Welcome to Asia and Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. I show today as a naval view of the Asia Pacific. And our guest is U.S. Navy retired captain James Kimo Fanel, editor-in-chief of Red Star Rising, a new service, and government fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy. Welcome to Asia and Review. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it. Great. Well, let's see.  And we want to talk a little bit about that. But for the benefit of our audience members who might not be familiar with the Shangri-La Conference, can you give them just a brief explanation? Yes. The Shangri-La Dialogue is hosted by a think tank, IISS, out of, I think, believe, London and England. But it's really hosted, co-hosted by the government of Singapore, and it brings in defense chiefs from around the Asia Pacific region to discuss items and concerns in the defense of the region. And so it's an annual event. And as you know, our Secretary of Defense was just there and gave a very interesting speech. It's got a lot of reaction from Beijing. Well, we want to talk a little bit about that, because his speech did get people's attention in Beijing. You made some pretty – what the Chinese would consider provocative comments about China. But what's your take on the speech? I think that it was a solid speech by a Secretary of Defense who doesn't have a lot of time in the region, but has shown initially right coming into the job that he was going to make Asia a top priority for himself and for the new administration. And he focused on two areas, key security challenges, and he mentioned North Korea, China, and then at the very end some comments about global terrorism. And then he talked about the U.S. strategy and approach to how we would, as a nation, address those challenges in the region. His comments about Taiwan really sort of stuck out to me, especially since I just came back after spending a year in Taiwan. And he made some pretty – took a pretty hard stand on defending Taiwan, didn't he? Yeah, he mentioned the Taiwan Relations Act and that we were kind of legally bound to follow that guidance that's placed on each administration by the Congress. And typically, at least in the last few years, our Secretary of Defense haven't articulated that in the forum, but I think his articulating that got China's ire. And so they've been sounding off today, the day after the conference closed, and many of their press publications and their foreign ministry spokesman making rather sharp comments. Beijing is not happy. No. Well, you know, now we're talking about U.S. policy in Asia, but it only seems the pull is between the Middle East and Asia. And as much as the U.S. has said, well, you know, the economies of the future and the wealth of the future is to be made in Asia, we still can't seem to extricate ourselves on the Middle East. So, maybe this is not a fair question to ask you, since you're an Asia-Pacific guy, but if one steps back and takes a look at both, what's the relative importance of the Middle East versus Asia-Pacific? Well, I think both are important.  So we have interest, strategic interests in Europe. We have strategic interests in Asia. And Europe's strategic interests and ours in terms of access to resources, energy resources come from the Middle East. Additionally, now over the last two or three decades, we've had strategic interests as we fight global terrorism. And so there are certainly areas there that we just can't ignore and walk away from. And so the question becomes, what do you do with the resources that you have and how do you allocate them to the two different regions that are strategically important to the nation? And that's been a challenge. And predominantly over the last 30 years, you could say that we've given a lot more attention to the CENTCOM or Middle Eastern region than we have maybe to the Pacific in terms of allocation of resources. However, Secretary of Defense Mattis went through a litany of lists of resources that have been applied to the Pacific, suggesting that we are now putting more attention into the Pacific. I think this is the real question of what have we really put out here and is it really having the effect that the Secretary said that we want to have, which is to deter unilateral aggressive action and the non-peaceful resolution of disputes, which is what we see China not always doing. Interesting comment. You know, Kirk Campbell's book Pivot, I read it, I finished reading it a couple months ago. And he makes a point throughout his book that Asia is always kind of an afterthought to the U.S. It talks big on Asia, but in reality, it's sort of a secondary interest. Do you buy into that? I think as I went through the Secretary's speech and some of the things that he said, he talked about that the U.S. was in favor of a rules-based order, you know, the peaceful resolution of disputes. And he talked and said all the right things. But at the end of the speech, I was left wondering, so how do we implement these things? For instance, he referenced the July 2016 arbitration tribunal ruling on the case of the Philippines brought against China's excessive claims in the South China Sea. And he mentioned that ruling. That's a good thing. He said it was a binding ruling. Well, how is it binding under what pretext is that binding on China? How has China stopped anything that they've done in the South China Sea? And so I think we're at a critical point in time where we say the right things, but is it really having the deterrent effect that changed China's behavior? And frankly, the answer is no. I agree with you. I think it can be said that China's goal was pretty clear cut. It wants the U.S. out of Asia. It wants to rule the rules without any interference whatsoever. Would you buy into that? From a military standpoint, I think it's very clear that China wants to drive the U.S. military out of the Asia Pacific region. I don't believe they want to do it in all one-fail swoop. I think they have a plan, the salami slicing, if you will. They go after things incrementally. But their reaction, for instance, to the THAAD terminal high altitude aerial defense network or battery that was put into South Korea, their reaction and response to a defensive weapons system has been clearly over the top, not just in their rhetoric, but in the way they've treated the South Koreans. Right. I mean, not just diplomatic pushback, but there's also been economic penalties that have been placed on the South Koreans, our ally. And so China is not happy about having U.S. military presence in the region. And so they're trying to do everything they can to drive us away. That's really interesting when you're talking about South Korea, because South Korea has really put a lot of energy into developing its relationship with China, becoming very friendly and to some degree maybe upsetting a few people in Washington, too. You know, this thing can only go so far. And China has really pushed back and overreacted, perhaps. I don't know. It's going to be curious to me to see what happens. Is that going to stay, or is it going to go, or what? And then on the other hand, the Koreans always say, well, you know, you guys might pack it up and go home and leave us hanging, as I think every Asian country does at one time or another. But we have the fad there. We have all kinds of exercises with the South Koreans throughout the year. And so this is sort of, well, are you guys going to really stay or not? And so at the same time, they try to develop their relationship with China very closely. So I don't know. It's going to be really interesting to see how it evolves, I think. Well, again, I think the Secretary of Defense is a very smart person and a very studied person on world history and strategic issues. And he talks frequently about that nations that have alliances and partners usually thrive and those that don't usually wither. And so he's right. That's what history teaches us. And that's why you need to look at the long term the last 15 years and watch China try to disassemble the structure of American alliances in the post-World War II environment. Look at the relationship with Philippines. Look at what's going on in Thailand. Look at some of the issues and the stresses that are in South Korea right now. Right. Capital after capital after capital across Asia is questioning and India as well whether or not the United States is really committed and is going to back up their words with real actions. And unfortunately, they can look at, see seven new artificial islands in the South China Sea that we didn't do anything about. Right. You can see in 2012 that China gobbled up and took Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines without a, without a firing a shot in the United States set back and did nothing. Well, you know, I was going to go there a little bit later, but since you put your finger on it earlier, right now, actually, what do you think you should have done with Scarborough Shoal? When this went down in April of 2012, when the Philippine Navy ship Gregorio del Pilar, which was an ex-U.S. Coast Guard cutter, a Hamilton class, was sold to the Philippine government and refurbished by the Philippines and brought into the Philippine Navy on its first deployment in April of 2012, it was returning from the South China Sea and it was heading back to Manila and it got word that the Chinese fishing fleet was or not fishing fleet, but Chinese fishing fleet and other vessels were in and around Scarborough, which is 140 miles west of Manila. It's 400 miles from mainland China. It's clearly in the exclusive economic zone of the Republic of the Philippines. Philippines is a part or treaty partner with the United States. And when the Chinese moved in there, we, we didn't really say anything. And for five months after that happened in the middle of April, the U.S. government, neither our State Department, a Secretary of State, neither our Secretary of Defense or our President made any kind of statement publicly that said Article 5 of our Mutual Defense Treaty should be invoked because China is now usurping and taking territory from our treaty ally. And instead, the man you just mentioned, Kurt Campbell, conducted, you know, behind the door negotiations with Fu Ying, their, their foreign ministry person, and from the Philippines and came up with some kind of a tacit agreement that everybody would leave in the middle of June, June 16th, I believe, of 2012. And when that happened, the Filipinos dutifully left the shoal in a Chinese state and they have maintained sovereign control over Scarborough Shoal for over five years now. And we did not do or say anything. What could have we done? Well, from the day that they started threatening the Philippines in April, we should have deployed combatants down there and came within 12 nautical miles of that shoal. We had the coordination with the Philippine government. It could have, they could have supported it easily. And we should have put a military shoal force in there, but we didn't. And worse is we didn't say anything internationally for five months and it really destroyed America's credibility or didn't destroy it. It severely damaged our credibility amongst Asian leaders. Well, we really didn't do much either about the fortification of those islands in the South China Sea. There was a lot of talk, but no action. And is that to be blamed on the Obama administration's caution? I don't think it's the way we deal with China isn't specifically, I don't think, with a specific administration, especially given now what we've seen with the invitation to China for RIMPAC 2018. This is a 40-year issue, but since we opened up relations with China and the Carter administration, we have had successive presidents from each party basically say to China, the relationship is something that we care deeply about and we don't want it disrupted. And so we will figure out ways to rationalize, accommodate, and even appease China to ensure that we don't upset them. And we have walked slowly