hey're gonna put forward are standing or failure or state of claim or in actual injury, all the preliminary injunction standards as well, will get litigated. And I don't know if the intent of the motion is to, we're not a party to this litigation. And I would think if, for example, there was a lawsuit involving some other piece of action that didn't directly involve us, we start weighing in, like for example, all the federal lawsuits about the election. We may have personal feelings about it, but I guess I'm a little bit trevidacious about starting to take sort of formal city resolutions or positions on lawsuits that don't involve us. If the resolution is intended really sort of as an expression of support or solidarity for clerks and the governor's resolution, I guess I'm more comfortable with that. But my concern is, I just think, for example, if a city in say Alabama had said, we wanna take a position against all the litigation, the recount litigation, I think we would have a problem with that, particularly because it didn't involve them as this doesn't necessarily directly involve us. If we're trying to articulate a position of support for general, maybe that's much more comfortable. I'm starting to repeat myself. I apologize. I think that's my concern and I'll stop right there for the time being. Can I respond to that really briefly? It does directly involve the city because this would be a blanket decision to open clerk's offices, which exist in municipal buildings, in city halls, town halls. It would force us to change our policies for access, not just to my office, but to the city hall building. So that is an act of policies separate from the clerk's office. It has to do with the actual physical building and the safety of what has been decided by the city is that our appropriate moves in the interests of safety of the municipal, not just the municipal employees, but the greater city at large. It wouldn't just mean I open up a ladder, open up my window and put a ladder out the door. It means we unlock city hall. If this group directly affects us and that is in fact the point. They're not just going after these eight clerk's offices. This is something they want to get through to have a blanket effect on all the municipalities in Vermont and I think all the municipalities in Vermont therefore have a direct interest in this lawsuit. And I don't think it's anything as abstract as somebody in Alabama not liking the election. This is about us. This is about city of Montpelier and how we get to run our affairs in the interests of safety. It's a shock, not off to the side or that's not oblique. It's a broadside right at that. I mean, I don't necessarily agree that that would follow. I mean, I understand where you're going with that, John and I'm not trying to be, I guess I'm expressing a note of caution here and I'm not familiar with the legal arguments that they're making. And so if I understand you correctly, John you're saying that they're attacking the sort of underpinnings of every clerk that's closing in such that if they were to prevail, I mean, because it's the rule of litigation is that the decision only affects the parties that have standing and have an opportunity to respond that are named in the caption as opposed to being affected. But what you're saying is that once the, if a decision was put out there by a superior court judge and said it's unconstitutional or whatever arguments are raising them and if they were successful then it's just a matter of time before our regulations would fall or they'd be susceptible to a challenge where we'd have to rethink that. And I guess along those lines, I mean, is there an effort then by municipalities either by the legal cities and towns or by some clerk's association to gain standing as an interested party in that? I'm not sure, but I just another thing to respond to these eight municipalities, they are random. Okay, this was not that there were particular issues with these towns. In fact, one of them has more of the most open policies I think of anyone at state and all these municipalities are baffled. They don't know who's bringing this but its intent is to create uniform access. I mean, that is written in there. So it, I mean, it is explicitly about Vermont municipalities and these are just the sort of, and I wouldn't say random, there's an attempt to sort of get a broad swath of types of municipalities and types of access. You know, you get Whiting in there and you get Milton in there or you get Northfield in there and you get South Burlington in there. But, you know, I think the intent is clear. It's not a lawsuit about Whiting and South Burlington and Plainfield and Northfield and Milton. I don't think that's being hidden. I don't think that's subtext. Right, no, I gather that. And I guess the other, you know, the other, you know, if we pass this, I mean, what effect does it have other than just sort of publicly stating that we support the defense of this or oppose the, as a general principle? I mean, is there an intent to then take action on this? Seek interested party status? I think speaking out is, you know, I have no intent when I circulated that letter and sent a letter of 200, you know, clerks from across the region, we're not looking for status. We're not looking for anything other than, this is our voice here. And I think there's inherent value in that. Yeah, I mean, sorry, Jack. And I know you're, I just want to sort of trace this down is that, you know, I understand there's a certain public principle behind that. But, you know, I'm wondering if this is talking about, is this something where, you know, and it would make sense to have these, you sort of unified voices say it. I mean, I presume that the attorneys are going to reach out to the clerks to be able to testify that this is a bigger issue than just these eight towns. But I mean, that to me would be much more effective to be able to make those arguments to the judge who would ultimately be the decision maker on that. You know, impeachment is more effective at getting rid of Trump than my speaking out. But I don't think that precludes my speaking out nor do I think it really frankly gets me off the hook for it.   Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit different and I guess I still have this at the end of the day and this may be more of a litigator or attorney's response, which is, you know, fearful about weighing in on this type of litigation, but I think I've made that point. Sorry, bad. Okay. Before I go back to Jack, anyone who hasn't spoken about this topic want to weigh in. Jack, go ahead. Thank you. While this exchange was going on, I did a little typing to try to address Dan's concerns and let me read you what I wrote to see if this might be something that would be more acceptable and potentially get a unanimous vote in favor of it. It is, and so this isn't an amendment yet, but if it looks like it flies, I would move to amend my previous motion to word it this way. It is the sense of the council that the limits on access to the Montpelier land records adopted by the Montpelier city clerk are reasonable and reasonably targeted to protect the public health and safety while maintaining reasonable access to public documents. Consequently, the Montpelier city council supports the municipalities who are opposing the action now pending as