I am James Malan and welcome to this edition of Talk of the Town. We have a legislative update for you and we have it with our buddy, Sean Garberley. Sorry, he's not our buddy. He's our rep. But nonetheless, Sean is in the house. So glad to see you as always, Sean. Great to be here, James. Really enjoy these conversations and I know that they are just good content for our viewers as well. So let me start by just a little recognition. I was, you know, preparing for our interview and I noticed that you're just a couple of weeks away from an anniversary of sorts and that you're going to be 15 years in the house pretty soon here. So just tell us your thoughts. I mean, that's a good long tenure.  So you've got plenty of things in front of you, no doubt. But you must be a senior member in the house at this point. Well, first of all, James, thank you for having me and thank you to ACMI for always doing these important legislative updates. It's a great way for me to get as close to my constituents as possible and I really appreciate that kind of service that you and the other volunteers here provide. Happy to do it. So good research. You really nailed it. Yeah. In March I'll be celebrating my 15th anniversary serving the people of Arlington and Medford in the House of Representatives. It's been the greatest honor of my life to be the representative here. I am shocked to say that it's been 15 years when I ran at the age of 22 for this seat. I never would have imagined that I would be here for 15 years and looking back at it. I can't believe it's been 15 years, but just like that I've learned a lot. I've worked with a lot of good people in the house to really try to deliver for the people of Massachusetts and for the people of our community. I think together we've partnered on a whole host of issues that have been really important and really transformative and improving the quality of life for people here in our community. In the city of Medford and across the Commonwealth, you know, I love my job. I love doing it. Every constituent I have has my cell phone. They call me on a regular basis for issues that are small or large. You know, it doesn't matter to me. It's what's important to the people I represent and I just love doing this job and will continue to do it until the people decide that they want somebody else. Well, or, you know, until you finally get tired of all the work that is involved in getting legislation passed. But I just want to follow up very quickly on one thing and that is, I mean, that's a good solid tenure in the house and that means you've learned a whole lot of stuff that, you know, that 22-year-old, 23-year-old you just wouldn't have known. Just pick one or two things that, you know, you really know now that you didn't know then about the way that the state house works. You know, looking at it from the outside, it can be very frustrating when you as a constituent see a piece of legislation that is so critically important, but it just can't get passed for a whole host of reasons. And for me, it's really all about unintended consequences. It's how important it is to vet a bill to really pay attention to the details. And as a state representative for the past 15 years, when trying to pass legislation that's taken a little longer than I would have liked for it to take, to finally get it passed, looking back at it, it's really all about building relationships and really working with other legislators to get something done. You know, you have a house of 160, you have a Senate of 40, and then you need to withstand a governor's veto and get it on his or her desk. And that's not easy, and it shouldn't be easy. Not every bill is a good one, right? Legislation can be complicated. You need to go through it line by line, and that's important. And that, you know, not everyone can be a good or effective legislator. You have to be patient. You have to care about the details, and you have to be a good listener above all. And so in any piece of legislation I've worked on, probably starting more in the latter year of my tenure than in the beginning, you need to bring everyone to the table, all parties, and really look through a piece of legislation and vet it from the beginning to the end. And that's really what makes a good piece of legislation. And that's working with 159 other colleagues. So when I'm trying to pass a piece of legislation, I literally have to meet with 159 individuals and convince them that this is the right approach for Massachusetts. And that I've done my due diligence and research and getting the bill vetted and ready to get passed. And it takes a long time. Right. So that's probably, you know, the point of that is you might have entered thinking, hey, if I have good ideas, if I know that this is the right thing to do, if I know that everybody agrees that it's the right thing to do, that's probably enough. Now you know. It's not at all. No. Not necessarily. Every issue is different. You know, the second thing I will say, and I think I've known this from the very beginning, I don't think this is something I have learned, is I get calls from constituents all the time. It can be in the middle of the day. It can be in the middle of the night. And as you pointed out, James, I give out my cell phone number to everybody that wants it. Most people don't want it. But for everybody who wants it, when they're calling me, it's not necessarily because they want to. We went through a pandemic that literally changed the landscape of public health, literally changed life for many, many people in our community, whether it was employment, whether it was losing a loved one. It changed a lot of people. And when I get a call from a constituent, I really try to drop everything to help that individual because they're not calling me because they necessarily want to. Some do, but they're calling me because they have to. And it's not necessarily a call they want to be making. I just got a call this morning that took an hour of my day around housing. Somebody who is unfortunately going through the eviction process and is trying to keep her kids in the Arlington Public Schools, trying to keep food on their kids' tables and trying to stay housed. And right now I'm trying to help her do that. So when people call me, they're calling me because they need help. And that is something that I have never taken for granted these past 15 years and just becomes more important to me every time I get a phone call or an email. Well said. And yeah, I just want to recognize for each person who's on the other end of that line when you pick up that phone, it's probably the biggest thing in their life at that moment. And it's not the biggest thing in your life, but if you can make it that for an hour or whatever it takes to resolve, it's good on you. It's important. Good. So we're speaking at the beginning, well, middle of February at this point, and that means that a new legislative session started not too long ago, but we haven't had really a chance to hear from you about the most important stuff that came out of the last session. So let's do that relatively succinctly and then like to move right into what you are anticipating to be the big things you want to do in the current session. Great. It's a great question. We had a great legislative session the last two years that ended officially. Global session ended on July 31st. The official end of the session ended at the end of the year and we just started a brand new session on January 6th. As the chair of global warming and climate change, I really focused my attention on climate change where we passed a really comprehensive climate change piece of legislation really addressing dirty sources of energy and to try to address that issue on a whole host of ways, trying to make Massachusetts the epicenter of the offshore wind industry here in the United States of America, making up at least a third of President Biden's goals for offshore wind nationwide. That's pretty important and that's pretty inspiring. And then as well as offshore wind, making Massachusetts a hub for electric vehicles, really trying to create the necessary, I don't want to say energy because it's no pun intended, but the infrastructure necessary in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to allow electric vehicles to thrive, to have the infrastructure here that will allow it to thrive. So I bring that bill up because it was a really important bill. And as the chair of the committee, it was something that I was directly involved in. This past session was also one of my most successful. I believe James, every time I come before you, I give a legislative update and you graciously give me the opportunity to talk to you about bills I've been filing, bills I've been working on, and some of those bills, literally we've been talking about for 10 years. A few of them got passed this past session. And I just want to kind of run through them real quickly.  That got passed that allowed so many across the Commonwealth get access to sick days so they couldn't, so they could take care of a loved one, take care of themselves, but without risking being fired. Really, really important. And I was proud to file that bill. The Macy Bill, the Massachusetts Inclusive Concurrent Enrollment Legislation that we've been talking about for 10 years, finally passed and makes Massachusetts the first state in the country in statute to allow students with autism and down syndrome and other learning disabilities to be able to access college, public universities for the first time in the country to put it in statute. And I'm just going to interrupt you for one second and say, I flash back, as you were talking, as you were saying that, I flash back to our very first conversation in the studio, different configuration in which you were talking about that. Right. So sorry about for the interruption. No James, I appreciate it. It's one of those bills, right, that took a lot of time to get right, to kind of bring everyone to the table to really look at each sentence of the bill. But we finally got it passed and it is the, I think, the most significant law related to special education since IDEA passed at the federal level. It's going to transform lives, students with autism and down syndrome and other disabilities will be able to attend college and learn just like their peers. And that is tremendously important. So I just wanted to talk about that real quick. Congratulations by the way. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a big one. Adoptees in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts weren't able to access their original BERT certificate, their document that tells them who they are, their identity. Now the bill that I've been filing for 10 years finally got passed last session. So all adoptees born within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, within our 351 cities and towns will each be able to now, right now, because it's implemented, will be able to gain access to their original BERT certificate, the document that tells them that they are they, right, who they are, really, really important. And the other piece of legislation that we had talked about for a long time that finally passed this past session was those living with multiple sclerosis, that they cannot under law be kicked off their drug that's been working for them. Hundreds of those in our Commonwealth living with multiple sclerosis live in fear. And it does happen where they get a letter in the mail from their insurance company that their insurance company is not going to cover their prescription drug that's been working for them to help prevent flare-ups and help prevent them from having to go to the emergency room. Now in state law, no one living with multiple sclerosis that's been on a drug for 30 years that's been working for them, controlling flare-ups, keeping them out of the emergency room, will ever be living fear of being kicked off, kicked off their drug that's been working because of bureaucrats within health insurance tell them to. So that to me is really, really important. The last bill that we got passed was around a disability-led commission, the first of its kind, a commission that's going to be led around the history of state institutions. It's an uncomfortable history in the Commonwealth. We have unmarked graves from Belmont, all the way to Belcher Town, a letter with a number. It's not a history that we're proud of here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And this is going to be a