Hello everyone, and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kili Iakina, your host and president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Honolulu recently enacted Bill 41, which lengthened short-term vacation rental stays to over three months, and this basically bans short-term rentals across most of Oahu. Now, this has become a very sensitive issue with passionate and well-meaning advocates on both sides. There are many people who believe that Bill 41 is good for Hawaii, that it will protect our neighborhoods and increase our housing for locals. Yet there are others who have grave concerns about Bill 41, and we're going to look at the views of one community organization today. Our guest is Dawn Borgeson, she's chair of the Friends of Kui Lima, which is a community group on the North Shore bringing voice to those affected by this issue. Dawn, thank you so much for joining us today. Aloha to you. Aloha to you too. Thank you for inviting me. You know, before we get started, very quickly, could you give our viewers a little bit about your own personal background and what you do? Well, what I do is right now, obviously the chair of the Friends of Kui Lima, I'm quasi-retired. My family has owned property on the island since the 60s. We're working on right now relocating over there probably permanently. But in the meantime, we've been very strong advocates of the North Shore, our family has been, and we've had property there around the Turtle Bay area since the early 80s. So this is a near and dear subject to us. We love the North Shore. I can understand. Dawn, how did you get involved in the Bill 41 issue? And tell us a little bit about Friends of Kui Lima. So Friends of Kui Lima actually started with Bill 89, which was in 2019. There were several parts of that bill that affected the North Shore community, especially but also around the resort area. And at the last minute, the resort area was actually left out of the bill. So we immediately became illegal short-term renters, period. And I connected with several other people that lived there as well as on property. And we kind of formed up this group because we had to go to an attorney to be able to get a declaratory ruling that we were actually resort property. We met all the requirements. And as a result of that, we kind of learned the hard way what worked and what didn't just in educating folks. So when this Bill 41 came around, we kind of fired up the band again. And this time decided we'd go ahead and do it in a much more partnership manner and developed our website and our communications. And we've been partnering with a lot of different groups around the island. I see. Now, Dawn, give us the nuts and bolts. Hold off. We'll have a lot of time to hear your critique of Bill 41 later on. But just right now, the basic facts, what is Bill 41? What does it do? What Bill 41 does is it basically kind of eliminates short-term rentals. Folks that had non-conforming use certificates previously can continue on renting, but they have to register. And then they designated specific areas in resort property areas as being permitted to be able to do short-term rentals. Anybody apart from that, if you didn't have a nuke, that's what those are called, the certificates, technically you're not eligible to apply for or to be a short-term renter for your properties. So that affects a lot of people across the island. On the North Shore, there's not only individual homeowners, but then there's folks that have condo units and that type of thing. Now, Bill 41 exempts the resort districts, however. So does that mean that people in resort districts on the North Shore can still do short-term rentals? Yes, it does. We're exempted by the tax maps that were included in Bill 41. Also too, in Waikiki, there's a couple of what they call condo tells that were exempted and considered resort property as well as Coalina. Unfortunately in Coalina, they cut it kind of in half. So a portion of that has continued to be resort property. And then another portion of it, they kind of dropped off similar to what happened to us a few years ago with Bill 89. Now, your concern is for those who are not living in resort districts and the impact this has on their ability to conduct short-term vacation rental businesses. Can you tell us a little bit about that impact? What kind of impact will that be upon, let's say the average individual who's just renting out a unit and what kind of impact will it be on businesses? Well, I can certainly say for the small business owners, folks that do cleaning, property management that aren't part of a larger group, this is really going to have a detrimental effect on them because of course they're going to lose some of that income, if not all of it in some cases. It also means that small businesses like plumbers, mechanics, those types of folks that go in and regularly take care of properties, those properties are no longer going to be rented. So it's kind of a question on how that's going to impact them. One thing I will say is throughout this entire process with Bill 41 is we've continually asked for data that supported the policy decisions that were made in order to say this is a good thing or a bad thing and that this is actually going to lead to affordable housing because we're very much for affordable housing across the island, but taking a sledgehammer to the approach doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. So obviously Don, you're referring to the claim that Bill 41 will actually make more housing available that local people can afford. You're saying if I hear you correctly, you've asked for the data behind that but you've not seen that. No, no, there's no data. In fact, we've done a lot of reaching out. We reached out to University of Hawaii. They should have a report hopefully coming out sometime this summer about housing on the island. I don't know if it'll be just limited to Oahu, but also the other islands as well. But there's no appreciable, you know, objective data that we can locate. A lot of people refer to the tourism authorities office as having data, but some people probably don't know. That's self-reported data and a lot of it comes from the hotels because that's kind of their anchor on where they're getting information. And so, you know, even at Turtle Bay, we would have heard about, you know, if somebody wanted to know how many people were staying, you know, what were the types of folks that were staying? Because it's not just vacationers that are using these short-term rentals. And that's a big misnomer of what short-term rentals do. It's not just vacations. So if it's not data and research that is driving the decision that it was made by the Honolulu County Council, what is driving that decision? Putting you on the spot here, I suppose. Putting me on the spot. I would say the hotel industry, they have been trying for a long time to eliminate competition. And as we know, with any type of industry, especially when it comes to travel, there's always going to be a change in the industry. And it has moved more towards people wanting to be able to stay in homes versus staying in a hotel for a very expensive nightly rate. And the hotels are nice, but you don't have the benefits of a kitchen, an area to lounge in necessarily, unless you really can afford it. And most families can't. You know, on the North Shore, we've got BYU right there. Plus we have the surfing competitions that happen where folks need a place to kind of unwind and join family and friends and stuff. And the hotel experience is so costly, it's cost prohibitive. Now, you're talking about surfing competitions on the North Shore. That has been, or at least it was prior to the pandemic, a huge thing for Hawaii, especially for the North Shore economy and for people who come from across the world to congregate and to experience something unique. What does this community of people who come together for the surfing have to say about Bill 41? How will this impact them? We have talked to Robin Herb, who is the regional director for North America and Hawaii. And their big concern is they need to have a location for the entourage. There is an entourage that comes with these athletes. And let's face it, they're athletes. They're world-class athletes. The ones that are the very top tier that have a lot of supporters can afford probably more expensive lodgings. And some of the sponsors do own property for the surfers. But for the regular ones that are just trying to work their ways through the competitions, it's very, very expensive for them. And they do need a place to be able to unwind. And by entourage, I mean, it's not just your support group. Some of them travel with their athletic trainers, as well as, in some cases, medical personnel, if they're having issues. So it's a lot for these folks. And to not have the ability now to be able to rent a property that's closer to the shore, because they have training, they have to get ready for the competition, that's a big concern. And Don, I would imagine that in addition to the athletes and what you call entourage, there are also the spectators. People from across our islands, locals, as well as people who come from across the world, who bring in dollars to the North Shore and to the Oahu economy whenever they travel to these surfing events. Right, right. That's correct.  And yet the Department of Planning and Permitting really never did any kind of an enforcement. So some of these neighborhoods that were impacted and not just on the North Shore, but speaking on behalf of the North Shore. Yeah, there's, you know, party houses. They should have been reported. Folks should have been there. There should have been something taken care of. I think in some cases probably there were, but you know, that's a really big concern for the folks that, you know, that are there. That's their home. And I think one of the things that's really important is you don't want a power party house, you know, to pop up because of some, you know, competition or something that's going on. Don, I hear that you're acknowledging one of the concerns that some of the advocates of Bill 41 had. Many of them said that short-term vacationers changed the nature of the neighborhood that they bring in noise, debris, they violate the basic rules and laws that are in the neighborhood. And I'm talking about a failure of enforcement. What's your overall assessment of some of the concerns of people over short-term vacationers? I think parking has been a big issue in some of the residential areas with Bill 41. They did address that with the, with the homes that are, you know, going to be able to continue to rent that parking has to be accessible to people. And I think it's important to understand and respect the neighborhood, respect the neighbors, keeping vehicles, you know, off street parking. Some of the other concerns, you know, that, that weren't addressed that should have been noise. And, you know, just the constant coming and going of vehicles, that type of thing. So I, I, I think. Yeah. And any questions taken, we might have been in a different place when they were proposing Bill 41. Now your group, friends of Queen Lima has also talked about other proposals, as you mentioned. And there's also bill number four, which you've addressed at the Honolulu County Council. That one, and I understand would increase property taxes of short-term rentals. Could you explain Bill four and tell us what your concerns are It's added a new tax classification for TVUs, which is the transient vacation units. Bed and breakfasts right now already have their own classification. And for some folks that might have been following this, there were about 800 or so people that they were saying were registered or had certificates. Of those 800 units or properties, there's only 34 that are actually bed and breakfast, which means there's a whole tax classification right now for 34 properties. Meanwhile, this new classification will affect pretty much everybody else. There isn't anything there has been some thought that there might be a two tier addition to this bill before it passes so that it would be based on property values would be how properties would be assessed. But the bill for right now is the structure of the taxing mechanism. It's