Connecticut attorney's title insurance company versus town of Bolton, NL. Yeah, I think that's more comfortable. I mean, if we want to even insert language that the actions we believe are fully compliant with the governor's hours under the public health statute. So I think that's perfect. I think I like that phrasing better, Jack. I think that answers my question. Thank you. Let me type something else in. What I'm typing in is, and in conformity with Vermont law and the governor's executive order. Kind of lost whether or not we had a motion in a second already. We did. Yeah. And so I moved that we, I moved to amend the motion that I made to strike it all and put this language in instead and let me happily read it again if you'd like me to. I think that would probably be good just to have it all. Sorry, go ahead, Dana. What I'm just going to say the second is fine with the amendment, but. Okay. Council member Jack, do you mind emailing it to us? Oh, I certainly would. Would not mind it. Mind doing that. I would happily do that. It is the sense of the council that the limits on access to the Montpelier land records adopted by the Montpelier city clerk are reasonable and reasonably targeted to protect the public health and safety while maintaining reasonable access to public documents and in conformity with Vermont law and the governor's executive order. Consequently Montpelier city council supports the municipalities who are opposing the action now pending as Connecticut attorney's title insurance company versus town of Bolton et al. Okay. All right, so there's a motion and a second which is this amendment. Any further discussion on this? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. So that motion is amended. Now we got a vote on the motion. So all in favor of, oh, I'm sorry. Any further discussion about the motion? I'll just maybe a final thing. I mean, because I do, our firm does a fair amount of title work and land transactions. And so I think substantively underlying this, I wanna say that I think, you know, this is the right, ultimately the right position. And if I was our, you know, because we have been able to do closing after closing it's slower, it's a little bit more difficult, but so is everything in COVID. And, you know, so I certainly agree with the substance of this position as well. And that's been my experience as a title attorney is it hasn't stopped people from buying helms or selling them. I just emailed that to John and Cameron. Great. Thank you. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. So that motion passes. Thank you. Thank you all. It does make a difference. The suit goes right here. Okay. We are up to the last item of our regular business, which is the warning for the town meeting. So you have a draft in your packet. You've just added an article 15 regarding the cannabis unless you wanna move it to some other location. I will note that I caught under article one, obviously we draft these from one year to the other. And there is a line in article one that says one council member from district three to fill out the remainder of a term of two years to expire in one year. And that is not, so that should be struck. That was for last year. Otherwise the numbers for the city budgets are all correct. We don't have all the final school numbers yet to put in. Just a couple of things about that, if I may, there's a couple of things, and sorry, I missed that, that was basically a placeholder because I hadn't heard back from who was kind of run for many positions they needed in cemetery parks, blah, blah, blah. But also the school and the CBPSA lines in there, they actually ultimately need to come from those respective clerks or organizations to go into the final. So those are essentially placeholders until next time on the final hearing. And you don't actually final approval of the warning until next meeting, which would you actually vote what goes on the ballot? So this is the first public hearing, if anybody has any questions about anything that's on the ballot. So does that mean we should open the public hearing? I thought the mayor already did. Oh, okay. Oh, I'll officially do that right now. Public hearing is open on the warning. So we don't actually need to vote on this tonight. It's just a hearing. Okay. Anybody else have questions or want to discuss anything on it? Can you explain why some of it is highlighted in yellow? So that's what John Odom was just talking about. Those three items need to come from the clerks of those agencies. So there are draft of them, but really until we get something official from the school district and CVPSA, this is unofficial. It's always loud. Donna and then Lauren, go ahead. But the actual at large comes from the person.  No, no, that's not how this works. This is just the warning says you're going to be electing one at large person. Just like it says, you're going to elect one council member from each district. That's what the warning says. Then the actual ballot will have the names of the people. All right, but it may be a placeholder that won't be filled if we don't have somebody who wants to be there. That's all. It still has to be on the ballot even if there's nobody lying. Yeah, it would just be your only potential to do anything would be to write somebody in. It would just be blank. Okay. Thank you. Oh, Lauren, go ahead. Just had noticed in the nitpicky vein, there's in articles 5, 9, 10, and 13, it talks about fiscal year 2020 to 22. And I think it's supposed to be 2021 to 22. It looks like it's like two years right now or a year and a half. Yep. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Any other comments? Public or anyone? Jack, go ahead. I assume I know the answer to this. There's the for articles eight and nine for the payment to the mayor and council. There is the $80 and $40 extra. And that is that because of the say, the extra pay period, just like with the other personnel. Okay. Raise? Don't spend it all in one place. Okay. All right. So with that, I'm going to close the public hearing on that and we will have the opportunity to vote on that next time. So, all right. So that is the end of our regular business. So we're up to council reports. Donna, go ahead. Yes. I sent everyone out a link to New York times. I'm really sorry if you weren't able to open it. I'll be glad to send you the article if you'd like about New York looking at empty commercial spaces and making it looking at options for housing. And I wanted, I've been walking by these state buildings that are mostly empty and thinking about why not have housing, especially like that ugly building of the department of labor. But I also got talking to people and thinking, well, Vermont college has dorm rooms that are empty. Heaton has a dormitory from the old hospital that maybe some of you don't know. On Heaton Street, there's now a senior housing on one side, but the other side, that dormitory was turned into offices by Washington County Mental Health. But it was fixed for housing. So there are lots of buildings like that. And so I'm just trying to get some stakeholders together and get the council to think about these kinds of creative ideas for housing that we should put the money in and set some temporary building or portable classroom or a shelter. So I'm going to be bringing some information at our next meeting from, and trying to get some stakeholders to talk about this idea. So I just giving you a heads up and I'm hoping to ideas and people you want to be part of the discussion. It's like a zoom round table. Thank you. You might want to come to a housing task force meeting to talk about that too. Okay, great. That's what I want. Names, all right. Semi, yes, all right. Housing task force. I'll send you a note about that. Yeah, good. Sam has already talked to some people and so Rick's really interested. Yeah. Okay, Connor. Now that was a great article, Donna and the Times there. Definitely would encourage everybody to read that. I think I'm all good. I would just encourage people again to download the My Ride app.  