commission to study that history. Those are human beings. They died under the care of the Commonwealth, or not the care of the Commonwealth. But they died with markers, with just a letter, signifying if they were Catholic or Protestant and a number. You don't know their history, don't even know their names. Talk about something so dehumanizing. And this commission is going to study all that and report back on how to make it right and create, hopefully, a memorial to these individuals. Right. At the very least, an honoring of their memories and a reckoning, perhaps, for all of us. That is a lot, and that was a good term. You're right for you and for the work that you've put in. And great examples, really, because, as you said, each one of those bills has a long history, multiple efforts to make sure that they stay in progress towards the goal that you've finally reached. And that really sums up a lot of what we were talking about earlier in the conversation in terms of what you've learned over your time in the House and how much patience is required and how you need to get everybody, or as many, as important as possible. Takes a long time, and you've done it, so well done. Thank you. All right, so let's face forward now and talk to us a little bit because one thing I've learned through these updates, I've been getting in education the whole time, one thing I know is that what you started on January 6th is a brand new term which means everything that you were working on before, whatever stage it was at, you got to start the process at least again, right? So what are the things that hopefully, less than 10 years from now, you're going to be able to tell me, I finally got this bill passed? Well thanks for the question, James. That is right, the beginning of January, I was sworn in to a new term as your state representative, as well as the 159 other state reps and 40 other state senators all being sworn in. The day after that we were sworn in, we had a swearing in of a new governor and a new lieutenant governor and a brand new auditor and a brand new attorney general. So we have tremendous change here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and tremendous opportunity as well. And what you did not read maybe in the news after both of those swearing in or inaugural events, legislators had maybe a two, three week window to file legislation. So I have been filing all of my bills, I have around 60 pieces of legislation that run the gamut on a whole host of issues around education, public higher ed, transportation, schools with disabilities and addressing climate change and housing. And so now we will be working over the next two years to try to build support to get those done. And I can run down kind of my individual bills, but I think it's more important at this point because it's kind of the first talk of the town, up the legislative update for this session is kind of talk to you about the major pieces. So Governor Healy now and Lieutenant Governor Driscoll just filed one of their first pieces of legislation which is no surprise to me or to any of my viewers was a housing bond bill. We have a housing crisis. People are having a very difficult time being able to stay in their homes. We need to address this. We need to do more to support individuals living in our housing authorities. We need to develop more housing stock. We need to allow for more raft vouchers and more mass rental voucher program, MRVP, the mass family rental voucher program to create more opportunities so people can stay in their homes. Right now we have a housing crisis. We have a lack of accountability crisis as well. We have so many people heading back into hotels, motels, which is the exact opposite of where we want to be and where we should be going. We need to have these folks find permanent housing. It is absolutely critical. So I believe this term we will be coming up with a piece of housing zoning, a piece of legislation that addresses this issue for a whole host of ways. That's really important. This passed on the ballot in November. The voters decided to vote for a constitutional amendment known as the fair share amendment. It is also known as the millionaire's tax that does a tax on income of those earning more than a million dollars. We're not talking about assets. We're talking a paycheck of more than a million dollars and some estimates estimate that we're going to receive as much because that did pass. Some estimates say that we're going to receive as much as 1.5 to 2 billion dollars a year on revenue. That our belief and our hope is that we're going to dedicate that revenue to public education and public transportation and infrastructure. So one of the pieces of legislation I filed this session is known as the cherish act. 85% of our young people that leave graduate one of our 29 public higher education institutions from community college to state university to UMass upon graduation they stay in the Commonwealth and they are invested in our communities and one of our 351 cities and towns but they are strapped with loads of debt and costs and fees continue to rise on these students every single day and the share of the investment the Commonwealth has made to their education into the 29 public higher education campuses has steadily decreased over the years as costs have risen from meals to textbooks to dorms and it's really outrageous and we as a Commonwealth need to invest in public higher education which is what the cherish act would do and would freeze tuition and fee rates and finally invest and I can't think of well there's a whole host of important things to invest in but I can't think of something more important in terms of the economic growth of our Commonwealth than investing in our public higher than our young people our students in public higher education. So I'm hoping and we'll be working and trying to pass the cherish act but make sure that part of the fair share amendment that the people voted on and supported and passed will go to supporting everything from early ed but also to public higher education. Another huge piece of that is of course and we were talking about it right before the program is investing in public transportation. We have a crisis in the MBTA especially here in the 23rd middle sex district. We are able to save some of the bus routes like the 80 but it's not going to reach me or anymore. It's going to Davis. Nearly every bus route out of Alewife 79 was canceled. That's outrageous. I've you know the previous GM I spoke three or four times to him about the cuts the draconian cuts that were made to the MBTA bus routes under the false pretense of efficiency and kind of a fake study that was done during covid that ridership was down. Of course it was down. It was down. It was down across the 175 MBTA community region. Right. People are coming back. And just like public higher education if you want to grow the economy if you want to invest in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts you have to invest in people. That's an education. That's our workforce. Guess what. You also have to transport these people to from their homes to their jobs and because they can't count on the MBTA to get them to their work their place of employment they're getting in their cars which is creating such congestion on our infrastructure that it's creating real problems. So one of my hopes with the fair share amendment and hoping that we'll see that kind of leadership from the Healy administration is that it is time to invest in our infrastructure but it's time to invest in our MBTA and the first thing we can do to get the buses back on our roads and restore our public transportation is the biggest struggle we've had since covid. The biggest challenge we've had is the fact that we can't hire the requisite number of our drivers bus drivers to be able to get buses back on the road. You can't you can't have a service if you can't have anyone to drive the buses. And I think we all know that bus drivers are not treated well on the whole by the general public. And so I think we need to do a few things. I think one is we need to come up with a salary that is better than that made in the past with salary and benefits to encourage people to become bus drivers. I think we have to find a way to treat bus drivers nicer more nicely so that they can have the impetus to do that job. So that is what I'm really hoping that this administration will put forth and that the legislature will pass legislation to invest in public higher education general ed early ed but also public transportation. It is critical. Well you will truly go down in the annals of legislative genius. If you're able to come up with legislation help that makes people be nicer to drivers and others. I think that would be great. We will hail that to the heavens when it happens. It's important. A couple of points in support of what you were just saying particularly about the MBTA. We were talking before we went on air. You took you more than an hour to go the eight and a half or nine miles from the state house to our studio today in your car which you had to do because of the public transportation situation as you said. So that's not good. And that that feeds right into an article that I saw recently in which Boston by if you measure it by the amount of time that is lost in congestion Boston is the fourth worst city in the world in the world. Chicago is worse apparently but that's the only American city. Right. You know crazy crazy. So you you're not kidding when you say we have a crisis. We never think that we were more congested than L.A. Right. It's just amazing. New York and New York. Yeah. It's it's it's a crazy thing. All right. So we we have as usual we've we have filled up the the half hour in no time at all. I will say for future for future conversations you know getting your thoughts on. Well let me just ask you in the minute that we have left what do you think about the big changes as you already cited in Massachusetts here especially in the governor's mansion lieutenant governor attorney general etc. What do you think. I think it's exciting. You know more Healy is not new to state politics. Right. She served as our attorney general for the past eight years. Kim Driscoll our new lieutenant governor is new to the state house but she's not new to governing. She was the mayor Salem a great city for for almost two decades I believe. So these are two individuals that are used to getting work done and rolling up their sleeves. I'm excited to be able to work with them. And you know we have a lot of challenges here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  I've already had several conversations with the lieutenant governor who I think is going to be a really hands on lieutenant governor as will the governor. And I think their their attitude and I think one of the benefits of both of them being in government in Massachusetts is that they know the legislature. They know the legislature how it works. They know that they need to be partners and they want to be partners in this work. And that's really really important in being able to get things done is to have a governor who's going to meet with legislators who's going to meet with the speaker in the Senate president to collaborate on getting things done. Now that doesn't mean we're going to agree 100 percent of the time on everything. That doesn't happen in the House. That doesn't happen in the Senate. And it's not going to happen between the legislature and the governor. But we've made a commitment to work with each other to get things done. That's the way she's acted as attorney general. Right. We've worked together on a whole host of issues to make positive progress. And I have no reason to suspect that that won't happen or continue to happen these next four years as she serves as our governor. Well I'll tell you what Massachusetts. There's a lot of grim news out there in the wider world. Massachusetts nice place to hunker down and try and get it right. Lots of lots of problems to address as you mentioned but also a good reason for hope. So there you have it. I have been speaking of course with Sean Garberley who is our representative here in Arlington and with a little bit of West Medford Drone in as well. And this has been a legislative update for talk of the town. We really appreciate Sean's time always. Thank you James. Thank you very much. And we appreciate yours as well. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm James Milan. We'll see you next time.


