Stevland Hardaway Morris, known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and multi-instrumentalist. A child prodigy, he is considered to be one of the most critically and commercially successful musical performers of the late 20th century. Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of 11 and he continued performing and recording for Motown into the 2010s. He has been blind since shortly after birth. Among Wonder's works are singles such as Superstition, Sir Duke, You Are the Sunshine of My Life and I Just Called to Say I Love You, an album such as Talking Book, Intervisions and Songs in the Key of Life.He has recorded more than 30 US top 10 hits and received 25 Grammy Awards, one of the most awarded male solo artists, and has sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the top 60 best-selling music artists.Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2013, Billboard magazine released a list of the Billboard Hot 100 all-time top artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 55th anniversary, with Wonder at number 6. Early Life Stevie Wonder was born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950, the third of six children of Calvin Judkins and Lula May Hardaway, a songwriter. He was born six weeks premature which, along with the oxygen-rich atmosphere in the hospital incubator, resulted in retinopathy of prematurity, ROP, a condition in which the growth of the eyes is aborted and causes the retinas to detach, so he became blind. When Wonder was four, his mother left his father and moved to Detroit with her children. She changed her name back to Lula Hardaway and later changed her son's surname to Morris, partly because of relatives. Wonder has retained Morris as his legal surname. He began playing instruments at an early age, including piano, harmonica and drums. He formed a singing partnership with a friend, calling themselves Stevie and John, they played on street corners, and occasionally at parties and dances. Career 1961-69, 60s singles In 1961, when aged eleven, Wonder sang his own composition, Lonely Boy, to Ronnie White of the Miracles, White then took Wonder and his mother to an audition at Motown, where CEO Barry Gordy signed Wonder to Motown's Tamla label.Before signing, producer Clarence Paul gave him the name Little Stevie Wonder.Because of Wonder's age, the label drew up a rolling five-year contract in which royalties would be held in trust until Wonder was twenty-one. He and his mother would be paid a weekly stipend to cover their expenses, Wonder received $2.50 a week, and a private tutor was provided for when Wonder was on tour. Wonder was put in the care of producer and songwriter Clarence Paul, and for a year they worked together on two albums. Tribute to Uncle Ray was recorded first, when Wonder was still eleven years old. Mainly covers of Ray Charles's songs, it included a Wonder and Paul composition, Sunset. The jazz soul of Little Stevie was recorded next, an instrumental album consisting mainly of Paul's compositions, two of which, Wondering and session number 112, were CEO written with Wonder. Feeling Wonder was now ready, a song, Mother Thank You, was recorded for release as a single, but then pulled and replaced by the Barry Gordy song I Call It Pretty Music, but the old people call it the Blues as his debut single, released summer 1962, it almost broke into the Billboard 100, spending one week of August at 101 before dropping out of sight. A follow-up single, Little Water Boy, had no success, and the two albums, released in reverse order of recording the jazz soul of Little Stevie in September 1962 and Tribute to Uncle Ray in October 1962 also met with little success. At the end of 1962, when Wonder was 12 years old, he joined the Motortown Review, touring the Chitlin Circuit of theaters across America that accepted black artists. At the Regal Theater, Chicago, his 20-minute performance was recorded and released in May 1963 as the album recorded live, the 12-year-old genius. A single, Fingertips, from the album was also released in May, and became a major hit. The song, featuring a confident and enthusiastic Wonder returning for a spontaneous encore that catches out the replacement bass player, who is heard to call out What Key. What Key, was a number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 when Wonder was aged 13, making him the youngest artist ever to top the chart. The single was simultaneously number one on the Rand B chart, the first time that had occurred. His next few recordings, however, were not successful, his voice was changing as he got older, and some Motown executives were considering canceling his recording contract. During 1964, Wonder appeared in two films as himself, Muscle Beach Party and Bikini Beach, but these were not successful either. Sylvia Moy persuaded label owner Barry Gordy to give Wonder another chance.Dropping the little from his name, Moy and Wonder worked together to create the hit Uptight, Everything's All Right, and Wonder went on to have a number of other hits during the mid-1960s, including With the Child's Heart, and Blowin' in the Wind to Bob Dylan Cover, C.O. Sung by his mentor, producer Clarence Paul. He also began to work in the Motown songwriter department, composing songs both for himself and his label mates, including The Tears of a Clown, a number one hit for Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. It was first released in 1967, mostly unnoticed as the last track of their Make It Happen LP, but eventually became a major success when re-released as a single in 1970, which prompted Robinson to reconsider his intention of leaving the band. In 1968 he recorded an album of instrumental soljazz tracks, mostly harmonica solos, under the title Ivets Red Now, which is Stevie Wonder spelled backwards. The album failed to get much attention, and its only single, A Cover of Alfie, only reached number 66 on the US pop charts and number 11 on the US adult contemporary charts. Nonetheless, he managed to score several hits between 1968 and 1970 such as I Was Made to Love Her, For Once in My Life and Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours. A number of Wonders' early hits, including My Shari Amour, I Was Made to Love Her, and Uptight, Everything's All Right, were CEO-ridden with Henry Cosby. 1970-79, 70s albums and classic period. In September 1970, at the age of 20, Wonder married Shrita Wright, a songwriter and former Motown secretary. Wright and Wonder worked together on the next album, Where I'm Coming From, Wonder writing the music, and Wright helping with the lyrics. They wanted to touch on the social problems of the world, and for the lyrics to mean something.It was released at around the same time as Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. As both albums had similar ambitions and themes, they have been compared, in a contemporaneous review by Vince Alletti in Rolling Stone, Gaye's was seen as successful, while Wonder's was seen as failing due to his self-indulgent and cluttered production, undistinguished and pretentious lyrics, and an overall lack of unity and flow. Reaching his 21st birthday on May 13, 1971, he allowed his Motown contract to expire. In 1970, Wonder CEO wrote, and played numerous instruments on the hit It's a Shame for Fellow Motown Act The Spinners. His contribution was meant to be a showcase of his talent and thus a weapon in his ongoing negotiations with Gordy about creative autonomy. During this period, Wonder independently recorded two albums and signed a contract with Motown Records. The 120-page contract was a precedent at Motown and gave Wonder a much higher royalty rate.Wonder returned to Motown in March 1972 with Music of My Mind. Unlike most previous albums on Motown, which usually consisted of a collection of singles, b-sides and covers, Music of My Mind was a full-length artistic statement with songs flowing together thematically.Wonder's lyrics dealt with social, political and mystical themes as well as standard romantic ones, while musically he began exploring overdubbing and recording most of the instrumental parts himself. Music of My Mind marked the beginning of a long collaboration with Tonto's Expanding. Headband, Robert Marguleff and Malcolm Cecil. Released in late 1972, Talking Book featured the number one hit superstition which is one of the most distinctive and famous examples of the sound of the Honour Clavine keyboard. Talking Book also featured You Are the Sunshine of My Life, which also peaked at number one. During the same time as the album's release, Wonder began touring with the Rolling Stones to alleviate the negative effects from Pigeon Hohling as a result of being an Rand B artist in America.Wonder's touring with the Stones was also a factor behind the success of both superstition and You Are the Sunshine of My Life.Between them, the two songs won three Grammy Awards dot on an episode of the children's television show Sesame Street that aired in April 1973, Wonder and his band performed. Superstition, as well as an original called Sesame Street Song, which demonstrated his abilities with television.Innervisions, released in 1973, featured higher ground, number four on the pop charts, as well as the trenchant Living for the City, number eight, dot both songs reached number one on the Rand B charts. Popular ballads such as Golden Lady and All in Love is Fair were also present, in a mixture of moods that nevertheless held together as a unified whole. Innervisions generated three more Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.The album is ranked number 23 on Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Wonder had become the most influential and acclaimed black musician of the early 1970s. On August 6, 1973, Wonder was in a serious automobile accident while on tour in North Carolina, when a car in which he was riding hit the back of a truck. This left him in a coma for four days and resulted in a partial loss of his sense of smell and a temporary loss of sense of taste. Despite the setback, Wonder reappeared for a European tour in early 1974, performing at the Middham Convention in Cannes, at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and on the German television show Musikladen. On his return from Europe, he played a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden in March 1974, highlighting both up-tempo material and long-building improvisations on mid-tempo songs such as Living for the City. The album-fulfillingness first finale appeared in July 1974 and set two hits high on the pop charts, the number one You Haven't Done Nothing and the top ten boogie on Reggae Woman. The album of the year was again one of three Grammys one. The same year Wonder took part in a Los Angeles jam session that would become known as the bootleg album A Toot and a Snore in 74. He also co-wrote and produced the Shreeta Wright album Stevie Wonder Presents, Shreeta. On October 4, 1975, Wonder performed at the Historic Wonder Dream Concert in Kingston, Jamaica, a benefit for the Jamaican Institute for the Blind. By 1975, at age 25, Wonder had won two consecutive Grammy Awards, in 1974 for Intervisions and in 1975 for Fulfillingness First Finale. In 1975, he played Harmonica on two tracks on Billy Preston's album It's My Pleasure. The double album with extra EP Songs in the Key of Life was released in September 1976. Sprawling in style, unlimited in ambition, and sometimes lyrically difficult to fathom, the album was hard for some listeners to assimilate, yet is regarded by many as Wonder's crowning achievement and one of the most recognizable and accomplished albums in pop music history. He album became the first by an American artist to debut straight at number one in the Billboard charts, where it stood for 14 non-consecutive weeks. Two tracks became number one pop round pits I Wish and Sir Duke. The baby celebratory Isn't She Lovely, was written about his newborn daughter Aisha, while songs such as Loves in Need of Love Today and Village Ghetto Land reflected a far more pensive mood. Songs in the Key of Life won album of the year and two other Grammys.The album ranks 57th on Rolling Stones' 500 greatest albums of all time. Until 1979's Stevie Wonder's journey through the secret life of Plants his only release was the retrospective three-disc album Looking Back, an anthology of his early Motown period. 