not the actual tax rate. The tax rate will happen next spring, as it goes through its normal process for the following property tax year. Don, you and your group are also concerned about bill nine, which would tax empty homes. Tell us a little about that. Yes, so this would be a home that would be for folks. If you lived in your property and you were out away from it for 180 days or more. You would be subjected to the increase of 3% mill rate for being away from home now they do have a medical exemption. And they do have a military exemption and that the problem is, is it doesn't stipulate whether or not it's a contiguous 180 days, or if it is throughout the year for medical for some folks as they might as you might know, sometimes the problems are are going to be are going to be ongoing right now the way it reads is it's a one time exemption that you get which would not be a good thing for folks that live there for a second home. Pretty much it pushes you into that situation where you need to rate your property and the idea behind it was is they don't want vacant homes. That's why it's called the empty home tax. So the property is available for people for affordable housing. But again, this is a sledgehammer approach to something when you're talking about a property that's affordable. If the, if the, you know, median value of a property is over a million dollars I don't know somebody that's just working one or two regular jobs could even afford to live in that property so it doesn't. Suggesting that it's going to address a problem but really the problem itself isn't being addressed as far as how do you get affordable housing available for folks that are making, you know, the regular wages not somebody that can, you know, that has a much higher value property. So, Don, I appreciate the critique you've given a bill 41 and other bills as well before the Honolulu County Council. But what do we do is there a better way to regulate short term vacation rentals. What are your thoughts as we close my thoughts are, again, I'll go back to the data. I don't know really how many folks are renting out a room in their house is a bed and breakfast in order to make their mortgage. There's single moms out there with kids that need that extra income to be able to get by. We've got, you know, seniors, elders that are doing kind of the same thing that they're renting out parts of their home in order to be able to keep their home. The data would provide us with some demographics about who actually is doing rentals short term rentals longer term rentals and know where those properties are and figure out how can we better help the council formulate policy to be able to address the housing shortage but without this kind of low hanging fruit which is kind of demonizing folks that rent out properties that are perceived as just vacation but in fact we've got medical folks that come over we've got first responders that come over and they need to stay someplace for 60 days. Or for the military transitioning in and out. So I think getting involved being educated we have on our website we try and keep up on the bills that affect the short term housing short term rentals. And just trying to get out there and let people know when bills are coming up it's it's really about folks getting involved and and really getting educated don't just listen to what's on the news. Don't just listen to one council member saying something but really get educated about what the contents of a bill are. That's probably the single biggest thing going forward. We're hoping to maybe help clean up some of the language that was in that bill at some point working with the with the council. You know to to address some of those issues but until we've got some data it's really difficult to kind of forecast and say this is going to work there's no one one thing right now I think that's going to work. I want to thank you your information has been very helpful and I think many people will benefit from it. I thank you again for being with us and for all your work with friends of Kui Lima. My guest today has been Don Borgeson. She has mentioned before is chair of friends of Kui Lima. And I'm Kaylee Akina with the Grassroot Institute on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii together. We'll be back with you next time. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


So I know we've got some time constraints. So I'm going to move to H-145 and their number of witnesses I did not get to testify last week. So we do want to hear from them again. And then Martin is going to be co-chairing this with me as one who has taken the lead on this bill. But I'd like to introduce Representative Ann Donahue, who also has done an enormous amount of work on this subject and was the lead sponsor of I think the original bill last year. One of the original bills. So welcome. Good to see you. Thank you very much, Representative Ann Donahue. And I just would like to comment briefly on two of the proposed revisions or changes that I've seen either floating around or in the bill. And I haven't gotten very expert on this Zoom yet. I'm going to, I can't do two screens at once, so I'm going to go to my notes and apologies for lack of eye contact or whatever one calls it. So the two pieces I want to comment on, one is the proposed addition of the phrase except in circumstances when the use of lethal force is justified, which I believe is a Department of Public Safety request to insert in two places to make it clear that both in terms of the duty to intervene when an officer observes another officer using a prohibited restraint and the penalties for use of prohibited restraint. And I think those who are on the committee last year know that that I was concerned about the final bill that we passed making it clear that if an officer is appropriately, I don't know if that's the right term, but if the use of lethal force is necessary under the standards that then this particular type of lethal force is not part, is not banned. So you know, I think this is about I understand the law enforcement community wanting to see this very explicit. I think when we clarified it amended it as per my request last year, I think it made it legally explicit, but not explicit to maybe an ordinary person. So I'm supportive of the change except that I think the wording should be different. I think that a lot of what we were trying to do in the bill itself was change the concept of justification to necessary or objectively reasonable. So although I know we do use justified a couple other parts of the of the language, I would prefer to see it saying except in circumstances where the use of force is objectively reasonable as defined in and reference those parts of the new statute. And the second part is the proposal to add the phrase without the benefit of hindsight, which is in subsection four. And that's an addition to the assessment of whether the decision to use force was objectively reasonable and that it's evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable officer in the same situation based on the totality of the circumstances. And it adds that phrase without the benefit of hindsight.  I am a little concerned. And the reason I'm concerned is I think that the concept that this wouldn't be reviewed using hindsight, I think that's already inherent in the language. You're evaluating whether that decision was objectively reasonable and from the perspective of the officer in the same situation and if they're in the same situation, then obviously they don't have hindsight available to them. So I don't think it's necessary and my concern is that it might in some way water down a little or lose clarity on the issue that was one of my greatest concerns in originally introducing the first version of this bill and which I've maintained a concern that it's not really expressed anywhere and that is the concept that if an officer actually escalates a situation to the point at which it does become objectively reasonable to use force, that that should not be a basis for saying that it was reasonably necessary. So so I'm a little concerned about losing some of the clarity and I guess I'll leave it at that. I would want to make sure that we didn't didn't lose that. And that's all I had to say. Thank you, Anne. Very much appreciate your your testimony. Martin, Martin has a question. There you go. Yeah, yeah, I want to make sure I understood where your first comments. I appreciate I understand what you're talking about with these without the benefit of hindsight. But the issue about the prohibited restraint, were you looking at the new definition of prohibited restraint or were you looking at recommendation from Jen Morrison as far as some language? I'm looking at the wreck. Yes, I was responding to the recommendation from Jen Morrison. It's I don't believe it's in your draft at all, but that that recommendation was being made. And and that was something in a course of emails I was asked about and OK, wanted to respond to it. So so I don't know if you're able to bounce around to another document then. But also under my name is proposed new language H one 45. And it addresses the issue that was raised by Jen Morrison, but it addresses it with a different language. And maybe I don't want to just jump on that right now. But if you can kind of at some point, even just an email to the committee to give your input, I don't want to give you your time to take a look at it. Or if we are with additional testimony, if you want to comment on it. But it does it a little bit. A little different approach, but but trying to get at the same thing. Same intent of making it making it clear. Sure, I will I will look at that and send and send an email. Right, I appreciate it because I am supportive of the of the concept of making it clearer as long as we're maintaining the same or same intent as last year. Great, great. Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify. Well, I'm sorry, I did have one more question. I apologize. OK, sorry. So the other the other it's not language that you would have right in front of you necessarily, but it's but it's another proposed change from from Jen Morrison. And that is in B five, adding the language to the extent feasible as an introduction to that provision. And I'm wondering if you have any comments on that proposal. Can you refresh me on what five goes on to say? Yeah, sure. It would be right now it's when a law enforcement officer knows that a subject's conduct is the result of a mental condition, etc. The officer shall take the information into account in determining the amount of force appropriate to use on the subject, if any. And they want the suggestion is to put the language to to the extent feasible at the beginning of that. So so I can also send follow up notes in writing if I get a chance to look at it. But it sounds to me that, again, this is this is an area as with the hindsight piece where that's actually clear in the existing language that it's implicit that it's to the extent feasible based on the way it's wording. So kind of doubling up to the extent feasible might. You know, send the wrong message in terms of. It not losing some of the strength of what's intended. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Ian. Thank you. Any other hands so that you get back to committee. Great. Nice to see you. OK. OK, now I would like to welcome will do white. Good morning, will do. Good morning, committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this bill. My name is Will White and I'm the founder of an organization called Mad Freedom that's committed to ending the discrimination and oppression against people based on their perceived mental state. I want to I don't think I have formally thanked this committee for the work it did in the last legislative session and getting S1 19 passed. It was a bill that I was very happy to see passed and actually shocked to see past, but nonetheless very happy about it and I appreciate all the work that you did to make that a possible to make that happen. So today, I just want to talk about both some of the changes that have been proposed to the bill that are actually in the bill and also based on some of the testimony I heard when I listened to the recording last week. The first place I'd like to begin is with the changing the definition of prohibited restraint. So I understand that this proposed change is based on the change is based on a desire to track the law that Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed. And I did go and take a look at the law as passed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was actually signed by the governor on December 31st, 2020. And the first thing I notice is that the bills that the Vermont's definition is still very different from the Massachusetts definition. And so if your desire is to track that language to get the benefit of an early judicial interpretation of that language, I'm afraid that you would not achieve that result because the language is significantly different. That being said, I do think that the Massachusetts language is a bit more artfully written than the Vermont language. But they do mean different things. And if I may, I did submit to Evan O'Connor, just one PowerPoint slide that shows the Massachusetts language and the Vermont language. Evan, can you put that up? Can you share screen to put that up? Or is that something that I have to do? I don't want to do it. If I could avoid that, I would like to avoid that. But I will, if you can't. Is Evan available or I think he's I'm just pulling it up now. I can do it. No problem. I appreciate that. So I think it's worth I think it's worth putting it up so you can see the difference. It might be easier to track my testimony. So the top of the first definition is the Massachusetts definition. And the second and what's below that is the Vermont definition. And the main difference and meaning that I'd like to point out is that in in Massachusetts, they first of all, they call it a chokehold. And they say that if you basically limit a person's breathing or blood flow with the intent of or with the result of causing bodily injury and consciousness of death, then you've engaged in this this chokehold. Vermont, on the other hand, says if you engage in this maneuver and it reduces the intake of air or impede the flow of oxygen to the brain, then that is a violation. Right. Whether or not it results in bodily injury or unconsciousness or death, that's that's very different. And it's very different because in Vermont and I like the difference, I want to say I like the difference and I like the difference because chokeholds have become for black Americans a form of terror. If you go if you saw any of the coverage of Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, you saw counter protesters reenacting the death of George Floyd as a way to terrorize black Americans. And so a chokehold, so it becomes a bit irrelevant whether a person has engaged in a chokehold that resulted in death or unconsciousness because the very act of engaging in this chokehold is itself a form of terror for many black Americans right now. And so I like the fact that the Vermont Statute actually prohibits if you read the plain meaning, even engaging in it, regardless of whether it causes harm. I don't know if that's what the committee intended, but that is the plain language of the statute and that's where it differs significantly from the Massachusetts Statute. But what I when I said I thought the Massachusetts Statute was more artfully written, I do think that's the case because the Vermont Statute will create a lot of proof problems when you actually get to court because it's actually a little too specific. It talks about exactly where you put the hands, the neck, the throat, the windpipe, the carotid artery. That's a really difficult thing for someone who's gonna be prosecuting the case to have to prove. But then you also say it impedes the flow of blood or oxygen to the brain. Again, it created a higher proof problem because now you have to get somebody, you have to get an expert to say that, yes, this actually impeded the flow of oxygen to the brain. And I just think it doesn't need to be that complicated. So I think that's why I actually prefer the language of the Massachusetts Statute. I think it is clear, more artfully written, creates fewer proof problems at trial if you actually get to trial. And even in considering whether you're going to bring this something to trial, it's cleaner and I think more effective in that regard. My problem with, so then I wanna get into this notion of preserving an officer's right to use this so-called prohibited restraint where lethal force would be otherwise acceptable. This for me raises more of a policy issue. And I would really appreciate some discussion around this from law enforcement. If this is preserved as a tactic that you can use for lethal force, are you going to be training officers to use it? And if the answer to that is yes, I have a problem with that. I have a big problem with training law enforcement to use something that this legislature has deemed a quote prohibited restraint. If you're not going to be training law enforcement officers to use it, how do we know that they would be using it in a way that would be less lethal than what we consider lethal force? Again, I think it's really a policy discussion. I think the community would benefit from hearing law enforcement's intent in this regard. And then finally, I think, and I raised this issue the last time I testified on the bill, if you are actually going to preserve this so-called prohibited restraint as an offense, as an affirmative defense, I really think it's problematic calling it a prohibited restraint. I've tried enough cases to juries and talk to enough jurors after a case where language such as a prohibited restraint would really throw some jurors off because they would say, what do you mean? Well, you're asking me if it was okay for this person to use a prohibited restraint. Well, obviously it's not because it was a prohibited restraint. And so there are jurors who just think that way. And so I think it would cause more confusion. I've just seen jury instructions written like this that just cause so much more confusion and they don't really, so the legislative intent is not truly realized. So I would caution you, if you really want it to be something that's an option that you really should not call it a prohibited restraint. So unless there are questions, I'll just move on to my next comment. Any questions, still hard? Folks, if I'm not seeing your hand, please jump in. So I'm just going to jump in and ask Evan to go back to the full, to no longer sharing screen so we can see everybody a little better. Thanks. So then I want to move on to the definition of a totality of the circumstances that you're proposing to change to add the person or persons involved. I have no objection to that. However, listening to the testimony, I do wonder if you're going to achieve the benefit you want to achieve by adding the word bystander. That word seemed to create a lot of confusion when I listened to the testimony and the questions from legislators last time. Some people were asking questions of all our police officers bystanders or what about this? And anytime when there's that much confusion from a word, it gives me pause about including the word. And then when I heard the explanation of what constitutes a bystander, both from law enforcement and others, they were really, in my mind, describing people who were involved rather than people who were bystanders. The literal definition of a bystander that you would find if you were to look, for example, in Black's law dictionary, it's truly a person who has no concern with what's going on. And he's really simply an onlooker, a spectator, an observer, someone who's there by chance. And so then when I think about that definition of a bystander, it really causes me to wonder, what would a bystander do that would justify the use of force? And that's because I don't have a good answer to that question. I'm reluctant to endorse the inclusion of that language. When I was thinking about a bystander trying to come up with, what are you getting at here? When would a bystander's conduct cause you to use a force that would be justified? I couldn't think of anything. I remember the people in George Floyd telling the officers that the person couldn't breathe. Are they bystanders? Perhaps, perhaps they're bystanders. And perhaps their conduct in alerting the officer to the fact that George Floyd couldn't breathe is something that actually would be part of the totality of the circumstances. However, when I heard law enforcement explain what they thought about bystanders, they were thinking of bystanders as actually more exculpatory, right? Making it their actions, explaining away their actions, not actually, you know, inculpatory used to just saying, no, that use of force wasn't justified. So I have two suggestions. One is, I think we need way more clarity about what role a bystander could play that would justify the use of force. And if you do move forward with including bystander in the statute, I would suggest that you actually include a definition. If there are no questions about that, I'll just move on to my next point. Yeah, I have one question on that. If you could respond to this comment as opposed to the question that's well, I'll set this up is that it seems to me, and now I'm already being leading in my question by saying it seems to me, but I'll go with it anyway. It seems to me that the presence or absence or whatnot of a bystander is readily part of the facts that are known by the law enforcement officer. I don't think we necessarily lose anything if we take bystander out of the totality of circumstances because it is still part of the facts known to the law enforcement officer. If you could comment on my leading question, you don't have to be led, certainly. Yeah, I'm focused more on, we're talking about bystanders because we're saying they may affect whether the use of force is reasonable. So I wanna know how could the conduct of a bystander enter into your decision to use force? That's for me the only question, because I can't imagine a scenario where a bystander would affect whether or not you're gonna use force on another party. You know what I'm saying? I just don't see it. And if somebody gave me an explanation about how somebody standing by would justify the use of force, I might be more able to understand why you would include it in the statute. Until I understand that, I'm wary of including these kinds of things in the statute. And I think my weariness comes from just my understanding of how the rules of statutory construction.  