back on other alliances and friendships and partnerships. You can talk about Taiwan. You can talk about the Philippines. You can talk about Thailand. And you see the erosion of our alliance structure. And we put a good smiley face on it at places like Shangri-La. But we need to be honest to ourselves and have straight talk inside the U.S. government, which is to say, what are we really going to do when our allies don't trust us? Good point. I think we're going to stop here and take a break. You're watching Asia in Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. I guess today is U.S. Navy retired captain Jim Kimo Fanel. And we're talking about U.S. naval power in Asia. And we'll be right back. For Every Game Day, a sign-it designated driver. Welcome back to Asia in Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. Our guest today is U.S. Navy retired captain James Kimo Fanel. We've been talking about naval power in the Asia Pacific. Our guest is extremely conversant with a variety of issues, so we're really glad to have him here with us. And he came all the way from Switzerland just to join us for this show. Well, not really, but we like to say that anyway. Okay, well, just before the break, we were talking about impact. And it's always controversial, I suppose we could say, will China participate or not? And this year again, it looks like China's going to participate. What's your thoughts on that? Well, I've been a vocal proponent or a vocally opposed to China participating in a RIMPAC given their bad behavior in the region. And so it was a little bit shocking to me to see the administration invite them again without a serious dialogue when we were kind of expecting that this new administration would take a kind of a zero base review approach of some of the things that have been sacrosanct over the years. And the president started in 2012 with an invitation, although the Chinese didn't attend, they were invited in 2012, they were invited in 14 and participated and sent an intelligence collection ship to the region. I remember that, right? They also sent one in 2012 that people don't talk too much about, but there was a Chinese intelligence ship that collected on RIMPAC in 2012. And then they were invited and participated in 16.  And it appears that that's what we seem to be doing is we keep inviting China to our big Easter spread or Christmas, whatever date you want to use on it. But we keep inviting them to a party expecting that they'll stop their behavior of thievery and robbery in the region. We don't do that for real robbers. We don't do that with other countries like North Korea or Iran or other bad actors. So I'm not sure why we take this approach with China, which gets back to this 40-year-old view that's come from essentially the establishment of relations that said, keep the relationship. Don't let the relationship be abused.  Interesting. Interesting. Well, some people say that really Taiwan should be involved in RIMPAC. And of course, I think it's, I should say, totally unrealistic to expect that China would expect that, would participate if Taiwan were participating. But we do have a number of exercises sort of away from the cameras with Taiwan, don't we? We have people that visit and participate in certain exercises like the Hong Kong series in Taiwan. I've participated in those and been an observer of several Hong Kong exercises. So there is some of that. And it is not unprecedented. And we have the Taiwan Relations Act. And I think one could easily make the logical argument that if we want to have better coordination with the Taiwan military, they now have P3s. And so we all have mutual interest in understanding the maritime domain, what's going on, where our ships and submarines and aircraft in the Asia-Pacific region, and that Taiwan has maritime patrol assets now. Sharing that information seem to be a kind of a logical interoperability that we'd want to pursue and RIMPAC would seem to be a nice place to do that. That's a key word, isn't it? Interoperability. You know, the Hong Kong, I've always been quite interested in the Hong Kong. And I read a comment the other day, and I guess it was not defense news, but shepherd news, I guess it was. Right. And the person that wrote that was suggesting that Hong Kong was fairly staged. This was all show for President Tsai. It looks like you read that as well. So when you observe Hong Kong, did you get the feeling it was staged? No. I mean, there's exercises by definition are scripted.  So if you want to be able to do air defense, then you have to have air defense batteries practice certain procedures. If you want to have fighters be able to provide combat air patrol, the fighters have to do that. There's certain things that have to be scheduled in certain times of the exercise that they have to be accomplished. So that's not foreign to Taiwan. All militaries do that, including the U.S. So my view of this was a little bit different. I don't think it's, it's not on par with the U.S. in some sense. It's not maybe as freewheeling as that we are, but we're a different kind of a military, different experience and much more innovative in our approach to things and freewheeling. I think that Taiwan's, though, over the time that I've been watching them, have more and more adopted those kind of approaches. I'm sure there are certain elements in Taiwan that you could characterize as being scripted and stilted and not really war-fighting and benefiting war-fighting training and readiness. But I think the trend line of where Taiwan's going is in a positive direction. But they need assistance and help from the United States, I believe. What's troubled me a little bit about the Hanguang is a few years, they had no live fire at all. And they depended very heavily on computer simulations. And I don't know maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I sort of think the real thing is not useful. So let's talk about that. I mean, it's not just Taiwan that does computer simulation. The United States military today does more computer simulation and training than we did when I joined the Navy 30 years ago. Is that right? Oh, definitely. And I can't go into details, but I can just tell you this, that Chinese fire more live fire weapons than any other nation in the Asia-Pacific region. And probably in the world when it comes to things like ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. So they appreciate your sentiments and our experience that there's nothing like doing the real thing to be really trained and ready. Hmm, interesting. Really interesting. Well, to be talking, the town is the one-belt-one road. And some people say, well, this is China's attempt at globalization. This is China's approach to globalization. And some people will suggest it's going to have a dynamic effect on the complexion of world power. But wonder what your take is? Well, I think the initiative clearly is China said that they want to change from the Washington consensus to a Beijing consensus. They want to change the post-World War II order of international norms. In fact, the responses to the Secretary of Defense's speech mentioned the fact that the U.S. imposed this kind of order and we're going to rethink how that is done. And we are going to do it through one-belt-one road. President Xi Jinping gave a speech in Davos, Switzerland this winter in January and talked about China's commitment to globalized economy. And so, yes, what you said is they're expanding to an area of the world that hasn't previously been touched by the global community, which is South Asia and Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, and connecting those through the old Silk Roads, if you will. There are many skeptics of whether or not this will be successful, because of the money, where the money is going to come from, will the investments that China makes, the loans that they give, will they be repaid, or will they all come up short? Well, we're getting down to our last three minutes. I often wonder about one-belt-one road. This is going to go through lots of parts of Central Asia, which was part of the so-called Russian Empire. I can't imagine the Russians are too happy about this. So, on the other hand, they want to pretend as though they're buddy-buddy with China. What's your take on that? China-Russian relations right now are, you know, for the last probably decade have been on a very good, good terms, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, these annual exercises that Chinese and that the Russians have in Asia and in the Mediterranean. And so, I think, in one sense, the Chinese are using Russia to help combat against America. But at the end of the day, the Russians will be skeptics if China gets too big. And so, you know, Westphalian politics, balances of power, some would suggest that we need to just keep moving along to see if there's going to be a balancing out between China and Russia. I'm not so, I'm not so sure right now. I remember, I think it was two years ago, I had a pretty interesting discussion in Beijing with a Beijing University professor of international relations. And he was calling the Russian-Chinese relationship Biao Mian. In other words, it just exists kind of on the surface. There's no deep substance to it. And I think in the last couple of years, it's taken on some substance, but I still think it's a very shaky show. I'm just waiting for the day when China says, you know, the Russian Far East, that's really our turf. We want it back. I'm just waiting for that day. I'm just waiting to see how the Russians handle that and how that wonderful relationship is going to adjust to that. Right. That would upset the apple cart for sure. That certainly would. Well, South China Sea, this is so unfair, but the clock is not our friend, usually. And again, today, it's not. We need to talk just a bit about the South China Sea, all kinds of talk about a code of contact evolving. But unless I miss something in the U.S., it still hasn't signed the Law of the Sea Convention. And isn't it about time? I think every chief of naval operations that I can remember in my lifetime has recommended to the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman that, you know, it should be signed. So from the U.S. Navy's position, it's something that should be signed so that we don't have to take pushback from China when we're having these kinds of discussions and negotiations about international law. And the first thing that Chinese say is you haven't signed that. I'm not an attorney. I'm not a, you know, a Law of the Sea expert. So there may be issues still that some people are concerned about U.S. sovereignty. But what I would say is that the United States is a cut, you know, we practice and follow the Law of the Sea Convention and its customary law. And so we shouldn't feel embarrassed or take a back seat to China when they say we haven't signed it. We actually did sign it as a country, but it just wasn't ratified. It wasn't ratified, right? And we helped write a lot of it. So I don't think that it's something that we should, you know, obsess on. Recall, China worked a declaration of a code of conduct with ASEAN nations in 2002 and then proceeded over the next 14 years to violate every element of that convention. That's what some people say. The U.S. didn't sign the Law of the Sea, but it follows it. China signed it, but it doesn't follow it. That's it. Wow. Well, I think that about brings us down to the end of our time. Unfortunately, we could go on and on and on. We're going to have to stop here. So thank you for joining us. And thank you to our guests for sharing his views with us today. My guests next week will be Mr. Unik Wu joining us via Skype from Taiwan. He is a really strong advocate of reinstituting the draft in Taiwan. And having served in the Taiwan military and advocating the return of conscription, I'm sure you will enjoy his views. So follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn just by typing my name, Bill Sharp, and we'll see you next week.