My Ride could do something like that. Not saying that happened, but it's really good. And it's, you know, I think we're seeing the bumps in the road on it too. But it's kind of a good period to do that before like state employees come back and everything. I think there is a time to catch a breath on this and do it right. So download My Ride. Jared. I can tell you, I tried to use it this week and they told me it was full. There were no seats left. That's a good problem to have, I think, now, yeah. And so I had to log in later. I actually think that that might have been, they were having an issue with that where it was sending people that message. So that might have been a glitch that has since been resolved. So keep that in mind. I was hoping it was successful. Yeah, right. That would be a great problem. Okay, Jay. All right, thanks. So this is probably like the best council report I could ever give or that my most favorite of all time is gonna be hard to top because I get to do two things. One, I get to brag about my amazing wife and two, I get to share some amazing news for the city. A few meetings ago, we heard from Kevin Casey and from Vermont River Conservancy about their interest in pursuing a grant with the LWCF, the Land Water Conservation Fund. And we gave them the go ahead and they did that. It'll involve some matching funds down the road, but they went ahead and VRC and Kevin and Alec, they all worked hard on it, submitted it a week and a half ago, Riccarta, my wife with VRC presented to the grantors and they just found out a few days ago that they're fully funded for the grant proposal at $300,000. So this is just the best news for the Confluence Park that we could have gotten in. I know there's still a lot of work to do in terms of design, in terms of getting the matching funds, but I just couldn't be more proud of VRC and Riccarta but also excited for the city, for this project and for the access that it'll create to our river right downtown. So I'm just super excited to be able to share that news tonight. And of course they'll be sharing it more broadly, Kevin and Alec and VRC in the coming days, but happy to let everybody know that they were successful on that. So really good news. Yeah, that's wonderful. Okay, Dan. So three things real quick. One is in the news recently, Vermont Law School has been sort of teasing the idea of moving to Burlington. And that may make some sense, but it would be really nice if we approach them to tell them that it was far more sensible to come to Montpelier or put programs here given that we are the seat of government and that we would love to have them as part of our community. So I think it would be really nice to be able to approach them and maybe it's not the city or maybe it's the MDC, maybe it's another entity, but I wanted to just simply raise that because if they're thinking at all about moving any part of their program, we should be pushing ourselves into the conversation if we're not already. The other thing is, and it actually ties onto the idea of what John was talking about with land transactions or what I said in reaction, which is there's a lot of new people moving to the area. And I think it would be, there's an old-fashioned idea of the welcome wagon where when people come into the community they get a basket of stuff and coupons to local businesses and introductions about the best place to get their oil changed. And maybe this is a Montpelier or a live issue, but I just raised this as well. It just struck me that we should be doing outreaching to new members of the community and saying hello and welcome and here's who we are. And I guess finally, this is maybe the old, the point that was made before, but I wanna emphasize that I hope everyone stays safe over the next few days and stays in a place where we can avoid situations as we saw last week in DC if in fact some of those things happen here because unlike lawful protests, the thing that happened to DC was not. And no one wants to have either a discussion or a First Amendment argument when there's armed insurrectionists. And so I hope everyone just simply stay safe and logs about it at home. Jack. I agree with, I don't have much. I agree with everything Dan said at Vermont Legal Aid, we've had interns from Vermont Law School and we've hired many graduates of Vermont Law School and we have some many outstanding attorneys who graduated from there. And I think we would be an ideal location for VLS to move. And if Dan, if you wanted to be one of the people to approach the law school, I would certainly be part of that too, if you'd like. And because as I say, Vermont Legal Aid has relied on VLS graduates to do some great work. And the fact that we're right at the Capitol is a great thing for a great opportunity for students. And the only other thing I would say is encourage people to stay home on Sunday. We don't need to show up at the Statehouse Law to give voice to the fact that the election's over and we won because we know it because President Biden is going to be inaugurated next week and I don't want to see anybody get hurt. And that's all I've got. Thank you. Lauren. Yeah, thanks. I just wanted to acknowledge it's a really sad day that for the first time in history, a US president was impeached for the second time by the US House because of inciting a white supremacist violent insurrection attack on our capital and democracy and now seeing threats in our own community. And I'm just really appreciative of Chief Pete and the Montpelier Police Department, Chief Gowens and our whole safety team in the community who are I know working incredibly hard to prepare as best they can to try to keep our community safe. So I just wanted to say thank you and echo to everyone to stay smart and safe over the coming week and let's hope for the best and prepare and thank you all. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I would just add my own thanks to all of you for your support and grace through all of this. You know, as we go through the next week or so, it's really hard to know what is gonna happen but I have faith that we are gonna get through it. We're gonna make it to the 21st and I feel good that we are gonna do our best to ensure that everyone is safe as best as we possibly can. And yeah, anyway, I'm looking forward to the 21st. Well, and the inauguration, I was also sad just that we didn't really get a chance to speaking for myself. Really that we didn't get a chance to celebrate the fact that the Senate is controlled by Democrats and that the election in Georgia went the way it did because it was overshadowed by everything that happened in the Capitol. In any case, I was grateful Dan that you brought up Eugene Goodman who was indeed a hero in saving lives at the Capitol on that day. Beyond that, last time I had last council meeting I mentioned that I would be sending out to you the city manager evaluation, which I did not do but I almost sent it to you this afternoon and I am pretty much ready to click send on that. So that is coming very, very shortly. In any case, grateful for all of you. Certainly, let's be safe over the next week. All right, John, go ahead. Yeah, just probably won an election update. The little emergency election bill has now gone through both the House and Senate GovOps. I think we're supposed to vote on it today but I think they're voting on it tomorrow. I've sort of lost track of it. I've been testifying in front of Senate GovOps a couple of times the last week but there's a lot going on. The governor is going, there will be money provided for this. The money's kind of close your eyes, throw it against the wall. Nobody really knows how much communities are going to need for it but it should be plenty. So it's going to cover everything that you all were concerned. I mean, it'll be a reimbursement situation which pay it out but then we'll get refunded or it'll come back. It also means I can spend a little more because this is just the closer we get the more of a challenge, more of a mountain this looks like to pull us off doing this all ourselves and turn it around in just a few weeks. So knowing that money is there means that I can spend a little more, basically get some temporary help in to help out and we'll just make sure it works. There is some talk that there was hubbub today that the governor might, you know, executive order require communities to do it this way, to do the all mail in. I think you won't see that. I think you'll see at least half of the communities not choose to do this but we will. So I think we can be proud of that, assuming it all works across your fingers. This is very scary right now. Bill. Yeah, thank you. I don't have a whole lot either. I'd like to thank our Montpelier Police Department for all they do, but you know, this is tough times to be police. You know, we've heard a lot of constructive criticism tonight, a lot of concerns has been a lot of posting on from Port Forum and I think those are all important questions that need to be asked and talked about. I will say that I, you know, it's our understanding that none of our officers have participated and I have full confidence that our people will do the right thing and stand on the right side of the constitution and the law if called to do so. And they've got a tough, you know, I mean, we don't know what to expect but we're certainly spending a lot of time preparing for this weekend. So just I'd like to say thank you to all of them. And I also was hoping that the chief could give us a brief update about stuff that's coming up, I don't know if you have a chance to ask him any questions anyway. I'm putting him on the spot. I didn't warn him in advance, but say chief, is there anything you want to toss in here? Yes, sir, I'll be as brief as possible and definitely answer any questions that the council may have of me. First and foremost, I'd like to say that again, reiterate that we don't have any specific threats to Montpelier, to the state capital or to any of our elected officials, but we take this very serious. I mean, I was right there watching this with the rest of the world and I'm just as concerned and we're looking at national trends. So we're taking this extremely seriously and I couldn't be, and first of all, I also want to thank Bill and Cameron for their guidance and their leadership and how we're doing this. They're an instrumental role with us and especially with their support to the department. That means the world. But I got to say that I couldn't be more proud of the men and women of this department and the sacrifices that they're making and the determination that they have and the grit that they're showing and ensuring that they want to, and ensuring the safety of our community. We are gonna continue our planning. We've been planning robustly with agency partners, federal, state, municipal partners to include our surrounding agencies, very, very town, very city. Hartford has even reached out to us to see if there's anything that we need. So it's just been great to be here in Vermont. We have sent information out, letting the folks via the CAN network that in the coming days, people may see Montpelier officers in ways that you haven't seen us before. That's because we have a heightened posture. And again, I want to reiterate that we're taking this very seriously. So you may see officers that aren't with the tie and everything else like that. We may be wearing level four body armor on the outside. Level four body armor is designed to help us against rounds from rifles and shotguns to those effects. So again, that's the level of how we're taking this and how we're being serious about this. Also to let folks know or to let the council know that we have been coordinating closely with Montpelier live and with the local businesses and merchants in the city. And we're providing daily updates to them so they can prepare and plan for the safety of their businesses and their staff as well. So that's an ongoing continuous process. And again, we've also been working with the community action networks as well. On another note, we had a meeting with again our partners early today and the level of concern and tips that have been coming in to the Vermont Intelligence Center to the state police is inspiring. So folks out here are diligent and which gives me faith and knowing that we're all gonna make it through this and that we all understand the safety behind this and that Montpelier rights are looking out for each other. And other than that, that's all I got. Thanks, Chief. I don't have anything else to report. I think there's a couple of questions. Dan and then Donna. Sure, Chief, I had a question. It seems like the timeline is growing a little bit on this. Do you have any sense? Is this something where, you know, we're really looking at the 17th to the 20th or is it starting sooner or later? Do you have any senses to, you know, what the activities are likely to be? Yes, sir. So from my understanding, it looks like that the reason that the 16th was one of the dates that's out there within the media is because that's a date of concern of other areas primarily in the U.S. Capitol. So it looks like, in my opinion, out of an abundance of caution, the bulletins are coming out for all agencies to be cognizant from the 16th through the 20th, especially. But the 17th and the 20th are the primary dates we're looking at, but we are again gonna increase posture, visibility, and but moving after this, I think that we need to make sure we remain vigilant beyond the 20th. It's not as soon as the 20th is over with, we go back to business as normal. The department is going to make sure that we maintain a very robust information sharing platform and working with our partners. Okay, thank you. And I'll echo the other counselors and mayor and that thanks to the department and all the work you guys are doing because it's really wonderful. And please express that to the staff. Yes. Donna, go ahead. Yes, kudos to the police department. Yay, we're glad