1980-90, commercial period. The 1980s saw Wonder achieving his biggest hits and highest level of fame, he had increased album sales, charity participation, high-profile collaborations, political impact and television appearances. The 1979 mainly instrumental soundtrack album Stevie Wonder's journey through the secret life of Plants was composed using an early music sampler, a computer music melodian. Wonder toured briefly in support of the album, and used a Fairlight CMI sampler on stage. In this year Wonder also wrote and produced the dance hit Let's Get Serious, performed by Jermaine Jackson and, ranked by Billboard as the number one R&B single of 1980. Hotter Than July, 1980, became Wonder's first platinum-selling single album, and its single Happy Birthday was a successful vehicle for his campaign to establish Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday. The album also included Master Blaster, Jermaine, I Ain't Gonna Stand For It, and The Sentimental Ballad, Lately. In 1982, Wonder released a retrospective of his 1970s work with Stevie Wonder's original music aquarium, which included four new songs, the 10-minute funk classic Do I Do, which featured Dizzy Gillespie, that girl, one of the year's biggest singles to chart on the R&B side, Front Line, a narrative about a soldier in the Vietnam War that Wonder wrote and sang in the first person, and Ribbon in the Sky, one of his many classic compositions. He also gained a number one hit that year in collaboration with Paul McCartney in their peon to racial harmony, ebony, and ivory. In 1983, Wonder performed the song Stay Gold, the theme to Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders. Wonder wrote the lyrics. In 1983, he scheduled an album to be entitled People Work, Human Play. The album never surfaced and instead 1984 saw the release of Wonder's soundtrack album for The Woman in Red. The lead single, I Just Called to Say I Love You, was a number one pop and R&B hit in both the United States and the United Kingdom, where it was placed 13th in the list of best-selling singles in the UK published in 2002. It went on to win an Academy Award for Best Song in 1985. Wonder accepted the award in the name of Nelson Mandela and was subsequently banned from all South African radio by the government of South Africa. The album also featured a guest appearance by Dionne Warwick, singing the duet It's You with Stevie and a few songs of her own. The following years in Square Circle featured the number one pop hit Part Time Lover. The album also has a top ten hit with Go Home. It also featured The Ballad Overjoyed, which was originally written for a journey through the secret life of plants, but did not make the album. He performed Overjoyed on Saturday Night Live when he was the host. He was also featured in Chaka Khan's Cover of Princes I Feel For You, alongside Mel Mel, playing his signature harmonica. In roughly the same period he was also featured on Harmonica on Eurythmics' single, There Must Be An Angel, Playing With My Heart, and Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues. Wonder was in a featured duet with Bruce Springsteen on the All-Star Charity single for African Famine Relief, We Are The World, and he was part of another charity single the following year, 1986, The AIDS Inspired That's What Friends Are For. He played harmonica on the album Dreamland Express by John Denver in the song If Ever, a song Wonder CEO wrote with Stephanie Andrews, wrote the track I Do Love You for the Beach Boys 1985 self-titled album, and played harmonica on Can't Help Love In That Man on the Broadway album by Barbara Streisand. In 1987, Wonder appeared on Michael Jackson's Bad Album, on the duet Just Good Friends. Michael Jackson also sang a duet with him entitled Get It on Wonder's 1987 album Characters. This was a minor hit single, as were skeletons and you will know. 1991–present, later career After 1987's character's album, Wonder continued to release new material, but at a slower pace. He recorded a soundtrack album for Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever in 1991. From this album, singles and videos were released for Gotta Have You, these three words and fun day. The B-side to the Gotta Have You single was Feeding Off the Love of the Land, which was played during the end credits of the movie Jungle Fever but was not included on the soundtrack. A piano and vocal version of Feeding Off the Love of the Land was also released on The Nobody's Child, Romanian Angel Appeal Compilation. Conversation piece and the live album Natural Wonder were released in the 1990s. Among his other activities he played Harmonica on one track for the 1994 tribute album Kiss My Ass, classic kiss re-grooved, sang at the 1996 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, collaborated in 1997 with Babyface on How Come, How Long, a song about domestic violence that was nominated for a Grammy Award, and played Harmonica on Sting's 1999 brand New Day. In December 1999, Wonder announced that he was interested in pursuing an intraocular retinal prosthesis to partially restore his sight. Into the 21st century, Wonder continues to record and perform, though mainly occasional appearances and guest performances, he did do two tours, and released one album of new material, 2005's A Time to Love. His key appearances include performing at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Paralympics in Salt Lake City, the 2005 Live 8 Concert in Philadelphia, the pre-game show for Super Bowl 40 in 2006, the Obama inaugural celebration in 2009, and the opening ceremony of the 2011 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Athens, Greece. He sang at the Michael Jackson Memorial Service in 2009, at Etta James Funeral, in 2012, and a month later at Whitney Houston's Memorial Service. Wonder's first new album in 10 years, A Time to Love, was released in October 2005 to lower sales than previous albums, and lukewarm reviews most reviewers appearing frustrated at the end of the long delay to get an album that mainly copied the style of Wonder's classic period without doing anything new. The first single, So What the Fuss, was released in April. A second single, From the Bottom of My Heart, was a hit on adult contemporary Rand B. Radio. The album also featured a duet with India Ari on the title track A Time to Love. By June 2008, Wonder was working on two projects simultaneously, a new album called The Gospel Inspired by Lula, which will deal with the various spiritual and cultural crises facing the world, and through the eyes of Wonder, an album he has described as a performance piece that will reflect his experience as a blind man. Wonder was also keeping the door open for a collaboration with Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones concerning a rumored jazz album. If Wonder were to join forces with Bennett, it would not be for the first time, their rendition of For Once in My Life earned them a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with vocals in 2006.Wonder's harmonica playing can be heard on the 2009 Grammy nominated Never Give You Up, featuring C.J. Hilton and Raphael Saadek. In October 2013, Wonder revealed that he had been recording new material for two albums, when the world began and 10 billion hearts, in collaboration with producer David Foster, the albums to be released in 2014. He is featured on two tracks on Mark Ronson's new album Uptown Special. Wonder did a 13-date tour of North America in 2007, starting in San Diego on August 23, this was his first U.S. tour in over 10 years. On September 8, 2008, Wonder started the European leg of his Wonder Summer's night tour, the first time he had toured Europe in over a decade. His opening show was at the National Endor Arena in Birmingham. During the tour, Wonder played eight UK gigs, four at the O2 Arena in London, filmed in HD and subsequently released as a live-in concert release on DVD and Blu-ray, live at last, two in Birmingham and two at the MEN Arena in Manchester. Wonder's other stops in the tour's European leg also found him performing in the Netherlands, Rotterdam, Sweden, Stockholm, Germany, Cologne, Mannheim and Munich, Norway, Hamar, France, Paris, Italy, Milan and Denmark, Alborg. Wonder also toured Australia, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and New Zealand, Christchurch, Auckland and New Plymouth, in October and November. His 2010 tour included a two-hour set at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, a stop at London's Hard Rock Calling in Hyde Park, and appearances at England's Glastonbury Festival, Rotterdam's North Sea Jazz Festival, and a concert in Bergen, Norway and a concert in Dublin, Ireland, at the O2 Arena on June 24. In 2000, Wonder contributed two new songs to the soundtrack for Spike Lee's bamboozled album, Misrepresented People and Some Years Ago. In June 2006, Wonder made a guest appearance on Bust Rhymes' album The Big Bang, on the track Been Through the Storm. He sings the refrain and plays the piano on the Dr Diari and Shamani XL produced track. He appeared again on the last track of Snoop Dogg's album T.H.A. Blue Carpet Treatment, Conversations. The song is a remake of Have a Talk with God from Songs in the Key of Life. In 2006, Wonder staged a duet with Andrea Bacelli on the latter's album Amor, offering harmonica and additional vocals on Kanzoni's Donate. Wonder also performed at Washington, D.C.'s 2006 A Capital Fourth Celebration. Wonder appeared on singer Celine Dion's studio album Loved Me Back to Life performing a cover of his 1985 song Overjoyed. The album was released in October 2013. Legacy A prominent figure in popular music during the latter half of the 20th century, Wonder has recorded more than 30 U.S. top 10 hits and won 25 Grammy Awards, the most ever won by a solo artist, as well as a lifetime achievement award. He has also won an Academy Award for Best Song, and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters Halls of Fame. He has also been awarded the Polar Music Prize. American Music Magazine Rolling Stone named him the ninth greatest singer of all time. In June 2009 he became the fourth artist to receive the Montreal Jazz Festival Spirit Award. He has had 10 U.S. No. 1 hits on the pop charts as well as 20 R&B No. 1 hits, and has sold over 100 million records, 19.5 million of which are albums, he is one of the top 60 best-selling music artists with combined sales of singles and albums. Wonder has recorded several critically acclaimed albums and hit singles, and writes and produces songs for many of his label mates and outside artists as well. Wonder plays the piano, synthesizer, harmonica, congas, drums, bongos, organ, melodica and clavine. In his childhood, he