsustainable. And so that's one answer. And of course, in the case of Greece, there is a program. There is a negotiation between member states, the IMF and the Greek government and you know everything about that. So, now the second question, I will answer to the second question, just pointing out to the experience you saw in the last five years and even before. We've given plenty of evidence of being able to act in an independent fashion bound only by our mandate, which is to reach price, to have price, to pursue price stability as defined as an objective of inflation rate below about close to 2% in the medium term. I think we've given plenty of evidence of being able to act independently. So, but basically some of these questions have to do impinge exactly on this point and I think the evidence is strongly in our favour. Mr. Draghi, did I understand you correctly a few minutes ago? You mentioned that 4.5 million jobs were created in the last years and then you mentioned this in the context of monetary policy. So, do you attribute this job creation, the number 4.5 million to your monetary policy? Well, we've certainly, if you go back to three or four years ago and you ask yourself which policies were in place that could actually create jobs and expand economic activity and then you see that the recovery gradually firmed up driven by consumption and investment thanks to the extraordinary financing conditions that the monetary policy of the ECB has created. Would this be the only factor? Probably not. Probably there are other things, but if we look around but first of all understand we are biased of course in saying that but even if we were unbiased it's basically the most evident outcome of our policy that by itself pursues price stability and it's exactly in achieving that objective that these jobs were created. Mr. Malin? Jan Malin, hundreds, but Mr. Draghi inflation in December was higher than expected and it seems that there could be some more positive surprises. In this context, is forward guidance still the right approach because it somehow limits also the room of maneuver of the ECB and my second question is on the difference between recalibration and tapering you've always said the reduction in April is not tapering but recalibration, but will there be at one point a classical tapering like in the US or could there also be continuous recalibration until bond purchases are at zero? Thank you. Thank you. Answering to your first or your second question I spoke about recalibration because before I think it was March last year the monthly flow of purchases was 60 billion euros because the conditions were such that would justify that amount then the outlook worsened considerably and so we upsized and then again we assessed the outlook in December and we downsized, so we recalibrated that so there was no tapering and what we're going to do in the future was not discussed today On your first question forward guidance has been one of the important parts of our monetary policy stance we think it was highly effective it gave a sign of a transparent reaction function by the central bank it's been very important in anchoring inflation expectations at the time especially when there was a danger they could become de-anchored what we have to judge in the oncoming inflation developments is essentially the underlying inflation pressures in other words whether the higher headline inflation driven mostly by energy prices translates its pass through in an underlying inflation so that the overall inflation rate leads to a process that is durably and self-sustainedly converging to our objective I think that's the assessment that we will the assessment that the governing council will have to make in the coming months and with this we close our press conference for today thank you very much thank you