When people learn that I was a 911 dispatcher for three years at my previous job, I get some different reactions depending on who they are. Sometimes they walk away. Sometimes they give me looks of derision, especially in the climate toward police departments these days. I often get asked what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened, or what's the craziest story that you heard, or, hey, did you hear about that chicken nugget drive through emergency? It was on YouTube. Thing is, sometimes I feel ashamed about working for the police department, especially in today's culture. I have stories about the weirdest thing that's ever happened, or the craziest story that I've ever heard, kind of in my back pocket, ready to go to answer those questions. Yes, I've heard about the chicken nugget drive through emergency on YouTube, and I'm here to tell you that it's kind of boring as a previous dispatcher, right? Like, you can go look it up, and it's like, oh, that's funny, it's not really funny. I've got a better story, you can catch me in the hallway, I'm glad to share it. The thing is that there's no real good stories that come out of being a police dispatcher, because it's so rare that you get the full arc of the story that actually occurred. Dispatch, police dispatch is right at the very beginning of an extremely large criminal justice funnel. It begins with somebody picking up the phone and calling 911, usually, and it can take months, years, sometimes a person's entire life to go through completion. So as a dispatcher, you get like this little tiny nugget at the very beginning. So I'm not here just to tell stories about 911 dispatch, although that would be super cathartic for me, I'm here to tell stories that illustrate how my experiences in dispatch and some of the techniques that I learned either by training or through the gauntlet of fire as it were, right, have helped me to become a better user experience designer. I'm currently the UX director for TenUp. We're a web agency doing enterprise websites, solving that content management system problem, and I use these skills every time, every day, right? For me, my experience as a 911 dispatcher was extremely formative, and I hope that some of these stories help you understand how to build better software yourselves. All right, so the slides in the background are not tied to the talk, as you can already tell they're there in case you get bored of listening to me talk, and they also are there to give you a sense of the place. This is what I could find on the internet. Dispatch is kind of a secretive thing. Police departments don't like to share information, so it was kind of hard to go back and piece together some of my three years there, but I want to give you a sense of where I worked and some of the stories and things that made the news, some of the things that were happening, things we found funny or annoying, right? Also, a trigger warning for this talk. I am going to talk about my perspective as a call taker answering 911 calls, dealing with subjects such as attempted suicide, violence, weapons, and chihuahuas, if any of those things make you uncomfortable, no worries, it's about a 40-minute talk. And then finally, I've always wanted to say this. Also, aspects are innocent until proven guilty by the court of law. Right, no, all seriousness. These situations that I'm about to describe, they took place a number of years ago, there's no personally identifiable information. If you do happen to know anyone that was actually involved with this, please talk to me, because I want to know what happened. One of the most important skills for a UX designer is the ability to conduct user research. Our goal is to build software for humans. That's actually been a recurring theme, which is pretty cool, right? Like nobody's building software for extraterrestrials yet. And even if you were, you would still want to interview them to find out what they need, right? And generally, this means a lot of user interviews. And it means asking good questions to uncover the often unstated needs and goals of those users. And now, if you're following along with like, police and unstated needs are kind of making those connections really, really quick. But I'm going to tell you a story that illustrates this pretty broadly, the unstated part anyway. At a man who gave me a call, this is 911, right? So my recording, because we don't actually say this every time we answer the phone, my recording picks up 911, what is your emergency? And this is what he says. I need an ambulance. Pro tip, no one ever says that if they just need an ambulance for a medical reason, right? Like that's weird. Nobody says, I need an ambulance.  And so that was like a red flag. Now, here's the thing about Scottsdale Police Department. We were a public, they are, I was, a 911 primary public safety answer point, which means that all of the 911 calls originating in my city were routed to my call center and we answered them. If it was a police emergency, we would also do the call taking, asking the questions and dispatch the police. If it was a fire or medical emergency, we would get the fire department on the line. They would ask all of the medical or fire department related questions and they would dispatch the ambulance or the fire department. So I could have transferred this on to somebody else, but that's not what I did. I asked a very important question. Why do you need an ambulance? And his response was equally unsettling because there's a man who's shot in my apartment, right? Which was like, eyes open, okay. I'm paying attention now, right? And follow up questions to that that are equally open-ended and trying to solicit more information to uncover what really happened here. Who shot him? I shot him. Oh, great. Now I'm dealing with a potential murderer. No joke, right? And so we're routing the call to the police department and getting address information, trying to assess the condition of the person who shot him and this guy's continuing to give really vague and interesting answers that aren't making a lot of sense. So I keep asking open-ended questions and trying to dig deeper. And the outcome for the police department was probably the best it could have been. I was able to get him to put the alleged gun that he had down and go meet with the police officers with nothing in his hands. That means that he didn't get shot because answering the door with a gun in your hands is not a good idea. And the officers were able to enter the building. And I learned later, right? Because again, answering 911 means your calls end and like you don't know what happened. I learned later, because these officers were willing to share, they entered the apartment and it was lined with little airline bottles of alcohol that were empty. And this guy was very, very intoxicated. So good, and incidentally, I really hope that they revoked his ability to fly commercial airline jets. Just saying. Good questions. Questions to elicit more information are open-ended. They're non-leading because good questions like that get good answers. Looks like a drink of water. When asking questions, when talking with stakeholders, when talking with other developers, sending email back and forth and so on. Playing simple language might not win any literary awards. But it helps, but it's easier to understand the intent, right? It helps people understand what you were trying to say. Mariko hit on this perfectly yesterday in her talk about language. And I'm gonna give some examples from my experience that are similar. Because police work is filled with jargon and codes and all sorts of crazy stuff like that. If you've looked at any of the police code lists, right? It's filled with 10 codes and three digit codes that are kind of hard to interpret and understand. And every police department kind of has their own way of modeling this. If you're on the West Coast, it's derived from the Los Angeles Police Department. Usually if you're on the East Coast, it's derived from the New York City Police Department. Usually, and then everybody gives it their own spin, which means every single police department has their own way of speaking in codes and nobody knows what each other is saying. This is illustrated by the following. In Scottsdale, the police code 907, which is 907, means an officer is in need of urgent assistance. This is contrasted with a 906, which just means, hey, I need some backup when you get here. Maybe it's a traffic stop, like just kind of hang out, watch the other guy and we'll go get done. It's afterward. 907 means, oh my God, get here quick because I'm in like a fight on the ground and it's bad. Incidentally, in Scottsdale, the police code 1097, just means the thing that you sent me to go do, I've arrived on the scene. I got there, right?  That's a problem, right? In Mesa, which is the city just southeast of Scottsdale, a 907 is a disposition code. It means the officer got done with the thing that they were working on and they said, go ahead and clear this with a 907. It just means I need to follow up with this person or this case later. Big difference. In Phoenix, which is just to the west of Scottsdale, a 907 is routine backup. Phoenix is 907, and Scottsdale is 906, and Mesa's 907 is nothing at all, right? This has critical implications and I mean critical in the most literal sense of critical, critical implications when these police departments are working together, which happens on things like a cooperative DUI task force in the East Valley. Some more examples of this would be vehicle descriptions. We are taught in police work and I was actually taught this in private security before that. The security officers that are floating around, they might have learned this. There's a way to describe vehicles using an acronym called Symbol, C-Y-M-B-A-L. It says for color, year, make, body style, anything else you notice in the license plate. You don't need to write that down because it has no relevance for software development. But, I'll give you an example of what this sounds like because it's a consistent way of describing a vehicle. So it'll be like this. All units copy and ATL for a possible 390 driver. All units copy and ATL for a possible 390 driver. Northbound Loop 101 from Shea. It's a dark gray 2012 Toyota Tacoma pickup with Wash Me, Written in Dirt on the back. Oregon plates of 917, Frank King, King. Basically, we're at 1421. Here's, and that includes all of the, pause for that, that's like every day, guys. That's every day. The, that was a contrived example to include all of those things. Here's one that actually happened. Ready? This is a stolen vehicle. It's in downtown Scottsdale, busy party Friday night or whatever. And it's a stolen vehicle, so you have to select the entire city. Everybody's gonna hear it and broadcast this description to every single officer in the city, which is kind of fun. All units copy and ATL for a 1040 vehicle. ATL for a 1040 vehicle. It's a pink six-seater golf cart with a sign on the side, saying bunny rides bouncing club to club. No further base clear at 1422. I kid you not. The, almost the instant I transmitted that, and the opportunity to switch back to my own channel and everything the lieutenant pulls up, pulls up the radio, right? And he calls me, he's like, base, three L three, can you, 10 nine the description, repeat the description. 1040, three L three is a pink six-seater golf cart with a sign on the side, bunny rides bouncing club to club. Straight face. Three L three, 10 four, and behind the vehicle. 