Sometimes, you come across a distribution and you just don't understand why it exists.  And I found myself saying this phrase so often, I decided to make a video series on it. So over the last few months, I've found really weird distributions to take a look at. And then I put them in this series. And sometimes the distributions surprise me. Sometimes they don't surprise me and they're exactly as bad as I expect them to be. But today, today my friends, well, let's just say this, I don't even know how to install software on this distribution we're going to show you today. I think I know how, but it hasn't worked for me yet. So it's an interesting distribution to be sure, but I don't know why it exists. So let's go ahead and jump into 4M Linux and see if we can figure out what the f*** this distribution is all about. Okay, so we're going to be installing this in a virtual machine.  So installing the VM first, I don't think it's going to have any of that kind of nonsense on it because it was on the front page of distro watching as we know they are the Paragon of Virtue and would never promote a distribution that would harm your computer. Installing a virtual machine because there's not a lot of information on here. So let's actually before we start this, let's go ahead and take a look at the website. This right here is the website. Now you can understand when I saw this the first time why my expectations for this distribution were so low. And it doesn't get better if you follow any of the links on here. There isn't about page. That's all you get. And it does tell you what the 4M stand for. So this is 4M Linux, 4M Linux is a small independent note that it is independent because that's going to be a theme throughout the rest of this video. General purpose Linux distribution with a strong focus on the following 4M of computing maintenance system rescue live CD, multimedia full support for a huge number of image audio and video formats, okay, multi server for DNS, FTP, HTTP, my SQL, NFS proxy SMTP SSH and Telnet and mystery, meaning a collection of classic Linux games. So one of these things is not like the other. I will admit that I have looked at this distribution now for over an hour before I started recording this video because the last time I did one of these videos, I got complained because I didn't do any research. So this time, I did some research and the one area that I didn't actually do any research on what are the games. So that should be an interesting thing for us to go through together. Outside of this page here, we also have a help section, which is at least it exists. Let's put it that way.  It's not it's also I will and I'll show you this once we get to the installation. It is the easiest Linux install you'll ever face. It's literally three steps. That's literally it. You don't enter username or password. You don't give it a time zone, you do none of that stuff. It's literally partition and install. I'll show you here in a minute, but it's I'm trying to find positive things and there are positive things that was easy to install for sure. So there is some help on the website, which I will applaud them for because as we've seen in some videos in this series beforehand, that's not necessarily always a given. I will say that I could use better documentation because from what I can tell, even on the website, there's no instructions on how to install software. Like I said, as far as I know where now, I have not read every single word of this. I will freely admit that, but I did search for the word install and I went through every single search results. So maybe I'm just missing it and it's completely possible. And I've also looked at the documentation that comes with distrust. So I'll show you that here in a minute. But other than that, the last time we should look at here, and this is a big critique for me is that there's not a download link. Yeah, there's not a download link. The only way you can download this from this page, as far as I'm aware, as far as I can tell is to donate. And I was obviously not going to do that without knowing at least a little bit more about it. So the only way I found to actually be able to download this thing was from Distro Watch in the direct download link that they always supply every time there's an update. So I clicked here and downloaded it like so. But from the website, there doesn't appear to be a way to actually download this directly from the website. Or from, I'm assuming that this means source forage because that's where the link from Distro Watch actually leads to. But again, why not supply the link? I'm assuming it's because they want you to donate, but whatever. Yeah, that's an it's an interesting way to force people to download to or most likely not download your distro. Anyway, so that is the website, such as such as it is.  So we're going to go ahead and get this as full screen as possible to get it. And you'll see what I mean by that a little bit later. So we're just going to boot into 4M Linux with the default drivers. And as far as I can tell, it's actually installing all the software like this. Every time you boot into a live environment, it does this. And then it starts X. So this is an X org based distro. And by default, it uses the JWM window manager. Now, I have never tried JWM in my life and I have no clue what it is or how to use it. It reminds me a lot of LXDE quite a bit of LXD. It also reminds me a little bit of like it has some like early GNOME vibes because you'll see like if we click on the menu here, that's kind of a GNOME thing or like a GNOME 2 thing. I guess not anymore, obviously, but something like that. So you have a menu here. But anyways, first time you start up into the live CD, it's going to ask you some questions. So it's going to ask you, do you want to change the English keyboard layout? And I do not want to change that. And then it's going to ask you if you'd like to set up a root password. And I'm going to go ahead and do this. Yes. And I'll enter a password, my normal password. It's going to tell me it's too short, but it's also going to let me do it anyways. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't actually ask me to redo it because it was too short. So I'm assuming now my root password is my normal password. I'm not sure because if I, as I'll show you later, pseudo doesn't actually exist on this system.  So it's weird. Anyways, here's, here's another funny thing. It asks, do you live in Europe? So this is, it's asking you to set the local time basically. It assumes you live in Europe. If you don't live in Europe, which I don't live in Europe. I mean, always kind of wanted to visit, but I don't live in Europe. I'm a, I'm an American boy. So I hit no, it exits out. So it makes, actually makes you go through through and it just sets it as UTC. It doesn't ask, go through and ask you what time zone you're in. You actually have to go through and do that later.  You're in a terminal already. Just run this here and then people set up their time zone. It would make a hell of a more sense than assuming that you're in Europe. And if you're not in Europe, just stopping. So we can not close this window. So it's gone. All right. So this is what JWM looks like. Now, the first thing I tried to do and the first thing I always try to do is get myself set up for getting this thing full screen. So I tried to use the, the GUI to do this, so I go settings, devices, display monitor, and yet 1080, 1080p is not there. Uh, why it's not there? I don't know. Uh, so I tried to do X render because we know we're using X. So we should be able to do this 1920 by 1080. And yeah, that's not there either. So it turns out that the only resolution that's available to JWM, at least the way I have set up is 768, 1920 by 768, or not 1920, but whatever it is, we can actually see what it is. It's 1024 by 768. Yeah. So we're not going full screen. All right. So, but that's not a unique thing to the 4M Linux. I've had problems getting display things to work on other distributions as well. So I'm not going to be too hard about it. So let's go ahead then, before we take a look at any of this other stuff. And before I, you know, do anything else, let's take a look at the installation. Now, usually with a Linux distribution, the installation thing is right in front of your face, or there's an icon on the home, you know, you're on the desktop or in the bar somewhere. And yeah, you can, you can just look, you can look for that all you want. As far as I can tell, there is no button here to install. There's not. So what would you do? Well, you would look through the documentation. Now the website has a really good documentation on how to install it. But being the person that I am, I didn't look at that documentation first. I instead was looking at the documentation that the distribution comes with. And there is documentation. So if we go here to 4M Linux in the menu and hit help, and I apologize that I can't make this any bigger, at least I don't think I can make it any bigger. Oh, I can make it bigger. Cool. Let's go ahead and make this bigger. Cool. All right. And that way we can zoom in a little bit. All right. So we're here at the top. Now you would expect in the documentation, the very first thing that they would tell you how to do would be to install it. That is not the first thing they tell you to do. In fact, it's actually the last thing they tell you to do. Well, other than the license and reports, the last thing is installation to hard drive. And this is how they tell you to hard drive. So you have to read through all of the documentation to figure out how to install it, unless you go back to the website and then look through the documentation there, which I highly recommend you do because it's better documentation than this. So we have to run this command here in order to install. And like I said, installing is actually fairly easy. So we're just going to go ahead and close this and we'll start a terminal. So by default, for Amlinix comes with bash and it comes with another shell here as well T CL SH never actually heard of T CL SH before, but I'm not surprised that it exists. There are tons of shells out there that I just have never heard of before. So I'm going to zoom in here. And if we run that command that we saw in the documentation install to HD, we're going to get some air. So we're just going to hit continue. And we're going to see air no petitions found on dev.sda. So this is the most complicated part of installing it. And it's going to require some Linux knowledge. So you can use fdisk, you can use CF disk, I use CF disk because it's easy. So we just go ahead and do a partition. Now I don't know if form Linux comes with something like G parted, I can't be sure it does or does not. I've gone through this. Wait a minute. It does in fact have G parted here, but it's not the gooey version, the gooey G parted that you'd expect. It's the terminal version of G parted, which I frankly never used before. So we're just going to go ahead and create a DOS partition. We're going to do a new one here, full size, primary. And then we're going to write it, write it and then type in yes. And then we're going to quit. That's all there is to doing to make a partition that'll actually work with. So now we're going to do install to to HD again, and then we'll enter. And then we will provide the name of the device that we're going to install to. So in this case, it's going to be SDA