was best known for his harmonica work, but today he is better known for his keyboard skills and vocal ability. Wonder was the first Motown artist and second African-American musician to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song, which he won for his 1984 hit single I Just Called to Say I Love You from the movie The Woman in Red. Wonder's classic period is generally agreed to be between 1972 and 1977. Some observers see in 1971's where I'm coming from certain indications of the beginning of the classic period, such as its new funky keyboard style which Wonder used throughout the classic period. Some determine Wonder's first classic album to be 1972's Music of My Mind, on which he attained personal control of production, and on which he programmed a series of songs integrated with one another to make a concept album. Others skip over early 1972 and determine the beginning of the... Classic period to be Talking Book in late 1972, the album in which Wonder hit his stride. His classic 1970s albums were very influential on the music world, the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide said they pioneered stylistic approaches that helped to determine the shape of pop music for the next decade, Rolling Stones 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time included four of the five albums, with three in the top 90, and in 2005, Kanye West said of his own work, I'm not trying to compete with what's out there now. I'm really trying to compete with inner visions and songs in the key of life. It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar? Personal Life Marriages Wonder has been married twice, to Motown singer-songwriter and frequent collaborator Shreeta Wright from 1970 until their amicable divorce in 1972, and from 2001 till 2012 to fashion designer Kai Millard. In October 2009, Wonder and Millard separated, Wonder filed for divorce in August 2012. Children Wonder has nine children by five different women. The mother of Wonder's first child is Yolanda Simmons, whom Wonder met when she applied for a job as secretary for his publishing company. Simmons bore Wonder a daughter on February 2, 1975, Aisha Morris. After Aisha was born, Stevie said she was the one thing that I needed in my life and in my music for a long time. Morris was the inspiration for Wonder's hit single Isn't She Lovely? Morris is a singer who has toured with her father and accompanied him on recordings, including his 2005 album, A Time to Love. Wonder and Simmons had a son, Keita, in 1977. In 1983 Wonder had a son with Melody McCully.  Wonder has two sons with second wife Kai Millard Morris, the elder is named Kyland and he occasionally performs as a drummer on stage with his father. The younger son, Mandla Kajay Carl Stevland Morris, was born on May 13, 2005, his father's 55th birthday. Wonder's ninth child, his second with Tamika Robin Bracey, was born in December 2014. Originally thought to be triplets, the couple's new daughter is named Nia, meaning purpose one of the seven principles of Quonset. Other. In May 2006, Wonder's mother Lula May Hardaway died in Los Angeles at age 76. During his September 8, 2008 UK concert in Birmingham, he spoke of his decision to begin touring again following his loss, I want to take all the pain that I feel and celebrate and turn it around. Wonder was introduced to transcendental meditation through his marriage to Shreeta Wright. Consistent with that spiritual vision, Wonder became vegetarian, and later a Vegean, singing about it on The Late Late Show with James Corden during the show's Carpool Karaoke segment. Awards and Recognition Wonder has won 22 Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He is one of only two artists and groups who have won the Grammy for Album of the Year three times as the main credited artist, along with Frank Sinatra.


Hey, this is Brett, and this 2019 Ram 1500 Crew Cab, six foot four inch short box, Bighorn Level 2 Sport Appearance Group is stock number 14245ZA. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, your new and used light duty truck and Ram headquarters. This 2019 Ram 1500 has the 5.7 liter V8 Hemi Engine. It's paired up with the eight speed automatic transmission. This truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop per the state of Wisconsin inspection process. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this truck is 100% ready to go. Extremely clean all the way around. That's exactly what I'm gonna do in this video. Go all the way around inside, underneath, start it up, take a look under the hood, show you all the options, and give you the most accurate representation that I can of the vehicle. Bright white clear coat is the color. I shoot all my videos in 4K. If you like the video, subscribe to the YouTube channel, click the bell notifications, get updates in the videos I do each and every day, and stay current on our ever changing and vast inventory here at Summit Auto so you do not miss out on gems like this one. This one comes with the 20 inch factory alloy wheels with the chrome covers and it has Goodyear Wrangler Duratrak tires. These are 275, 55 hour 20s. I would say that they have probably about 70% of the tread left on them. So great tread left on those tires. Frame and under bodies in really nice shape. This is a two owner clean title history, clean car facts from right here in Wisconsin. Front fender is in excellent condition. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. This one does come with the LED headlamps, running lights and fog lights. I will turn those on at the end of the video so you can see just how bright they are. It also has the painted front and rear bumpers part of that sport appearance group. You get the gloss black grill as well and the white surrounds on there. Part of the sport appearance group as well. The hood is in excellent shape. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. And the passenger side front fender is in really nice condition as well. No major dents or dings on there. Passenger side front wheel, no scuffs or scrapes. And as you go down this side of this 2019 Ram 1500 take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. I take these HD videos so if you're far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle you can see the truck, hear the truck and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises. And you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. Now if this video helps you make that buying decision or just make the decision to come take a look at the truck let your salesman know that you saw the video that it was helpful and that Brett sent you. You get the wheel-to-wheel side steps on here though it's a really nice feature. These back wheels are in excellent condition and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. You get the rear spring suspension on the Ram 1500s helps keep your ride nice and smooth especially if you're unloaded. And the frame and underbody under here looks really good. And the lower rockers and cab corners there's no corrosion on them which is really nice. Those are the really nice step-ars to the chrome ones. Pass in your side box, no dents or dings. LED tail lamps, you get the painted rear bumper that's in really nice shape. I didn't see any dents on that. You get the backup parking sensors. The full towing package which includes the receiver hitch, four pin and seven pin wiring. Also the chrome tipped dual rear exhaust. The tailgate is in excellent condition. No dents or dings on there. That's a shot down assist. Comes with a spray and bed liner. Beds in pretty nice shape. Little bit of light duty usage but that's what truck beds are for. And that shuts nice and solidly. Coming around to the driver's side just as clean as that passenger's side. No major dents or dings on the box. And for full disclosure, no scuffs or scrapes on this back wheel looks really, really good. You do get the capitalist fuel fill which is a really nice feature. Never get gas on your hands again. And then the cabin doors on the driver's side are just as nice as the rest of the truck. You get the fold up tow mirrors. They have blind spot wiring built in directional signals. They fold up like so. And in like that, back seats are in excellent condition. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have. The power sliding rear window with the built in rear defrost. These headrests do fold down for better visibility if nobody's riding back here. And like I said, you get the latch system, no rips, no tears on the seats. They are in really nice condition. You get the nice flat floor back here. You also get in floor storage with removable bins. I believe this one has rear airbag suspension as well and that is where the compressor is. Nice all-weather floor mat. Two USBs, two USB-Cs and 115 volt 400 watt plug-in. Child safety locks on the back doors and the inside and bottoms of the doors are all in a really nice condition as well. Show you the VIN sticker here. No previously owned in Canada trucks here. Has the tire and loading information sticker.  No rips, no tears, both these seats are heated. Very nice condition. Has the power driver seat with lumbar. Factory all-weather floor mat up here. Power pedals, auto head lamps till telescopic steering wheel. Power windows locks and mirrors, cloth bolster, wood grain trim. Hop inside, check out the miles radio and everything that this one has to offer on the interior. You can see this one has 58,523 miles. You do get the seven inch LCD display, digital speedometer, compass display. You can change those corners to read pretty much whatever you want. Instrument cluster is very nice and clean. It does come with the heated leather wrap steering wheel cruise controls and gear selector on the right. Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. It also has audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. Push button start, push button four-wheel drive, eight-speed automatic transmission. Down there is your controls for that air lift, air suspension. This one has the 8.44C radio. You get AM, FM, and Sirius XM radio capabilities. As you can see, it does have the factory navigation system as well. There is Highway 41, so that is working nicely. You get your climate controls here, which includes your dual climate controls, your heated seats and heated steering wheel controls, and your backup camera, which they've made those HD crystal clear so you can get hooked up to your bulk camper or trailer the first time, every time, and you can zoom in on that receiver hitch for even better results. You get all your different apps on here as well. This one does have projection manager. You can project your cell phone to the screen. We did a demo on Android Auto if you wanna check that out. That's in the upper right-hand part of the screen. Down here are your more tactile volume tune and climate controls, factory brake controller, stability control, tow haul, front and rear parking sensors.  This one has two USBs, two USB C's and an aux jack, cell phone holders and 115 volt 400 watt plug-in. Keyless entry with remote start. You get the cup holder and coin holder sliding tray there. Dual glove boxes and the passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition as well. No rips or tears on there. The headliner is in very nice clean condition. This one does have map lights, assistant SOS buttons and your power side and rear window button. Home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. Let's start it up and take a look under the hood and check out all those LED lights in front. Starts right up, no check engine lights or anything like that other than my hood's open. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. And hopefully from this HD video, you've been able to verify the quality, condition, options and of course, cleanliness of this truck all the way around inside out. I think for the age and miles on it is in fantastic condition and very nicely optioned out. The heated seats, the nav, the LED lights, really a nice truck. And under the hood, we have the 5.7 liter V8 Hemi engine, engine base is very clean. Runs very smooth. Once again, this truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off. Shocks are doing a great job holding that hood up. There is the emission sticker. And this truck is 100% ready to go. I would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint. I don't say this often on half tons, but I would ship this on anywhere, California, Texas, New York, Florida. Whoever's gonna get this truck is gonna be very happy with the quality and condition on this one. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of other 550 new news cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half tons, three quarter tons, one tons, you name it. We gotta go to the website right there. Summitauto.com, full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle, all at summitauto.com. If you wanna check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Click the bell notifications, get updates in the videos I do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle walk-arounds on YouTube. And stay current on our ever changing and vast inventory by clicking those bell notifications. You'll get updated by every time I do a video and it's your best way to not miss out on gems like this one. In fact, any second you will see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel in the upper left, a link to all the Ram 1500 truck videos I've ever done in the upper right, a link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left, and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those, check us out. We're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2019 Ram 1500 Crew Cab, six foot four inch short box, big horn, level two, sport appearance group in bright white clear coat. Thank you so much for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.


Okay, this is Credit Card Networks 101, what they are and how to secure them. I don't do public talks very often, so if I don't give you guys eye contact, deal with it. This is in the 101 category, so I'm not gonna be getting into crazy stuff like, you know, here's your server, here's exactly how you get the numbers. So all of you that are interested in just getting a quick fix on the stealing credit card numbers, this might not be for you. It's got a very strong focus in the hospitality industry, and that's because of two reasons. One, that's the most unsecure industry as far as credit card networks are concerned, and two, that's the one that I tend to deal with the most and the corporation I work for. So with that said, any of you that didn't read my introduction, I'll start there. Credit card networks have grown into a viable and necessary asset and large transaction-based businesses, are these networks protected? Are there formal security measures to protect these packets from external and internal threats? Most network administrators, controllers, CTOs, and CIOs are not even aware of credit card's flow or existence on their networks, generally speaking. Further, some of these protect their network switches too much and they disable the true functionality of credit card networks causing a lot of problems and opening up a lot of exploits. So we're gonna start off with how credit card data gets to point A, from point A to point B in a credit card network. Okay, so how does the flow of credit cards work? Does your card get swiped and then magically the money is removed from your account? Obviously not, let's take a look into what's involved. In a nutshell, your flow looks like this, and let me give you a quick flow chart here. You have point of sale systems, property management systems that start here, so we'll call them property management systems. And since we're talking about- Brighter color, okay, sorry. Bigger, no, no bigger, sorry, that's the best I got. So you got your property management system and in a credit card network, it's gonna go directly to a central point. Point of sale. Darker. Okay, I can just use hand visuals instead if that would be better, you know. Pretty much, back to blue, how about dark blue? Okay, so these both connect into a master transaction engine. And pretty much what happens is it uses your existing network in most cases where they'll just take the packets of credit card data, swipe data, no, and they'll just swipe them in these systems and they'll go across your existing switches and whatnot to a master server. Master server then has either a dial out or a least line connection directly to the internet or directly to the front end processor. And it gets authorization that way. So that's the very stripped down version of what a credit card network is. The processor, credit cards don't go directly to a bank. All credit cards, they get authorized through a automated clearing house or a front end processor, whatever you wanna call it. And pretty much from the start of time they didn't really organize it too well. It was just diners club and the American Express. It was all in New York. So if you wanted to accept these clients' cards, you know, you just connect it directly to these networks. Well, they wanted to expand it out across the United States and then they added other people like Visa and Mastercard and Traveler's Card, JCB. So what happens is you have all these merchant banks where they have to have the money withdrawn from their account and moved into or credit card issuers banks that has to be moved into a merchant bank. So they created front end processors which is pretty much just somebody that literally gets paid to move money from point A to point B. So they have all the connections to all the issuing banks and all the connections to the merchants' banks. And all they do is just say, move his money from there to there. It also happens in a two-step process. The two-step process is the authorization and settle. For those of you who have debit cards where you have the cute little logo on your credit card, on your check and count and you couldn't get a real credit card to tell, but yeah, I got a real credit card but it's just your check and count. You might notice that, you know, if you don't like balance in your book or whatever and you say, well, where's that money? Or, hey, how did I get overdrawn this money? It's because it first authorizes the money. It doesn't actually remove it. So what happens is if the merchant does not remove the money of your account in time of matter, it just releases the authorization. And all of a sudden you think, hey, they forgot to charge me. I'll just get a free payday. The next thing you know, you're overdrawn 200 bucks. So it has two steps, authorize it first, settle it next. So that's your two stages. So with the credit card network, what we got here is skipping around, trying to catch up from that long speech. So with the credit card network, obviously it goes through there. So you can see some inherent problems when you're just using existing equipment, especially in the hospitality industry. So let's get into the inherent risks of what's all involved there. Getting money using social engineering. If you have the right tools and three letter acronyms and everything you can get what you need from merchants. Calling a hotel and say you're with an issuing bank and that you need a voice merchant account number of this site. Say I'm with your bank, we have a problem, we wanna make sure that this person who was charged was from your site, what's your merchant account number? And they say, oh, sure, no problem, I'll give that to you. And you need this to verify what you need from them, okay. You can even give them the credit card number or fake one or yours, you know, just to tell me up, see, the one that has their credit card, give me that money or give me that merchant account. So what you do with this is you have a merchant account and this is the biggest, most prevalent problem in the credit card industry is actual credit card terminals. You got transfer 80s, variphone, hypercom terminals. These are all very unprotected devices because you can go out on the internet or on eBay and just buy a transfer 80 credit card terminal from anybody. And so with this merchant account number, if you know how to operate these transfer 80s and Omni 395s and hypercoms, you just pretty much take that merchant terminal ID in there, punch it in there, that's not my terminal ID. And you call a front end processor and you say, hey, my terminal broke, I just bought a new one, I'm with X company, can you give me the password to redownload this terminal? So you might talk to X company in California and you live in New York and you just hit the button and you just download all of their data onto there. Now you have a full-fledged working credit card terminal sitting from your favorite phone booth down the street. And yeah, you just swipe a card and say, I want to credit them $300, hit close batch, and boom, you just gave yourself $300 and nobody knows what's going on. And the accounting departments in hospitality networks got to tell you sometimes they reconcile, they don't balance. At the end of the night, they just say that looks good, whatever, and at the end of the month, they reconcile and say, oh, looks like we're short, what do we do? Well, it's too late, everything was already pumped through. We don't know where it came from. Getting money directly from the merchant. Another thing with hospitality networks, auditors get paid $750, $515, $8 an hour. They don't really care about their job. They're working a midnight shift because they have their other daytime job that they're going to support whatever they got going on. So they're pretty much just get this problem fixed, move on to the next one. They don't pay attention whatsoever.  She decided, I'm short on money this week, I want to get that money back.  So what they'll do is they'll try and do research using their credit card software and everything. This is beyond terminals, it's actual in front of your software. Well, Faxmere statements proves to me that you got double charged on this because they'll dig through it and they won't be able to find it paperwork or just a big, huge mess but they're not familiar with the software enough.  