That's what they do. They wanna give full meaning to every single word in the statute. And they're gonna think that you have been really deliberate in the words that you've used in the statute and they will try to give them meaning. And I can't think of a meaning, but I know lawyers are very clever. And so I want to know the full impact of this language before I say, yeah, I endorse it or I think it's innocuous or I think it's implicit. I don't know so I can endorse it and I'm more skeptical of it because I know this language in the hands of clever attorneys could defeat the meaning of the statute. But just if we don't have that language in there, conceivably, if in fact it's relevant, which a court would presumably figure out, if the act of a spectator, as we will use that word instead, is somehow relevant to whether the use of force was justified or not. That's part of the facts, presumably known. So I'm just saying that- I would agree with you. Yes, I would agree with you. I would agree that if, you know, facts we just don't know how, say we just don't know how a bystander's conduct could do this. If it weren't in the statute, if the word weren't in the statute, the officer would still be able to point to the conduct of a bystander in his or her particular instance to say this did affect my use of force. And then it would be considered along with the totality of the circumstances analysis. I do agree with that. Right, because at one point, one of the many versions we looked at last summer, we tried to have a list of all the various kinds of known facts there could be. And ultimately we decided to simplify because you're not gonna capture everything. And if it's relevant, it will be brought out in the disciplinary hearing or in the court. So that's why we've tried to scale back and keep it as simple. Maybe bystander belongs in that other bucket of facts, as opposed to something specific in here. Right, thank you. I think that's a better practice of writing statutes anyway to be probably in this case, not try to capture all the facts because the more facts you try to capture, the more the court will consider that this was complete instead of just kind of abroad. You know what I'm saying? I think it's better to leave it to use words like totality of the circumstances instead of trying to spell them all out. Thanks. And then I also just wanted to say about, before the inclusion of the phrase without the benefit of the hindsight, I don't need to belabor this point. I agree with Falco Schelling's testimony in this regard. I think it's problematic for the reasons that he said, that's all I'll say on that. And then I want to talk about the B5, which in the suggestion to include the phrase to the extent feasible at the beginning of that phrase. Just to remind you, B5 is that part of the statute that reads, and I think it's important to know exactly what B5 says because it says, when a law enforcement officer knows that a subject conduct is the result of, and it lists, you know, medical condition, the officer shall take that information into account in determining the amount of force appropriate to use on the subject if any. Now, when I listened to the testimony last that was given by Jennifer Morrison, you know, she said that it was not always possible to assess the root cause of behavior, or there's not always time to do a laundry list of assessment. But if you read the statute, the statute is not asking for any assessment or any determination of the root cause. The statute says, when the officer knows, and it only applies when the officer knows. It's not, and so I think that's really important to keep in mind because it's not asking for any assessment, and so the argument that we need to the extent feasible for that reason is just not, it's just not found it. But the other thing that she said that I found problematic was, problematic but also very illuminating was in the exchange between representatives alone about training because she said that she wanted to add to the extent feasible because it's easier to operationalize because they train officers to address behaviors. And when I heard that, it became more clear to me why we see, you know, 11 year olds being pepper sprayed and five year olds being handcuffed because if you're only addressing behavior, then I guess you're indifferent to who's is exhibiting that behavior. But it was my understanding or at least when I was encouraging the legislature to adopt this language was that it was to generate actually a new type of training where we did more than just address behaviors that if we knew the source of those behaviors we would take that into account. And so I think this is really a conversation worth having because I don't think it is a good reason to put to the extent feasible in the statute in order for law enforcement to continue to train officers the way they have always trained officers. I do believe that this B5 is asking law enforcement to train officers differently when they have the knowledge of why somebody is acting in the way they're acting. And I'm really actually troubled because when the in the current draft the December 2020 draft of the statewide policy law enforcement use of force came out, there appears in that policy the statement there is not a separate legal standard for use of force involving persons experiencing mental impairment. That is not an accurate statement of the law but it may be an accurate statement of what they want the law to be. And so that statement in the policy the suggested language about including to the extent feasible suggests to me that the law enforcement in this committee are not on the same page when it comes to what the standard is when the law enforcement officer knows that a person's behavior is because of mental impairment. So I'm very much opposed to this language and very much look forward to a conversation between this committee and law enforcement about their understanding of what this committee has asked them to do in enacting this provision. And I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Will. I really appreciate your testimony incredibly thoughtful and comprehensive and your slide was really helpful too. I tend to be a visual person. I think it was helpful to many folks and it'd be great to have it on our website. So thank you. Not seeing any hands. I wanna make sure I don't miss anybody. No questions. Great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Okay, Robert Powell, welcome. So, Robert Powell. You're muted, Rob. Now I'm unmuted and let's see if I can be seen for a moment. Okay. I have problems with my camera and it freezes. So anyway, I appreciate you're inviting my comment on this. I'm late to this party as well. I'm trying to follow along with what I heard this morning. I concur with what I've heard from Willda. Obviously she studied this issue quite thoroughly including prior testimony which I have not had the opportunity to do so. I am concerned that by adding the language proposed by law enforcement, I agree with Willda and with representatives of the law that less is more when drafting language. The more you put in there and I agree with Willda's take on this, the court is gonna try to figure out what each word means. So, with regard to the bystander language, I'm sorry, I have to flip back and forth which was section B. I'm comparing what's in the bill is introduced with what was posted today by representative Lillan. And I'm confused, is that representative Lillan, is this your proposal or the committee discussed proposal? This is a proposal based on some of the testimony that we heard last week. And it's my proposal at this point. It's not the committee's. Well, I think this is an improvement over what is here in the bill is introduced. Totality of the circumstances is a term of art known to the legal community and includes any and everything present at the time. I think when you start to try to expand the definition, you're gonna confuse judges. I agree with Willda that lawyers from time to time try to insert more confusion into a case that then exists in an effort to benefit their party's position. So again, I go back to the lessons more and I like the language in representative Lillan's proposal. I question, so that's a substitution for six, right? So what would eliminate as person there are persons involved in any bystanders. I think those terms are fully encompassed by the term totality of the circumstances. So that's my comment on that. Likewise, and I again agree with Willda's take that, well, similarly in terms of what I would term to be surpluses is in B4 and B4 without the benefit of hindsight. Any case in the federal courts where there's a discussion of use of force, the case president always says without the benefit of hindsight. So codifying that I don't think is necessary. That is the way that judges interpret these matters. And I mean, one thing I would and I don't know if the committee has waded into this debate yet, but qualified immunity sort of overshadows all of this. And I don't know if the committee has thought about it. There are other state legislatures around the country who are grappling with that issue. Qualified immunity in very brief, if you have not stopped me, if you're familiar with the term and what it means. Nobody's stopping me, so I'll keep talking. Qualified immunity is basically a device whereby a governmental official will be immune from any legal action unless their acts violate a constitutionally established right. So what that means in practice is you have to have a prior decision with the facts aligned on all fours in order to hold somebody liable. So, let's say the seven-year-old out of control behavior who threatened suicide with a knife doesn't line up with somebody who's a nine-year-old attempting suicide with a weapon. I mean, that would not be clearly established in the views of our federal judges at this point in time. And that's what the national debate is about. Do we want to be so overly protective of state actors, particularly police, where there is a general principle that is essentially abdicated because you can't find a similar case with the exact same facts. So I think it's important to be considering these issues when you're trying to regulate use of force because unless and until you can find a case that aligns, it's gonna be dismissed on qualified immunity on motions. You're not gonna get to a jury with it. So what does that mean to curtail some police officers, unfortunately, who think they have the right to use excessive force or whatever force they think is appropriate irrespective of the circumstances? I think not having that discussion is not really discharging what you're trying to accomplish. That said, I'll go back to the language and I agree on any questions about that. I just went through a qualified immunity in 25 words or less, which is a very complex concept, but it's something that overarches your entire work in this area. And you might want to hear from the legislature on that or somebody who will speak solely to that topic with more preparation than I just did. But I think it's important to understand where you're litigating these cases in the civil context, you're gonna have, as a plaintiff, you're gonna have to contend with that concept. I still see no questions or hands, so I'll keep going. Actually, I'm sorry, Felicia, go ahead. Yes, thank you. I'm interested on your perspective on whether or not a mending qualified immunity has a place in this bill, or if you were just mentioning it with regard to how we structure this bill so that it does not butt up against qualified immunity and not end up being effective. Thank you for the question. I don't think, I just want you to be aware that the good work you're doing on this bill will likely be for not if qualified immunity still controls. So whether you do it in this bill or a standalone, I think it's important to conversation this art state legislature needs to have. New Mexico is actively working on a bill. There are other states, there are other drafts out there. I'm happy to supply it to the committee or committee council. There's actually a pretty well-developed national movement to curtail qualified immunity as established by the United States Supreme Court. There's nothing that, to my knowledge, and I've not fully researched the issue that our state supreme court has weighed in on application of qualified immunity, but it is generally these excessive use of force cases in these so-called 1983 cases which provide civil remedy for state actors violating constitutional rights or usually litigated in federal court. However, if qualified immunity did not exist in state court, you'd see more and more actions in state court with the purpose and intent of curtailing state actors who just disrespect and don't follow constitutional mandates. So my suggestion would be, this is round two of your discussion on use of force. It's late in the game. I would suggest you have a committee conversation about qualified immunity and consider a committee bill that would address it. Other questions on that? I, just to respond, I really appreciate your response on that. It does spark the question that maybe is better for some committee discussion at a later point of adding in that anyone found in violation of this use of force statute is not granted protection under qualified immunity. You're gonna hear a lot of pushback. I am not knowledgeable enough on Vermont's qualified immunity statute to just openly suggest that without having testimony history on it, but it does sound like something that would need to be put in consideration. I don't wanna speak for the committee, but I do wanna speak that it would be my opinion that I would hate to do good work and not have it be effective. Well, that's my concern. And I think you are doing very good work in this bill this year and vote on what happened last year. I just, you know, I agree that if you don't contend with that overarching problem, this good work may not produce the outcomes that you're seeking. So I appreciate your interest in