one. We'll do that. And then do you wish to change this? No. And then is form Linux the only operating system on your PC? Yes. And then enter. And then do you want to install now? Yes. And it's going to install now. That's literally the installation. That's all there is to it. The hardest part is giving the hard drive a partition. And it's done like literally normally at this point, I would say, well, you know what, we're going to pause and I'll come back when it's done. That was literally the entire installation. That's all there is. So pro points. This is the fastest Linux install I've ever seen. I'm going to call it the easiest because I know how to create a partition. I guess if you didn't know how to create a partition on a hard drive using CFDisk or FDisk or G-Parded, you'd have some problems. But outside of that, it was, I mean, stupidly simple. All right, so we're going to go ahead and shut this machine down. Now, sometimes virtual box will remove the ISO. Sometimes it won't. In this case, I know that it won't. So we're going to go ahead and power off and then yes, we don't see a grub menu at all. So whether or not it even installs grub, I'm not sure. I'm assuming it probably does and it just doesn't show the menu. So how it would work if you're installing this on a drive that has multiple partitions and multiple distros on, I don't know. Well, it would have to, it'd be something you'd have to find out. I don't have that set up. So as was before, you're going to get this the first time you log in. Now, whether or not you'll see this on your next login, I'm not actually sure. We might have to test that out. I haven't tried that. So we're just going to, we don't want to need to change that. We would like to have a root password. So I'm actually going to enter a very complicated password this time, like actual complicated password. It still says it's too short. That was eight letters long. Okay. Okay. And I'm still not in Europe. I haven't magically transferred ported myself to Europe. So I'm just going to hit no here again. And then I'm going to show you how to go about setting up the time zones. Because why not? TZ select. Okay. And then enter proceed. We're in the Americas and we're in the United States, which is 49. And then one is fine here as well. Okay. And then one for yes. Okay. I'm assuming that that is a bash script of some kind. But the way they had it set up, you have to actually enter one or two instead of typing yes. So they didn't do the case statement as well as they could have. But we now have the proper time. So what's next? So normally during this thing, I would go through and install some software. Now, the thing is, is remember at the beginning, I told you that this was an independent Linux distribution. And then I said that that would be important. It is important because you can't use a standard package manager. There's not apt on the system. There's not Pac-Man. There's not DNF. There's not Zipper. There's not EO package. There's not XPBS. Literally none of that stuff. So going in the biggest problem with this distro that I've come across is that there's no easy way to install software. Now, if you go to the website and search for install and try to go through the documentation that way, as far as I can tell, there's no documentation there that tells you how to install software at all. There's just not. Now, there is, if we go here to the helpful documentation, we go through and change the font so we can actually see this again. We'll go back to 16, do OK. And then maximize this. If we search for, actually, I can just scroll down to it. Again, installing software seems fairly important. And it would seem logical that this would be the second thing in the documentation. Like right after installation, here's how you install. Here's how you update the search, especially when you're doing an independent distro that uses its own package manager, which this does. You would think that you would go through and provide that information right up top, like right after the installation that that would be the most logical place to put it, but it's not there. And instead, it actually is all the way down the document. No, we're going to continue to go. We're going to continue to go. We're still not there. No, still not there. Oh, here we go. Right here. It's actually under 3.4, a 4M Linux packages, so-called add-ons. So this is how you install software. As far as I can tell, so 4M Linux add-ons are accept tar archives, which are named in the following way, add-on underscore, whatever. And then they are stored in slash var slash 4M Linux. You can easily view their contents with the net commander, which is installed. You can use the script ZK to install packages. So it's a simple package manager. It can be used as follows. So ZK add-on under dot tar dot xz will install add-on dot tar dot xz. Now, as far as I know, this doesn't actually work that way. Now, I notice here that it says underscore and then start. So I'm assuming the name of the package would then go there. So we're going to try this here, because I didn't notice that before. So what I would really like to do is install NeoFetch. So I'm going to go ahead and close this here. And I'm going to go to the web browser. Now, by default, as far as I can tell, there's only one web browser installed. And that is PaleMoon, which is a really old fork of Firefox. And you can tell it's really old by the fact that it looks really old. But it's here, and it's functional for what it is. You'll find a lot of websites that don't work in it. And you'll find there are a lot of parts of websites that don't work with it. So if we go to Researcher NeoFetch, click on this. And I believe if we try to hit the normal button to get the get cone URL, it just sits here and spins. That's a PaleMoon thing. It just doesn't work with that. But it doesn't matter, because Git's not installed anyway. So we can't actually do things that way. So we're going to go here over to Releases. We're going to scroll down to the Releases. This is the tar.gzm. I'm hoping that this script will actually work with a .gz zipped file. And it doesn't have to be the other way around. But we're going to go ahead and try it. There's nothing hurting us from trying it. We're just going to go ahead and save.  And we'll cd into Downloads. The good news is this is just bash. All your bash stuff will work just normal. We'll do this. And then what we'll do is I'm going to go ahead and do an LS. And what we're going to do is do that other thing. So I'm going to go back here to remember what it is. zk and then addon underscore then the name. OK, so we're going to try this. So we're going to do zk addon underscore and then the name, which is neo fetch, neo fetch, if I can spell, and then dash 7.1.0.tar.gz. OK, we're going to hit the Enter button and see if this worked. Maybe it did. Maybe it did. It did not. OK, so that got closer than it did when I was trying this out earlier. Earlier it just said you couldn't use it because I was just trying to do zk and then neo fetch like that. I assumed that it worked like that. And if you hit this, it just tells you how to use zk. So how do you install software? That question remains unanswered. I have no clue. I'm assuming maybe that the reason why neo fetch didn't install is because it's dot gz instead of dot xz. Frankly, I don't know why they would set it up that way. They're both tarred balls. So why it couldn't handle both? I don't know. So that's just the thing that we're going to have to live with. We can't get it to install software. Now, the good news is that if you want some other software, there is a way to do it. So if we go up here to extensions and then we say, let's say we want Firefox. Let's just say Pale Moon is just not doing it for us, which I won't blame you. Like, Pale Moon's not a very good browser. It's just not. So let's go here to extensions and then NetApps and then Mozilla.  No, it's not. So if we hit Firefox, we're actually going to see a terminal pop up. And it says, would you like to download and install Firefox? So I hit yes. And it's actually going to download and install Firefox. So there is a way to install software. But basically what this is doing is just going through and taking the tar ball of the binary for Firefox and then installing it and then launching Firefox. That's literally what it's doing. Why there isn't an easier way to install other software that also comes in a tar ball? I don't know. I don't know. I'm 100% sure I'm doing something wrong. But without really good documentation, how am I supposed to know? So here we are. We have Firefox installed. Now, that's the thing about forum Linux that you have to know. There's not a ton of software here installed by default that you would expect there to be installed. If you go here to the NetApps, Chromium is not installed by default. With all these not installed by defaults, you have to install those things just like we did with Firefox. I'm pretty sure Thunderbird is exactly the same way. So most of this stuff that's here is not actually installed. So if we go to, let's just say office and do library office, it's going to ask you to install it. So most of that stuff, it appears in the menu, but it's not actually here. So there is some stuff obviously that's actually here. So we know Pell Moon is installed by default. But I'm guessing that none of this other stuff actually, so let's see if SM Tube is not installed. So SM Player is not here. This is kind of a mess because you don't actually know what you're getting. We know there's no way that YouTube, BL and Handbrake or Blender are actually here installed. Those are going to be things that you haven't. So let's see if VLC is here. VLC is not here. So other than Pell Moon, I'm not actually sure what you actually get. I'm guessing like VirtualBox, you're going to have to install that. Like you would with Firefox, get GUI is going to be the same thing. Now here are their games. I'm not going to install all these or even read through them because there are, there's a ton of like, okay. So let's just see here, SuperTux cart two or SuperTux cart. You have to install that too soon. So what, basically, if you do any of those games, you get them all. I'm assuming with the 4M Linux game packs, we're going to go ahead. Yes, there and let that install. I have noticed in my times where I could get the pre-loaded stuff that's not actually installed but can be installed. I've noticed the mirrors are, how would you say, really slow. Yeah, they're really slow. Not that surprising. It's just a small Linux distribution. So you're not paying for a lot of servers or whatever. They probably have one, exactly one server. So I'm not going to, you know, poo-poo it that much, but just don't know going in if you're going to try this, that, yeah, the mirrors are slow. Okay, so when you go through and install all those games, you then get this pop-up that says Pulse Audio should be disabled. Okay. Why though? Why? Like, we know Pulse Audio is kind of terrible. You should be able to game with it, right? None of those were, can I disable Pulse Audio for you? Hell no, I'm interested to see if any games will launch with it running. I mean, I just want to break something. Anyway, let's go back up here to the games now. And let's see here, Altress, this is going to be Pulse Audio. So you can't launch any of the games without actually disabling Pulse Audio. Pulse Audio, and then we have a full screen version of LTRS, which I'm assuming is going to be Tetris, basically. Yeah, it's Tetris. I've never heard of this before and I'm no cool how to play, which I'm not playing. I don't know what to say. Yes. The real question is, to get out of this, you just keep hitting escape, which is probably a good thing. At least it wasn't control-delete. So yeah, gaming, apparently you can do. It has some games here, but you can't use Pulse Audio with it, which would then lead me to wonder, how do you get sound? I don't have my headphones on, so I can't tell you if it was actually playing sound, but I'm assuming that it wasn't because it actually killed Pulse Audio. You could see it do it. I don't understand, okay? Like, we know that it is possible to have Pulse Audio running while gaming. It's been working for a long time.  