10 four, three L three. All units hold your traffic for a three L three with a 10 40 vehicle, a gold water and third. It's a pink six-seater golf cart. One atom is restricted. And that's how you do this. Common plain language helps audiences engage, especially those that aren't in your community to begin with the outsiders as it were, right? The acronyms and emoji that you use on a regular basis within your community might help build culture. In fact, they do help build culture, but recognize that every time you use one of those, acronyms, emojis, memes, whatever it is that's unique to your community, you're also alienating everybody who's not inside of it. And it sounds to them the same way that that police gibberish just sounded to you guys. Using a structure for your communication, such as issues, bug reports, meeting notes, whatever it is, helps people fill in the gaps where they don't immediately understand what's being said. It gives them a context. By giving vehicle descriptions in the same way every time, if I didn't quite understand that you said gray, by knowing where it comes in the lineup of that vehicle description, I can fill in the blank and know that that thing that kind of was gray, right? One of the strongest tools for a 911 call taker and for a UX designer is to know when to not say anything at all. Letting silence create attention, and when the other person starts to talk, listening really carefully at what they're about to say, is super powerful. The inclination for people to fill that void is so strong they'll end up incriminating themselves. Here's an example. I got a call on non-emergency this time, and so my recording picks up. Scottsdale Police, this is Taylor, how can I help you? And no joke, he put actors to shame with how much he could curse over the next 10 minute window. It was, I wish I had recorded it and memorized the script, it was amazing, right? Like the stream of vulgarity that went on on the other end of the line was incredible. And I can't even begin to replicate it, nor would I if I had memorized it. As he started to slow down over this course of 10 minutes, so he'd go for like three minutes and start to slow down and I'd just come, mm-hmm. I need to start back up again. Yeah, start back up again. Oh yeah, yeah. Right, and eventually he ran out of things to say, which is pretty incredible that he had distinct things to say the whole time. And he ended up threatening the officers that gave him a ticket. If I ever see officers so and so and officer so and so I'm gonna kill him. Pro tip, it's not a good idea to threaten an officer's life. I sent an email to those two officers letting them know the person who said this, what they said, offered to give them the recording of the call if they wanted it. And apparently they went to the gentleman's house, the next day to provide some customer service. Next time you're talking with a collaborator, a stakeholder colleague, whatever it is, try asking an open-ended question, a good one, and let the silence run just a bit longer than usual and see what happens. It's awkward, isn't it? Like, what's he gonna say? Getting a call, okay, I'm gonna take this serious now. So I gave you the warning beforehand and here we go, right?  Now, all of our calls at a 911 call center can be scary things to listen to, right? But there's something that is different about this particular caller than the others. So I wanna give kind of an example, put this into context. Another really scary thing that can happen to people is intimate partner violence, domestic violence, and so forth. If you are in a situation like that where you don't feel comfortable with the person that you're with, you don't feel comfortable leaving, they're not letting you leave the house, whatever it is, right? Please talk to somebody. I don't wanna diminish that. But for us in dispatch, it was a routine, sadly routine call that happened over and over again to the point where the questions I would ask were the same every single time and they hardly ever changed. What's the address? Is it physical or verbal? Are there any weapons involved? Are there any kids in the house? Are there any dogs? What's his name? What's his date of birth? What's he look like? What's your name? What's his date of birth? What's you look like? That sort of thing, right? Send two officers, dispatch within three minutes, done. Sadly, sadly routine. By contrast, every suicidal caller has unique needs and a unique circumstance and these calls are what we call exigent circumstances. That means that's a legal term and what it means is that as a police department, we did not need to get a warrant in order to search your phone records to call the cell phone company to get an address. We did not need a warrant to enter your home. This is where your life is in danger. It's exigent circumstances and it's serious and it can unfold in a matter of minutes and it can unfold in a matter of hours and as a call taker, you stay on the phone for as long as it takes to resolve that situation and every situation is different. Okay, so September, this is the disclaimer here. September was National Suicide Prevention Month.  Seek help, there's crisis lines, counselors, a friend, 911, Suicide Prevention Line is 1-800-273-TALK. I'm available if you feel comfortable talking with me, but please reach out. The topic that we got onto is not suicide, right? The topic is knowing when to be quiet, knowing how to have empathy and communicate with somebody, letting them know or knowing how to control that conversation to a point where you're not pushing for information too hard, where you're listening to understand their needs and so forth. The example of this had the best possible outcome, right? And I don't even remember how the call came in because I'm probably blocking it subconsciously. This gentleman called and he did say that he was looking to hurt himself and he had a gun with his hand, which to anybody who's worked in suicide counseling, plan means having a time and intention are the things that are indicators of how much of a risk somebody is. Having a gun in your hand saying you wanna hurt yourself is pretty high on that list. And thankfully I was able to talk this gentleman into putting the gun down first, walking into another room second, talking to a police officer third and he got the counseling that he needed there. Best possible outcome. But it's those type of calls are a push and a pull between asking too many questions too fast, having empathy to build trust so you can ask more questions, having empathy to build trust so that you can ask them to request them to do something. I wanna disambiguate empathy and sympathy again, proffer yet another definition of the two because this is how I learned it and maybe this is helpful for you, maybe it's not, take it with what you will. The way I learned it is that empathy is understanding someone's emotions more objectively, I understand these are the symptoms, this is how we can move you forward in your life, this is how we can get you out of this. I can show you the light because I understand what this means. Sympathy is where I actually feel those same emotions, much less productive. If you have somebody who is depressed, it is much more helpful to understand why they might be depressed, how you can help them, where you can move forward, what their needs are at the time than it is to become depressed because two depressed people is much less productive. That's my proffer of a distinction between sympathy and empathy. If you disagree, I'd love to chat in the hallway. Okay, so getting off of that topic because that was a downer, sorry about that, slightly afternoon. Working in an online call center, like working in an open source community, is this collaborative app, like working in any community, right? Like any job anywhere, it's a collaborative thing. Within the call center, there's this intense collaboration between the call taker who's receiving the call and the dispatcher who's giving to an officer. It's critical that those two people, and then further on down the chain, the responding officers, the district attorney, whatever it is, that everybody understands the problem, takes ownership over the problem within their purview, and has agency to make change if they need to. The story that I wanna tell is this great push and pull between, not push and pull, there was no push, this great exchange between myself as the call taker and my dispatcher. Got a call from a lady on emergency again, who was very distraught. She had just received a call from Victim Services. Her husband was being released from jail that evening. He had been put in jail the previous evening for holding a knife to her throat, and she was understandably upset about this development. I have no idea why we were releasing her husband after less than 24 hours after doing this. But nevertheless, she had the foresight to call the police department, which was great. So I asked her a couple of questions, two of which are important, right? Are there any dogs in your house? Yes, I have a few chihuahuas. Great, you can deal with chihuahuas. Are there any guns in the house? Yes, I've got his arsenal. Okay, is there any place else you might be able to stay this evening?  No, there's no else I can stay, and I'm certainly not gonna tell her that she can't defend herself, although not necessarily a good situation. Put in what's known as an FYI call for your information, and that just goes into the system. It links to the address. If we ever pull it up, we can see it. It lets the dispatcher know what's going on. If any of the officers decide to pull up their calls, they could see it, but it's not gonna get dispatched. My dispatcher decides to change that FYI from an info call. She's like, nope, I want an officer to acknowledge this distinctly. She sends it to the beat officer to go talk with this woman. Fine, fast forward several hours that's a fine picture of me, isn't it? Fast forward several hours into my shift, and I get a call in 911. Now I'm telling the story, so you're gonna make this link immediately, but I had no idea this was her on the other end of the line because she's just screaming, right? All I hear is screaming. Oh, these are lovely, oh my God. So I enter the call with the 911 information that comes from using a landline, and we route the call. I put it in as what's known as a 415 other priority. That's gonna send two officers within three minutes to some sort of disturbance, I don't really know what it is yet, and I'm working on gathering some more information. My dispatcher recognizes that it's the same address as before, and she goes, hey, that's the same address. I'm gonna send another officer, fine. She has the ability to change the situation. She has the agency to change that situation, she's taking ownership over that call, right? So she keeps it as the 415 other and just adds another unit to it. So now three officers are going, and no sooner did she do that than I hear this, bang, okay, so cognitively, gunshot, right? And the beeping, I know cognitively, does not mean that there's a heart rate monitor hooked up to the headphone, and that was a flat line. But what's going through my head and emotionally my response is that, oh my God, she just died, scary. The call gets upgraded to an unknown problem. All of the officers in the district are going as fast as they can.  Help ma'am, are you there? Hello, can you hear me? Hello, hello, are you there? Hello, right, nothing. Again, answering, having stories as an unknown dispatcher can really stink unless you get some back story of what happened afterward, because that's all I knew for several hours, and I went on with my job answering calls and whatever. Turns out the beeping was the carbon monoxide alarm in her house. The bang that I heard was a gunshot. It was not at her, which logically makes sense, since she's the one with the arsenal at this point. She had fired a shotgun into the header above the door frame, and luckily for her soon to be ex-husband, I hope, he was not killed because it hit the door frame and not his head. The beeping was the carbon monoxide alarm both from the smoke from the gun discharge, but also because the officers found some 35 Chihuahuas in the house that had not been allowed to go outside for like three months. Some of you have dogs, or can imagine the situation, right? That also is what prompted the fire department to be responding, to check the air quality, to see if the Arizona Humane Society could enter the house. Apparently the officers, because when you go to a call like this, you have to clear the house. So every single room you're checking to make sure the bad guy isn't there, right? Clearing the house. Apparently they were slipping on three inches of dog poop. Vomiting in the yard is horrible.  