that. I'd be happy to participate in that. I have worked in this area. I don't know if you know anything about my background, but I do bring these cases in federal court and qualified immunities and it's a very difficult hurdle to overcome. And I'll leave it at that for now. Excuse me, Martin has his hand up. Yeah, I was gonna follow up on this issue actually and I know it isn't 100% clear on the outcome. However, by having more well-defined standards in statute and presumably as we're watching what's developing in the policy, the policy to operationalize the standards that we have here, wouldn't that narrow the opportunity to make the qualified immunity defense? I'm not saying it gets rid of it. I'm not at all saying that, but by having these clear standards both in statute and in policy, it would seem to me that that makes it more difficult for that to be a successful defense, the qualified immunity defense. Is that not the case? Let me think on that a moment. I mean, the qualified immunity decisions talk about established constitutional principles. I mean, what you're doing is obviously providing statutory guidance. Would that rise to the level of established constitutional provisions or principles? I'd have to think on that. I understand your point and it may be of help and again, I go back to my earlier comment where you want to be as succinct and directed as possible without language which I would consider to be surplusage and confusing. Like, I mean, I put it in hindsight, bystanders, other persons, I think the broader clear language left alone, I think provides better guidance to all concerned. So let me just follow up just a little bit on this thought again. What we've been dealing with until recently with Vermont's law, with what California recently did, what Massachusetts just did, which goes into even more in depth. Prior to that, it was really just that these standards were developed in case law. So if there wasn't cases on point, well, then qualified immunity applied, but here we're putting into effect a statute that lays out those standards and other states are doing that as well. And really this is pretty new as far as actually having those statutory standards. But I'll look just specifically at the before the, which we talked a bit about, Will DeWight talked a little bit about as far as the law enforcement, if the officer knows, they're supposed to take that into account. And presumably, and we're hoping to see this soon in the policy that's gonna be developed, it will be talking about, all right, well, if they know about these impairments, here's the steps. Hopefully it'll involve a lot of the policies that actually were in place in Burlington, but just were not followed in the Grenin case. But it would seem to me that it would be, it will become more difficult for a law enforcement officer to ignore that situation or just taking the Grenin situation for a qualified immunity defense to be successful. You know, I'm speculating somewhat obviously, because this is new ground, but I guess I'm, my thought is that I'm not, I'm not quite, I'm not there where I'm thinking what we're putting into place is gonna be undermined by the qualified immunity defense. And maybe that was, there wasn't a question in there, but if you wanna comment on what I just said, that would be appreciated. Well, I think it would be best for me to consider your comments and parameters of discussion and provide a response after having given us some more thoughts and some research. I understand your point, Representative Belan, certainly statutory guidances. It's helpful. But then I talk about, and then I think about Molda White's comment having gone through the draft use of course policy in which, and I agree with her, and if you have a letter in your committee folder today from Zach Horsley to Disability Rights for a Month, that clearly says that, and I had a case, it was a taser death in Sefford in 2012. We got a statement of interest from Department of Justice. It was one of the last acts of Obama's Justice Department, the statement of interest in which it said that, persons who exhibit behaviors that are manifestly indicative of a mental health issue require accommodation. And Molda's take on the draft policy is that, the policy that you don't actually have the ability to prescribe, right?  This is a policy, as I understand the process, that police can write, implement and train on. And if it doesn't conform with the law, what's the legislative's prerogative in that regard? Well, we can come back and be more specific and amend the statute next year, you know, or next biennium. So we try to have this law setting forth these standards certainly, but then allowing the flexibility to law enforcement to operationalize them. But that doesn't mean that if those policies go into place and they really are not operationalizing what we've set out as standards, we can tighten down a little bit. But that's hopefully, I don't suspect that that's gonna happen. I think that the law enforcement is, in our conversations with them, really are trying to implement the standards that we have in here, but we'll see. Well, I appreciate your continued attention to the issue. And your concern around making sure that your good intents are followed and fully implemented by law enforcement, prosecutors, civil litigants, and all involved. So let me give some more thought to the broader question and provide the committee with some materials. And I do appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today. If anybody has any further, unless somebody has further questions from me, I'll yield to the next person on your list. Thank you. Not seeing any questions. Okay, so we, thank you. Thank you, Rob. Good to see you again. Yeah, thank you. So committee, we only have about seven minutes or so, but I do wanna give Jen Morrison a chance to comment if she'd like. And certainly we will, I'm sorry for remaining witnesses and also Jen that we don't have, that we're running out of time, but certainly we are gonna continue this discussion next week. So welcome, Jen. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and good morning, everyone. Thank you for your continued hard work on this most important topic. I wanted to just say a couple of quick things. I really appreciated the testimony this morning. I took copious notes. I'm certainly gonna be watching this again. I wanna reassure Will DeWyte, anyone else who's watching, the draft, a second draft is forthcoming. We have a very small team of attorneys and two police chiefs, myself and Trevor Whipple, who are reviewing every piece of feedback, whether it was an email or the more corporate feedback from Med Freedom, disability rights, Vermont, et cetera. And we are really going over in detail the recommendations and the next draft of the policy will reflect a lot of that feedback, not all of it. And we'll be keeping track of what parts we use and don't use. We're at a little bit of a crossroads of do we write a second draft when we don't know what the underpinning legislation is going to say? You know, we're trying to make that decision of do I invest that type of time, knowing that we have all this body of feedback and we're going to incorporate a bunch of it or do we wait until we know what the underlying legislation is? So there is another draft forthcoming and I look forward to sharing that with the interested stakeholders. So I guess I would ask and to Mr. Appel also that some trust needs to be extended here, that the Department of Public Safety has made an investment in a position as a policy expert to have a single person now available. This has never been available before to have the bandwidth to pull together all sorts of different viewpoints to try and create policy for law enforcement. So this is something that is different and new this year. I'm going to do my very best to demonstrate that this can be a raging success. So I look forward to working with all the folks who have testified going forward. And I just wanted to also state to that the comment about responding to behaviors was not meant to be presumed as in a vacuum. That's obviously our training is multi-dimensional and is based on scenarios and all sorts of context. So while I can understand why review the video might have caused Ms. White a little bit of hesitation around my comment about use of forces, we're trained to address behaviors. It's not one dimensional, it's multi-dimensional. So I did wanna address that. I really appreciate all the discussion today. I think that this morning is the first time that I saw Representative Lalonde's alterations to the current H-145. I certainly would wanna run this over by our legal people. But I think we're gonna get there. I think that what he wrote is not, you know, I don't look at it and go, we can't live with that. But obviously I need to talk to our legal people. There's a lot smarter people involved in this than I am. So I appreciate the continued good work. I'm available anytime for questions or comments from the committee or from stakeholders as well. So I'll look forward to seeing where this goes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I truly appreciate working with you. And yeah, we will get back to it next week. And I think Martin will probably address his amendment, but we did not expect you to be prepared for that. So don't worry, okay. Martin. Yeah, I just wanted to ask, Jen, if you could also, I don't know if it will come up, but just in case there was language that was proposed by disability rights Vermont, which is on our page. If you could have looked at that in case we do need you to weigh in on that language. I don't know if that's the case, but just wanted to... Sure. We have our group yesterday reviewed the disability rights Vermont feedback. We broke it down into what we believe are 14 individual comments. And we made copious notes on whether, parts of it will be incorporated into the next one or whether it actually already exists somewhere in training. So I am prepared at any time to speak to that feedback. Just, I wanna make sure that I'm clear. This is something that we just received as testimony on the, not on the policy, but on the law, on the bill. And it's on our website under today's date. So that's a little bit different. I understand that they did provide input on the policy, but they have provided proposed language, which I don't know if we're gonna be taken up or not, but I just wanted to flag that for you. So you knew that was there. Thank you. I appreciate that. And also for the committee's edification, I am seeking the assistance of a group to facilitate the first attempt to put together that appendix D you'll see in the use of force draft use of force policy that there's a placeholder for appendix D, which is guidelines for law enforcement when interacting with a person experiencing or perceived to be experiencing mental impairment. So understanding that I'm trying to be a sponge and take in all the info from all different sides of it. I will be using some facilitators to pull together the stakeholders in that and help us build that so that we can provide that resource out to the field. So that is something that the work on that will begin soon, I hope. Great, excellent. Thank you. Anybody else? Coach. You're muted, coach. Sorry about that. I wanted to thank all of the witnesses that participated this morning. Jen, we really appreciate your work. I would just like to extend if we can be of any help in utilizing the communications that we've put together with the affected communities in the state, please reach out to Martin and let him know and we would be happy to help with that. I think it's imperative that that be done and I'm offering that assistance. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that and I will go direct with Representative Lalonde to see if we can develop a list, shall we say, of people to invite into the process. Thank you. Great. Not seeing any other hands. Again, thank you to everybody who has testified in my apologies to those who we didn't get to today but I forget which day next week but we definitely are taking it up next week because this is an important bill and I wanna keep moving on it. So with that, I will adjourn and we will go offline, please. Thank you.