I mean, well, that's really weird, right? So yeah, I'm not gonna go through any more of the games. You're free to install this and look at those games if you want. I mean, fine, well, go ahead and launch SuperTuxKart and see how this goes. All right, let's see how it goes. You can, keyboard is not working. I think I was going for there for a minute. Okay, there's no, okay, because it's not full screen when the, yeah, all right, let's get out of this. Get out of the exit race, Lord. Why the other one opened up full screen? I don't know, and why the keyboard wasn't working at all. I mean, I've only played TuxKart maybe one time in my entire life, but I'm pretty sure there are keyboard controls. Like it's not like a mouse-based steering game, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe I'm just misremembering it. I thought WASD was the thing that would work. So gaming was a fail. Okay, all right. So if we go back up here to the, up here where it describes the four M's. So remember, this was four different things that it was aiming to do. One of them was maintenance. So theoretically, you could boot into this live environment, the live environment that we were on, and then CHroot into a system that you had installed on a hard drive. You could do that. And you'd have to use, so if we go back to the terminal here. So you could go through and do, get into the terminal and hit sue. And then if you had a password, which apparently it still didn't take my password. I don't know why I didn't take my password because now we're in root. We were in root before because there's no user, there's like no user account here. So you're always running everything as root as far as I can tell. And that's the reason why there's no sudo or anything because it doesn't need sudo. It's already in root all the time. As far as I can tell, don't ever run everything as root. Okay, just don't do that because that's not, you're gonna RM, RF slash or something and you're gonna delete your whole system and don't do that. It's not healthy. It's just gonna lead to heartache. So you can in fact use forum Linux live CD to then do things in midnight commander to back up your files or do whatever you need to do from that. I don't know why you would use this particular brand of Linux to do that. You could use the ISO of the distro you were trying to save. And thus this is the distro you're trying to save but whatever floats your boat. And then I find it entertaining the second end is for media but VLC is not installed. I'm not of the things that are here for media apps. I'm not sure what actually is installed. So we know SM tube, which is SM player. Is M player installed? No. So how can you be for media if none of the media things that you would use or installed by default? Is X sign in? No, none of these things are installed by default. You actually have to go through and install them which is fine and dandy. I install software all the time. We all do if you have good internet but if you don't have good internet you have to go through and install all the stuff. Adding on top of the ISO that you already had to download. Now I don't remember what the ISO was in terms of size. I'm assuming it's really, really, really freaking small. It says here that MPV is installed. I don't see MPV there. Do you guys see MPV there? Like I don't see it. I mean is that what? I mean maybe they called it. No that's MPV, that's not MPV. That's a different thing. Let's go here multiplayer. Let's play. You wanna? I wonder if this is the stuff that is. Oh, see I've been doing this wrong the whole time. I think, yeah. All this stuff here is actually installed. Okay. Now I understand. So like G-Parted is here. Okay, all right. And let's see. Office Abbey Word is here. Okay. I got hung up on this section here. So this is where they use, this is like their little app store. None of these things are gonna be installed. But up here we have some stuff that's actually installed. Okay, it makes you feel a little bit better. So if we go to multimedia, we do have things like Minitube and MIDI installed. Let's view G-Pick and then edit. We have Audacity here that's installed. Devices, but I still don't see MPV. Like I don't, I don't see MPV. I see Minitube. I don't, I'm assuming that's for playing YouTube videos. So that is for playing YouTube videos. And interesting. Okay, so if we go back here and do, yeah, celluloid is, that's gonna be a, that's going to be a video player. Okay, it says MPV is played, is installed. But I don't, I don't see MPV here at all. I don't even see the option to install MPV. PAV use controls here, even though it turns pulse audio off every time you launch a game. Image magic is here, conversing, which is an image conversion thing is installed by default, which is a weird choice. A lot of stuff for like webcams is installed. Maintenance, we have a few things. We have NNN and MC is installed. PC Manifem is the GUI file manager. We have GNU parted and for partitioning, NetWatch. I really was hoping that there'd be something here for NeoFetch, but there's not. There's an antivirus installed by default. Wonder what fornerd is here. So we have Vi, MG, Nanos here, MC edit, Huntsabelle, okay. Internet, NetSurf, HexChat. NetSurf is a open source web browser that I've literally never heard of before. So that's new. Taurus here. What is, GNOME PPP is going to be like that phone dialer thing, right? GW get, you get is here, but git wasn't installed by default. Selfie is going to be a email client. Really old email client, really old. I'm not even sure. I'm not sure that Selfie is still being developed. It could be. I haven't used it since I first switched to Linux and that's been four years. So all right. I think that this has gone on long enough. Now there are other things that it supposedly does. Miniserver was another thing. And then we looked at the games.  Why does it exist? And in this case, I don't know. Like I don't know why this distro exists. Now I'm sure it's possible that the guy behind this did this for himself. And I'm sure that's 100% true. Right? So I don't want to derive his effort because it's obvious that he's gone through and put some effort into this. Like this is an independent Linux distribution.  I make, this thing works. Like you can install it right now if you want to and you can do stuff on it. You can play SuperTux cart. You can go through and text edit and use Vim, which is not by the way installed by default, but there is an option to install it, which is a saving grace, I should say. But anyway, so you can do it. So the fact that it exists and there's literally probably just one guy behind this is actually fairly impressive. I think that, or at least I hope that he, or they did it for a learning experience. Like they wanted to learn how to do this and so they did it. I hope that that was the case. I hope that there's not actually any expectation that this thing is for other people to use because it's not very good. I would love to know how to actually install software. Like I would, I'm assuming that the reason why that tar baldin install was because it had the wrong extension at the end. Maybe, or I was just doing something idiotically wrong, which is also 100% possible. So that is for him Linux. If you've used this before, let me know in the comment section below. I would love to hear from someone who actually used daily drives this thing. If that happens, I will give you a heart automatically whether or not you like it or not. And if you haven't used form links, let me know in the comment section below if you would ever actually give this thing a try because I'm highly interested in that too. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Gentoo is one too. Patrick O, Primus, Sid A, Marcus, Meglin, Dex, I'm tool Steve A, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Amateus, Merrick, Camp, Drashly, J-Dog, Beat, Disruptor, Peter A. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


in this video we're going to show you how to create and send an amazing and professional email hello everybody and welcome to burn to learn this is rod davis so let's begin first let's look at a typical email it's a plain straight up ordinary email that people send to one another all the time now i want to show you the same email see how colorful it is how the statistics appear in a graph form now let's go back and look at both emails side by side here's the straight up ordinary looking email here's the newly created email now i ask you which of these emails would you like to send the plain average ordinary looking one or the amazing one with all the color and the graphics which one would you send we agree we would send the second one with the color and the graphics when you click on the new email setting this is the page you will go to this email will be from burn to learn training at gmail.com now it's time to complete the tulip and we can do this by typing in the first few letters of the email address the name will appear automatically and we'll go to the two line when you click on it to add additional addresses to the two line click on the address book look at all the names there let's type in the first initials of the name we want and that's Dustin Garza we click on Dustin's name and it automatically appears on the two line click okay and there it is now let's prepare a cc address put in the first few letters the name appears automatically and when you click on it the name burn to learn training at gmail dot com appears on the cc line automatically now it's time to prepare a subject and we're going to say hey friends check this out now we're going to show you how to add the body to this email by inserting a table with six rows first click on insert and then click on table move your cursor down six rows click on the sixth one now you want to center this now we're going to begin with the very first row we're going to click on pictures and insert and we'll go down the many options and pick images now we're going to double click on the image we want and then click insert and there you have it the image is nice beautiful right on the first cell now we're going to work on the message part of your new email now let's select it and copy it all right now let's go over to our new email where we will paste it there we have it now let's work on the style of this message a little bit let's consider the font there are several options we can choose we really really like braskabille old face that's looking pretty good now let's choose the font size notice how the font size changes as we scroll down the font sizes we like 14 so there we have it now