Income tax 2022-2023, section 179, deduction part number two. How much you can deduct? Let's do some wealth preservation with some tax preparation. Most of this information can be found at publication 946, How to Depreciate Property Taxure 2022. You can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Income tax formula. We're focused on line one income. Remember, in the first half of the income tax formula is, in essence, an income statement. However, just an outline, a scaffolding, other forms and schedules flowing into these line items. One of those, the Schedule C, having business income minus business expenses. The net income then flowing into line one income of our income tax formula. First page of the form 1040, noting that the Schedule C would flow into the Schedule One, flowing into page one of form 1040 line number eight. The Schedule C, profit or loss from business income statement format, income minus expenses, we're focused on the expenses side and more particularly related to the depreciation and even more specifically the 179 component of it. Remember, support accounting instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. When we're talking about property, plants and equipment, even if you're dealing in a cash based system, you'll typically have to deviate from it doing and a cruel thing. Putting the equipment on the books as an asset allocating the cost over the useful life. That would be the normal thought process for depreciation from a bookkeeping standpoint, which makes sense for decision making. Then you might have an accelerated depreciation. Remember for taxes, we would always like to get the stuff, the depreciation, the expense earlier as a general rule. There are exceptions. So if we can have an accelerated method like a double declining method, a makers method usually being a form of double declining, that could be good. And if we can front load and get the deduction upfront in year one, that is usually a beneficial thing as well. And that's what we're talking now, which is basically the 179 deduction and possibly a special deduction. Are those types of items, which don't make sense from a bookkeeping standpoint, but sometimes make sense from a legal standpoint or from a lawmaking standpoint to try to stimulate the economy or do whatever they're trying to do. So electing the 179 deduction just as a recap and the introduction, you can elect to recover all or part of the cost of certain qualifying property up to a limit by deducting it in the year you place the property in service. So we've got this depreciable property. Normally we would have to depreciate it. We would like oftentimes to get the depreciation in year one, and that's where the 179 deduction may come in. So this is the section 179 deduction. You can elect the section 179 deduction instead of recovering the cost by taking depreciation deductions. Okay, so how much can you deduct? That's the big question. Your 179 deduction is generally the cost of the qualifying property. However, in other words, basically whatever you paid for the qualifying property that would qualify for the 179, possibly getting the deduction. Now note how big that deduction could be because normally the idea from a bookkeeping standpoint is that these are such a big deviation in terms of when you're buying the equipment and when you're going to consume them to generate revenue. That's why you had to think about a depreciation in the first place. So it's obviously a substantial depreciation for those businesses buying equipment. That's part of the point from a legislative standpoint because they're trying to stimulate the economy by having people invest in larger pieces of equipment and so on. So however, the total amount you can elect to deduct under section 179 is subject to a dollar limit and a business income limit. So those are our two limits. Obviously, software helps us to apply these in practice, but we want to have a general idea of them so we can discuss these when talking to people, clients and whatnot. So these limits apply to each taxpayer, not to each business. However, seeing married individuals under dollar limits later. Okay, so for a passenger automobile, the total section 179 deduction and depreciation deduction are limited. Remember automobiles often has their own issues because the iris is concerned that people are buying obviously quite expensive automobiles when they don't need them for the business purpose. If you're just driving to a client's house, do you need a $150,000 car? Probably not. They might be skeptical that you might be overdoing it on the luxury side, meaning personal side of it instead of a business use of it. So that's why they might limit the deduction for automobiles. That causes its own issue. So see, do the passenger automobile limit apply in chapter five? So you can check that out and we might talk a little bit about that later. If you deduct only part of the cost of qualifying property as a section 179 deduction, you can generally depreciate the cost you do not deduct. So if you're limited, it's a qualified piece of equipment, you're limited in one way, shape or form to the amount that you can deduct in the first year, not being able to deduct the full amount, then you may still be able to do what you would normally be able to do. Take the amount that you didn't get to deduct and in essence depreciate it like normal, which you would think using oftentimes like a maker's depreciation, for example, depending on the type of property. We'll talk more about maker's method in future presentations. So trade in of other properties. So if you buy qualifying property with cash and a trade in, its cost for purposes of the section 179 deduction includes only the cash you paid. So example, Silver Leaf, a retail bakery, traded in two ovens having a total adjusted basis of $680. For a new oven costing $1,320, they received an $800 trade in allowance for the old ovens and paid $520 in cash for the new oven. So on the date that Silver Leaf traded in the two old ovens for the new oven, the old ovens and the new ovens are classified as real property under the law of the state in which the old and new ovens are located. And as a result, the old and new ovens are real property for purposes of section 1031. So this is getting a little bit tricky because remember we have this issue in terms of certain types of things. Are they part of the building real property in other words kind of like real estate or are they something separate from the structure in which case you might call them. They would be like equipment or something like that other than part of the property. Now it's kind of interesting in terms of when you would want something to be called real property or not because if it's real property you might be able to get this 1031 exchange which often applies to like real estate which is kind of an interesting kind of scenario when you're talking like in this kind of scenario here because often times if it wasn't related to an exchange situation often times you might want to call it not real property but rather something other than real property like equipment or something because then you might be able to depreciate it possibly having accelerated depreciation like a 179 maybe and possibly being able to depreciate it at least over a shorter period of time as opposed to real estate which you usually have to depreciate over a longer period of time. So it's kind of an interesting example they have here the new oven is section is section 179 property only the portion of the new oven's basins paid by cash qualifies for the section 179 deduction therefore silver leaves qualifying costs for the section 179 deduction is 520 so it's kind of a little bit more of an unusual interesting example their dollar limits so the total amount you can elect to deduct under section 179 for most property placed in service in tax years beginning in 2022 generally cannot be more than 1,080,000 so those are dollar limit quite high often times for small businesses but larger businesses can hit that limit quite readily clearly so if you acquire and place in service more than one item of qualifying property during the year you can allocate the section 179 deduction among the items in any way as long as the total deduction is not more than $1,080,000 so this becomes an interesting area as well you might think that's pretty straightforward but if you have multiple pieces of property that might be subject to a 179 deduction and those properties have different or varying useful life for normal depreciation then if you hit the cap of 1,080,000 you might want to think about like which properties you want to apply the 179 to you would think as a general rule you would like to apply the 179 to those properties that have the longest life of depreciation that's applied to them because then the property that goes over the threshold has the shorter lives hopefully which means you'll still under normal depreciation rules get to recap the costs earlier than later as a general rule so that would be if you hit the caps so it gets a little bit more confusing than just saying well we'll just apply the 179 just willy-nilly until we hit the cap and then go over it you want to think about it possibly a little bit more in depth because there could be differences in future depreciation depending on the useful lives of the property so you do not have to claim the full $1,080,000 either so you could claim less than that why would you ever do that if you had a ability to claim the $1,080,000 why would you ever claim some 179 less than that well if you claim the 179 less than that then you would think that the depreciable property would still get a depreciation deduction in the future and you might be in a situation where if you take enough 179 it's going to take you below into a tax bracket that's lower due to our progressive tax system so you might say hey look I'm going to take enough at this higher tax bracket rate and then maybe I would be better off applying the rest to the future possibly because that will help me out in the future when I'm having a higher tax bracket rate possibly as opposed to taking the deduction earlier so the general rule we always want the deduction earlier normally but there are exceptions for example if I have a lower tax rate due to the progressive tax system due to having less income this year or changes in the tax law I expect to happen next year increase in