Hey everyone, this is Dan. Welcome to my first video on advanced micro devices and NVIDIA. In the last two three years, these two semiconductor companies have outperformed the broad market and they also outperformed even the semiconductor industry average. In the last three months they have been picking up very quickly. Is it a good time to buy or is it too late to buy already? I did the fundamental analysis of these two companies and have set my price targets. Let's get down to the details. In the next few minutes, I'll be talking about first AMD, I will cover the profile of the company, any immediate merger activities that will affect the future of AMD, the market share, the product performance, the company strength and weaknesses. And then I'll do the same for NVIDIA. Then I will look at the key financial data for both companies and put them side by side with each other and then look at my own valuation of the companies. Then we'll look at the professional analyst opinions. We will also look at a couple of charts quickly with regard to the price movements of the two companies in the last year and in the last three months. And then I'll be talking about my strategies for trading the stocks. Advanced micro devices, they focus on computing and graphics and enterprise embedded and semi-custom processors. And they are headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It's a US company. Recently they announced a second quarter earnings and the results were very positive. For example, the bottom line, the net income went up 250% year over year. Very impressive. And the revenues went up 99% year over year. And that's why the stock price has been picking up quickly ever since the quarterly earnings announcement. This is the chart showing the market share of AMD in the CPU market compared to the industry leader, the market share leader Intel. We can see that back in 2006 AMD had 50% on market share and Intel had 50% on market share. And after that AMD dropped to less than 20% and then Intel benefited from AMD's decline. But starting from 2016 AMD's market share has been climbing up steadily at the expense of Intel. And there's a major player behind this at AMD causing good things to happen since 2016. I will talk more about that later. If you look at the performances of the AMD processors from this particular industry benchmark offered by tomshotware.com out of the top seven processors AMD occupies four spots, including the number one and number two positions. Of course, there are many ways to benchmark processor. This is just only one way to look at it. But at least from this, we have a glimpse of what the AMD processors are capable of from one perspective at least. This is a list of the top processors offered by AMD and offered by Intel and their prices. And you can see here AMD offers very competitive prices for processors that have performances that are better or equivalent to the performances of Intel processors. And that explains why AMD has been gaining back market shares since 2016. To talk about AMD, we need to talk about this other company called Xilinx. Why? Because AMD is in the process of acquiring Xilinx. In a nutshell, Xilinx offer integrated circuits in the form of programmable logic devices, which are different from the mainstream AMD processors. The products offered by Xilinx are complementary to what AMD has been offering up to now. A few bullet points about the merger. First of all, it was announced on October 27, 2020. And the merger will help AMD build cutting edge semiconductors for consumer electronics and cloud computing. AMD also expects to achieve operational efficiency and saving $300 million within 18 months because of the merger. It's a stock exchange merger. Each share of Xilinx stock will be exchanged for 1.7234 shares of AMD stock. And because it's the stock exchange merger, AMD will not have to borrow money or increase its debt mode to fund the merger. Of course, then new shares of AMD common stock will be issued in order to complete the merger. And by the way, the stockholders of both companies have already approved this merger. The merger will also have to be approved by major governments, including the UK, EU, which already approved the merger. And as far as I know, the US government has no objection to the merger. And one final piece is the approval from the Chinese government because AMD does a lot of business with China. And rumor has it that China will approve the merger, hopefully by the end of this year. Let's talk about AMD's strengths and weaknesses. As far as strength, number one, they have shown steady increases in revenues and EPS since 2016. Their enterprise, embedded and semi-custom segment have been posting annual growth. And actually, as of this last quarter, it posted growth of 183%, which is very impressive. And they reported a straight quarter of record server processor revenue. They are really gaining the market share in a server area very quickly. And AMD's processors are very competitive against Intel's in terms of price and performance. We saw those benchmarking charts. They have won quite a few major contracts for gaming consoles, including Sony's PS5 platform and Microsoft Xbox Series X platform. That means they will have steady source of orders for at least the next six to seven years. So that's a big plus for the company. And of course, the sidelines merger is supposed to generate synergy with AMD. As far as witnesses, number one, they are subject to the supply constraints in the semiconductor industry, the very well-known shortage that's been happening the last year or so, because they do not have their own fund. And in the GPU market, they are trailing NVIDIA in terms of performance and market share. We'll talk more about that later. But AMD is definitely gaining a lot of market share in the main CPU market for individual PCs or servers. If you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to suggest that you click the like, subscribe and notification button so that you'll be notified when I publish the next video for AMD and NVIDIA. Also, it will encourage me to make more videos like this in the future. Thank you very much. Let's continue. Let's talk about NVIDIA. Now, NVIDIA focuses on graphic and computer networking. The company's product are using gaming, professional visualization, data center and automotive markets. They had quartered in Santa Clara, California, the same location as advanced micro devices. This is also in U.S. company. The last time they announced the quarterly earnings was for the first quarter and that was on May 26, 2021. And their earnings beat the Zax Consensus Estimate of 3.28 per share. And it represented an earning surprise of 11.59%, which is very nice. And over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed the Consensus EPS Estimate four times. But definitely, this is a company with very strong financial performance. And we'll look at the charts later on. Their next quarterly earnings announcement date will be August 18, 2021, about 10 days from now. I'll be definitely watching that. Very careful. Since NVIDIA's main business is in the GPU market or graphic processing units market, let's talk about GPU. GPU is also known as visual processing unit. It's a computer chip that performs mathematical calculations rapidly for the purpose of rendering images. Actually, recently, the functions of GPU has been stretched to cover other applications. We'll talk more about that later, but they originated in processing images. A GPU is composed of hundreds of cores that handle thousands of threads. You might consider those to be thousands of simultaneous processes. Compared to the traditional CPUs, a CPU only involves a few cores with some memory that limits its ability to handle multiple threads or processes at the same time. GPUs are widely used in portable electronic devices and medical equipment, as well as mobile phones and many other devices. And recently, GPUs have been used for artificial intelligence platforms. Deep learning. We'll talk about that in the next page. Virtual reality and augmented reality systems, as well as in supercomputers. Now, this is the impressive part. The global GPU market size back in 2019 was valued at $19.75 billion. It is projected to reach $200 billion by 2027 at the annual growth rate of 33.6% much faster than the traditional CPU market. One of the major applications of GPU is deep learning, which is related to neural network and is a sub branch of artificial intelligence. The applications include facial recognition, autopilot for vehicles, for example, evaluating loan applications, SONA and radar, signal processing for national defense, ECG and EEG analysis for medical applications, even stock trading advisory systems. So that a lot of very important functions that are offered by GPUs today. It's a very fascinating subject. If you're interested, I've provided three different links. The first one is a five minute video about deep learning. The second one is a 19 minute video, and the last one is a one hour MIT lecture on deep learning. You can see the links below this video in the notes section. Let's look at the GPU market share. In the GPU market, there are two main players, NVIDIA and advanced micro devices. So starting from 2010, NVIDIA had 60% on the market, and then they increased their market share to more than 80% in 2015. And since then it's been going up and down. And most recently, they've regained market share and it's currently sitting at about 80% again. They're taking market share away from advanced micro devices. You might see the market share chart drawn like this with Intel way on the top with more than 60% on market share. This chart actually is not very truthful. When a chart is drawn like this, they are including the CPUs produced by Intel that integrate graphic processors in the CPUs. This type of integrated units cannot really match up with the dedicated GPUs in terms of performance when it comes to PC gaming and other computation intensive applications. And that's why I tend to want to look at this chart split in the market between NVIDIA and AMD. In terms of performance