let's work on the date let's really make that pop after we put some color on it like this golden look and change the size of the font let's make it really big let's try 36 now center of it oh that's really outstanding it just kind of pops doesn't it now let's get some some spaced and the top and the bottom of it so it doesn't look just squeezed in this spot and there you have it so now we're going to add a color border and we're going to select a color for it now we're going to insert a chart in this email so go over to chart and we have several options there's a line there's pie there's bar there's stock there's service surface let's use a pie chart just click okay uh there it is okay first we center it center the message on the message tab and now we want to change this background color now we want to give this chart a title so we click on the title section and type in the title we want gonna give it a color as well choosing yellow we're also going to change this font size to 20 and so now we have a very bright yellow title check this out now we want to teach you how to put a signature right in your chart so click on insert and then click signature we're going to choose the burn to learn signature and there we have it we want to cut and paste it in the chart so that it's properly aligned next we want to show you how to give your amazing email a very professional look we're going to add header and footer margin with color so first we go to get a color for it and that's a nice color that complements our top header now we're going to put a footer in there with another color and this will be a matching color now this will really give our amazing looking email even a greater look of professionalism we want to remove the borders around this email so we select the whole thing and click on no border and the border lines disappear and we have an amazing looking professional email ready to be sent all right there we have our new email the next thing we need to do is to send it so let's scroll over and hit the send button it has come through in all of its color with our border lines with interesting color with the body of it at the right font size and a good signature this is an amazing and professional looking email one that we should be really proud to send if you enjoyed this easy to follow video leave a comment in the section below if you have something you would like to learn we can make a video about it for you this has been Rod from burn to learn thanks for watching


A lot of paper. Look at you. Look at these opportunities for you to dress up in one day. Stay away from that. Worrying about that. I would have had a pair. You know what I'm saying? Start with opening up. I'll send you a video. I promise my wife I'd go get this operate. Oh, thank you. Yeah, send me the... It happens when you go away, honky. At least I know I'm invited. Ready to go, Jim? Yeah. Just kick it off. Oh, thank you, Mike. Thanks, everybody, for showing up. You're welcome. What are we going to talk about tonight? We're going to talk about TIFs. Tax-Increment financing. Sometimes they're referred to as TIDS, which is a tax-increment district, but either one means the same. What's in a TIF? Got it? Good name. It's a mechanism used for funding development and redevelopment projects within a city. It allows the taxing jurisdiction benefiting from the development to share in its cost. Cities and villages may create a TIF if 50% or more of the proposed district or area is blighted. There's a maximum life in a TIF for a blighted area of 27 years. It's in need of rehabilitation or conservation work. It's also 27 years. It's suitable for industrial sites, which has a 20-year life, and it's also suitable for mixed-use development, which also has a 20-year life. How does a TIF work? Concreation of the value of a TIF is frozen for property tax purposes. So, for example, if we draw boundaries around some property and say that's going to be a new TIF, whatever the value of those properties are at the time is frozen, and that's called the base of the TIF. That base still shares the taxes that are collected to all the taxing jurisdictions. The difference in the TID is that when we have new development, any increment of development that's over and above that base, the city gets to retain the full tax rate in order to pay back for any of the mechanisms that's used to finance that, whether it's borrowing debt or on a pay-as-you-go basis to a developer to incent the developer to put a new project on that property. Hey, Jim, could you give us an example? I mean, like how did Blue Harbor work in that respect? Well, that whole peninsula was a TID. So, when Blue Harbor came in, the city put all the infrastructure, water, the sewers, the roads, the parking, and it incurred about $16 million of debt. And based on that, when people developed down there, say, for example, Blue Harbor, all of the taxes was an increment to the base. The city, I think, put in $16 million for development. It paid $13 million for the land, Nancy, or something like that. So that was the base of the TID. So anything that went on the ground after that because there was nothing developed there was an increment to that TID. So the infrastructure that the city put in was not part of the increment? Correct. Okay. Once the TIF closes, all the taxing entities go back and then get the, what was the increment that the city collected then gets distributed to all the taxing entities. So at the end of that, they get the benefit of the development. But again, it's 20 to 27 years out. So do we save up for that? How does that work? I'm sorry? Do we save up for that? Knowing that in 27 years, we're going to have to pay a fair amount of money to a number of taxing entities? Well, we make enough money on the increment to pay back the debt we incurred to spur that development. Okay. So once that's accomplished, and again, I'll go through the TIDs and show you that, then it all goes back to all the taxing authorities and we get our 35%, which is roughly the city's rate of the total tax rate. On an ongoing basis. Yes, on an ongoing basis. How do we fund these TIF projects? We can bond for them, like we did at South Pier, city borrowed roughly $16 million to do the infrastructure. It could be a city lead pay as you go. In that instance, it's really where there are some grant monies that the city can get a hold of and give the developer the benefit of it. But we use the last one, which is a developer lead pay as you go. Where developer comes in, and based on the increment he's going to put in, we pay him so much back over a period of time. And the advantage of that is so the city doesn't have to go out and borrow money in order to pay the developer. We pay it as he develops the property and if he puts the proper increment in, he gets what we have promised to him. If the increment is short of what was projected, the developer only gets what he actually put in as an increment. TIDs we have in Sheboygan are TID 5, which is Paper Box. TID 6, South Pier. TID 7 is Nemshoff, the plant. TID 10 is Water Street. Development 11 is Washington Square. 12 is 8th Street Office Building. 13 is Landmark Condos. 14 is Festival Foods. 15 is Pick and Save. And TID E1, which is an environmental TID, is Northgate Property. What I laid out here, and you can see copies in your folder, we plotted from 2006 through 2013. The bottom blue line is the base of the TID. So when the TID was formed, and this is a small TID, but when this TID was formed, there's roughly a million dollars of value in that TID. You can see the increment, and if you look over to the far right, the increment's in thousands. It started out in 06 with 54,000. It grew to 144, and currently today the income is at 121,000. Now you have to understand that these TIDs are, for the manufacturing piece in these TIDs, the state puts values on them, and they put the value on the entire TID. So we get from the state, not for individual parcels within that TID, but we get a value for the entire TID, which shows the base and then the increment in that TID. And the state does that based on market value, if you will. They call it equalized value, but that's supposed to represent market so that every year these fluctuate. They use our assessment ratio and then take other factors that they use to determine market to put a value on the four walls of a TID, if you will. So as these things fluctuate, the city's revenue fluctuates in these TIDs as well. A good example is the next one, which is TID 6. TID 6 had a base value of $20 million. And you can see that on the right side, that in 2009 it hit its peak, the increment was $112 million. And as you go down to 2013, you can see the increment is now only $35,000. There were several factors that affected this. One was the sale of Blue Harbor. When the city negotiated Blue Harbor, they had some contracts in place where if the estimated value of the property fell below a certain value, Blue Harbor had to make it up on the real estate tax side. And it also had a contract where if it did not generate enough of room tax revenue for the convention center, which the city built, it made that delta up as well. When Blue Harbor was sold, both those deals went away. So we lost a fair amount of increment. When you look at Blue Harbor was built for $40 million and sold for four, we lost $36 million of increment the day it was sold. The condos that were attached to Blue Harbor were valued at roughly $20 million. And based on where Mark had ended up several years ago, it's currently at $10 million. So we lost about $10 million of revenue there as well. And the condos, what's the name of the condos across the river? Do you have the new ones? Marina Vista. Marina Vista, same thing, valued at close to $16 million, have a value currently today of under $7 million. So that TID has gone through some downsides based on the economy. And it put the TID in jeopardy of meeting its payments. So in 2012, we had two TIDs that we could amend that had more incremental value in it or cash to fund TID 6 so that we can pay the interest and principal on TID 6. Jim, you say since they're televising, we should probably have a little microphone. When you said it was almost in jeopardy of not making its payment, what did you mean by that? Well, based on the increment we collect, is the revenue that we use to pay the debt that we incurred. Okay. So just a straight line relationship. Yes. Okay. At $106 million, we were making far more increment than our debt payment. But at $35 million we're falling short by five to $600,000. Jim, I have a question also. Who establishes the initial, what do you call it, the value of the property? You know, you're saying who was initially evaluated at. X amount of dollars. Is that purely just construction costs or is there... Well, when it's brand new, it's basically on what it costs to build. And the assessor will after a period of time look at the revenue approach on commercial property. So we'll go and value it based on earnings. The manufacturing piece, our assessor does not do the state does. Tid 7, which is Nemtchev, you can see that there was a $3 million base. We currently have about $5 million of increment, and that tid is in pretty good shape. Tid 10, which is Water Street. We have maps up here. If anybody's interested, maybe I'm going a little bit too fast. If you want to see the tid and what's in it. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Let's go back to tid 7. I think tid 6 and 5. Tid 5, tid 5. Tid 5, for those of you that can see, really encompasses the shipwreck and paper box plant. This is South 7th Street clear right here. Georgia is up here. This is the plant. It was really set up for expansion. Really, as really the existing shipwreck and paper box makes up that entire district. You can kind of see that by the boundaries. A little bit of the street is in here. The majority of tid 5 is shipwreck and paper box. Any questions on that? Tid 6 is more than just salt pier. This is salt pier. It also includes the Kepso Building, the Highland House, rock mine industries. And then it goes up on the east side of South East Street. I mean, the west side of South East Street. It includes all the properties from the old power and light place up to the swing street with the school district. Then it follows along and it includes the Jim Reference Marina Vista Tangoes. It includes Marina Vista and the whole kind of walkway front with the marina at the land park and the beach. So it's, and then it also includes the pentare properties to the south of salt pier. So when it says salt pier, it's really more, the district is a lot larger. So when punctuation is happening in values, that's where you're seeing it from is based on what the entire district looks like. Chad? Yes. Would the YMCA be in that or is there on the other side of the street? The other side of the street. Okay. So there. And there again, they're not taxable. Right. So then we're up to 7. 7 is the NEM, when we say NEM shop, plant NEM shop chairs. It's really unconscious as you're enjoying the NEM shop. And this is what we call the last question of the municipal building. Municipal service building sits up here. This is New Jersey, Salt 22nd Street, and it goes back to the plant that's along the river. It does include some redevelopment, potential redevelopment parcels in the future if NEM shop was ever to expand out and really set up to help the NEM shop plant through expansion. So it's got the majority in the plant. Wildwood softball park would be right here outside of the district. So Chad, we would have like the improvements that we made would be streets and lighting and that sort of thing. Yeah, there was some with expansion plans and there were some waterways and some storm sewers that had gone through there and they had to be located as part of their expansions to expand over. So that's where our incentives are helping it go on to relocating the utility lines of the Wildwood NEM to expand. Got it, Jim. If we could back up just for a minute. From a TID 5 perspective, that currently is the only one that is slightly underwater. That TID was formed in May of 1991. The max life is through 2018. And it looks like that when we close this out in 2018, we'll probably have about $2,000 that will be shy on that investment. Not significant, but a couple thousand dollars. TID 6, that TID was formed in 1992. It's got an expenditure period for that TID that we could spend money to recoup in debt through 2017. It expires in 2023. We currently have it extended to 2023 and with the help of TID 11, which I talked about and we'll get to in a bit, we'll able, because that TID has cash in it, it has an increment that's greater than its debt. We'll transfer about $2.4 million to TID 6 and by the end of 2022, TID 6 will be hauled. So that's the good news, even with all of the shortfall in revenue. Did you explain the difference between the life, let's say it's a 27-year TID versus the expenditure period? Right, there's normally five years between the end of the TID and the expenditure period. Because if you spend money, the theory is that you're going to recoup that investment through the end date of that TID. So they normally end within five years of the end date, the expenditure period. So we could theoretically invest money or borrow money for further development in TID 6 with the hopes that we would get it paid back by the end of 2023. TID 7, again, NEMSHA. That was formed in 1994. It ends in 2021. This looks like that we'll probably close it in 2016 ahead of its life unless they come back with some further development on that site, NEMSHA, to expand. All of the debt will be repaid by the end of 2016 so we can close the TID out. There will be, it appears, at least on the projections, the projections that we used in these looking at the 2012 rate for 13 and the 2013 TID values supplied by the state. We projected those out through the end of the TIDs, not assuming that they would fluctuate, that they would go any lower or any higher other than if we knew that to be a fact if something changed between 12 and 13. So I would look at it as a conservative view of the future. But one never knows. Hopefully we're through the trough on values. But I know that we'll probably have a couple point differential in 14 as opposed to 13 because our assessment ratio went to 110%. And when we did these estimates, they were at 108%. TID 10, Water Street. This is Pennsylvania Avenue on the south side. Saltwater Street and North 10th Street. I mean, North Water Street and North 10th Street. This really includes the redevelopment of what would be called the Verifying Area and the Kingsbury property into those tax credit projects that the Northern has. The Guard of Toy Apartments are leading in that. Those little single family condo units that had developed along the North 10th Street. And then it follows the river all the way down. One opportunity that still exists in this area is this two-acre parcel which is our Kingsbury property, the redevelopment already currently owns that. The parcel, they've been working to try to get a development on there. Market rate apartments are some kind of tax-generated development. But the rest of the district is really these, there's a part, two-parts workers, Water Street part in them, this Riverside part that we included into it. And then it was amended later on to include the Walgreens as a corner of 14th Street. So this kind of makes up the whole thing. We're a little worried about this today as well. It was formed in 97. It ends in 2024. The city had borrowed a lot of money to reclaim the property because of the contamination. It has an outstanding advance to the general fundings of about two and a half million dollars as we sit here today. But it appears that by the end of 2023, we will be able to pay the advance back to the general fund, and this TID should be okay as we see it today. TID 11, Washington Square. TID 11 really starts down here. This is Washington Avenue, South Business Drive, and the railroad tracks on the south. On the west side, this is the parcel that Steve Schmidt has pulled some of his construction stuff on it. And these are the outlights for the Washington Square development. And that's really what has driven the development of this TID district was the redevelopment of Washington. The development of Washington Square from the Formal Chronicle Hill site, which was a way of refining. So the strip center and then all of the outlight development along here is included in this district. So it really goes from north open to open doors and down along the railroad tracks to the far south side of Washington. This TID generates about $300,000 a year more in increment than it does in debt. So we amended this TID to feed TID 6 to help pay that off. And over the life of this TID it ends in 21 and the payments go through 21. It pays about $2.4 million to help TID 6. Just a question for Chad. Chad is the property to the south of the Piggly Wiggly there. Does the city own that? No, this is a private developer that developed for Washington Square. Are there plans to add on there or is that just going to be held as green space? They're marketing it. So that will bring additional revenue into it. There's a culvers plan that's breaking around here. That's the wall credence. They should be breaking around first thing in the spring. There are new culvers down here. That's planned and they're working on the development here. So these parcels will continue to fill in as all blocks along Washington Square mall shopping center. TID 12, downtown office building. So TID 12 includes the downtown office building is the Nemchoff chairs from the Miller working on the east side of the above and beyond children's buildings. So the children's museum here. This is the office building. The district used to just include the office building and the parcels across the road to vacant lot and then where the white pay is. It was amended to include the grand state into that and then there was a ticket incentive when grand state was built as part of that. So the district really goes from the parking lot on the north of grand state. And then this is the Boston store actually is sitting on the south side here. This is the parking lot south of grand state. This is where, like I said, the left ticket is in those other businesses. And it includes the wild center on the west side. So that's pretty much the district. This TID, since it started, lost about half of its value. I think the peak in 2009 was about 11 million dollars. It's currently at 5.3. But having said that, it was formed in 2000. The max life on this is to 2027. And it appears based on the increment we have and the debt that needs to be repaid. We'll probably repay this by 2019. Yes. Could Boston store be added to that TIF since it's going to be empty soon? We've talked about that. There's a possibility that we could look at extending our older land if need be. Maybe, Chad or Jim, you want to explain? We'll get so many amendments to TIFs to add things in or take things out of, whether it's a sharing agreement or expanding the boundaries. Yes. So to amend the project plan, the original plan for this one where it has the financing and sending out the boundaries, is it four? Total of four. Total of four property amendments for model theories. So there is some opportunity there. The challenge is, what is the best time to amend it and include the property because of what you recall from Jim's previous discussion earlier, we're talking about capturing that new increment. So since Boston store already has a value as it sits today, does it make sense for that to be in the district now or should some development happen, should it be in the district at that time to capture more increment, to allow you to do more things, those are the things that as developers we need to weigh in on the city level to see where the best time it is to maximize the amount that we can do to try to redevelop it. So whether it's a new store or a completely new idea there, depending on when, we have to look at what the time is right, is it better to have a clean slate and just have the value of the land, is it better to have the land and the building, but the value is going to be higher so your increment is going to be less, so we have to weigh all those things as we're looking at this to figure out the direction of the development and some opportunity in this district. Then the other thing is, is some of these districts that may close out with a little bit more or cash value or maybe some interest in expanding them to include some of the streets. In the new districts, you'll see we've included the streets. In case we need to do infrastructure improvements, there will be another way of funding some infrastructure improvements versus setting up all the way all the time to the capital improvements program. So we're looking at