you're there. But I feel we would be amiss if we close the meeting without recognizing that three of our counselors and announced their reelection runs. And I missed it, I'm sorry to say. So I'm making up for it now. And maybe you all wanna say a word to your constituents on the TV that you're running for city council. Lauren, Jack, Dan, wanna say anything? Let's let Lauren go first. Sure, so yes, I'm running for reelection. Paperwork should be arriving soon, John, in the mail, the postal services is on tap. But yeah, I know I would love to hear from people as I run of what your priorities are and really hope to build on the work and these really challenging times eager to kind of keep up the momentum for a lot of the projects we've been working on. So I would love the chance. It's been an honor to serve and would love to be able to do it for another two years. Either. I feel the same. It's an honor to serve. Montpelier, everyone's heard me say this before. Montpelier is the best place in Vermont to live. And the work that we do here at Week In and Week Out helps keep it that way. And it's an honor to be able to be a part of that and to keep Montpelier being the great city that it is. And I hope people will continue to support me on town meeting day. I'm running for reelection as well and looking forward to actually serving in a full term as opposed to this one year experiment. And hopefully this has proven fruitful for both myself and District 3. I've enjoyed it immensely. I'll echo Lauren and Jack's sentiments that this is, you know, I feel like I'm the luckiest guy to have the opportunity to serve, you know, with the staff, with the fellow counselors, with the mayor, Bill, Chief Pete. But it's also, it's a great opportunity to really make sure that everyone's voices and ideas are heard and thoughtfully processed. And so, you know, if there are constituent concerns and if anybody wishes to give me any feedback or thoughts, always open and always available and try and make those responses as thoughtful as I can whenever I receive emails. So I hope for support as well. I'd ask all of you to vote, I think only Jay's the one can do that in reality. So thank you. Great. I did have one more item. Okay. And that is, we don't want to forget to stay on to get our picture. Oh, right. Oh, that's right. Thank you, I almost forgot. Yeah. All right, so. Council members and Cameron and John Odom, if he likes, could you just stay on at the end here after we adjourn? So we just get a group picture. And then chief, I know you wanted to call chief Pete. I know you wanted to call me, but we need to do our photo up first here. Okay. All right. Well, with that, I'm going to adjourn the meeting. Clearly like 10 o'clock came and went and we were just still going. I think it's a good sign that people are like, no, let's keep talking. It's great.  We're done. Right. So without rejection, we're going to consider the meeting adjourned.


Today, we are going to look at energy and quality of life. We have already seen for a country and for the world as a whole, what is the overall energy balance, what are the issues related to energy and environment. So, if we think in terms of what do we mean by quality of life. So, when we look at quality of life, we think in terms of the general well-being of individuals and societies. So, what are the parameters, if you look at your own day to day life, what do you think affects your quality of life. You may also want to think about, if you had a choice, where would you like to live? In India, would you like to live in a city, would you like to live in a village? Which city would you like to live and why would you like to live in that city? And if not in India, anywhere in the world, if you had the option, what would be your choice? So, in looking at this, we visualize what aspects of life that we would like to see. This we would like to see how these factors, the parameters that affect the quality of life are linked with the energy use. So, there are many different indices that people have proposed for quality of life. If we look at, for instance, this is a graphic, one of the indicators that is used commonly is the gross domestic product. And we try to see what is the gross domestic product per person. So, in general, if you look at the GDP, if you look at any country, a country is producing steel, cement, mobile phones. In all of these, if we see what is the value addition that has been provided and we add that up, that gives us the gross domestic product. So, typically, a country that is more affluent will have more of an income per person. And we generally tend to see that income per person is one of the parameters that affects and shows how well of a particular country or community is. And if you see this, you will see that in the different per capita income of Indian states and different countries, different states within the country, we have a number of, we have a wide variation in terms of income. And if you look at this map, this is a map which was given in the times of India. It was, we tried to compare different regions of the country in terms of their income per capita and compared it with other countries of the world. So, some parts of the country are underdeveloped and have low income. And in other countries, other parts are well off and can compare with high income countries. So, for instance, this metric shows that different states, some states have income equal to some of the medium developed and developed countries. And some are poor and comparable with some of the less developed countries. So, this is the variation in the GDP per capita. There are, the income per capita is one metric, but that is not necessarily the best metric. So, the United Nations created a metric called the Human Development Index. There are also many other metrics which have been proposed by different researchers. For instance, David Morris provided an index called the Physical Quality of Life Index. So, typically what happens is if you would like that there is a good quality of life, you would like that all the people are educated, there is a literacy, the health is good and then infant mortality that means number of infants who are dying per thousand is small, life expectancy is good at birth. So, these are some physical quality of life indices. There are also other indices called the Happy Planet Index. The Popsicle Index is an interesting index which has been proposed which is an index of safety and it just says that if you ask people what percentage of the children can go out and buy a Popsicle and come back safely and what percentage thinks that the country is safe enough for people to go and that, if that percentage is high, it means that there is an intrinsic safety and the quality of life is high. Gross national happiness, this has been proposed by a country like Bhutan, of course it is difficult to quantify, again there are different kinds of metrics. You will find that there is an index called the Livability Index which has been used for different cities and it tells you based on the kind of services which are there in the city, the kind of expenditure and the kind of costs. There are also many gender related development indices and multi-development dimensional poverty indices and a gender inequality index. So we will look at the Human Development Index in more detail. In