And those dogs were, of course, dogs and some other stuff, I think the slide has gone through a couple of times, were of course taken from her. The last thing I want to talk about is less about an actual call and more just to talking about how our assumptions about what makes good software can be just dead wrong. Ooh, bad pun, sorry, dark humor, can be incorrect. The first of these four is we had a system computer aided dispatch, several computers set up, its main function is to allow you to enter calls for service, show you all the calls for service that have yet to be dispatched, show you all the officers that are not on a call, show you all the officers that are on a call and the map, because maps are nice. When I got there, after I got released from training, so about a year into my career, I was looking at this map and this is horrible, right? Like I have some design sense and whoever put this together, the colors were just like all over the map. Literally, anyway, it was horrible. So I put together a proposal to change the colors to make it more design friendly, like how many degrees of separation do we need, how many different colors, let's keep them within the same hue, whatever it is, let's make it calmer on the eyes and so forth. Got it approved by a whole bunch of different people, finally instituted in the program and I forgot, I did not understand one thing about how this map was used, which turned out to be kind of annoying for people. In our city, in Scottsdale, the city is very skinny, up to a certain point and it becomes huge, very broad. It's divided into four districts, one, two, three, four, as you go up and each district is divided into a whole bunch of different beats and those beats were what was colored differently. Right at the nexus between skinny and large was one beat that was colored the most, the brightest pink you have ever seen, it was horrible, I hated it, but it meant that when the map was way zoomed out, it's very small and a pin is put in the map, you could see where the bright pink spot was, see where the pin was and get a general sense for where in the city that pin was without having to look at any of the roads or the outlines or anything else, because the bright pink spot was your reference location, was your registration for the maps, kind of geographic, I had no idea. And it turns out that implanting a new color scheme for the map was pretty disruptive for a while. Second thing is building an intranet. The first one I got there, the way the information was collated was we type it into a Word document, maybe add some navigation at the top of that Word document, but it would be pages upon pages in this Word doc and to find something like what do you do with a dead bird if someone's asking, right? Like you pull up the Word doc, control F, type bird or something, right? It would come up with a bunch of answers, you'd hit return until you got down into the doc to the thing that you were kind of looking for, not a brilliant system, but whatever. And I'm like, oh, I know, let's have an intranet, right? Like I know something about IAA and intranets and this is gonna be great. So I got the approval to build an intranet and that kind of blew up and eventually it's like, yes, we're gonna build a SharePoint thing and now we have two problems, a Word doc and SharePoint. SharePoint's search feature is kind of the thing to highlight here, right? Like it's not just SharePoint, it's that I didn't really understand how the Word doc was being used, even though I was using it. In a Word doc, you can hit control F, you enter a couple of terms. It tells you how many terms are matching and you can hit enter to see the full text result, one after another. As you go down, it'll tell you, it'll show you how far down on the document you are, how fast you have a general reference of how far down you've got to go. In SharePoint, none of those things exist.  Not understanding how things were actually being used led to our systems becoming a little bit more inefficient over time. Third thing is backup systems. Thankfully I had nothing to do with this, but in a call center like 911, as you'd expect, there's all sorts of backup systems. What happens if the power goes out, the radias go out, whatever it is, right? We have a backup system in place to handle that, which is great because it's a mission critical emergency communications system. And I suspect that most of you working on various software components probably don't need the level of backup systems that we need. If the global internet goes down, you guys finally get to go out and go hiking and it's great. Maybe you will suffer from less burnout if that happens. However, I would suggest that some of your systems, some of your applications, some of your processes, some of your communities could benefit from a backup system of some type. What happens if the main developer on a software stack goes AWOL, just kind of disappears off the internet for a while, like does anybody have a phone number for them and address? Is there an alternate way to get a hold of them? What's the backup system for that? What's the backup system if GitHub disappears tomorrow? God help us all. Hopefully somebody has a repo cloned locally that's relatively up to date, and that's no big deal. And we can move on to whatever replaces GitHub. Things like that. It's a thought exercise I encourage you to go through. And one, that when the power was intentionally turned off late one night so that we could upgrade some stuff and we were on a card system instead of a computer system and manual phones, which was crud, we had a process in place and it was horrible, but you could get through it because it was there. The last thing is that our CAD vendor, computer-aided dispatch vendor, like vendors of a lot of software, including maybe some that you're working on, love features. We all know this, right? And like, oh yeah, we're gonna push back against features. Features sell their product, right? They can sell you a dispatch system, it costs a whole bunch of money to get installed. And the only way they're gonna get you to think about them again is for tweaks to that system, because it's proprietary and we're gonna tweak, we have to tweak it for your benefit and we were willing to do that. Or they're going to build enough features into their versions that eventually you will want to upgrade because of these features. And that's wonderful. But there's like this overlooked, what is the actual feature that people want? And it's often overlooked, like CAD has a number of built-in features that I described earlier, tracking units, tracking calls and all that stuff. One that's often overlooked is speed, right? Like in 911 dispatch, I could care less if I can right click on something and stroll to a contextual menu and click on a thing to open a dialogue to do something with it. Never gonna use that. What I'm gonna use is this like horrible command line interface that you built into it because it's the fastest way to get things done. T comma, 3L7 comma, goldwater slash third comma, comma, comma. License plate comma, state, right? That's like the syntax for entering a traffic stop and we did this daily. Add a vehicle to the call, ASUV comma, T37 for the unit, comma, comma, comma, I don't even remember it. My fingers remember it. In summary, I've touched on a number of points about building better software. I've talked about asking good questions to uncover the unstated needs and the underlying problem. This gave the story of the man with this refrigerator. I think. Used plain language and structured communications such as the 907 debacle and symbol for vehicle descriptions. Talked about sometimes how being quiet can provide the information that you're actually looking for. Highlighted by this guy who was on the phone ranting a whole lot. Talked about how everyone in a project should understand the problem that we're trying to solve and have ownership over the problem to within their job scope and have the agency to make change as they need to to build better software. Lastly, the software that you all write is absolutely meaningful. And I encourage you to go forth and write it but writing usable and effective software is really challenging. I encourage you to do everything you can to help solve people's problems better and you of all of the conferences that we could potentially be talking to are the right people to do that because you, unlike a lot of other people really understand humans. Thank you very much.


The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a miraculous text. At a time when the world emerged from cataclysmic events, the Declaration sets out universal rights and recognized the equal worth of every person. The Declaration, which was drafted by representatives from all over the world, embodies a common language of our shared humanity, a unifying force at the heart of which lies human dignity and the duty of care we owe each other as human beings. In the past 74 years, the importance of universal, indivisible and inalienable rights has only become clearer. Yet there is a growing disconnect between the standards on the one hand and the realities on the ground on the other. Even as the 30 articles of the Declaration have sparked transformation in all areas of our lives, the ambas of racism, misogyny, inequality and hatred continue to threaten our world. We face a triple planetary crisis and skyrocketing inequalities, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. And we are grappling with a rise in populist politics and authoritarianism, a deluge of misinformation both online and offline, and an alarming spread of conflict and violence. All of these factors are impeding our progress towards a freer and more equal world. In 2023, we will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is also the 30th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration on Programme of Action, which paved the way for the creation of my position, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and my office. The upcoming anniversary year will be our opportunity to recall the consensus envisaged by the Declaration to reset and to strengthen the remarkable human rights architecture that we have built over the years. With an eye to the past as well as to the future, I hope that the UDHR 75 initiative, which will be led by my office together with our partners, will allow us to rekindle the spirit, the impulse, the energy, and the vitality that led to the Declaration 75 years ago. The language and spirit of the Declaration have the potential to overcome division and polarization. It can make peace with nature, our planet, with each other, and point the way to sustainable development for future generations. The light of the Declaration can shine in the daily lives of individuals in communities all over the world, in their neighborhoods, in schools, offices, and on the streets. But this requires our generation, including young people, to give the Declaration new life, to take ownership of it and to repurpose it to meet the needs of our times and the challenges of our future. In 2023, I invite everyone all over the world to take up the torch for human rights and use these rights to forge a common future of dignity, freedom, and justice for all.