the tax rate then I might want to take the deduction next year if possible maybe so tip the amount you can elect to deduct is not affected if you place qualifying property in service in a short tax year or if you place qualifying property property of SpongeBob in service for only a part of a 12 month tax year caution after you apply the dollar limit to determine a tentative deduction you must apply the business income limit described later so we'll get into that in it's the other limit right to determine your actual section 179 deduction so example in 2022 you bought and placed in service $1,080,000 in machinery and a $25,000 circular saw for your business you elect to deduct $1,055,000 for the machinery and the entire $25,000 for the saw a total of $1,080,000 so you might say so we hit the limit and instead of just saying I'm going to put the full amount on this piece of equipment that costs the same amount as the limit we decided, they decided to fully depreciate the $25,000 saw and then apply the rest here so that means that you would expect the difference between you know the price of this first piece here and that $1,055,000 you would still be able to depreciate in the future you would imagine that they could have applied all the $179,000 to the first piece of equipment and then have the whole $25,000 of the saw to go forward what would be the difference between the two? why does it matter? well they might have depreciation they might have different depreciation lives into the future which could affect how early you get the depreciation normal depreciation rules so this is the maximum amount you can deduct your $25,000 deduction for the saw completely recovers its cost your basis in depreciation is zero the basis for depreciation in your machinery is $25,000 so you figure this by subtracting your $1,055,000 section $179,000 deduction for the machinery from the $1,080,000 cost of the machinery and then you would expect that $25,000 you would be depreciating over you know whatever the normal terms of depreciation would be so situations affecting dollar limit under certain circumstances the general dollar limits on the section $179,000 deduction may be reduced or increased or there may be additional dollar limits the general dollar limit is affected by any of the following situation the cost of your section $179,000 property placed in service exceeds $2,700,000 you placed in service a sport utility or certain other vehicles they always mess things up you are married filing a joint or separate a joint or separate return so costs exceeding $2,700,000 so now you've got a lot that was put you know we're not talking about the dollar limit but you put a fairly hefty amount in costs of the machinery so if the cost of your qualifying section $179,000 property placed in service in a year is more than $2,700,000 you must generally reduce the dollar limit but not below zero by the amount of cost over the $2,700,000 tax software is helpful with this but you can see the general concept here is which would basically be you want to buy the machinery if you can so that you get the $179,000 deduction but you don't want to go crazy about it one because there's a limit and you're not going to get the $179,000 deduction after that limit and two because if you go way over the limit not only do you not get the $179,000 deduction because of the cap but you're going to reduce possibly the amount of $179,000 deduction cap that you would have otherwise have so if the cost of your section $179,000 property placed in service during 2022 is $3,780,000 or more you cannot take a section $179,000 deduction ouch! example in 2022 Jan Ash placed in service machinery machinery no costing $2,750,000 this cost is $50,000 more than the $2,700,000 so Jane must reduce the dollar limit which is $1,080,000 by the $50,000 over that limit that means that the total that she gets for the $179,000 has been reduced to $1,030,000 so sport utility and certain other vehicles here we go with the vehicle thing the iris is always skeptical about those vehicles because people like to buy expensive stuff in terms of their vehicle so you cannot elect to expense more than $27,000 of the cost of any heavy sport utility vehicle an SUV and certain other vehicles placed in service in tax years beginning in 2022 this rule applies to any four wheeled vehicle primarily designed or used to carry passengers over public streets roads or highways that is related that is rated at more than 6,000 pounds gross vehicle weight and not more than 14,000 pounds gross vehicle weight $37,000 limit does not apply to any vehicle designed to seat more than 9 passengers behind the driver seat equipped with a cargo area so either open or enclosed by cap of at least 6 feet in interior length that is not readily accessible from the passenger compartment or that has an integral enclosure fully enclosed the driver compartment and load carry device does not have seating reward of the driver's seat and has no body section protruding more than 30 inches ahead of the leading edge of the windshield now all of this stuff with the cars gets kind of messy because you can imagine what is basically happening here they are saying if you have a car that is for personal use then you would think they want to limit it because you might buy a really fancy car that is over and above what you need then they have this law well if the car is over 6,000 pounds then you would think that that would be more like a work utility vehicle or something like that but then what happened is the SUVs for personal use got fancy over 6,000 pounds because there was tax benefit related to those so now the question is well now it's got to be over 6,000 pounds but you have all these other kind of restrictions that you can think the code puts into place to make sure that it's not actually personal use very fancy over 6,000 pound car that you are getting a personal benefit from but it's actually like a work vehicle which was the original thought of the weight limit in the first place so in other words the weight limit in some cases may have actually backfired in trying to do what it's going to do because it could lead manufacturers to make these SUVs heavy so that they can qualify for a tax benefit possibly but you can see the intent of the code here is trying to say in my interpretation that what is actually a work vehicle versus something that looks like it could be more of a personal vehicle type of thing so married individuals so if you are married you figure your section 179 deduction depends on whether you filed jointly or separately so if you file a joint return you and your spouse are treated as one taxpayer in determining any reduction to the dollar limit regardless of which of you purchased the property or placed it in service so this gets kind of interesting because you know from a tax standpoint you would think that if you had two individuals and they got married then you're kind of like one entity so that kind of makes sense on the one hand but when you look at other kind of things with married couples you don't want to disincentivize people being married so for example when you look at the standard deduction limits and the tax tables typically the standard deduction for married is twice as high as it is for single because because you might have two people that are both working that now have the same tax return same with the progressive tax rates but but when you get to these dollar limitations it's kind of like well now you're one legal entity so would it make sense to double the amount of these limitations so they're saying no here generally right so if you file a joint return you and your spouse are treated as one taxpayer in determining any reduction to the dollar limit regardless of which of you purchased the property or placed it in service if you and your spouse file separate returns you are treated as one taxpayer for the dollar limit including the reduction for costs over $2,700,000 you must allocate the dollar limit after any reduction between you equally unless you both elect a different allocation if the percentages elected by each of you do not total 100% 50% will be allocated to each of you that's getting messy example you are married so you and your spouse file separate returns so now we're getting this messy situation separate returns married couple filing separately you bought and placed in service $2,700,000 of equipment farm machinery in 2022 we're leveling up here on the farm equipment your spouse has a separate business and bought and placed in service $300,000 of qualified business equipment your combined dollar limit is $750,000 this is because you and your spouse must figure the limit as if you were one taxpayer you reduced the $1,080,000 limit by the $300,000 excess of your costs or over the $2,700,000 you elect to allocate the $780,000 limit as follows $741,000 that's going to be the $780,000 times 95% to your machinery and $39,000 that's the 5% allocated to your spouse's equipment so if you did not make an election to allocate your costs in this way you and your spouse would have to allocate $390,000 that's the $780,000 times 50% to each so obviously this is a kind of a messy example but you get kind of the idea of it they're filing separately and so they went over the limit which they're applying to as if they're one taxpayer even though they're filing separately obviously you would think that it wouldn't be right to allocate the limit 50-50 you would think because one of the equipment was a lot higher than the other so you're going to try to use a ratio kind of analysis to allocate the benefit to both sides in a way that seems fair okay joint return after filing separate returns if you and your spouse elect to amend your separate returns by filing a joint return after the due date for filing your return the dollar limit on the joint return is the lesser of the following amounts the dollar limit after reducing for any cost to section 179 property over the $2,700,000 the total cost of 179 property you and your spouse elected to expense on your separate returns example the facts are the same as in the previous example except that you elect to deduct $300,000 of the cost of section 179 property on your separate return and your spouse elected to deduct $20,000 so after the due date of your returns you and your spouse file a joint return the dollar limit for section 179 deduction is $20,000 this is the lesser of the following amounts the $780,000 the dollar limit less the cost of section 179 property over the $2,700,000 $320,000 the total you and your spouse elected to expense on your separate returns