the Human Development Index, there are essentially three different parameters. One is the gross domestic product, the GDP per capita and the other is in terms of the education or the illiteracy. So typically if you look at the percentage of the population, adult population who is not literate, who cannot read or write and you will find that when you plot this, this plot which you see here is a plot of 127 countries and the 10 groups of 10 countries with the best, the ones which are using the lowest energy per capita to the highest energy per capita. And you can clearly see that the countries that have a higher energy use per capita typically are better off in terms of the literacy or have a lower illiteracy rate. Similarly the life expectancy versus energy use, you will see that beyond a point, when you look at 2 tons of oil equivalent per capita per year, as you go ahead beyond that most of these countries, the countries which have higher energy use per capita also are the countries with a higher life expectancy in terms of number of years at birth. And this is again another metric which is used in many of the quality of life indices. So infant mortality that means number of deaths of infants of age up to 5 years per thousand births and you see that those countries where there is a significant, whether the energy use is relatively high when we talk of 3 to 4 tons of oil equivalent per person per year, you find that the number of infant mortality has also declined and this is a better quality of life. So we can see very clearly that typically a certain amount of energy use or energy service which is provided per person if that increases, all of these indices, whether you talk of literacy, whether you talk of the life expectancy, infant mortality, all of them tend to do better. So the Human Development Index which is proposed by the UNDP has the combination of 3 dimensions. The first is the life expectancy at birth, long and healthy life. So there is a health index, there is a knowledge in terms of both the mean years of schooling and the expected years of schooling which gives you an education index and the third one is a decent standard of living which is given either in GDP per capita or recently it has been in terms of the gross national income per capita on a purchasing power parity basis and this gives us the income index. So in all of these 3 indices, we have basically 3 indices, the health index, the education index and the income index. Without this Human Development Index, all of these indicators are then normalized to go from 0 to 1 and then based on this, the average of these 3 either earlier it used to be taken as a geometric, as an arithmetic average, now it is taken as a geometric average is taken to give the Human Development Index. So any country, all the countries are ranked with 1 being the best and 0 being the worst. So you have a score between 0 and 1 and the closer you are to 1, the Human Development Index is preferred. So the energy is generally needed for development and for improved quality of life. These factors that we were talking of the life expectancy at birth, education, literacy, infant mortality and income, these are all put in terms of this Human Development Index. For each of these indicators, the index actually calculates, the index is calculated in terms of you have an index which is actual minus minimum divided by maximum minus minimum. With the idea that for each of these parameters, one of the countries has the maximum possible value and then you have a minimum possible value. So basically, this index ranges from 0 to 1 and in all of these, we calculate each of the indicators and then take the average of this. For instance, in the case of Germany and China, you find that we find the life expectancy indicator 0.87, education 0.954, GDP 0.895 and the average of these 3 gives you the overall Human Dimension Index, HDI for Germany, HDI for China. This is calculated by taking the values of minimum and maximum as we did. And you can see for life expectancy, the lowest life expectancy is 25 years for one of the countries, maximum is 85 years, this was for a particular year. And then if you see Germany is 77 and China 69.8, while adult literacy going from the minimum is 0 and maximum is 100, Germany is pretty much near 100 where you get 99 and then similarly, the enrollment ratio and GDP per capita. Based on this, we get these calculations, each of these indices when you take the actual minus minimum divided by maximum minus minimum, you get these values and this is how this is done. For another year, that was for the previous year. In 2013, if you see the life expectancy, the maximum was taken as a life expectancy in Japan which was 83.6 and for another and the minimum was 20 and then similarly, you have the GNI per capita, the maximum was for Qatar which was some 87,500 dollars, US dollars, the minimum was 100 dollars per capita. And when we take all of this, in the case of let us look at what are the numbers for India. In 2013, our rank on the Human Development Index was 135 and the HDI value was 0.5 around 0.59. Life expectancy at birth was 66 and the GNI was about, this was in 2013, the gross national income was about 5000 dollars per person per year. This has improved compared to previous years and we are on a trend of increase. Similarly, UNDP modified this where they are now taking the indicators in terms of the geometric average. So that means you take each of the indicators and take the cube root of that and then multiply all these three to get the final value. And to give you an example for Ghana, you can do the calculation yourself. The values, we are already given the minimum and maximum values and if you look at the life expectancy at birth 64.6 and the GNI per capita and based on this, if you see these were the minimum and maximum as we said and using these values in the technical notes of all these human development reports, you will find the values of calculation. We did it in a similar fashion just like we had done the actual minus the minimum by the maximum minus the minimum, you get the kind of indicator values and then the geometric mean of all of this gives you the Ghana HDI of 0.558 slightly lower than that of India and similar. You can see on this plot, the link between the energy use and the energy consumption and the HDI and you can see that typically the ones with high HDI are high energy consumption often go have an improvement in the HDI. You can look at if you look at the UNDP data, you will get all the data for all the different countries and you can make these calculations yourself. You can also see this is for India over a period of time. The human development indicator has been increasing and now it is of the order, it is a little more than 0.6 and we are of course moving forward in that. You can within this, you can also look at the human development indicator for different states and we have not had every year this is not published but there for previous years if you look at it, Kerala, Delhi, Punjab all seem to be doing well in terms of the human development indicators. If you look at Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, they are relatively still poor in terms of the quality of life and as we look at the development and the energy use, the HDI can improve. There is a lot of this data. There