ranking, here is another ranking chart from timeshotware.com. Again, there are many ways of benchmark performances. This is just one aspect of it. With this particular benchmark test, NVIDIA GPUs occupies seven out of top 10 positions, including top two positions. Definitely NVIDIA has been producing some of the best GPUs in the market. When we talk about NVIDIA, we also need to talk about ARM. Why? Because NVIDIA is in the process of acquiring ARM. ARM is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Their main business is in the design of processors. Actually, they licensed their designs to semiconductor companies that make semiconductors for mobile phones, such as Qualcomm, and also semiconductors companies that make semiconductors for tablet computers, chips in smart TVs, and in total over 160 billion chips. Since 2016, ARM has been owned by SoftBank Group, which is a Japanese company. That's very important to know because I'll be talking about something in the next few slides. With regard to the NVIDIA and ARM merger, it was announced on September 13, 2020. And we already talked about what ARM offers. NVIDIA expects, of course, synergy from this merger and they will continue ARM's open licensing model. Specifically, NVIDIA expects the ARM merger to help them with development of artificial intelligence in the NVIDIA processors. And this merger is worth about 40 billion dollars. It will be met through a combination of shares and cash from NVIDIA. Here's the catch, though. Most recently, as of August 3rd, it was reported that UK, remember ARM is a UK company, that the UK government is considering blocking NVIDIA's $40 billion dollar takeover deal for ARM because of national security risk. Remember, we saw that ARM is currently owned by SoftBank, a Japanese company. So I don't think the UK government will be concerned about ARM being owned by American company instead of being owned by a Japanese company. I think the UK government is just posturing to gain some advantages in the trade negotiations with the U.S. And I think they're just using this as a bargaining chip. My prediction is that this merger will actually come through. We'll stay tuned. What are NVIDIA strengths? First of all, they have very steady increases in revenues and EPS since 2016. And they have the industry leading GPUs with over 60% of market share since 2011. Actually, at times, they reached 80% market share, especially in the last couple years. And the world demand for GPUs has been growing rapidly, especially for the automotive industry and for artificial intelligence development. The rate of growth of GPU market is estimated to be 33% annually. And it's definitely higher than a traditional CPU market, which has been growing at about 4%. And they definitely have the industry leadership in deep learning and AI. What are their weaknesses? They are subject to supply constraints because they do not have their own foundry, similar to advanced micro devices. And they face competition with AMD in the GPU market. Although NVIDIA has been doing pretty well in the last couple years, regaining their market share. And the ARM merger might be blocked by the UK government. My own personal opinion is that the merger will actually go through. Let's look at the key financial data related to these two companies. First of all, sales. The green line is the Intel sales. I've included Intel because they are still the industry leader in the CPU market. And then the black line is AMD. The orange line is NVIDIA. As you can see, the sales for Intel has been pretty steady, gradually going up. And NVIDIA has been going up much faster than Intel, although at a lower level, AMD has been bumpy. Their sales went down and then started picking up again from 2016 to today. If you look at EPS, pretty steady for Intel and steady for NVIDIA, actually with a pretty steep climb with EPS for NVIDIA. And then AMD, bumpy. They actually were having losses from 2012 through 2016. And then when they finally turned positive, they've been climbing up very quickly. Why do we have a curve like that? I can summarize it in two words. And that's because of Lisa Sue, who is the current president and CEO of AMD. Ms. Lisa Sue is an electrical engineer and an MIT Ph.D. After serving successfully a Texas instrument, IBM and free-scale semiconductor, she joined AMD in 2012 and then was promoted to president and CEO in October of 2014. And shortly after that, she was able to turn the company around and lead the team to design and produce some industry-leading processors. And therefore, they were able to perform very well financially since 2016. But that's a key player for AMD. Now, what about NVIDIA? NVIDIA is a little bit more fortunate. They have the same president and CEO since the founding of the company. And that was 1993. And that's why the performance has been pretty steady. More financial data. Return on equity, pretty steady for Intel and NVIDIA. Again, bumpy for AMD, but it's been going up in the last five, six years. Debt to equity ratio, again, pretty steady for Intel and NVIDIA. And if you look at AMD, they climbed up. And then just like the EPS, starting 2016, it's been very good here. The debt to capital ratio has been dropping quickly as of 2021. The debt to capital ratio is much lower than those of Intel and NVIDIA. So at this point, AMD financially is a very healthy company. That's why I'm very bullish about AMD, as well as NVIDIA. Let's look at my own calculations for the stock prices of AMD and NVIDIA. First, I look at the top semiconductor companies and look at their trailing PE ratio, forward PE ratio and PEC ratio. And AMD is here with the PEC ratio of 1.35, which is pretty impressive. And then based on their trailing 12-month performance, current PE ratio of 38.81, the EPS growth, which is 76% very impressive, market cap, and the current stock price. Then I apply the estimated earning growth of 32%, which is from Yahoo Finance. And if you look at the historical earning growth, 32%, it's actually a pretty conservative assumption. And then a PE ratio of 38, which is reasonable. Then I arrived at the stock prices for 2021, 2022, and 2023. And from that range, I paid a target of $160 a year. Now, you might ask, what about a merger with Xilinx? Let's talk about that. First of all, let's repeat the calculations we just showed in the previous page here. Now, if you then look at Xilinx as a standalone company, these are their current performances. And based on an assumption of 38 PE ratio, which is the same PE ratio as AMD assumption, and the EPS growth are just 9%. And that's also from Yahoo Finance. I think 9% is a low number because the current EPS growth is 69.6% based on the quarterly earnings from the first quarter. With these numbers, I arrived at the calculated stock prices for 2021 and 124, and then 135 for 2022 and 147 for 2023. I then merged the numbers for the two companies by adding the net income for the three years using the PE ratio of 38. And then from those numbers, I calculated market cap for each of the three years. And then I calculated total number of shares after the merger and arrived at these prices for the three years. And from that, I conclude that I could set the target of $150 a share. Notice that it's $10 less than the $160 a share for AMD being a standalone company. Now, if there's indeed a lot of synergy between AMD and Xilinx, of course, a combined company will be worth a lot more than $150 a share. But for now, I just want to be conservative and set it $150 a share, which is already higher than a current price. Let's look at NVIDIA. Similar to the way I calculated the evaluation for AMD, I assume the PE ratio of 70 against the current PE ratio of 96 and the EPS growth of 27%, which is based on the estimate from Yahoo Finance. And from those assumptions and the current figures, I arrived at these stock prices for 2021, 22, and 23. But I really think the 27% EPS annual growth rate is too conservative, especially considering that the GPU market is going to grow at 33% annual rate even faster. And that's why I did another set of calculations assuming 40% EPS growth rate. And with that, I arrived at a higher set of stock prices for 2021, 22, and 23. And based on these two sets of numbers, I believe it's okay to set a price target of $240 a share to be achieved by the end of November 2021. Let's look at the other analyst opinions. First of all, the closing price was $112.35 for AMD. And my target is $150, almost 40% higher than the current price. And I expect the target to be achieved by the end of November 2021. Yahoo Business gives AMD a buy rating, 2.3 out of 5. The high target is 169.7, average is 104. Low target is just 17. I think this is not a typo. I double check. I don't know which analyst gave that rating. Maybe it's a typo from Yahoo, but indeed it's 17. Lewis Nevillea doesn't like the company much, gave him an overall C rating because he heavily penalized AMD for their quantitative rating, which is related to the chart. And the reason why is because AMD stock price has been pretty flat in the last year or so until about three months ago, all of a sudden it stopped to jump up. And I believe Nevillea will upgrade AMD pretty soon. And the fundamental rating is a B, which is pretty solid. TipRanks.com overall is a moderate buy with a high target of $150, average target of $107, and low target of $70. CNN Money overall a buy rating, high target of $169, median $110, and low target of $60. So my rating of $150 is definitely higher than the average ratings from these analysts and almost at the high targets. And I'm comfortable with my target. Well, Nvidia, the current price is $206.37. My target is $240 to be reached by the end of November 2021. Yahoo gives an a buy rating with a high target of $250, just $10 higher than my target, average of $189, definitely lower than my target, and a low target of $110. Luz Nevillea gives them a B rating, which is a buy rating with a quantitative rating of B and a fundamental rating of B. That's because Nvidia has been going up more steadily in the last six months to a year than AMD. And tipsrank.com gives them an overall