Woman leaves car in bar parking lot overnight, comes back to note that leaves are speechless. When your day is going bad, one silly mistake can make it 10 times worse. Parking tickets are irritating enough, but when there is a legitimate reason for parking, it's infuriating. One Canadian woman forgot about the consequences when she left her car in a parking lot overnight. But she never expected this incredible gesture. Couples are used to tough times. From financial struggles to the impact it had on their relationship, Shelly Harrison and her husband were desperate. But no matter how strapped for cash they were, they weren't going to downplay their anniversary. Finally, she had something to look forward to. But just as her hopes began to rise, they were immediately shot down. One day, she found a menacing note on her windshield. Was it a joke? A threat? Had she gotten a ticket? What she discovered made her grab her phone. Shelly and her husband settled in Sherwood Park, Canada. Like many, she had fallen on hard times. Little did she know, things were about to become much worse. Unfortunately, her father passed away unexpectedly. She was horrified. And as she was trying to organize funeral arrangements. She returned to her car to find a parking ticket. Surely, someone would understand her situation and be able to help? But as she left the courthouse, she was greeted by another police officer issuing yet another ticket. But there was moral fate waiting for Shelly. Shelly's landlord had issued an eviction notice the same week as her father's passing. Objecting to the unfair eviction, she went to court and after a long day, lost the dispute. As if her day wasn't terrible enough, she had been issued another ticket during the court case. She was strong, but everything was starting to weigh on her heart. She couldn't afford a funeral, let alone parking tickets or a new deposit for an apartment. But she tried to stay positive. It could be worse, became her daily mantra. However, when her husband arrived home and said we need to talk, her head spun. On the day of their anniversary? She never expected him to say the following words. Shelly waited patiently at the kitchen table. She had just poured two glasses of red wine that matched the dress she bought for $8 at the charity store. But when her husband asked her to sit down, her heart began to race. I'm being laid off, he said before throwing his hands over his face. Shelly fought the tears that formed in her eyes and rushed to his side. She wasn't going to let a series of unfortunate events tear them apart. They didn't need much. And a dollar could go a long way if you were smart enough. She refused to let his news spoil their night. But she never expected her entire life to shift that very same night. If they were going to spend the foreseeable future pinching their pennies, they would at least splash out tonight. They went to their favorite table at original Joe's restaurant in Sherwood Park, Alberta. They ordered their usual the pulled pork burger and steak sandwich. As per their ritual, they halved each plate and washed their meal down with a few drinks. They had planned to leave after one, maybe two, but nostalgia got the best of them. After the last call, they made their way outside. Their car was the last left in the parking lot Shelly stopped. She had a better idea. Shelly was responsible. You don't have to be drunk to be impaired, she shared. I wasn't some crazy drunk lady, but I definitely had no business driving. She knew the dangers of driving under the influence. And she would never put her husband or another innocent person in danger because of her poor decisions. But she was having a terrible streak of luck. Could she really risk leaving her car overnight? The last thing they needed was more debt. But it didn't seem like she had any choice. Unfortunately, Sherwood Park was a very rural area. And every cab they tried to hail was already occupied. They could have ordered an Uber, but there was none in the area, and they would have been left waiting for quite some time. But it was cold, and they were eager to get back home. Shelly's keys burned in her pocket. The roads were quiet, and there were never cops around the area at this time. In the end, Shelly made. The safe decision and requested an Uber. That night, Shelly slept soundly for the first time in weeks. When she woke, she knew it was going to be a good day. She put on her jacket and made her way to the door. If she was quick enough, she could have breakfast ready and on the table before her husband woke. But first, she needed her car. However, when Shelly opened the door, she knew that was going to be impossible. Shelly had slept through the beginning of a snowstorm. She had experienced countless days of heavy snowfall in the past. After all, Canada was famous for its frosty winters. Usually, she stayed indoors holding a cup of hot chocolate while lounging in front of a fire. Authorities recommended all residents to stay indoors and to avoid the treacherous roads. So, Shelly had to postpone her rescue plans. She dreaded the possibility of getting another parking ticket. But she truly had no choice. After two days, the snow finally cleared and the roads were reopened. But her good mood couldn't last forever. As soon as Shelly approached original Joes, she worried. When she saw her car, she froze. Her vehicle was stuck under four inches of snow. Why had she left it so long? She looked over her shoulder. Her cheeks were red from both the cold. Breeze and embarrassment. She put on her gloves and began to push the layers of snow from her windshield. Then, she discovered a piece of paper beneath the wiper. Had the wind placed it there? But she soon realized that it was indeed left for her. Tears began to fill her eyes. She knew she shouldn't have left her car there that night. She shouldn't have wasted money on drinks. If she had been more responsible, she wouldn't have been in this mess. After all the times. She'd visited the restaurant, she had never seen any parking attendants in the lot. Her stomach turned. Maybe the owners reported her because she had blocked their entryway. But when she opened the folded paper, her breath caught in her chest. As expected, the note was from the restaurant's management. Shelly braced herself for the worst. But as she scanned the page, she realized that they weren't pressing charges, and they weren't angry. Turns out, they were delighted with her decision to leave her vehicle. I'm not sure if you had consumed alcohol at our restaurant or not, she read from the typed letter. But we wanted to thank you for not drinking and driving. Shelly couldn't believe it. Finally, her luck had changed. But there was more to this story. Closed as a voucher for one pound of our delicious chicken wings. Please accept this as a thank you for being responsible. Life is valuable, have a great weekend, Jay McLean closed the letter. Jay was a managing partner of original Joe's. When he heard of Shelly's decision from the staff, he was impressed. He believed her actions deserved recognition. But Shelly didn't base her decision on a reward. She sighed. A thoughtful gesture was the last thing she expected. She had to share her encounter on Facebook. However, she never thought their actions would receive this reaction. When I found the letter on my windshield, I thought I was getting in trouble for leaving my car in front of the entryway to the pub. Wow. I'm so impressed. Definitely going back, Shelly shared. With her friends and family online. She uploaded a picture of the note and clicked post. But strangers soon caught wind of the story. And understandably, her experience went viral for more than one reason. Shelly didn't think much of her post. She shared it to show though she cared about that there were still kind people left out there. After months of hardship, she had finally caught some luck. Since sharing her story online, the post has been shared over 5,000 times by friends, family, and. Everyone has been touched by her plight. She hoped her experience would inspire more businesses to act in such a thoughtful way. Her family thinks this will also encourage businesses to offer rewards for responsible patrons. But it turns out, Jay McLean wasn't the first business owner to act like this. Shelly felt compelled to reach out to Jay. He later told her that he had been leaving similar notes of cars for the past few years. But he hadn't come up with the idea himself. A friend who ran a bar downtown was doing the exact same thing. I just thought operating a restaurant in a rural type area like Sherwood Park where transit is minimal and a lot of people drive, I just thought it was the perfect match he shared. But there were some online users who thought he had some ulterior motives. The majority of online users reacted positively to Shelly's post. However, there was a handful who made sure to express their negative notions. They believed that Jay's actions were not completely selfless. They shared the possibility of Jay only doing this for the free advertisement. Shelly was horrified. She had sat down with Jay and they had both laid all their cards on the table. She couldn't stand back and watch them tarnish his reputation. Jay is a great guy, truly only doing what he feels is right. I can't believe that some people actually are accusing him of taking advantage of the situation. He's been doing it for over a year. With no expectations. Just being a good guy, Shelly commented beneath her post. Whatever his intentions, his positive encouragement was refreshing. And although most establishments discourage drunk driving, few are brave enough to respond to their customers' actions. Mothers against drunk driving estimate won death every 51 seconds. These accidents are caused solely by impaired drivers. Shockingly, the act is currently one of the top causes of death in the United States. Police officers dedicate their lives to enforcing sobriety on the road. But those who try to voluntarily raise awareness should be applauded. Jay spoke of how valuable life is to Shelly. And although she had her own struggles, the note gave her a sense of pride, reminding her that one decision can have a massive impact. Would her streak of good luck continue?


Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP BuzzChat interview and I'm here today with Rick. How's it going? Hi, Christian. Thanks for having me on today.  Well, sure. I'm probably here mostly because I'm a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. I've been a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP since 2010. So it's my 10th anniversary or last year. It may have been hard to keep track. I've got a number of those little cubes on my statue. Well, now that they've kind of rolled up to the everybody gets renewed or not renewed at the same time, it's like I should be a nine-year office apps and services MVP. I came on board as a SharePoint MVP. So now I'm at the nine and a half year mark, but waiting to see if I get renewed for my night time. Yeah, it's always a situation where you're going, well, if I don't get renewed, I have a lot more time. If I do get renewed, I get to hang out with my friends a little longer. The reality though, and I'm sure it's the same with you, is that we would do the same stuff whether or not we're an MVP. Oh, pretty much, pretty much. Sorry. I mean, in 2010, I joined the MVP program, but that was not when I first became involved with the MVP program because in 1993, I joined the Microsoft PowerPoint development team at Microsoft, full-time employee. And I was on PowerPoint for 17 years, designing and building the application. And for the last 10 or so years of that, I was the program contact with the MVPs. So when I retired from Microsoft, they had this evil little plan in mind already, and they called me back in and said, we want you to be an MVP now. And so I've been an MVP. So my background with the MVP program was about 20 years, and with PowerPoint is 27 years. I don't even remember PowerPoint back in those days. Are there videos out there of what that experience looked like of people demoing things? That'd be fascinating to go and look at. PowerPoint actually existed prior to Microsoft owning it. It was an application that had been developed by a company called Forthott, and they were actively trying to sell it to both Microsoft and Apple at the same time. It was a Macintosh application first. And I think version one was definitely just Mac, and I think version two was Mac as well, and three was the first one out on Windows. I think that's right. And three had pretty much come out just before I joined. So it's been around for a while. Wow. Yeah.  So before they standardized everything, and that kind of broke all of my knowledge that I had built up around Excel. But not that I remember any of that, even that.  No, of course not. It's funny, because I had spent a couple of years working with Paradox and other database management tools. And did you ever work with VisaCalc? Never worked with VisaCalc. I worked on VisaCalc. Really? So I was there at the beginning of spreadsheets in the Apple II world, largely credited with moving personal computers into businesses. Yeah, that was, so I was back in junior high and high school, you know, spent a lot of time like we bought, we had, I think our first home computer was an Apple IIe, and it, of course, we had, you know, the gaming systems and stuff. Oh, sure. Sure. But not that you never played games on the Apple IIe. Of course not. Well, it was that, what was it, the reverse eye or whatever that came? Oh, yeah, yeah. And Mule was the one that came out on, Donkey was the one on the original IBM PC, like one game that came on the DOS disk. That's interesting. Well, so, you know, it's funny, like, so I do these productivity tips webinars every month with a friend of mine, Tom Duff, and we go through and we talk about it might be, you know, a SharePoint tip, we go, we have 10 tips every month. And there's a lot around productivity, but some of the more popular, and I try to go and I blog on some of the tips that I've shared out there. Some of the most popular tips have been PowerPoint related tips, because people still, you know, use it pretty heavily. And there's, I'm glad to see some of the capabilities. I have to tell you, so I, it's funny, background, I was actually an industrial design major as my first major university. I did two and a half years, I dropped out of the program. I just, I got fed up, because there's so much of it was drawing and pen work. Yeah. And I was doing graphic design for the student newspaper and you know, a bunch of other things that I just, I wanted to do. I just, I couldn't stand spending 10, 15, 20 hours on a single drawing, a technical drawing, and was doing stuff on computer. And I leave the program, I leave that, that university, I go back and visit friends like a year later, all computerized, everything to digital.  But it, you know, with PowerPoint, like I see these, the people that they do these just incredibly intricate, beautiful presentations and the animation work that they do. And I'm thinking, I don't have time for that. I just, you know, it's gotten easier. But I say one of the coolest features is one of my absolute favorite things has come out in the last five, six years has been the, you know, the AI driven the ideas capability in PowerPoint. It is fantastic. I can dump my images and my text and it go and give me 20 different options. And it's just, it's dramatically improved the quality of the stuff that I show. Yeah. The PowerPoint team keeps very close tabs on our keeps very close touch with the MVPs. And so we're seeing that kind of stuff all the time, giving them feedback. You probably, have you touched on Morph yet? Of course. When Morph was first talked about, yeah. Morph for the animation is probably one of the biggest time savers and provides some amazing results. And not to dismiss the AI stuff, but AI is playing a big part in the future of office applications and PowerPoint probably is one of the more visible places it shows up. Well, I have to ask you as a PowerPoint MVP. So what are the, you know, the kind of the four or five coolest things that you've seen come out of it in recent years? What are the big things that impressed you? We've really touched on one of the biggest ones, which is Morph. I'd have to say before I left Microsoft, one of my big projects was doing the first version of PowerPoint on the web. And we were basically dealing with no support from servers or any of the browsers or anything. So we had to deal with what HTML could do and that was about it. And what they're doing now is nothing short of amazing to me, to be able to get on any computer a PowerPoint presentation in email and open it up and have it go to the browser and render and play animation, allow you edit it. I mean, there are some limitations, but it's just phenomenal what you can do. And there are even tricks to if you're, I'll give you a new one I found out about, that if you've gotten a presentation from somebody in email and you open it up in the web browser, you can actually use the web browser to export it as PDF. Really? So yeah, that's just, I was blown away. I haven't actually done this yet, but it was proposed by someone as a solution to another problem someone had had in their workflow. And it's like, yeah, that'll work. It's just amazing. Well, I mean, just the fact that we've moved from having to install like an office server solution to be able to use the applications and make sure everybody can open the applications to it being encapsulated as part of the downloaded file, somebody you don't have to have Microsoft office installed, and you'll have a little more limited, yes, but you can collaborate and respond to and do some editing and, you know, across all the office applications. It's pretty amazing. And across across platform too. I mean, PowerPoint. PowerPoint is one of the most amazing cross platform features knowing how the file formats work and how data transfers between legacy applications and current applications and cross platform applications. It's having dealt with those problems for so many years. I'm I'm totally impressed by what the team has been doing in the last, you know, in the last 10 years. Well, the Morph capability that you mentioned, I seem to recall that that was a was that a Microsoft RD effort? There was another product or they even called it refer to it Morph, or is that something else? It was back when I'm pretty sure it was I'm pretty sure the Morph that's in the product was entirely done by the team on the R&D stuff. Typically shows up in in in developer builds get demoed, but rarely the R&D team just doesn't doesn't engineer for the kinds of things that the development team has to do with specifically international language dependent issues being able to be backwards compatible that kind of stuff. It's just they're basically proving concepts. Sure. And that's that's the 80% of the work that takes 20% of the time. Well, and that's why I if you were familiar with, you know, I've talked about this on a few different recordings, but like the GitHub pure R&D effort to GitHub. And man, I remember seeing the demo for that and thinking, yeah, man, that's all smoke and bailing wire that's like wires holding that together for the demo. But I could see how directionally it was, you know, help it would go into and shape the product.  And there's it's in GitHub is no more except I've got an icon still on my phone. It doesn't do anything doesn't open anything. The app is still on my phone. It's cool. But yeah, there's the other thing that is speaking of the web version of stuff. And there's not so I've not been paying attention to, you know, just the pure web version of the browser version of PowerPoint of where there are parity issues and features with the desktop. But the presenter coach capabilities is another one of those tips.  And for it to pull in the audio and the timing of your slides and the continents on your slides as well as the words, pull that in there the transcription come back and identify pregnant pauses ums and oz. It's like a mini it's a mini toast masters built into PowerPoint there. Well, have you seen the automatic subtitling and language translation? That's that's we we were using that at the at the Latin well even at the virtual MVP summit we were using it. So there was some Microsoft translators at separate site and destination with some of that capability has been around for a few years. I did an event now it was a bit, you know, so I was doing an event in Sacramento and speaking we had some Spanish speaking people that were struggling with wanting people to talk slower. So they kind of understood things. I said, let's try this out. And so I set up my laptop in front of me on the translator site. If you're right, you know, I've not looked at it in a few years to know if it's all still there since they're building this into the other capabilities like teams. But with the camera on me, and they were sitting there watching my presentation in the same room, but through the lens of my camera and the translator with headphones, and it was doing real time translation in Spanish. And they were satisfied with it. I don't know how accurate it was. I've got my eighth grade Spanish skills. You know, I think if you watch subtitling with English, you can kind of get an idea as to the the the amount of noise there is introduced in language. It's it's it's come a long way. It's still has a long way to go, but it's come an amazing long way in the last decade. And we'll get better and better as we go. And especially with people developing translation dictionaries and phonemes and stuff for individuals, I think is is the real the real test is when when there's a one to one speaker to translator relationship. Right. Well, I know that with this as far as the accuracy again, I don't know how many languages are supported now. I know that with my daughter who's fluent in Tagalog, I had her like look look at some of the translations of this. How accurate is that she's like actually that's she was surprised at how accurate it was. There was a few little things, but I had had more to do with the tone, the speaker, that it was with the translation. But yeah, there's just some amazing capabilities. Anything else that kind of strikes you? You know, I'm really I'm really upset right now because I've seen some demos recently and I can't remember if they're they're approved for public distribution. Always be careful with that. So I've got to hold back. But there's there's if it's not I mean, there's some stuff, amazing stuff coming out in the future. And there's stuff that has just come out that's pretty incredible too. So yeah, it's I'm I'm very proud of my past association, my current association with PowerPoint, because with all respect to the other applications, nothing demos better than PowerPoint in these days. And I'm I'm always excited reading through release notes on any any office update.  