are other indicators also apart from this is that you may have an overall good quality of life but you may have a problem in terms of hunger. So, there are indices in terms of what proportion of the population do not get the required nutrition and there is this index called the hunger index which again is something which you may want to look at. In a state, some states there are studies where you have computed the human development index and this is showing you a plot of the HDI for various districts in Maharashtra and this is another thing where you can try and see how the energy use and the HDI combines. This plot which I am showing you here is a plot where we talk about each country is shown as a, on the x axis is the annual electricity consumption kilowatt hour per capita and on the y axis is the human development index, HDI going from 0 to 1 and if you look at this, you will find that this is the plot for India. You can see that India has over a period of time has improved in terms of the HDI and the electricity use per capita and the corresponding period has also been increasing. We currently use about a little less than 900 kilowatt hour per person per year and you can see that that is much lower than the world average. As we go from this 0.6 or 0.65 and we want to go to the region of 0.8 or 0.9, we will need to increase our electricity consumption by a factor of 2 or 3 and you will also see in this case that there is a trend in general there is a scatter. So for the same level of electricity consumption, you can find countries with different ranges of HDI. So there are countries which are more efficient and those energy services, they have a better quality of life for the same amount of electricity use. You can also see that beyond there is a minimum amount of electricity requirement for having a particular quality of life but beyond that there is the curve sort of becomes flat. So that beyond the point then this electricity use does not necessarily result in improvement of quality of life and this could be for instance if you see US, Australia, some of the Saudi Arabia and others you will find that they have not really increased the quality of the that that electricity use has not necessarily contributed to improvement in quality of life. So essentially what happens is when we think in terms of what is the implication of this when we think in terms of a country like India where we are at a particular point and we want to improve the quality of life, we will need to increase the electricity services, the energy services and so we have a target and then the per capita energy use will need to increase and we need to design our energy systems to go for this. The other issues related to this are also we can also look at what are the issues impacts in terms of the employment and this is a plot which shows I told you about the Maharashtra situation. This is showing you the human development indicators for Maharashtra and it shows you a plot of the different types of HDI. We talked about countries as they develop. You can see this is a time trajectory of the HDI versus the primary energy supply. You can see that all the countries have been moving in a path where the HDI has increased and correspondingly the primary energy use has also increased which means that there is a link though it is decoupled as we said that beyond the point there is a plateau and you can see that also in this kind of projection where you see beyond the point when you start using energy more than a certain amount this is not reflected in any improvement in the quality of life. So it means that up to a point we do need a certain basic energy services which is required for provision of the kind of services which are required for improving the quality of life but beyond that it sort of stagnates and stabilizes and then they does not result in an improvement. Similar kinds of plots have been done in terms of carbon emissions. So you can of course see that as we saw last time that the same amount of energy services can be provided and depending on the fuel mix you can have different kinds of carbon requirement for that energy but historically if you see the different countries and you see the HDI versus the CO2 emissions you see a sort of trend in terms of the usage. As we go forward if we decarbonize our energy sector this trend can be decoupled and we could really have improvement in quality of life without increasing our carbon footprint and most of the countries if you see over a period of time they have been improving their HDI and this is what development is about and this is where we need to think in terms of increasing the energy services and improving our energy system. There are other indicators which are also important from an overall point of view and one of the indicators where you look at developed country we also want to see that there is less inequality between genders and in terms of this there are different kinds of gender inequality indices very similar to the index indices that we do for the HDI and these indicators can be in terms of health, empowerment and labor market. In each of these cases what is done is we compare the average kind of services and the average kind of health for men and women and then we use this in the form of an index. We look at if men and women are doing a particular job are they getting the same amount of pay. What is the proportion of the women who are in the labor force and these are some of the indicators on which we identify the gender gap in terms of economic participation and opportunity, the educational attainment, health and survival and the political empowerment. What percentage of the MPs are women, what percentage of the leaders and the cabinet are women and so on. And if you see in the Indian context of the ranking of about 149 we do not seem to be doing too well in the terms of the gender gap but we are still on a path of improvement and if you look at compared to some of the Scandinavian countries where relatively they are much better off in terms of relative gender equality you can see that this is. So when we talk in terms of overall development and quality of life equality in gender is also one of the parameters. You can also see that within the country there are different. So this was a study by Amartya Sen the Nobel laureate in economics and this study showed that you compare Kerala with different parts of the world and compared with US China and you find that in terms of health Kerala seems to be doing better than China and in some parts of the US. And this is and similar things in terms of the women health and survival rate by age and so that is so all of this with what we have done so far is we have looked at different kinds of indicators for the quality of life. We focused on one particular indicator which is the human development index and the HDI as proposed by the UNDP we saw that all the countries are rated and this is non-dimensionalized from a factor of 0 to 1. We saw also that the HDI varies with the energy use and the electricity use. We said that in order to improve the quality of life we need to increase the energy services but beyond the point then there is a saturation and this will be useful to us when we think in terms of making projections of what kind of future development we should have and how our energy systems should work.