And you send it into them and everything like, oh, I can't find it here, but it appears that you have it on your statement. Maybe it was a bug in our system and it double charged you, that's why I can't see it. And then they just go ahead and send you a free credit. Little bit of an issue there. And it does happen and we actually have a story where somebody checked into a hotel from one of my clients, they swiped their card, it was declined. They said, well, okay, it's declined. We'll let you stay right now while you get that fixed. So they stayed for the three nights and it was a really expensive hotel. And then what they did was they're like, well, they just bailed out on the check completely and they didn't pay, they just left. So it was $1,000 that the hotel was out of. Well, they didn't know how to operate their credit card software or their front desk software very well. So instead of just voiding out the transaction, they credited it $1,000. Oops. And then we have our software here that's supposed to audit it, credit card network software. Inherent design is to make things simpler. You have 15 billion credit card terminals in your hotel or in your casino. And you don't wanna have to go from door to door to door getting all these credit card receipts and everything. So it's all electronically stored. You just look at your list, look at what it's supposed to be, you like it, you hit close batch. Well, with these people, they didn't bother doing that. They hit close batch, gave them $1,000. Then they called us up afterwards and said, hey, I just gave them $1,000. And when I tried to recharge them, said the account has been closed. So, yeah, go figure. So somebody out there is really happy with their new $1,000 hooptie. Okay, hacking from, where are we at here? Hacking from inside the network. Using shared networks too often hotels boost. We have internet access in every room and wifi in the lobby. You can see where this is going. And not everyone realizes that they're given their customers access to the same shared media as their credit cards. The latest craze in hotel networks, large install is high speed internet, so they love to boost all this. And the internet hookups in every room. So the general point of attack here is gonna be the lobby. You don't even have to check in.  So, and it is real and it has happened and we have had to reconcile that quite a bit. And of course, you know, they don't put firewalls and it's just like FBI's carnivore for those of you who are familiar with that. And what's inside these packets, that's the important thing that people don't understand. If you manually enter a card, it's no big deal. You just have, you know, 16 digit card number, expiration date and a dollar amount.  They want address information, that kind of stuff. Well, with swipe data, you're literally getting what's off that magnetic strip. So when they swipe it at their front desk system and it goes across, you have magnetic data. And everybody that has any inclination with credit cards I know that that's pretty much the cherry bomb of what you want, you know. So, let's get into the rogue employee. Another thing that we run into with credit card networks is that they're not very, they're very new. Not a lot of people know about them and they're not very secure in a lot of situations. You see a lot of people who are just like, hey, we just have the defenders password, username and password. Everybody in the whole entire hotel, you know, that deals with the credit cards remotely. We'll just log in with these.  It was bad, you know, and, you know, he has this little Uber friend who's like, really? What do you got over there? Well, we were always doing credit cards at night and everything, and we all used the same password. And he's like, really? Tell me more, you know.  It's a pretty unsecured network. Nobody will ever notice. And that one hasn't happened yet, but it can. Also, this stuff is getting pretty cheap, so it ends pretty scalable.  So they're going across the internet and the traffic's encrypted. It's, you know, 384-bit moving target and all that fun stuff. So when it's across the wire and everything, nobody can really grab it unless they know what they're doing and know what they're looking for. But they're connecting to the internet using a Linksys SOHO router, you know. And the same token, when they use that router, they offer their five-bedrooms internet access, you know, going across the same thing. So that's another exploit that comes into play. What else you got here? Okay, what's involved with them reading the packet information? Let's say one of you guys knows what you're doing and you wanna go out and test this. What are you looking for across your internet or across their network? The most common thing that is a biggest problem why these aren't secure is because they're only supposed to be installed in trusted networks and obviously we're talking about how, even though they're supposed to be, they're not being installed. So how do you read the information out of them?   It's literally all there and ask you because when you're working with a property management solution or a point of sale solution, their engineers are lazy. They don't wanna have to plug this in. They don't wanna use binary. They don't wanna use secure tunnels. They don't wanna take the time to actually make sure it's secure. So what they'll do is just say, well, let's create an API to your interface but let's just make it a clear text API. That way we know we can't screw anything up but there's something wrong. It's all clear text anyways. We can see where it's going wrong. And they'll do that. And there's over 80 point of sales in property management systems that all they do is ASCII right across the line. So that's pretty much all your clear text stuff there. Let's see here. So the main point obviously is that this is a problem and it has to be resolved. So let's get into some ways to protect it from a credit card standpoint. Protecting from social engineering we kind of touch base on that, how to protect yourself against that. It's pretty much, you know, somebody calls in with their Photoshop statement. What you really wanna do is just call your merchant bank. Nobody wants to do that. Just call your merchant bank. Did they take it out twice? Yes, they did. Send the credit. No, they didn't. Okay, let's do some other research, you know. Protecting your networks. Nobody uses, they use ASCII. Nobody's using anything else. VPN solutions are pretty cheap these days. You know, all it would take is just installing a VPN between your two internal computers or help just be smart and get a managed switch. You know, and just, you know, that port only goes to that port. Don't let anybody else talk to that stuff. Easy enough. Social engineering on the card cloning side or the credit card terminal slide, it really can't be avoided too much because, you know, even the best, most secure person who's sure about their network, you know, will give away a terminal ID or it'll just be sitting in a dumpster and you guys can see how dumpster diving works later on today.  The only thing you can do is move to a credit card network and get off terminals. That's my biggest thing, terminals.  So I left a lot of reference lists in my directory. You have a lot of room to work with, find out which credit card networks are which and the actual white papers and how to program your own transurities. Omni395s, 3300s, HyperComs. It's all freely available on the internet for anybody who wants to be a developer of this stuff so you can see exactly how it works and how to take over a credit card terminal. So that's pretty easy and straightforward. Okay, so what are the credit card companies doing about this? Well, they've knew a lot about it since it went really crazy with the debit cards back in the mid-90s but they didn't care. They just thought that it wasn't big enough problem so it wasn't until, well, 99, 2000 that they started designing these. So you got Visa, who has their card holder information security program. There's is pretty much, it's called the SISP audit, not to be confused with CISSP, it's CISP. It pretty much just gives you pretty lame stuff to digital dozen, like, hey, only one person is supposed to be accessing your credit card network. Make sure that their loans has a password. Hey, make sure you have a business class firewall. Hey, make sure that the physical access to these terminals are limited and everything. And if you really want to try and own somebody's credit card network, just read through this and like the SISP one and just go to Visa.com and read it and then take everything that's there that says good practices, which are pretty much just like we suggest you should do these and just believe that they ignored all of them intentionally because that's exactly what they did. So that's a good start for anybody who wants to find out how to actually get into these. Just read through that thing and it's like, wow, they're not doing this, they're not doing that. And they're not, you know. Also, these people like small hotels, they have a big huge thing with connecting to cable modems and to DSLs.  That's kind of lame. So, you know, you can still put a port sniffer on there for a packet or a packet sniffer and port sniff everybody out. And if you see like a weird port and you recognize it from one of these credit card companies ports that they use to send out in crypto traffic, you know, you have a live one and then you go through their Linksys router and just get into their network and then migrate across because the vendors themselves, I work for a vendor, so I'm gonna go ahead and spin our wheel for a minute here. We do do a very good job of encrypting the traffic once it leaves our presence. Thing is, is that before it gets to us, it's not very secure, you know. So, I mean, we got moving target to open source protocols, one closed source protocol who knows what it's coming across, you know. That's pretty secure going across the internet. But coming in, taking it over, that's another story. You can't really get around that. Also, MasterCard has their site data protection one, so you can look up on that as well. And American Express has one. It's kind of hard to find, but it's out there. Unavoidable threats, we already went over that. So basically, I'm gonna kind of wrap it up a little bit early here and open up for questions because I can't think of other stuff I should probably have mentioned. Basically, credit card networks during everything, resale, what else, hospitality, all that fun stuff. They're very insecure. Bring your wifi jacks out there and give them all day long. With that said, any questions? Cause I can't really remember anything, yeah. No, they don't. I'm sorry, the question was, when somebody calls in and decides to be a social engineer and say, hey, I need to get this credit on my statement reversed or this charge reversed to a credit, do they take any information down about that caller? And the answer is no, they don't. The only information they take down is what's your credit card number? Honestly, we're recording this. I've worked at call centers and I've worked in our call center has, I'm sorry, what? Oh, the question was, this call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes. Do they actually record that call and do they actually go back to the tapes? In my experience with call centers, working in different vendors besides this, no, they don't, they listen in on them and like once a week, you're evaluated on a call you have taken. But for the most part, most of them are not recorded, they're purged after one week or a month. Yes, sir. Okay, the question was, what's the regulations on swiping cards versus stamping them? Speak up. Okay. The question was, what's the policy on swiping cards and manual entries? Why do they have that? And what's that involve with it? Is that pretty much it? Well, the thing is, is that swiping a card, ideally when a merchant accepts the responsibility of accepting cards, they are supposed to train their staff on a couple basic points, check the ID of the person that is giving you this card. It's a mandatory thing no matter where you go. Even if you see these visa commercials and everything, let's say like, hey, here's our visa logo, now you don't have to give out five forms of ID, that's wrong. Anything