Hi guys, welcome back to this channel. It's Mix from the next creation. If it's so fast, come across this channel, consider subscribing. By the way, don't forget to hit that notification bell because it's always very important for you to get the updates wherever we upload a new video. What are we looking at? We are going to look at the frequently asked questions about security girls in Qatar and one of the questions that is being frequently asked is how much is the security guard paying in Qatar? I think most of the time we talked about how much is the security guard paying in Qatar but definitely it cannot stop me for people who have come to the channel for the first time. I definitely need to know something that you need to know about the payment of security guards in Qatar. It will depend actually there are a lot of factors that are going to depend and one of the factors is just going to depend on your experience, how much experience you have in the Gulf. You've been in the Gulf for quite a long period of time then you definitely know that you'll have a little bit of higher payment. Also sometimes also something that we need not to underestimate, we look at the gender, we look at the male and the female. Sometime you find that the male are paid more salary compared to the female because the male definitely sometimes need to work more hours compared to the female and definitely you find they have they have more pay that we can see.  Then definitely you will also depend on the project what kind of project you're working for. Those projects what you call the government projects they are those projects for the under individual projects they are projects like you're going to work in a hotel and security guard so definitely all those kind of projects will also matter or will also define how much you are going to be paid and all this that we are talking about it will be sometime depending on either you basic salary or you over time salary that will come your way depending on your capital project. But when we look at what the government gazeten or according to the government gazetion regarding the basic wages or the basic salary in kata is that a guard that is supposed to be earning every security guard or domestic worker or cleaner the minimum basic or the minimum the basic salary the minimum amount of money the person is supposed to earn is supposed to be 1000 kata riyal that is after working for eight hours you are not supposed to earn below that amount of money that is according to the government gazet that was released on march 2021 where it was officiated that that could be the basic salary and still on top of that what you need to understand is that they will give you what you call a food token a food token of what you call the food allowance is called a token and it means unequivonito 300 kata riyal depending on whether the company provides for you food or the company does not provide for you food that is a true scenario if the company provides for you food then they will not give you that token meaning that after eight hours of duty you are entitled to basic salary of 1000 which is pretty not a bad idea which is not a bad deal in one way or the other then when we look at the total amount what you are supposed to earn at the end of the day then we look at have you taken your day off there are some companies that do not give you day off and you'll definitely count the old total sum of it all and those companies that will give you day off and definitely after giving you day off they will subtract that day off you get so meaning that you're also going to be a lighter you're going to get a different amount of money in one way or the other so definitely that will give the changes will give the violations the violations within the changes the salary that is being received then something on top of what you call the overtime or the total amount of monthly salary that you will be getting at the end of the month it will depend on what kind of particular projects that you are working for some are working what you call government projects and there is actually an amount of money that should be paid to everyone who works in that project then also those that are working private projects depend definitely well how you are going to be located or where you are going to work in sometimes so you find that yourself that apart from the basic salary then definitely you have to earn that amount of money which is also going to include what you call your overtime in one weather and something that still we need to understand that when you look at accommodation much is much as it is gazeted by the government to be paid accommodation allowance most of the security guards companies here in kata they do give accommodation to their guards and definitely that is something that they tentatively tend to do because there is one to keep people in one and one area so they will give you accommodation they definitely also they will give you what you call transportation so you find that they are only catering for your basic salary overtime time then also catering for your food allowance in case they are not given to you and something still I have to let you know that in case that company has to give you food food provide food for you then it has to be 30 meals a day that is lunch that's a breakfast lunch and dinner which has to be served to you and this one must contain all the food values according to the ministry of labour uh to ministry of labour and that is definitely what you need to hope I've tried to share something for you thank you so much for coming back this channel by the way don't forget headstate to put a comment in a comment section tell me what you think tell me what you want me to talk about uh definitely I'll be able to get back to you thank you so much see you again in the next next video this makes from your expression


One the future could be like this Well, we are literally drowning in data That's kind of already I think some people already feel like you know constant notifications or We could become superhuman Right Where we can reach the universe, right? No limit to what we can know It's funny now every second movie that's made in Hollywood these days has the same motif Which is that we become superhuman by plugging into the internet directly Called the singularity Now this is a very dangerous thought officer are they going to say what this is a machine calling you and you probably hang up So it's an interesting angle, you know, I think okay Could be amazing useful convenient strange creepy confusing dehumanizing Hard to say The jury is out on this, but I think we have to think about this Everything that we do has to in the end make greater human purpose So the typical example of how we push in the boundaries like virtual reality Maybe it'll be so good that we don't even want to go without it anymore And we're just kind of falling off the cliff there. And so that's a key question How much technology is too much technology when we use social media They're sort of distracting us and could be perceived as good or bad, but in the future artificial intelligence quantum computing The blockchain genome editing virtual reality Well, that's not the future. That's the day It's here now So we have to ask the question, right? Is it more important to have algorithms or is it more important to have relationships? Or the answer, of course, it's both right. I mean, we should not put algorithms over Andro rhythms, you know human things we should not always put convenience over consciousness Machines don't do relationships and relationships are 95% of what matters to us So combining those two things will be very important You know, it's a huge skill shift from the from the left brain You know the mathematics the calculation to the right brain a skill shift the world economic forum has pointed out The skills are shifting from 2015 to 2020. So critical thinking creativity emotional intelligence cognitive flexibility If we have kids or you're about to have kids This is what they have to learn What makes them more human? This is the key question underneath all of this How computable are we? Is that the digital GERD? Is it possible to express ourselves in data? Are we just algorithms? I mean, it's interesting when you ask that question in Europe, you get people are saying, oh, no, not this But in China or Silicon Valley people are saying, yeah, maybe we're just technology That is a question we have to answer eventually You know, otherwise we can have these kind of situations Where machines can give us good counsel Or we can just get a download of the latest skills That could be quite useful as envisioned in many science fiction If we're just data then this is our logical destination But here's the thing on the end Human intelligence means a lot more than just numbers Man and machine, woman and machine are converging And some people think it's a good idea if we also then become essentially technology You know, we've heard the debates about singularity and the whole convergence of man and machine I mean, who in this room does not want to be superhuman, right? I mean, that's kind of like we all think this is a good idea for us to gear up and become super powerful Now in this evolution, we're going in this world from mobile devices to handheld devices To maybe wearables and very soon brain-computer interfaces I mean, many people talk about this and how long would it take for that to work? It's already working, just too clumsy and too expensive Well, Microsoft HoloLens is $6,000 It'll be $500 in two years and then maybe $100 and maybe free eventually We've talked about these things, some of them for 50 years Like artificial intelligence, it didn't happen We talked about 3D printing for 20 years now, not much happened But now, you see takeoff, escape velocity as they say I mean, it's funny, in the next 10 years we're going to see things that are straight out of science fiction 20 years, I mean, if you're my age, we will live to see what we call the singularity The convergence of man and machine Us mere humans aren't we supposed to have knowledge and turn the data into knowledge? Isn't that what we do? And now machines do it I'm not doing it all that well yet, but you can imagine 5 to 7 years quantum computing, million times the capacity, endless sensor networks We can get a machine with an IQ of 100,000 In theory And that machine will be vastly superior to us in terms of calculation I'll show you why that's not a reason to worry really But I mean, it does make you think If we have computers that have unlimited knowledge What's the change for us? When we have to think about this, do we want to collaborate with technology Or are we going to enter a place where there are conflicts? And who decides? With great power comes great responsibility Gardner just announced a couple days ago in the research organization Gardner That digital ethics is the number one topic for 2019 You'd be surprised because when you're in the tech business you're saying Okay, as Bartol Brecht once said, dinner first, then morals I mean, it's very hard to sell ethics It's not a product It's even harder to sell humanity But now companies like Microsoft and many other companies are saying It's very important for us to do the right thing with technology Because in theory, very soon we can do anything Here's a key question And given that we're talking about you're not far from Silicon Valley Who will be mission control for humanity? Who decides? Right now this is a minor issue or somewhat of an issue Because most of it is not really working that well yet We don't have perfect AI, we don't have the perfect IoT We don't have 6G networks We don't have quantum computers yet But they're right over there So this is a key question How do we control and how do we figure out what's good? And the best example is Facebook Gunning at democracy