that option as well. 1013. Right, right. So 1013 was set up for Landmark Square development. Really, and then it includes the Sheboygan senior community and that's pretty much what's in the district. This is pretty stable here and as Jim will talk about the numbers, but right now the Sheboygan senior community property is not passable. We all know that they're building a new facility in the town and they're going to be at some time vacating this. So I think there's some opportunity in this district point forward for some additional value if this was to be resold or redeveloped into some type of apartment or a scene of living or something that would be on the tax rolls that appears to be the direction that we're going. So this is really the district. This is another one of those districts that could be amended to include maybe some of the adjacent streets because there's some street issues that run on 6th Street in this area as well. This TID was formed in 2005. It runs to 2032. It had no debt against it. We just had a developer incentive that we needed to pay. It appears that that'll be paid off through 2019. So if there's nothing else we can do, this TID would end, but it goes on for another 13 years after that and has a very good incentive in it. So that's potentially something that in 16 or 17 we might want to look at so that we could do something there to further help that area. TID 14. These are festival foods. This is an orative that was created a few years ago, and you can see festival foods in this area is still under construction. It was really set up to redevelop the Walmart properties into the festival foods in that quick trip. This is a mixed use district. Under the mixed use versus redevelopment we have to have obviously a mixed use of land uses. So this includes commercial and some residential. So the Sunny Ridge development and the north building that the county just sold is included in that as well as residents of the Army National Guard Place, the Taylor Heights Festival Foods, and then it goes down to include, this is the old Century Building which you all know has some potential for the development of something going forward so we made sure we included that. But you can see in this district we've included the intersection of Urie and Taylor because the public works department has said that in the future they're going to have to do some major upgrades. There's traffic lights in that area so if there was an excess improvement we could potentially find some of those improvements as part of that. So we've made sure that we included the intersections in the building that were in this district. Under TID 14, that was formed in 2011, it runs through 2031. It appears that there was only a developer incentive that was to be paid in that TID and it appears that that will be paid by 2020 based on the increment we have in there now. So again this is another mixed use TID that we've got another 11 years of life and in around 17 or 18 we should look at that to see if there's anything we want to do with the increment to carry it forward. 15, will you just pick and save? I'll sign. This is the pick and save. This is the old Kmart. The area was all dated but this was where the new pick and save was built. This district is another mixed use so it includes some residential and commercial. It has the new auto zone that was built on the south side Wilson Avenue is included in there and then some of these other properties that may bring some additional value going forward. This was strategically chosen as well because I think this is the 20th over here and Wilson they have a flooding problem down there and the public works department had identified that in the future they had to do some major rates in the storm sewer to handle flooding in that area and not access increment in this district going forward that would be the possibility to do some of those infrastructure improvements as part of that. The district included some of the street right away to deal with the intersections. As you recall probably the last council meeting we came to the council to borrow or make an advance from the general fund to TID 15 to pay the incentive agreement. There is no debt in that TID but the increment that we had as you can see from the slide up here in 12 it was only 3.1 million dollars even though the value that was put in in the increment was roughly 7 million dollars by Pick and Save. So we lost value in the rest of the TID so with the revenue we took in we didn't have enough to pay the incentive agreement but as you can see in 13 it's gone to 7 I think it's going to drop almost below that because of Bethesda, that strip mall was bought by Bethesda and that's a non-taxing entity. So it looks like this TID based on the latest projections should be okay in 15 and 16 it ends in 31 and we're projecting it to be paid off or the developers agreement in 2026. So even though we had to borrow some money from the general fund this year to pay the developers agreement it looks like in the long haul it will be okay. And the last one is Northgate. This district was really set up strictly to deal with contamination issues prior to Northgate this is the Pigley Woodley on the north side of this strip mall surrounding that to deal with contamination issues is part of the development for that area. It includes the little car lot that's just in the south of the Pigley Woodley development. And then it follows this and you might say why is that originally as part of the deal for the developer at this time we were going to acquire these additional parcels up here and do some redevelopment on these parcels and then we're moving forward. But this is really it. So this is north 15th street here the polar word site is over there. Ironically these parcels that you don't see here are in the town of Shibuya as well as the polar word site. So this is one of the things where every mortar is narrowed to. But anyway this is the district. The date that was formed it was 2002 it ends in 25 2025 and it appears based on the debt we have today and some advances that are open against it it should close in 2021 and be okay. I think we covered this but it says TID amendments that TID may be amended by the plan to add or subtract property in that TID to extend the lifespan of the TID or to donate tax increments to other TIDs. So we've done three of those I think in the city with the TIDs that we've had. And TID amendments chat covered boundaries may be changed up to four times no limit on project plan amendments one expenditure period amendment if it's not cash flowing. I think these next set of slides I really covered as I went through them we can recap them pretty quick and again this is for your information. It shows the start date, the expenditure period the end date of the TID the maximum life higher estimated closure date based on our forecast it shows expected revenues expected expenses in the TID and I told you in TID 5 we'd do a couple thousand dollars shy and it shows the valuations that are based on a 2013 equalized increment value of 120,800 dollars and a 2012 tax rate of 23 dollars and 78 cents. TID 6 a lot bigger number again revenues projected are 15 million 536 expenses are 15 million 536 and again maybe a little conservative but we based the value of that TID going forward with a $35 million increment. TID 7 M-Shoff plant this shows revenue of 572 expenses of 475 so when we end it in that year there'll be excess revenue in that TID and that'll be like TID 3 when we closed out last year all the taxing entities will get their piece of the revenue over expenses when that TID closes out. So in this example we would share roughly a hundred thousand dollars we'd get roughly 35 and the other taxing entities would get the balance once it's closed. Water Street again closing that in 23 with an end date of 24 we break even on this one with roughly $2.8 million of revenue and expense. Jim how do you calculate the administrative fees? Is there a formula? They're normally set if we do put them in there's some in here that we pay an administrative fee to the state there's other TIDs that we put an administrative fee for the city to administer the program such as these last two and developer agreements I think it's like $7,500 a year that we put in for the administration of it. Why did some of these districts over time too and there's an exposure? There's an expense related to that. Washington Square TID that will end in 21 as you can see there's $4 million of revenue and $3.3 million of expenses so it says there'll be roughly $700,000 that we would share if we found no other use for that TID. 8th Street office building TID 12 again we've got a little more revenue than expense there so we would be sharing roughly $200,000 if we closed it in 19 the TID goes out to 27 unless we find another use. Landmark condos TID 13 $1.7 in revenues and we expect to close it out in 19 there'll be a million five of expense so there'll be a couple hundred thousand again we'd share if we found no other purpose and again this is closing out roughly 13 years early so there's definitely something that the city could look at doing there and extending the boundaries. Festival foods TID 14 again there'll be some cash leftovers roughly for almost $500,000 and that will close out 11 years early as well so again there's some opportunity for the city in the future. TID 15 pick and save again about $300,000 and probably five years of life left so there's other possibilities that we could look at in that TID as well and Northgate TID 1 again thank god it's breaking even that one's been a stretch but we're closing it about four years early advantages of TIDs increases property values it spurs private investment and development which is what we all seek in the city to create that value on the revenue side so that we can keep our cost structure in line incremental revenues reinvested in the TID district that also helps to stir more economic development and the benefits the underlying tax bodies at the end of the TID life and not only benefits the city to pay back the money it's borrowed to do the development but it also helps the other taxing entities with that increment once the TID is dissolved some of the disadvantages if the increment does not materialize as planned the city must find other sources of funds to cover the expenses and that was an example that I used a couple weeks ago underlying tax districts see no benefit until the TID is really terminated which is 20 to 27 years out TIDs may be used in areas where development would have occurred anyway again it's the chicken or the egg and increases the administrative burden on managing a local authority to manage these TIDs and the properties within them any questions? of course I have one quick follow-up one of the things that the PowerPoint did address and I just talked about it was the city has what's called a joint review board and that is made up of all of the taxing jurisdictions so the LTC the school district the county and the city and they all come together when we're proposing to do a TIF or change the boundaries or add a project in there they have to approve it because there's a lot going on so there is a process and procedure in place they have to agree on that take a vote in that type of stuff to make sure that they're on board you just can't go out and say I'm gonna set up a TIF here and not talk to the other underlying taxing jurisdictions is that a