that has a visa logo, American Express logo, I understand that it says that, but automated clearinghouses and merchant service providers have a separate one and it is actually kind of a conflict of interest. You know, the merchant share and some policy exactly because they're going through an MSP, which is not the bank, not the clearinghouse, not the card holder, but just some guy who knows it very well and they just give him free money to just move money around somewhere else, you know? They say like, cause they're the ones that have to deal with charge backs. You know, when a charge back comes, it goes to the merchant service provider and not their direct bank. So they say, you know, we want to keep our charge backs lower on these cards. So we require you to check ID on every card regardless. Okay. As far as that's concerned, swipe data, they believe that once you swipe a card, you have checked their ID and you have compared it with them and you've compared the name on the ID to the name on the card. And so since you've compared all these and you swipe the card, which card physically means the card was there. So you got, I checked his ID, the card was physically there. Everything checks out. That gives you the best charge back protection. Now, if you sit there and go back and forth, back and forth, the card just does not want to read. They have to, now the discount rate, we didn't really talk too much about a discount rate. Discount rate is pretty much when you have, what's my time by the way? 14 minutes, okay. The discount rate is pretty much every card, if you ever go anywhere and they say debit or credit, always tell them credit if you have a debit card. Always tell them because debit, you get charged 59 cents to 250 for a transaction. Credit, the merchants themselves gets charged a percentage of that transaction. So if you have a $100 transaction and the average discount rate is 1.5%, that's your discount rate breaking out. So, what happens is, if it's 1.5% for a swiped card, check the ID and you swipe the card, doesn't swipe, you gotta manually enter it. I mean, you have to manually enter it in. That means the terminal does not know that the card was actually there. The discount rate skyrockets to about 2.9 to 3% depending on what your deals are. So how do you bring that discount rate back down? You manually imprint the card to say, yeah, it really was here. It just didn't read in the reader. And then another thing, yes. Okay, another thing that they want is your zip code. Okay, we need some personal information about this person. Get your zip code in there. That also lowers your discount rate for the merchant. So that way it saves them money. Anyway, they look at it, it's gonna get down to maybe 2% if they have everything required. They entered the CVV2 code. They entered the zip code. They entered the last four digits, the credit card and the terminal again. And they took the manual swipe. It'll probably get down to about 2.9, but not before, sorry, 1.9. Yeah. Possession of a swipe here is the same thing as possession of anything else, like what do you call it? Pirate radio. It's, right, the only, it's another one of those freedom of speech spills. I can have this BQ sword that I'm not supposed to have, but as long as it's on the wall, nobody cares in that sense. And also it's like, well, I have a pirate radio device that can propagate signal like 15 million miles, you know? But as long as I don't turn it on and put it on hijack somebody's frequency, I'm allowed to have it for hobby purposes. So it falls under the hobby rules. You're allowed to have it, but if you get caught doing bad things with it, you know, then of course, you know, you're looking at minimum, I believe. Credit card fraud is minimum 15 years, if I'm not mistaken. Correct me if I'm wrong, anybody that knows. Well, that also gets into the, you know, found facts with the search warrant was for that or this bust was for that. And then we came across this, I think the law, you know, a good choice to lawyer will take care of that for you. I'm sorry, what? Exactly, yeah, you know, and it actually works that way sometimes too. Who's next? You say? Because here's the interesting thing about it, you know, merchant service providers, it's a very dirty industry, you know? They see it as, okay, who does all that fraud protection that wasn't swiped, we're talking about, it wasn't swiped, the discount rate skyrockets, who actually gets that money? Well, the merchant service provider gets a little bit extra of that money because if they have, if that card actually does get charged back, they have to spend their time actually going in and researching it and everything and calling the merchant and all that. So they take that little slice out. So, believe it or not, even though you see these echo terminals and translators and they're all owned by banks, they're not 100% compliant with their own regulations. You know, if a hotel, you have to put rooms, room number that was stayed in, the infolio or invoice number of that room. You know, these terminals can't accept that information and that information actually gives you better discount information and they know that. They don't care. They're just like, well, if it's not fully compliant, it just means we're gonna get more money off the top and it's the same philosophy, you know? It's like, well, we can push that but, you know, they make more money on a transtriety than they do on a credit card network solution, you know? Because it's like, well, I'm just gonna bump the price out.  You know, the, what is it? The Hypercom one, I believe they have on there. It's 50 bucks, but, you know, three years ago was $400 from your merchant service provider and they're taking a $250 straight off the top, a profit off that. Yes? Yeah, the actual line of it, it can be up to about, I believe, five different people who touch your money before your bank, before the merchant bank will. Because, Yeah, authorization, the way it works is when you swipe the card, it goes to the front end processor. The front end processor then passes it on to the merchant service provider. Merchant service provider then either passes it on to their little sub merchant, they'll have like a merchant service provider and then their master one so they can double dip, you know, kind of like electricity industry and then it goes to the issuing bank. Issuing bank then spits out a six digit off code and it comes back to that line. Then when it gets cleared at the end of the night and they close out their terminal, goes to the front end processor, says hey, close my account. So the front end processor tells the merchant service provider hey, close everything out of their account. So then it actually removes all the money out of them and moves it to the front end processor and the front end processor moves it to another back end processor and the back end merchant service processor puts it into the merchant's account. So it actually goes across that line.  Yeah, in all honesty, 50% of Visa charges that go through don't even talk to Visa, they just have a logo and the bank pays a royalty to Visa for carrying that logo, you know, and they make a lot of, they make a lot of money off that, you know. The only one that actually does have a lot of transactions moving through his MasterCard and I think they have like six MasterBanks that they like Wells Fargo and a couple others that actually carry the MasterCard logo and they actually store a lot of their data there because they give them data mining purposes for it. They actually have the right to give to all of their issuing banks information in groups of like general trends, yeah. Aloha is on ASCII, that's all I'll say on that one. Just go to eBay and type in Omni395. How did he get it? They don't care, they don't, there's no regulation who's allowed to get these terminals. If you're a customer that wants to buy one of these from us, we're gonna sell it to you. You'll sell it to anybody. You don't care who it is. You don't need a little certificate saying I'm an MSP. Yes sir, in the back. I'm sorry, what? I'm not informed on that, so I couldn't tell you. Yes sir, how do charge backs work? Generally speaking, what happens is when somebody sees something on their statement that they don't agree with that they think somebody fraudulently took, what they'll do is they'll call their issuing bank to start it and say, hey, there's a charge on here that's not mine. And then the issuing bank will then in turn initiate a call with the merchant service provider. And they'll say, hey, we have your merchant here. It says that he wasn't charged. So then the merchant service provider will then contact directly the merchant and they'll say, we need your records for this particular client. We need to see a signed receipt. We need to see your close out batch on this and we need to compare this to their general signatures of this client of this issuing bank. And they have to go through this big, huge fiasco. And the thing with credit card networks is they make charge backs simpler in that aspect because it's all stored on computers and whatnot. So all you have to do is type in a credit card number and it pops up. Their signature, you know, you're seeing electronic signature pads now. That gives them a better discount rate because it's easier from the pull it up. They don't have to go through a huge two-year box of receipts to find it. So that's generally how charge backs work. I couldn't tell you the actual little details on it. I'd deal mostly with the merchants and. I couldn't. Yes, sir. PayPal actually has a quasi credit card network.  It gets an ID tag from what I understand. Anybody from PayPal, go ahead and shoot me if I'm wrong. It goes through there and then it just goes to front-end processors like anybody else. Some people would say they're front-end processors like PayPal, but they're actually still going through a front-end processor. You know a bank. Well. It started as a bank through a bank. Well, they're a bank, but they still have to, they still, they still, they still have to go through a front-end processor just like any other bank. So if they have their own front-end processor, they have their own, but they still have to go through it and it still has to be a separate entity. So, right. Yeah, an X and all that. Is there any others? I leave, I'm just about out of time. I'll take one last question. I know that people have partnerships with each other like generally speaking like Sears and a couple of their other, because Sears has their own clearing house as well. They would, they work with other businesses as well having similar black lists, but for all intents and purposes, there really isn't. The whole point is that the credit card industry, it seems robust and secure and it's not. It's just plain old not. Nobody knows what the other guy's doing and it's just free rein and people wonder why card terminals are getting cloned and people are stealing credit cards. And not the second one, but the first data place got gipped. I already read about that. Where five or six million credit cards were just taken off the internet. Yeah, it's just not there as far as security. Yes. Okay, I can't answer that one. If you wanna talk to me about it afterwards, I'd love that. Please give me a signal to clear everybody out. Thank you very much to those who stuck around. I really appreciate it. And apparently there's one other guy at the con with his shirt. So if you see me and you have more questions, just come flag me down.