Well, good morning. Good afternoon, or good evening, whatever you're listening. This is Davisville on KDRT LP 95.7 FM in Davis, California We live at KDRT.org online. I'm Bill Buchanan. I thank you for tuning in Well the Palms Playhouse in Winters is a fabled place for music. It started in a barn in South Davis in 1975 moved to downtown Winters in 2002 and Performers over the years have ranged from Taj Mahal and Steven Stills to Dar Williams local musicians like Mumbo Gumbo and many many more Well this month the Palms sent a message to its customers and friends known as the fronds of the Palms That it was going on indefinite hiatus because of the pandemic If that means the Palms might reopen someday or might not or anything in between. Well, any of that is news My guest today is Nora Carey who bought the Palms in 2016 with Andrew Friday I'm glad to welcome her back to the show We last talked with her when she and Andrew acquired the Palms and again that was in 2016 Nora. Thank you for joining us today My pleasure. I'm glad to be here. I should say we're doing this one like all the others lately by zoom So if you hear straight it's stray random electronic noises along the way. That's just zoom listening or Noises from my children in the background. Oh, that's true. That's true. All these things are part of the soundscape these days I do want to start by saying I was sorry to read about the hiatus I mean, I guess I can't say I was surprised, you know indoor concerts haven't been allowed for a long time now I'm wondering could you tell us more about what you mean by indefinite hiatus? Sure? Yeah, so We are not renewing our lease at the Winner's Opera House and That's primarily primarily because while our landlords have been generous in giving us a couple of months rent-free They were expecting us to pay rent throughout the Time that we weren't going to be able to offer concerts and it just wasn't financially feasible for us to continue if If there were a known end date You know if we knew that the pandemic was going to last another year or something like that I think we could probably do some fundraising and cover the rent, but with really no and insight It didn't seem right to to ask folks to pony up for for our rent especially since there are so many other really Worthy causes right now, you know people are hungry and jobless and Not that music is not important But it just didn't seem right to to ask for help when when we just don't know how long this is going to keep going so Removing out of the building, but the Palms as an entity doesn't necessarily have to to be done Music is always going to be important. We're always going to strive to to bring it into our community in some form, you know, whether that's through supporting programs in winters or beyond Or putting on outdoor concerts or you know, I I really personally want to keep Doing something with music in the community whether that's under the label of the Palms or not Okay, so so the Palms will no longer exist at that location, you know barring some unexpected change right, but the Palms as sort of a Brand or a moniker might continue Maybe at a physical location and but maybe more as sort of a sponsor of events Yeah, you know, I think that it remains to be seen what it's going to look like And I think that largely depends on how long the pandemic lasts and sort of what form are Our new normal takes when this is all done my parents have both been really active in the winners friends of the library here in town and they have put on a summer concert series at the in the Rotary Park at the gazebo every summer to benefit the friends of the library and One thought we've been kind of bouncing around is whether we would want to Extend the concert series beyond the month of July as it as it has been in the past and maybe You know put on a concert a week all summer and that could be partly sponsored by the Palms or or under the name the Palms or maybe house concerts or or traveling concerts or you know, I'm Keeping music in the community is my primary focus. I don't know how it's going to happen exactly, but you know I should mention you referred to your parents. You grew up in winners and I did you have lots of roots there And so it gives some meaning to your answer is what I mean to say Yeah, my dad's in position and a Music teacher he taught music in the kindergarten here for close to 20 years. I grew up with a lot of music in the home I married into another musical family my husband's parents owned a 16-piece big band for close to 20 years and Yeah, music is a really big part of our lives So some version of the Palms will continue at least we can hope yeah Wow, that's still a kind of big news that you know You'd be moving out of there and of course when the Palms this is before you bought it but when it moved from Davis to Winters 18 years ago now the idea of the physical location of it was was a big part of it because People have loved the Palms over the years. So if they know it, you know, it has a reputation I think that goes far beyond this region. That's one of the ways has been able to get these Really good musicians some very famous and some not some locally famous to play there Because the Palms has always been known as a good venue for that, right? So the idea that the physical location is ending That's takes a moment to digest. I guess it's true. Although I think you know people were equally Pretty shocked and upset when the Palms moved out of the barn. I think some people really thought it would never be the same I still have people say, you know, I loved the Palms when it was the barn and sure I'll keep coming in Winters, but it's you know, it'll never be the same Okay, well hard. I Have to add a personal note there because I'm one of those people who went to the Palms in Davis And I really liked it there, but I like it also where it's been in Winters I I think you and then Dave Fleming before you and then of course going back to Linda McDonough who started it all It's been a variety of people who have had a real sense of what's special about the Palms And so maybe I take your point there that if some of that spirit can continue in some new form Well, that's still significant. Yeah, I think so too.  I mean, you're not alone in having a small business that's just been hammered by this It hasn't been easy like I said before I have kids. I have two young kids at home. They've been struggling and so we've been struggling along with them My husband's a math teacher and hasn't had a lot of work recently. He's a on the university level So we've just been at home. We've been enjoying Planting a great garden and doing a lot of cooking and some adventures very close to home and trying to make the best of it Andrew has similarly not had a super easy time of it He's gotten really involved in the black lives matter movement in Sacramento has been organizing protests and And actually has been helping with some of the audio needs of the protests speakers and purification So, yeah, I think we're trying to make the best of a really rough situation and we really feel for all the other small businesses out there Yeah, that's And you said that towards the start of the interview to which which I thought your points well taken. There's there's a lot of Suffering and dislocation occurring right now, you know, the music obviously is still important But it's it's part of a wide range of things I wanted to ask you if your last concert then was in March, right at the location, right? Yeah, March 7th and Who was playing that night? It was the Carolyn stills Combo Carolyn Sills is a great singer and guitar player from Santa Cruz Santa Cruz area And she plays her own original music and then she also does this really great Patsy Klein special So this was the Patsy Klein Spectacular that she's put on a number of times at the Palms. I was gonna say you've that's one of your repeat performers there Yeah That night did anyone have any sense that that might be the last show? I mean the pandemic was starting to crowd in at that point, right? So that was a really unusual time. We had had the show the previous night was cancelled I think a lot of it a lot of the Sentiment in the room on those early nights in March depended on the sort of demographics of the audience shows with older audiences in Early March were really sparsely attended and a lot of people emailed us ahead of time asking sort of what we were doing in response to the pandemic and then certain shows didn't really feel much different from an average night, but I Was already by early March communicating with bands and booking agents for upcoming shows sort of asking What are we doing here? Are we gonna try to postpone this? Are we gonna try to keep going and I got a range of answers and so I think I Didn't necessarily know that that show on the 7th was going to be the last one, but It was you know at least going to be one of the last I Was really pushing to postpone or cancel shows and admittedly I mean Understandably some bands were resistant because of course it's their livelihood and They don't want to have to Put a hold on that. Yeah. Well, and I think it's hard to remember in some respects For me anyway what I was thinking in March about the pandemic But what I recall is that we all were kind of thinking you're hoping it might not Last as long as it has which in hindsight seems naive at least to me But I remember thinking that at the time that you know, well, maybe Maybe things will be better by summer or fall. Yeah, we postponed a lot of our spring dates to the summer Thinking oh, yeah by June will be fine and then you know May comes around and we have another round of emails Like well, maybe we'll push these to the fall and now it's just it's really an open-ended Question we don't we don't know yeah, what are you what are you hearing from the musicians overall as you say? It's you know, it's this is their livelihood to of course if they don't have venues to perform Yeah Well, I'm in communication closely with several musicians who've performed here and just other friends of mine who make their lives as touring musicians and It's been really hard. You know, I think a lot of musicians live paycheck to paycheck as it is some of them have found some success with online streaming With, you know donation based concerts or they've set up Patreon accounts where people can support them with monthly donations and Some musicians who have families have enjoyed not being on the road I think you know getting to spend more time at home has been really special, but it is all tinged with this sadness and insecurity about How long this is gonna last how long they can keep up the online shows? I've also talked to several sound engineers for whom this is, you know, huge and devastating and and they just feel like What's happening to their craft now if everybody's doing online shows they don't need sound engineers anymore and Yeah, it's scary for everybody in the business Yeah, I can say doing this show. I sure miss my sound engineer Yeah, doing this over zoom is uh, and this is actually a comment it's a little off the mark maybe but I remember discussing with a photographer when Digital photography made it much easier to improve the average quality of a photo But he made the point that that meant that you didn't you know, you raised the average but you lowered the best expression I don't