unanimous vote or no they could vote again I mean do you need the approval of each and every taxing committee isn't that correct Steve yeah it's a majority vote but it's a majority vote one other issue with respect to TIFs or a big picture of issue is historically cities and villages incorporated in these penalties have the power to create TIFs and that's because the process is development of communities in incorporated areas towns do not have TIF authority although over the last few years they've been pushing like crazy of the legislature to try to give authority to create TIFs and the issue is for instance and one TIF that was not discussed here because it was already paid off the industrial part if that was very successful TIF we used to generate revenue to create the industrial market in the city if towns are allowed to create TIFs if they're given that authority we're going to be in a very difficult competitive disadvantage because typically you're looking at more rural areas towns are going to be able to develop things like industrial parts if they have the TIF ability in competition with cities and villages so I know it hasn't happened yet but I see that there's some proposal to grant the town of Brookfield or something like that specific authority to create a TIF for a specific purpose I don't think it's passed but it's being discussed in the towns year after year in the legislature are pushing for authority to create TIFs if that happens it will have a great dis-incentive to the cities right now developer comes in wants to do a project city can offer availability of financing through TIF district town cannot so if the towns can offer TIF financing it's going to be a lot tougher to develop in cities the latest proposal in Madison is on the floor right now is that towns and villages greater than 5,000 people would have the ability to TIF which again I don't know the population of all the municipalities or towns and villages around us but could be a challenge there have been proposals over the years in the last 15 years Oligo-Huskan municipalities have historically been very strongly opposed to the ability of towns to have TIFs it's really a competitive issue if towns can create TIFs it's going to be much more difficult for cities to bring that up I think that the important point in all of this is that those TIFs that were created over time appear to be okay and will end successfully and that we didn't have to use taxpayers' dollars vis-a-vis borrow more money to throw at these to pay back the debt that's the goodness in all of this and some of them appear to be very successful as well and the spirit of the TID have developed the incentive or the development that benefits not only the city but all the taxing entities is there a limit on the number of districts that we can have in the city does any of the tax dollar that goes basically in the TIF the money goes back to pay all the expenses does any of that money go towards public protection and safety any fire, police, street maintenance nothing at all so then the burden for the rest of the community to make sure that we have enough money to supply them with fire protection, police protection to charge them a rate and they get the full city rate they pay the taxes but we use that to pay the debt the debt goes back to the debt and that's only the increment we still get up to 35% of up to the base and then that increment we get as well to pay back that so we're still getting something for general operations and then underlying base are there protections for the city built in I don't suppose they could over such a long period of time but in the developer lead pay as you go the development agreements where the developer would indemnify the city for losses or probably can't do that the only dissonance for a developer is that if he does a development and says I'm going to add an increment of X and he comes short of X and he gets paid on what he's actually put on the agreement do you foresee any new tits coming up not real close there might be some wiggling of boundaries based on some of the things that were brought up but none other than anything else thanks thank you


Well, it's everybody Jason for Jasper's case breaks.com. This is our last fiddler to sell out flawless Baseball random teens break on our website. We're gonna give away the last 10 spots in that break with 2021 mosaic quick pick quick pitch Hobby pack break number 25 mosaic quick pitch. So again guys first we do the break randomize the customer names and teams to strip the hits out Then at the end of the break, we'll take all the customer names We randomize them in the top 10 out of 30 get into the flawless break. So here we go. Here's the dice roller. Let's roll Two in a set to my five seven times. Good luck one two three four five six seven Seven times Carl down of Carl there we go seven times here One two three four five six Mariner's down to the Pittsburgh Pirates seven seven seven All right, so stick to what you got guys. Let me get a quick pitch pack really quick. Let's see a purple Stevenson Latino five tool Bryce Harbour and Larry Dovey for Cleveland all-time greats Number 250 so Philly and Cleveland. All right, there we go Let's switch scenes now boom Give away the last ten Roll two and a three five times. Good luck one two three four and Fifth and final time guys boom five times Top ten runs a Brandon your Megan right there man. Congrats Carl Carl Bennett Dusty Nicholas Ben Mark Michael and Carl. There you go, buddy. Boom top ten are in congrats guys. So coming up next is flawless baseball One box round teams break. Appreciate it guys


What if I were to ask you, which did better in 2020? Gold or the S&P 500? Think about it. Don't check a chart. Just think about it for a moment, anecdotally. If you guess gold, you're right. For the record, as of the time of this recording, the S&P 500 is up 16 spots 66%, whereas gold is up 23.7% on the year. And it was up higher at one point before it corrected to now what appears to be a bottom going into 2021. Now you might be saying, you know, Bob, don't go, don't go that fast. The NASDAQ composite is up more than 40%. Fair point. We're going to talk about that later on, because what matters when you invest is your risk versus your reward. So we're going to talk about the four D's in this video. What are the four D's? One, the dollar. Gold is priced in U.S. dollars. So it's critical that we understand where the dollar is relative to the price of gold and to identify where it might be going. Did you know that the U.S. dollar is down nearly 6% on the year for 2020? And we're going to go over a chart later on where it shows that in all probability, it's going a lot lower to debt. We're going to talk about the debt and how that plays into the wise behind gold moving significantly higher and an all probability to new all-time highs in 2021. The third D is decoupling. The world is changing dramatically. We have a COVID crisis. We have a crackdown on Hong Kong. We have threats from China to invade Taiwan. These are all catalysts that have already sent stocks lower and gold up higher. The only thing that saved the stock market was the Federal Reserve. But all we need is a serious catalyst, a geopolitical risk to send stocks lower and gold shooting up higher. The fourth D that we're going to talk about is doubt. There's doubt that's continuing to rise at current of as to the ability of the Federal Reserve to maintain control on interest rates. If the Federal Reserve cannot control interest rates, folks, that means that stocks will be unable to move up higher. If stocks correct, that means it will be a risk off environment. That means traders will sell stock and they will buy precious metals whether it be gold, silver. I love silver as well just as much as I like gold. But for the purposes of this commentary, we're going to reference gold. So let's talk first about the first D, which is the US dollar and how what happened on August the 15th, 1971 changed the world. Take a listen. Strength of a nation's currency is based on the strength of that nation's economy. And the American economy is by far the strongest in the world. Accordingly, I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar in the gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interest of the United States. Now, what is this action, which is very technical? What does it mean for you? Let me later rest the bugaboo of what is called defaluation. If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less. But if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today. The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar. Now, folks, what you just saw President Nixon do back on August the 15th, 1971, was by far the most bullish case for gold and the most bearish catalyst for the U.S. dollar that the world has ever seen. You'll remember if you're over the age of 40, 50 years old, that back during those times, a father could support a family of five, six kids, send them all to college. Maybe they had a loan. The mother certainly didn't have to go to work, but that all changed after that policy decision. Why? It's because President Nixon, by his own admission, despite his bugaboo about the ability of the consumers to buy the same amount of goods if they bought American, he admittedly devalued the U.S. dollar. And then at the same time, he was negotiating to open up China where we ultimately ended up exporting a tremendous amount of our jobs. So, so much for buying American. So, what I want to draw to your attention is this chart here. This is the value of one U.S. dollar from 1971 to present day. And you could see on this chart here that after that announcement in 1971, the U.S. dollar just dropped like a stone and it has never, ever looked back and it's only going to get worse. And why am I spending so much time on the U.S. dollar? It's because gold is priced in U.S. dollars. So, as goes the U.S. dollar, so goes the price of gold. That's why it's so important. And at the end of this video, I'm going to show you a chart. I'm going to give you the technical analysis of how the U.S. dollar looks as we move into 2021. You're not going to want to miss it. So, stick around. Let's go to the second D, which is debt. Now, ever since 9-11, the United States has been printing money hand over fist. And this chart here is from the Federal Reserve. And they have been printing money since 2000. They had kept prior to 2000 rates artificially low. They jacked them up too quickly. That burst the dot com bubble. And despite all the talk of economic recoveries since 2000, we've never really recovered. And we only blew more and more bubbles vis-a-vis the Federal Reserve's printing of more and more debt. Now, I'm going to show you a chart at the end of this video when we go to the doubt phase of as to whether or not this current stock market rally can continue. I'm going to show you a scary setup that's unfolding in the debt market, which is quite contrary to what you would expect to see with the debt bubble ripping through the ceiling with no end in sight. So stick around because this is only going to get worse in 2021. What does that mean for the price of gold? It's very, very bullish because they're killing the U.S. dollar and they're inflating a new bubble which is set to explode in the stock market in the debt market. Now, real estate is becoming not a bubble yet, but it's beginning to expand. And we could expect that at some