Good evening and welcome to Byline. We have a really great show tonight. I'm so excited to have these two guests because they have been working on helping us save money on our electric bills and helping us reduce our carbon footprint and giving and breathing life into policy around one of the most important things that the Council has been working on over the last year in the policy arena, and that is energy and climate change. And so Darcy Dumont, a town counselor, is here and Dwayne Brager from the UMass Energy Extension Services here. He was also a big shot in Boston for a while. We will not hold that him against him. Did a great job down there, but he came home so he could work through the University to help communities all across the state learn how to do what they could do around energy to help address climate change. But let's dive right in with you Darcy.  You're on the Climate Action Committee. Help me with the name of the committee. Energy and Climate Action Committee of the town council. And recently the town council took an important vote and stepped forward. Tell us about it. All right. The Inter-Municipal Task Force on Community Choice Aggregation has been working for two years now to make a recommendation to the towns. And the three towns that are working together to put forward Community Choice Aggregation are Northampton, Amherst and Pelham. And Northampton and Pelham have already authorized the towns to go forward with a plan of aggregation. And Amherst was the remaining town that needed to authorize the basically the executive to go forward with approving a plan of Community Choice Aggregation. So last Monday, I'm probably not supposed to say a date on show, right? Very recently. Very recently. The Task Force brought forward a recommendation and a suggested motion to authorize the program. And the town council unanimously voted for it. To move forward with. It was a motion to authorize the town manager to execute joint powers agreement and also to approve a plan that's going to go to the Department of Public Utilities. So that's terrific. So all of the background work is now done. The town council is voted. Now the staff gets to go to work on putting the plan together. And with the other two communities, that plan has to be all three communities, then you're going to go to the Department of Public Utilities with your aggregation plan. So for those who don't know yet, Dwayne, what an aggregation plan and program is, could you explain it? You've been helping communities all over the state do it.  So community choice aggregation is not a new thing in Massachusetts. And it really dates back to the Electric Restructuring Act of 1997, I think it is. You got it. And I was chair of the Ways and Means Committee at the time. And within that act, there is a provision that allows for municipalities to aggregate. It's called municipal aggregation in the act. And it basically allows municipalities to work on behalf of their constituents to move forward for going out competitively for electric retail supply for their customers in their town who care to use it, who care to opt for that program. And allows the town to work on behalf of their constituents to really get a competitive advantage to get a good energy price from the retail electric markets that were established under the Electric Restructuring Act. And over the course of time, there's been a relatively small number of communities and municipalities that have joined in and opted to go forward with municipal aggregation until recently. And the last probably seven to 10 years, there's been a great deal of interest across the Commonwealth on municipalities to aggregate their loads and go for a municipal aggregation to the extent that there are well over 100 municipalities within Massachusetts that have active approved aggregations at this point. Fantastic. And many more who are in process. That's correct. And the process is that the town's put together a plan that needs to meet the rules of the act. And those plans are submitted to the, are actually first reviewed by the Department of Energy Resources and then are submitted for approval to the Department of Public Utilities. Fantastic. And Darcy, you started working on this well before you got elected to Town Council. What benefits did you see and why did you put so much energy into it, no pun intended, before you became a counselor and continued as a counselor? What's the, what are the benefits to this? Yeah, I'll have to say, I'm so excited about this getting enacted because this was something that I worked on before I was a town counselor. It was an issue that I actually brought to every door as I was campaigning for Town Council. And so I'm thrilled that this is one of my goals that has at least gotten through the first step of actualization. But I was inspired because I had heard of other towns that were using it to green up their energy. But in addition to that, I had heard about what is going on in California, which is a more advanced version of, of community choice aggregation. It isn't just the basic bulk purchasing of energy. It includes two other elements which are providing additional energy efficiency services and also development of local distributed energy resources. And in other words, development of local solar. Usually it would be local solar and the ability of communities to, to source, own and control their own energy. And so there are a lot of reasons why that is advantageous. It allows you to add to the sources, the renewable energy supply above and beyond what's required under the renewable portfolio standard. It allows communities to be more resilient because it allows them to do more creative solutions with their electricity, like creating micro grids, using electric vehicles for charging, using energy storage and other such things. And so it, it allows you, it would allow a community to sort of accelerate climate action in a way that already not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions, but it also brings in revenue for the town. So it's like a win-win. Terrific. So, Dwayne, you just, will you try to jump in there? Yeah, I would just say that what Darcy's talking about is, is really important because that's really what differentiates the inter-municipal efforts that we're making with Northampton and Pelham and Amherst. In that, as I was describing before, municipal aggregation is a fairly reasonably commonplace at this point across the Commonwealth. But it's mostly one town at a time. And it's usually, and it's with the exception of the Cape, the Cape Cod, it's, I think it's, it has always been one town at a time. In this case, we recognize that Amherst itself, nor Pelham, Northampton probably do not have the economy of scale individually to do a more innovative community choice aggregation that we're interested in. So we are all forging together with common, common goals. And importantly, we've been very clear, even in the order or bylaw or whatever that was passed by the town council. The provision. Provision that was passed by the town council, that the primary objective of our community choice aggregation is to save green, is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And that's likewise across the three, three municipalities. And that will drive certain choices that will be made, like how much traditionally generated power versus green power will be purchased as part of the portfolio. Correct. And, and there are many because, yeah, you could just say, we want to do this to save money. Right. And you that would lead you to a certain set of decisions. If you start with the idea that this is part of our strategy to reduce our carbon footprint, then you're going to be able to make, you will make other choices. Correct. And, and to date, I would say, probably the large number of municipal aggregations have been strictly about trying to save a little bit of money. Yeah, there are more and more that are very interested in reducing or increasing the use of renewable energy. But for the most part, they've gone about that by buying green power from the grid. And not necessarily locally. The big catch here is, is that we are trying to use this, not only to reduce our carbon by buying more clean energy above and beyond the RPS requirements, but also to do that in a way that really brings forward this concept of energy democracy where we really localize the decisions and actions that the the towns take with regard to making wise decisions and use this program, as Darcy was saying, to really move forward and support and help finance and develop local renewable energy resources, particularly solar for our area that can contribute to our, the supply that we are demanding through this municipal aggregation. So I know this is very early in the process to be making any pronouncements about what the package will look like. But given what we were just talking about, saving money versus improving the environment, one possibility is that you can choose the A package or the B package. The A package could be the lowest cost available based on meeting the state's standards of the mix between traditional and green power. And the B package could be exclusively green power. And there may be a price differential between the two. But if you're making the if you make the decision to go with the second package, it's because you've decided you are willing to spend the extra money to do that. Is that a fair? Yeah, but I think we want to be cautious as well, that we're not expecting, given the availability of technologies and incentives across the Commonwealth. And we are not expecting this program to be costly to electric ratepayers of Amherst, Northampton and Pelham. In fact, we're very cautious to make sure that that does not happen. We're trying to use this community choice aggregation and using it somewhat some different business models than other municipalities have to try to keep as much of that savings locally so that can be expended, particularly to provide assistance and energy efficiency measures and low moderate income citizens around and residences and rent the renter community around the Commonwealth as well. So, you know, generally, these municipal aggregations, you know, probably can save consumers on the order of, I think $1 or $2 a month in terms of savings from gaining into a municipal aggregation. Our idea is to keep that $1 or $2 a month by everybody, which across the three towns accumulates to about $180,000 a year for each for this municipal aggregation that then has the ability to use that money for the benefit of the ratepayers by investing that in energy efficiency measures and demand side management, battery storage, solar to try to really take more local control of our load, reduce our load, reduce our peak loads in particular, and make that's where additional savings can come to