But the stuff that comes out for PowerPoint, you just kind of go, man, the whole move to agile development in the office team, I is something when I left office, I actually got trained in agile for another couple of projects. And I kept on thinking, how would I have ever tried to get this, this, this development methodology to work in office. And it was just like, office was just so stuck in its old ways. And to within 10 years, have them turning around such that they're releasing new features every couple of months, that just blows me away. They release more features than we then we would release in three in six months, they really more features than we release in three years. It's, I think that we're having the same, we're going to see the same kind of change, fundamental change to what we see being built based on this whole experience, this whole work from home, it's, it's, it's forced companies, so just every industry to rethink what a lot, I've worked in collaboration technology, most of my career, that's kind of, you know, my space project portfolio management found my window knowledge management in collaboration technology. And the vast majority of companies that I've worked for or with did not support work from home policies. And companies that are building the technology wouldn't allow their employees to work from home and use their technology to build the technology. So I think this is forced companies to, to really think, Hey, we could do this. And if not everyone sides will chunks. And that's why I think that the commercial real estate is going to be in a tank for a long time because of this. Yeah, it's funny in the valley. Of course, you have Apple has just developed their, they just opened in the last two years, the, the flying saucer. Yeah. And that's all open plan. And I suspect there's going to be people who are going to want to be going back into the, the individual office of the older buildings. And they may be looking to re-engineer some of that, some of that structure. But, you know, it, there's no, there's no, there's no consensus on work for home versus, versus work in the office. I mean, there are companies I mean, there are companies that I think Facebook has been saying that they want people to come back in. But Twitter, I basically said, work for home, from home for the rest of your life. I think that's right. Yeah, I think you're right. That, depending on your concept of product development, and especially, I think it's going to come down to this has given us a considerable hunk of time to judge productivity in this environment, which has always been the managerial reluctance that the middle managers, if they can't be watching people working, they're not sure that any work's getting done. So this, this has been, this has been quite a, quite an experimental environment to test out some of the, to get some real metrics on it. Well, I think that's, you know, kind of where I was going with that too is that, look, I think it's going to have a direct impact on the types of features people want to see with a product like PowerPoint, which it'll be used in, you know, maybe even in a more of a real time, almost like a, I don't know, I'm just, I'm just thinking out loud here, but like, you know, within a white board scenario. So it's presenting part of it, but you're working and moving pieces around on it. We were just, we were just in a conversation about that, that, that as well. And I was pointing out that you, you can get in these presentations, specifically with engineers, but you know, engineers are just a different breed, where they actually present in edit, in the edit view, they don't go into slide show view. And they're showing the slides. And I was trying to think from the standpoint of product development, could there be a, a mode that you went into that kind of left the tools there, but diminished them a bit until you want to use them, but was still edit mode. So you can move stuff around on the screen. And they're not far from, from doing that kind of, that very kind of thing.  I did see an interesting demo from Prezi, where they were doing kind of, for folks that don't know Prezi to a few years back, that was supposed to be the PowerPoint killer. And instead what it gave is people a motion sickness, but it's a cool application though.  And that's the motion sickness thing. You really need to give users some control over that. Maybe they just want to slide over me a little bit of thing. And they were just like, no, no, this is the way. And I go, you realize the one thing feedback we got unexpected feedback we got in PowerPoint was that behaviors within the application that identified what they were, what people were seeing as PowerPoint were things that they wanted to diminish to the point that when you move your mouse on and you see the little control bar at the lower left hand corner, we had to put something in there to turn that off. So the people would never see PowerPoint UI on the screen because people were just saying, no, no, we don't want anyone to be thinking about it's a PowerPoint presentation. We just want them to see the information. So Prezi was really kind of branding themselves with this motion sickness. But they did, they did something really cool where they now are doing, they have a Prezi video.   It's really quite cool. It's a great idea.  I've got a good friend who is the, was the kind of in all the SharePoint events that I would speak at around the world. He was the token Prezi guy, you know, the representative there. He was a SharePoint MVP, you know, but he just was really passionate about the technology.  I mean, that was just, I don't think that is still possible within PowerPoint in the same way. Actually PowerPoint implemented some features that will do exactly that kind of thing. Really? I mean, it's a combination of Morph and some, I've forgotten the name of the name, but you can actually on a slide, you can, if you're work editing a slide, you can drag a slide miniature from left out onto the, on onto the slide area. And that creates a link to that slide. And then there's a, there's a feature called zoom where you will zoom in on that translation. You can basically do the same thing as, as the zoom and Prezi. And in fact, because of the way slides work and the way you can, you can kind of hide the fact that it's a slide by making the image background the same as background of the original one. So you're just looking at like a train, like a icon of a train, you click on it and it grows out and then all the wheels are spinning or it moves along, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a combination of a couple features that do that. But yeah, they, Prezi is still a valid, a valid platform for, for a number of people. I mean, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of young people like, like experimenting in it and, and they like saying they're not using PowerPoint, I think mostly. Yeah, it, you know, it does the job, it does a great job at it. Yeah, I'm still, look, I know that there are, there are people that are much more artistic that will go and they do these beautiful presentations, which they, you feel like you're not looking at a bunch of slides. The stuff that I do, I don't, where I don't need to have it that, that beautiful, that rich and stuff. I like to have as part of a presentation, the animations and, and, you know, different things, but it's, I mean, I'm always thinking of, you know, what's going to be the next step for this? It's not just me giving a presentation. I have sessions, which I never hand out the slides on. I've given a, there's a, the last keynote that I did for the ARMA conference, for example, you know, didn't, didn't share that out, or, or shared a few of the slides as in PDF format, where it was much more about the visuals that, but the majority of stuff that I do, the intention is they're immediately published out to SlideShare. People want to get their hands on them. So I'm, and I'm not reading through all the text, but I'm providing all the content that's there within the notes or on the, on the, on the screen for it to be a downloadable asset. It's, it's not that it's right or wrong. It's the, I'm, it's a different intent, different purpose and, and result that I'm, I'm intentionally building. It's a very, it's a very common workflow. And it is, unfortunately, the thing that does lead people to read their slides. And it is, and it does contribute to, I have a slide, well, let me talk about two of the things that I do. I'm the founder of the San Jose branch of Pachakacha, which is a Japanese presentation style started in, in Tokyo.  So they came up with two rules. First rule was every slide deck has exactly 20 slides. Second rule was every slide advances automatically after 20 seconds, no more, no less. And what this did was it focuses the presenter on, on presenting the essential meaning of their presentation, the core and just working it down to exactly what they need to tell the audience and keeping things moving. Typically, when we, when I work with, with presenters for these events, I recommend that they have little to no text on the slides, that the, that the, the message is in what they say. And the slide is reinforcing and supporting that message. And we, it's such a successful format, most of my events are held in bars and we're, we open it up to anybody who wants to come. We have volunteer presenters and we just have a blast for an evening of presentations. And I just remind people, when was the last time you thought you were going to sit down and watch 12 presentations in the evening for fun. But we, I'm currently just this morning, I wrote the first instruction mail to a new group of, of digital arts students at San Jose State. We're going to do an event in July. And we're going to do it virtual. So we'll be doing the presentations and everything over, over Zoom, I expect we're going to be using Zoom. And I'm looking forward to that, because I've done a couple of, I've done a couple of events now using Zoom. There are some things we can, we're limited to. But one of the big things is audience feedback. Because you can't, you can't typically judge how you're being received. There's no cues back and forth. I try and see if we can leave the microphones open, because sometimes they're ooze and oz and stuff. Well, there are other webinar platforms that have little more robust tools they could actually see, do people click and open up their email?  