point in time to blow not for the first time, but for the second time in the past 15 years. Let's move forward to our third day. Now, prior to the Trump administration ever taking office, the Chinese were behaving very, very aggressively. They were building manmade islands in the South China Sea, which they promised never to militarize, but ultimately they did. And that was under Obama. Then fast forward to the Trump administration when tariffs became the weapon of choice by the Trump administration to try to get a level playing field with the Chinese. And then you had the ratcheting up of tensions given the fact that the Chinese ultimately did nothing in an effort to try to avoid the spread of COVID outside of mainland China, although they did limit the expansion of the disease within China. Then when you fast forward to the crackdown in Hong Kong, the ratcheting up of tensions between Taiwan and mainland China now with threats and even territorial incursions now both by air and by sea by mainland China into Taiwan, the stage is being set during this period of U.S. turmoil, whether it be the elections, whether it be this economic catastrophe that we find ourselves in, whether it be COVID. It's a mixture. It's a cauldron of weakness for the United States and a perfect time for the Chinese to take action over in the Taiwan Straits. They have already made an incursion into Northern India, which failed, but they did it nonetheless. And you could just scroll through here, the South China Morning Post, and you could see that we continue to blacklist Chinese firms that are associated with the Chinese Communist Party. And in closing on the decoupling issue, there are opportunities that are emerging in Vietnam and in India. I'm going to share with you a chart of each of those markets at the end of this video. So stick around because this decoupling is providing us opportunities not just in gold, but in emerging markets as well. So we'll talk briefly about that. We'll talk more about it more broadly in future broadcasts. So let's move on to our fourth D and that is doubt. And the doubt is, can the U.S. stock market continue this trajectory higher into 2021? Let's take a look at some analysis of why I think it's going to be very, very difficult, but not impossible, for the stock market to continue this trajectory higher. Let's begin with the Schiller PE ratio. You can see that a current day, we're at 33 spot 65. And you may be saying yourself, Hey, listen, Bob, it's been higher. You look at your own chart. It was much higher back in 2000. That's absolutely correct. But did you know that we are well above the black Monday highs going back to 1987? We're above the highs of black Tuesday going back to 1929. Add to that this chart. Now this chart here shows you in red companies that are overvalued with a PE of 20 or greater on the S&P 500 in blue fair value and in green undervalued. And you could see that the S&P 500 is now well past the highs of 2000 in terms of the number of companies that are overvalued with a PE of 20 or greater. We have far surpassed the dot com bubble. So right now we are in no man's land and it could be as simple as a bad treasury auction for this to come completely unwound, or it could be a geo political event. But can we proceed higher? We've seen crazier. We have never seen the amount of debt printing money printing that we have seen anytime like this in history. So yes, can the insanity continue? Absolutely. Let's continue. Here's a chart of the S&P 500 on a quarterly timeframe. Now we're going to talk about this and with two points to be made. One, is there more upside here? Two, would I rather from a risk reward perspective buy gold or buy the S&P 500? Let's talk about it. So the quarter is very close to an end and we are trading within a strong, very strong uptrend channel. That has not been broken yet. The however is, is that we are trading up and into the upper band of resistance, the upper band of the trading range. So when you look at past history, once we've done that, we've either retraced all the way back down to or just shy of the lower band of support. So is it possible for us to continue higher and break out above this upper band of resistance going into Q1 2021? Yes, it's possible. Is it probable? No, it is not. So I would side more so with bears as to whether or not the markets are going to continue this trajectory higher into 2021. And when you take a look at your oscillators, you could see that RSI is in a downtrend, meaning we have a bearish divergence. The markets are sending us a signal vis-a-vis the RSI, where we are putting in higher highs and higher lows on price. Yet the RSI is putting in lower highs and lower lows on price. And when you take a look at the stochastics, they are rolling over, putting in lower highs and lower lows. So the stage is set for a sell-off here. And you may be saying, you know, Bob, what you're betting is, is that the Federal Reserve is not going to win here. They are printing money. They're going to keep interest rates down forever because they have the power. I'm going to show you a chart in a second that's going to wow you a bit, stick around. Now I'm recording this on Saturday, the 19th of December. The Federal Reserve met this past week, and they were very dovish, very, very dovish. And one might expect that when you take a look at the weekly chart of the 10-year yield, which is what we're looking at, we would think that, wow, you know, yields must have dropped last week because the Federal Reserve was so dovish. They're standing ready to have the back of the market. One problem. Yields rose by over 5.5% last week alone.  And despite the fact that they continue to print money, let's go to a one-year view, hand over fist, you would think that yields would be dropping. They are not. And that is what has been keeping the stock market higher, declining yields. What if the Federal Reserve no longer has control of yields? What if bondholders are looking at the United States and saying these people have no idea of what they're doing? They've gone mad. We want to get paid more for our debt rather than just simply getting paid less than 1% over a 10-year period. Think about it. And when you take a look at the lows of the year, back in August of this year, 2020, all the debt printing since that point in time and yields have just gone up and they have broken out. Not only have they broken out, they've created a W formation and now they're poised to break out higher. What does this mean and what does this have to do with gold?  Now let's take a look at gold. Gold, this is a quarterly chart. Gold has had a beautiful year. We made a new all-time high this year. Yet nobody wants to talk about it. Granted, we didn't hold those gains, meaning we did not close out the year at new all-time highs. Perhaps we will by the end of the year. I doubt it though. It's improbable. But what we're setting up for here, after this pullback, we have rallied off the lows of the quarter and we are poised to break out into Q1 of 2021, which is a seasonally favorable period of time for gold and that continues into the spring. Now, when you take a look at two charts and you ask yourself the question of what has more upside here given the fundamentals of the strength of the U.S. dollar, a chart of which I'm going to talk about in a moment, and the risk of higher yields in the future in 2021, which has more risk and upside potential? Gold, as you see here, or the already extended and at resistance S&P 500. That's the question you need to ask yourself. Do I feel more comfortable from a risky war perspective with owning the S&P 500 or gold as my speculative trade for 2021? The chart I'm going to leave you off here with is the chart of the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar, this is a quarterly chart, is breaking down and breaking down dramatically. We hit lows just this past week, last seen back in April of 2018, multi-year lows, and we're only going lower. Did you know that of all the U.S. dollars in circulation right now, 21% of those dollars were printed in 2020? Think about how dilutive that is to the U.S. dollar. We continue to purposely devalue our currency, no different than what President Nixon did at the beginning of this commentary. And look at the chart here of the U.S. dollar, it's being reflected. And this can get a lot worse very, very quickly, and things in the United States can get real, real, real fast. And if you ask me, what do I want to own in that scenario, stocks, which are essentially certificates of paper or gold, gold, hand over fist? Take a look at the relationship of gold highlighted here, obviously in gold versus the U.S. dollar, as goes the U.S. dollar inversely goes the price of gold. So folks, in closing, one of our key trades for the coming year, 2021, is going to be gold, silver, and the miners of both. The metals, gold and silver are tools for preservation of buying power. Where is the miners? Those are wealth creators. So in short, if you want to preserve the value of your U.S. dollar, you buy the precious metal. If you want to speculate and gain wealth during this soon to be great period of time, then you want to buy the gold and silver miners because they tend to outperform the metal. Now, I mentioned earlier other areas that we like, and I'm not going to talk much about them today, but I just want to share with you other ideas that we have. And we've been talking about them for quite some time now, where we want to take advantage of going back to the third D, which is decoupling. That decoupling is bringing with it a supply chain shift. So the question needs to be asked, who benefits? Let's talk about it. This is the Van Act Vietnam Vectors ETF. And you could see that this is a quarterly chart that we are breaking out to highs not seen since April of 2019, a beautiful year for the Vietnamese fund. We plan on buying this fund. We are already long of emerging markets. We believe that emerging markets are the place to be along with gold and the miners moving into 2021 and beyond. Why? The declining US dollar acts as a tax cut for emerging markets. Add to that the coupling of the supply chain moving from China into other markets, Vietnam, the closest. And the other market that we like is the Wisdomtree India Earnings Fund. Now, the beautiful part about this is that India, their stock market is breaking out to multi-year highs as we begin 2021. Now, as the huge population of India begins to see a growing middle class because of that supply chain shift, anyone who knows anything about the average Indian citizen is this. They love gold jewelry, huge buyers of gold jewelry, not just bars for their central bank, gold jewelry from over a billion Indians. Think about it. So this is an untapped market that is now blowing up. We will be a part of it. And the rest of the emerging markets, not so much the US markets, but certainly gold mining stocks, silver mining stocks, we continue to accumulate those names, silver, gold. So I would encourage you to please join the contrarian trading community. We think outside the box, we're not giving you talking points of what you hear on CNBC. We think for ourselves, we have a great strategy that is playing out very, very well in 2020. And I believe that it will carry through to 2021 and a number of years beyond until the United States gets its fiscal house in order. Thanks for joining and I hope to speak to you soon. Be well.