know if I'm saying this quite as cleanly as I'd like to but no I understand and and it's it's a similar thing I think you know a musical performance where you've got at a good venue It's built for that with engineers and performers that are doing it You have the potential for a really wonderful peak experience and it's just not the same if it's you know mediated by by zoom It's true and it's also been a big learning curve for a lot of people trying to Figure out how to get the best sound quality in their bedrooms Yeah, I sing in a Local chorus and early on we were trying to figure out how to somehow have practice over zoom And we soon realized that that was just not possible, you know latency issues and everybody was trying to figure out their own situation at home and it just There's so many layers of technology over the top of the the music that it it kind of loses the joy It was quick station ID. This is Davisville on KD RT LP 95.7 FM in Davis, California I'm Bill Buchanan and my guest today is Nora Kerry Who is one of the two owners of the Palms in Winters if the Palms Playhouse? It's a concert venue among other things and it's on an indefinite hiatus Which Nora's telling us means that they won't be returning to that location But that's something of the Palms may continue So you've run the show for a few years. I wonder you must have had some interesting moments in that time Maybe particularly satisfying shows. I've seen a couple shows. I saw Peter Case there I guess it was a year ago that I thought was a typically wonderful Palms show He you know was comfortable and he was in good form and anyway, I'm wondering if you have a couple of moments from from running the Palms That might just sort of stand out for you Sure. Yeah, there are a lot, but a Few really big memorable shows for me were When we had trio dark Holly come They are a group from Molly who Released an album a few years ago with the Kronos quartet and they were touring with Kronos and then they had the opportunity to put on a few shows Without the quartet and we got to have them and it was so powerful Just their their whole presence on stage was was really mesmerizing Yeah, that was a lovely show We had we started this very Low-key sort of experimental Sunday afternoon jazz series really just because Well, I'm married to a jazz musician. My dad's a jazz musician. They actually Started playing in a band together just a couple months after I started dating my husband and You know, I think they and their friends just kind of wanted a venue to Put on some really relaxed shows, but then it gained momentum. We ended up having this Swiss Jazz pianist Nick Barch come with his group Ronan and that was one of the most How do I say this the room was transformed in a way that I'm not sure it had ever been Before at least under my watch. They had a lighting director with them Who despite it being three o'clock in the afternoon just transformed the room to be this Other worldly space the band were all in black and the lighting was really Severe and the the entire rest of the room was really dark. And so you were just in this Zone and the music was amazing. I'm sorry. I missed that just listening to you describe that that really sounds like Not your usual experience not our usual experience. We really lucked out and then I'll just mention one more We had hubby Jenkins come on two different occasions he had previously been in the Carolina chocolate drops and then sort of ventured off as a solo performer and he just Radiated cool calm and collected put the audience at ease had great banter It's just a solo show and I think everybody just loved having him he interspersed songs with Chapters from a kids choose your own adventure mystery book and Pulled the audience about you know should be turn left or right at the top of the stairs, you know And we so we were all sort of involved in the story as it unfolded and that was just great It was really fun. It must have been satisfying to be able to help shows like that happen. Yeah, I'm proud of that And and I is it is that part of what you want to have continued in whatever form the poem stakes? Definitely I Think it's okay to mention her on air We got a lot of help and support from Kate Ladish who was a longtime volunteer She started volunteering with the Palms right around the time that it moved to winters and over the years she's been lighting director publicist merch seller You know just all around helpful person and she gave us a lot of support and direction early on about Sort of the culture of the Palms and how to help it continue and also technical information about how to communicate with bands and You know how to set up the show we were Clueless when we started to be honest Well, it was a labor of love wasn't it when you and Andrew bought it. It really was. Yeah. Yeah You know Dave Fleming had it and he was you know wanting to call it a career and You know a place like the Palms particularly to the people who developed real affection for it Which I imagine includes the musicians, you know It has those moments in its story They're like those hinge moments, you know Like is this the end of it and Davis it had to leave because development was crowding in on the barn, right? And and so it landed in winners and then Dave needs to leave and then you and Andrew stepped up to get it You know the the pandemic of course has walloped so many things, right? But something that Kate said that that really stuck with me that that I hope to continue in some form was she was talking about The the shows where everything clicks you just You do all this work. There's this real scramble at the beginning You don't know if the show is gonna start on time. You don't know if you know The audience is gonna be happy or if the sound's gonna work out and then Not every show but a lot of shows There's this moment early on where you can just sit back and go. Yeah We pulled it off and that is the the magical feeling that I hope to continue in some form Yeah, and that's partly the magic of music, right? I mean music is Kind of an emotional language. Yeah, and so if you are Watching a really good performance and partly that's matter of matter of individual taste you know, if you like folk or jazz or what have you but if it's a good performance and Yeah, everything clicks That's really why people go to shows, right? I mean and listen as opposed to just have it in the background Right, there's something that happens. That's really very meaningful. Yeah, and you know under certain circumstances I think you can probably have that when you put on an album at home and Sit down and listen, but it's it's a different thing when you're in the room. There's there's some buzz between the the people on stage and the people in the chairs and everybody can feel it you know as a Actually, no, I forget was was the palms Or is it a nonprofit or were you set up as a profit business? Well, it's not a nonprofit And there was no profit so Well, I was wondering about but what I what I was leading to the question was, you know with the pandemic There were a variety of programs that were designed to to help small businesses Carry on for at least a while. Yeah, and I'm wondering was that useful to you and to Andrew Well, so there were a couple of programs offered through the small business administration But they were understandably primarily geared toward people on payroll helping businesses retain their employees and We have had people on payroll pretty consistently Throughout our time as owners, but only a couple people at a time But it just so happened that we didn't have anybody on payroll when the pandemic started. We were just in between Employees and so we weren't really able to take advantage of most of those programs So so you weren't you and Andrew then weren't employed by the poems We were not on payroll. No But it's remarkable you I'm sure I can only imagine the hours that you've all put into it. Yes, and to think that it was You essentially weren't getting any You know any paycheck for it and as you said there was no profit, right? Yeah, it's funny early on after I told my kids that the poems was not gonna continue my younger son Who's four said so maybe this time you could get a job where they pay you instead of you pay them Well, yeah, that's the honesty of a child, right? But I suppose, you know, you were after something I don't want to romanticize it. It's hard. It's hard work It's hard work, you know, but but you were after something different forms of payment. Definitely. Yeah, I I didn't have any Impression that this was gonna be a big moneymaker So a couple questions near the end, I guess one is and you mentioned this at the front a little there's there's a lot of places that are Supporting music people who hear this and think, you know, they want to help Where where can they look to help if what they want to do is help music keep good live music keep going That's a great question. Well, there are a couple of organizations that are working nationally and more locally to To try to get some federal support for independent music venues There's an organization called Niva national independent venue association, I think They've got a great website you can sign up for their emails if you want to and you can donate and they're trying to get Some sort of federal support package, so they're a really great one that's doing some work currently, but then I would say Sort of bigger picture find a venue that you love. That's a nonprofit and Sign up for a membership if you haven't We got a lot of great support and advice early on from the freight and salvage in Berkeley They're a nonprofit they could really use your help I imagine a lot of people would put you on that list nor they'd want to help you and Andrew and the poems We have gotten a lot of very generous offers of support and people who say that if we Want to start back up again that they'll help in any way they can We really appreciate it and I feel badly that we Aren't able to take people up on that right now To be honest, there's a burnout factor We were already, you know Struggling to keep our heads above water as are many other venues before the pandemic and this just Added such a another layer of difficulty that I feel like I need to just kind of take a breather So I hope that some of that support will still be there if we you know if we pop up again in a year or two years and Want to start something up. So does the poem still continue as an organization? So I'm actually exploring what it would take to become a nonprofit Okay, that's one possible outcome and If not, it'll just be I'm not sure exactly what the you know, the tax structure will be but an LLC or something like that that That could continue just indefinitely until we decide to do something with it Okay, and so so but the point then is there will be some entity that continues and I think that matters because the palms is at another one of its Junctions, that's right. Yeah, and if there's still an entity that continues and still an interest in continuing it then maybe it returns someday Yeah, um as long as people can keep an open mind about what that might look like. Yeah, okay Well, Nora, thank you very much for talking with us and I really appreciate your candor about all this It was a pleasure. Thank you And people you've got a facebook page and you'll keep your mailing list going the the palms right? So, okay, so all people can find that on google. Well, thank you. Nora very much. Thanks bill Uh, we've been talking with nor carry co-owner of the palms in winters. Uh, I am bill Buchanan. This is davis phil on kdrt Thank you for listening