So you're actually getting real time data about whether people are, now they could be sitting in the back with their eyes closed. You have no idea because they're in the browser. But, you know, there's a little more data around it, which I think I find really, really interesting that attentiveness. But the other thing I have to say, because I'll get all kinds of upset friends, if I don't, is that a few years back, a number of PowerPoint MVPs and some other people outside of the organization got together and we founded the presentation Guild. And I've been on the board of directors of that. I think we're into, well, it's, let's just say five years, but that was, that's the same people that were at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. No, that's the Lollipop Guild. Okay, so this is, this is an organization that basically supports trains and recognizes presentation professionals, people who more companies should hire to make sure that their, their presenters are speaking well, that their documents are well created, that their messages are on target, that everything you want to happen, correct in a presentation happens that way. So we've got any number of, of graphic, graphic designers who work specifically in tools like PowerPoint. And we have a credentials program where you can come in and take training to be a certified presentation, present, present, we've been, we've got three levels planned, we have the first one done and we're, we're, we're issuing certificates now, based on tests that people can take. But we have a membership, a website, we have a Slack channel, we have, we have events, we take place, we take part of the part in the presentation summit once a year, which again is going to be virtual again this year. And yeah, so we're the, a lot of the people who are involved in this are PowerPoint MVPs. So it's a good group of people. What's the Japanese, the style, what is that presentation style called again? It's called petchakucha, P-E-P-E-T-C-A, pardon me, P-E-C-H-A-K-U-C-H-A, petchakucha. Because, because the, the whole TED talks movement kind of initially started around that same concept of a certain length, maybe it wasn't that. More digestible. It's not, uh, TED is not as strict and, uh, but yeah, the, it's kind of the difference between a performance art and haiku. You know, petchakucha is definitely the haiku. It's, it's the very precise. There's another one called, what's it called? It's got the same name as the Microsoft Development Event. But anyway, they, they do 15 slides in 15 seconds or something like that. They just changed the numbers up a bit because the petchakucha, petchakucha organization, you actually have to be, uh, awarded the found, the foundation for a city where Ignite, that's it. Ignite, Ignite can be used by anybody. So, yeah. But I know that, uh, so I attended twice events in downtown Seattle, um, that were something similar where it was five minutes long at auto. Like they had no control over four slides. They got up there and it was, they, they kind of stood over on this round carpet on the side of the spotlight on them with the slides that were just going. And it was, uh, when you were talking about, you know, I never thought I'd be sitting here watching people give presentations on a broad array of topics of anything somebody was talking about.  It was fantastic. Yeah. That's, that's what my, my usual events are like that. They're not themed. Uh, when I do stuff for the, what I'm doing right now is for the San Jose Museum of Art. And those tend to be more people from the same organization and same background or their city civic leaders or planners, um, our local art people. But when I have a regular event, it could be anyone from, uh, a father telling the story of what it was like to raise an autistic or a child, or it could be, um, someone just explaining how they made their, their Brady Bunch style, uh, one person in all the cells, they're all the same guy seeing, you know, as a whole, a whole session on that. Uh, I, I, I had, uh, the people who, uh, created, what's the name of the company where you, you rent other people's houses? Oh, Airbnb. Airbnb. So the president of Airbnb, like a couple of months before he started the company came by and did a presentation about this idea he had for renting out other people's houses. It was, it was great. We, we, the, the diversity of, uh, uh, an evening of fetch a couch is, uh, is terrific. Well, I know that you've got, uh, you know, on your website, you, you have your, uh, you've got links to a few of these different things. And to all provide in the blog posts and stuff around this, you know, link over to that. But what, where else can people want to find out more about this stuff or about you and get in touch? What, what is the best place to reach you? That's absolutely the best place. Um, I'm lucky enough to have a bizarre last name and a slightly unusual, not as, not as unusual as when I was in middle school, but, uh, my first name is Rick RIC without a K. My last name is Brett Schneider, 13 letters with five consonants in a row in the middle. And so my dad always went by Brett. So I go by Rick Brett, R-I-C-B-R-E-T. And I'm Rick Brett on Facebook, on Twitter, um, on Insta, no, not on Instagram, uh, Instagram. I had to go with something else because, uh, long story. Um, but, uh, you can, you can pretty, it's, I'm pretty easy to find. Well, you know, I really appreciate the, you know, talking, I've got some stuff to go take a look at as well here, but, uh, yeah, now I'm interested to find out if there's any of these groups, uh, you know, officially here in the Salt Lake area, I'll have to go check it out if there is. I'm pretty sure there's one in Salt Lake. There's gotta be. There's gotta be. There's over a thousand worldwide. One last question on that. Is there, uh, etiquette for watching those things? Like when they wrap up, does everybody sit there snapping? Is it like a bit hipster? No, it's, it's pretty much straight up applause and, and, uh, and, and cheers. It's funny because, um, as, as the emcee for the events, I always have to tell people that when they're done, don't run away from the stage, hang around for the applause, hang around for questions. But yeah, we just did. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's not, it's not a hipster thing. You could do that. That's the typical to see that, but that's the normal for, you know, you wrap up a presentation and there's already somebody at the door of the next group trying to get into the conflict. Right. Right. Because you took too long, right? Yeah. That's right. Doesn't happen with Pochakacha. That's right. Well, really appreciate your time today. Really, it's great to, uh, to get to know you and to learn more about this stuff. It's been fun, Christian. Thanks for having me. Thanks a lot.


There was much that Paul could have boasted in, much that Paul could have gloried in, much that Paul could have mentioned in his introduction to this dear church in Rome, much that it could have bolstered his reputation in the eyes of this church. I've seen the resurrected Christ, Paul could have said, signs and wonders done through my hands. I, Paul, could have said, I am a somebody in the eyes of this world, maybe. That's not where Paul begins. Have you noticed those things that this world would often commend? Are those very things that are despised by God? He who glories, let him glory in the Lord. Paul says, I am a slave of Jesus Christ. It's not he who commends himself that is approved, but he whom the Lord commends. Amen.


Mr. Chairman, Secretary-General of the ITU, Heads of Delegations, Distinguished Delegates, Allow me to commence by thanking the Government of Romania, the International Telecommunications Union, for hosting the PP-22 and for the hospitality extended to us. It is indeed an honor and privilege for me on behalf of the Government of the Republic of Namibia to address you. Namibia has made significant progress in the development of its ICT infrastructure with 112% mobile penetration and 74% use of the internet through various technological platforms and services. Namibia has a population coverage of 96% for 2G and 89% for 3G and 85% for 4G. Namibia prioritizes broadband internet connectivity particularly in the country's most remote areas through the implementation of universal services. Last micro-activity will boost rural business, reduce the unemployment rate among the youth and lead to an overall increase in socio-economic development. Accordingly, the broadband policy set clear targets to be achieved to ensure that broadband is accessible and affordable to all. To respond to the most pressing agenda of digital transformation and ensure that Namibia embraces the fourth industrial revolution, His Excellency President Dr. Hage G. Kengov established a fourth industrial revolution task force in July 2021. The task force produced a comprehensive report with recommendations for implementation, thus we endeavor to formulate a national digital strategy which will lead to a process of integrating ICT across sectors with a specific focus on e-business, e-learning, e-health and e-governance. Mr. Chairman and distinguished delegates, the key objectives of digital transformation are digital inclusion, digital infrastructure, digital skills and digital services. These implies that each citizen should have access to high-speed broadband services and be equipped with the right skills to utilize such services in a safe digital environment. The digital ecosystem should above all incorporate rural areas, women and the youth. The provision of ICT services comes with challenges of cybersecurity and increased e-waste. We are in the process of analyzing responsive legal frameworks addressing cybersecurity to ensure safe online services and e-waste management to minimize the impact of e-waste on the environment and human health. Finally allow me to thank the ITU for their continued support in the area of ICT development through your assistance to develop and review the policies and legislation for ICT in Namibia. I wish you all success in these important deliberations and I thank you.


High stress situations, such as JRTC, often forge a family-like bond for military organizations. But for Master Sergeant Jerry Hankins and Staff Sergeant Matthew Hankins, it's also their reality. My inspiration for joining the military would be my father. He had deployed two times before I got into the military and I kind of felt at that point that he had done his time and served his country and it was time for somebody else to step up to the plate. My grandpa was a drill instructor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and that was kind of my inspiration to come into the military. I think every father hopes that their sons follow in their footsteps for sure. I think that a lot of people do automatically set a higher standard for me, knowing my dad and knowing who he is and what he's accomplished. But I also do think that having kind of that higher standard pushed me to become better than what I even thought I could be. Master Sergeant Jerry Hankins agrees that he held his son to a higher standard. I've had to learn to step back and let him be his own person. I think he has forged his own path. As I have forged mine, I think he's did that on his own. We both deployed as Alpha Company BSTB to Afghanistan for nine months. My father being there definitely helped me a lot, helped get me through that, and kind of made the experience a little less frightening. That trip home for him to experience that, that feeling of coming home was probably one of my favorite memories. Some of the rewards of serving with my father have been, I always have a good mentor to always turn to, someone I can always trust to call. When you endure something such as this, it does strengthen the bond. When you endure it together and then after it's over you can talk about it and reflect back on the hard times, the rough times and the good times, and I believe it does bring us closer together. For this father and son, serving together has been a great experience. I'm proud of him, keep pushing, be the best that he can be and the skies will let him. You can do whatever it is you set your mind to do, you can do it.