the consumers as we are instituting these new practices, which you might not otherwise have access to through the traditional utility company products. That's right. And what Dwayne is explaining here is what we define as CCA 3.0. And what you had said a little earlier about the different options. If that's what a municipality is offering, we define that as CCA 2.0. In terms of just buying credits. Right, just buying credits and offering different packages with different credits. But the version that we're hoping for over the long term is this much more complex program that we define as 3.0 that will provide this local resilience, keep the money in the local economy, keep the jobs in the local economy. And so it not only has the benefits of, for rate payers, but it has benefits across the board for local resilience. Okay, so this is getting a little bit in the weeds, but it's a potentially important point. So there are about 30 communities in Massachusetts that currently have traditional municipal electric companies. Some of our electric, electric and gas, electric gas and telephone, but they're local municipals and they've been around for a long time. The municipal aggregations that we're talking about now are new. It's a new invention. It's maybe 20 years old or so in Massachusetts because 1987 was when we wrote the law. And by the way, this is where I will tell you that I actually put that provision in the plan. It was my top priority as Senate Ways and Means Chair to create municipal aggregation was not my idea, but it's okay. It brought it to me and I said, make sense. So I'm excited to hear how many communities are doing it. But now let's help me understand this. The 100 or so communities, are they now considered municipal electric companies? Not at all. Very important distinction. That's what I wanted you to clarify. And I don't suspect Amherst Northampton or Pelham are looking to become municipal utilities. Municipal utilities are micro utilities, if you will, that have control and responsibilities for their poles and wires, essentially, and the electric distribution around their city or town. In this case, for the CCA, the Community Choice Aggregation, the utility company ever source or national grid would still provide the distribution system and the billing to residences. Okay, so now let's take this the next step. Traditional municipal electric companies do not have to collect the two fees that are associated with green conservation and green energy and roughly on our, for most of us on our electric bills, there are these two little fees every month we pay a tiny bit into the fund, 600 million a year's reach is raised from each of the funds. And one fund is used to help with energy audits and implementing energy conservation in our homes, our businesses, our communities, our schools. And the other is to help stimulate and bring to market green technologies that will help reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change. Will our bills in municipal aggregation continue to have those two little fees? And do those two little fees go into the state pool? Or are they retained in the pool of these three communities to use as we choose in the work? Okay, Dwayne. Okay, so the enlighten us. Yeah, okay, in the weeds, it'll complicate it up to it. But it's a very important question. I think the way that we're envisioning it in the way that the task force is envisioning envisioning it is that that ratepayers would continue to pay those small fees that go to all the mass saved programs, as you mentioned, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to support their programs that that small fee will continue to be on the bill. And as we plan it at this point, those would continue to serve to enable those programs statewide programs. So they would go to the state into those programs. Exactly. Now, the exception is that in the municipal aggregation bill that you wrote or put together, does allow for what's called a part B of that provision, which does allow for a municipal aggregation to also take over, if you will, the energy efficiency programs away from mass the mass the statewide mass saved program and to deliver deliver comparable and approved energy efficiency programs on their own. If they are approved to do that, and it's a much higher lift to be able to demonstrate that the town the municipal aggregation is enabled to do that, then only in that case with the DPU approve you and enable you to keep that that extra charge on the bill for for energy efficiency for the community. So in Massachusetts, it's only the Cape Cape light compact that has gone for that part B. And and they did that very quite a quite a while ago. So that's an option that's on the table. Our local aggregation has not yet made that decision. We probably I think that there's an agreement that we would need to scale up a fair amount in order to have the capacity to do that. But if we did do it, we would have a massive amount of extra revenue. But so I think that the task force is for seeing that other towns will join in. And so it's just a question of overtime. How many other towns will join join this aggregation? Yes. Yes. And are you going to actively pursue that as a three town entity after you get up and running and everything is stable and working well? Do you post launch? Yes, post launch. Yeah, the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission is part of our task force. And so they're sort of keeping an eye on that as well. We're really cautious to submit our plan is the three towns first, to get this going in the in the vision that we have. And then but then be open and work out a methodology to add more towns, do you have to return to the DB DPU? Or are you going to put in your plan that over time, you will welcome others to apply to be part of your aggregation? It's a good question. I think I think, okay, if another day, if another town was to join, they would have to put in their own plan to DPU. Okay. And in some way, say that we're going to aggregate, but we're going to join this one with this. So that's very helpful. So there's two very important questions right there. The first one is, are you going to go plan B? Yeah. And the second is, will you try to take control? I'm sorry, that that is what how you take control of your conservation and your are you allowed to take your conservation money and leave the research money with the state? Yeah, in fact, I think part B is only about the mass save energy efficiency. Okay, that's what makes sense, because you're not going to be able to do research at a proper scale locally. Okay, well, that's a very, very interesting. I will say just to add to that. Our strategy is, as Darcy said, let's table the part B until we get going and afterwards. But our strategy from the get go is to let's use our program just as the way it is to really stimulate our right to access mass save statewide mass save programs much more robustly than we are currently in Massachusetts. And our other communities successfully doing that, because mass save is a very complicated animal, as I can see you. Yes. And as a legislator, we I was trying to get a review and revise after 30 years of program should be reviewed and revised. And we couldn't get it through because the utilities control effectively control mass save, although on paper, it may not appear so, but they effectively control mass save. And there's inherent conflicts of interest there, because conservation means you're going to be delivering less power. Right. And that I think that was a mistake that the legislature made. I was in part, I was in the legislature, but I was, I was, I was young and naive at the time. It was in very early. Not so long ago. Okay. It was in my very early years. And so I did not have a big role in it at that time. But subsequently, I came to understand that that was a structural mistake. Right. It really needed to be in an independent agency with independent capacity. So it's such an interesting thing. So are a lot of communities making that move? Are they keeping their money? Or doing plan Bs or most? No, no, no. Only, only the K and I. And are they just, are they afraid or they just thought that was biting off too much? Because you've been advising. Yeah. So what's been the dynamic around the state? Sure. Well, there's evidence that, and clear that it's a much heavier lift in terms of developing your plan. The plan that you have to submit to get approved for Part B, which is a separate approval, is a much heavier lift. And for good reason that the town needs to demonstrate how they would be delivering energy efficiency that's on par with MassSafe. And so we really don't feel like we have the ability, potentially, to do that at the get-go. And we don't want to compromise or jeopardize our ability to get approved for Plan A, Part A, by putting in something for Plan B. So how often do you have to go back to the DPU after they first approve your Plan A? Ever? I don't think so. I'm not aware that we have to. And then you are free to go back later and propose a Plan B? Correct. And so any municipality that hasn't done it yet could potentially do it? Exactly. And there's been a few that have done that. Well, there's been a few that have been submitted for Part B but have not been highly scrutinized and I think either rejected or Lawrence. So Plan Bs as a separate entity are tough and very few communities have tried to do an A and B at the same time. Correct. Only the Cape Light. Only the Cape Light. And that was at the very early days of the Venus Y aggregation. I would say that what we're trying to do, as you mentioned, a good observation MassSafe can be complicated. And so one of the things that we are looking to do as a community choice aggregation just with Part A is to try to simplify that and have some programmatic activities within our three communities to bring MassSafe and cut out some of the complications so that there is more adoption by people within our communities. If there were ways of being able to do that it would be really terrific. Okay, in the final minute, how long it's 47 seconds? When does it go to the DPU? How long do they take? And when do we think we're going to be able to start this? Well, we think that we will be able to submit to the DPU within three or four months, ideally. We don't know how long it will be at the DPU. But once we get approval we think that we then will be able to launch probably best case scenario within six months after that approval. So sometime in 2021 we might be able to buy electricity from our own community? Absolutely. You heard it here. Thank you so much for joining us. What an inspiring conversation I really enjoyed having you guys here and thank you for doing this work. This is so great. Thank you, Sam. Really, thanks. And we'll see you again another time. And you too.