strong buy, which is very positive with a high target of $250, average target of $204, and low target of $150. CNN Money gives them an overall buy rating with a high target of $250, median target of $193, and low target of $110. Let's look at the charts for the last year. The yellow line here is Nvidia, which is definitely the best performing line here. And I also show the SMH semiconductor EDF, which went up by 58%, and Nvidia went up by an impressive 81% in the last year. AMD went up by about 29%, and the blue line here is QQQ, representing the movement of NASDAQ 100, went up by 41% or so. And then SPY represented the movement of S&P 500. The red line here went up by also about 29%. And then Intel definitely has been underperforming, went up only by 12%. And now if you look at the last three months, AMD really jumped up, especially since their quality earnings announcement, because they really demonstrated some very impressive performance in the last quarter. AMD went up by over 39% in the last three months. Nvidia about the same. SMH, the semiconductor industry went up by 10%, QQQ by 10%, and SPY barely went up only by about 2%. And Intel actually went down by 6.5%. And that's why I'm very bullish about AMD and Nvidia. What are my strategies? I'll be holding some AMD and Nvidia shares for the long term. Currently, I don't own any shares, but I will most likely be buying shares at the right moment in the next couple of weeks. And I will shrink trade some of the shares. Generally, I will sell when the price pulls back at a major resistant point or when bad news happens. And I will buy when the price bounces back from a low RSI point and from a major support point or when passive news develops. I usually update my subscribers by way of Twitter messages when I buy or sell shares or when there's major news development. In the next few days, I will be posting my technical analysis for AMD and Nvidia. Stay tuned. Let me recap my price targets. AMD is at $150 a share and Nvidia at $240 a share to be reached by the end of November 2021. And currently AMD is at $110 and Nvidia at $203. So both of them have a lot of room to move up. I'd like to suggest that you subscribe to my Twitter account, which is DanMarketL. For example, a few days ago I tweeted that I increased my price target for Moderna and BioNTech. Those are two of the stocks that I've been tracking. And I've made a lot of profits from those two stocks. On July 29th, I tweeted that I bought some shares of Moderna and BioNTech. If you like what you've seen, please click the like, subscribe, and notification button. As usual, I will very much welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. I'd like to remind you that I'm not a financial advisor. I provide my stop trading strategies and my analyses for educational purpose only. If you want to buy or sell stocks, you should make your own decisions and you should consult with your financial advisors before you do so. This concludes my video for now. I will chat with you again in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I'd like to wish you the very best of luck with your financial investments. Have a wonderful day.


Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. Hi, my name is Miguel Zamora. I'm the managing director of Rural Voices. So, let's connect. So Rural Voices is an organisation that focus on supporting rural communities, agricultural communities, so their voices can be amplified and we can try to include them in the sustainability conversations that civil society organisations, governments or companies implement all over the world. I have been working in sustainable agriculture for 25 years and the big scene that I keep on seeing again and again why some sustainability initiatives do not have the impact that are intended is because they tend to miss a key part, an obvious part, but a very important one, which is including the voices of those people who need to implement those initiatives. For example, we have been working with rural communities in Ecuador. That's where I am from. And Ecuador has one of the largest cocoa producers in Latin America. We're working some communities there. We're trying to understand potential labour issues, right? Child labour, risk of forced labour. And when we approach the different companies that might be working there, there was a big kind of wall. People were like, no, no, there's not a problem here. There's no child labour here. There's no forced labour and we were, okay, perfect. We believe you. What we're trying to do here is to understand if there is a risk that something might happen later. So with that, we went to different communities. We reached out to farmers and to workers and we learnt a lot of things that we didn't know before. That those companies didn't know and didn't quite understand because they have not been able to ask the questions. We learned that a lot of farmers are also farm workers. They work in other farms when they're not working in their farms. That when they hire other people, they usually hire people from their communities or the higher relatives. So there is a very informal arrangement, which is great, but it creates some risk, right? If you don't have a contract, a verbal contract, how much you're going to get paid, how many hours you're going to work, there is a risk that potentially those workers may be taking advantage of. We also saw that there is a very common practice for children under 17, 16 to work on the fields, many times helping their parents, but other times just working for other people that they may know in the community, but still there is a child labour. Not so much for them missing education, missing going to school, but the type of practices that they can use. Using machetes, using different fertilizers, pesticides. That's like a major risk that could happen. So when we went to these communities, it wasn't to tell the companies, look, you have a major problem of child labour or forced labour or of other labour abuses, but there is a risk. So by identifying the risk, now you can focus on preventing that that risk becomes an actual negative impact on the rights of people. We're still in the process working with these companies to try to implement some of the recommendations that we have included. But for us, the big thing is that we have been able to amplify the voices of those communities to tell their story about what are the risks that might exist there. Risks that may be the companies that were purchasing that cacao have not been able to identify before. People say we are what we eat. They usually mean we are nutritious food, healthy food for our bodies. But there's also something about who we are as people, our values, our values as a society. So we know that agriculture, mainstream agriculture, there's a lot of problems around child labour, forced labour, working conditions. Mainstream agriculture is a big contributor to greenhouse emissions to climate change. Part of what we as a people can do and should do is make sure that the food that we eat is being produced in a way that, you know, is treating people properly with respect in a dignified way. So by working on this and making sure that the workers, the farm workers who work in the different fields, that the small farmers can tell us, in the conversation around what we need to do and what we need to do around sustainability, can say this type of initiative has worked well in the past. These others do not work that well because we have different incentives, we have different capabilities. It's just not the right fit. So by having that first-hand perspective on what should sustainability look like on the field, we feel that we can have better initiatives that are not only smarter because, you know, they have like the right perspective included but also the right scene to do by including everybody who is affected in that conversation. So that's what I think we do, the problem that we're trying to solve. I joined the canopy because I see there's a good opportunity to meet people who are working on sustainability. Hopefully other people who might be working on agriculture who might be working with rural communities or that might be working more socially. Usually people think about sustainability tend to focus a lot on the environmental part which is super important. But, you know, my organization working more on social issues when I contacted the canopy and I learned more about them noticed that that was an important part for them. So being able to meet more people and organizations that are working on that area that might either be here directly or may refer me to, that's my main goal. As having moved here a year ago, there is a lot for me to learn about the UK, about Europe, about the agricultural sector, the food sector here. So that is my main goal and to be able to share, to be able to learn about what others are doing, to be able to provide my perspective if anybody is interested to. One of the most rewarding things about working on sustainability is the human connection with other people who are also interested in the same goals. So that's another reason why I joined the canopy. For people who may want to learn a little bit more about what we do, there is a website, ruralvoices.farm. I'm also available over email, Miguel at coffeehente.com. That's coffee is the drink. Hente is people in Spanish and that's from previous work that I was doing in coffee. I usually come to the canopy Wednesdays and Fridays. That's related to picking up my kid after school. Those are the days that work better for me and my partner. And yeah, I'm always available to chat. I love talking about sustainability. I love talking about rural communities. And yeah, I look forward to catching up over coffee, which is, you know, a product that I love. So yeah, let's chat next time that you see me. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your office R&D profile to connect with your canopy neighbors. Just head to the members page and find them. This is a canopy podcast made by New Allotment. The canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Thank you for listening.