Moodle 2.7 has two core themes. The responsive Bootstrap-based theme clean is now the default and other standard themes have been removed. If you used one of the other themes, make sure you reinstall it from the plugins directory before you run your upgrade. There's a new theme, More, which can be customized from within Moodle, making it easier for administrators who don't have access to theme files on the server or who don't have the knowledge to develop their own themes. So if we go to Appearance, Themes, Theme Selector and change the theme from the default theme Clean to the new theme More, we can then see how to modify the More Settings page to configure the theme for our own purposes. We can, for instance, choose our own text color or link color, and then we have the option either of selecting a background color for our theme or, as I'm doing here, bringing in our own created background image. And if we add a background image, there are then options to choose how this image is repeated and its position. Other features include choosing the main content background color and secondary background color for blocks, for example. And if our organization has a logo, again, we can bring this in directly on this page. The More theme also allows us to add custom CSS and to add text in the footer. So if we save the changes and go to the front page of our Moodle, we see that using More enables that administrator quickly to create a customized theme.


The first time for me, I literally thought my lips were like possessed and then I'm just gonna shop around Waterford and see what I can find We are on our way to this new part of each and now it looks like the world is ending Today is a full-on KD day. Hey guys, it is February 16th. It is a Friday. So happy Friday Right now I'm gonna go pick up Laura as smoothie and myself because I've been craving one so badly But Laura actually just got her wisdom teeth out yesterday So I wanted to surprise her with a little treat and after that I think I'm going to go to Waterford Lakes and shop around a little bit because we are going to happy hour today And I want to get a super cute outfit And I feel like it's always better if you shop for just like one specific event rather than going on a shopping spree And not knowing what outfit you're gonna wear for each event and then that way hopefully my closet will pile up and be Super trendy and cute. I don't know.  So hopefully I can make some money too today I tried vlogging last weekend and we didn't really do that much. So I just stopped and didn't post it But hopefully this weekend will be a lot more fun All right guys. I got the goods. I got an angel food and I got her an island impact You don't even like look like you have it done on camera But I think you'll be good So I just got to Plato's and I have some clothes in the back that I want to sell to them So I'm just gonna go through those really quick and just make sure like those are the ones I want to sell and not keep And then I'm just gonna shop around Waterford and see what I can find It's already $2 from Plato's closet and then what I got was $10. So basically I just got $22, which isn't bad I'm definitely not complaining. It's extra money Right now. I'm gonna go into the label which is just like a boutique in Waterford right next to sweet I'll probably wear that red top But I just wanted to see what they have because I think I have like a gift card to there So might as well just stop by guys. How cute is this fitting room? It is so adorable Look at this beanbag. I literally want that in my room. So I got a few outfits crop top Some plain shirts For being honest like it's cute, but I don't know if it's my style and this is like $40. So I'm guessing the top is like Yeah, like around $40. So this outfit for $80 not my style. Fortunately, I think I'm gonna pass So I ended up with two plain shirts from the label And then I got the cutest choker that I've been wanting for so long and then I got some shoes too And they're on sale for $15, which was a really good deal And now the last stop is Ulta because the last happy hour my lipsticks went missing so I think they like fell out of my purse or something and My favorite chapstick also fell out of my purse and I like just got it and I have to tell you guys about it, too Because it's like the weirdest freaking thing ever Basically makes your lips like numb and like Feel like they're on fire, but I think I'm like addicted to it now So I have to get another one and I also want to see if they have like good lip colors I wrote this one down. I think it was like the Maybelline lip color stay I don't know. I think I saw that on like Instagram and I wanted to check out the color range So I'm gonna go do that So I got two things from Ulta one is already on my lips It is the Tarte lip paint and the color Fortune This is the color that's really close to the dose of colors, which I lost last happy hour So I had to get another one and when I said like oh, do you have like a similar color to this? She was like, oh, we actually have dose of colors here And it was like up in the front and only the tester was there for cork So I totally would have bought or re-bought another one But I just like don't want to wait for shipping So I just got that one and then this is the thing that I was talking about it's called lip freak Like the first time for me. I literally thought my lips were like possessed It felt so weird and it's starting to feel really weird right now But it's actually an interesting feeling and I kind of like it. So yeah, I had to buy this again Also, I got the original flavor. I think it's original It's just the sin o' mint because the other ones just smell kind of funny. Well, this kind of smells funny too, but It's the most normal one. So now I'm gonna go get gas and head home and start getting ready. So I'm all done getting ready and Let me show you my outfit of the day really quick So this is the shirt I got from Play-Doh's and I think it's from Forever 21 I think that's what the tag said and I got the shirt for four dollars at Play-Doh's closet So holly up and then this skirt is from boo-hoo. I'll try to link it down below. Is it working? I Use this on her. It is the boss Lee Dry shampoo volumizing because she said her hair was flat. I think it looks a little bit You didn't get like a before shot. Oh, yeah, I literally say this is a hundred times better. Yeah, but honestly like okay But you do more Yeah Oh, I don't know I got it set in a PR package, so Look at that They have those like Bosley infomercials, they're probably losing it like now that you say it kind of rings a bell You know a messy look. Yeah, yeah Charlotte thought it would be a good beach day Yeah, it's really hot outside. I was standing out there for like a minute and I was like starting a sweat So I'm excited. Okay. How's restaurant? It's really cool. Just clean up my room Charlotte's in the shower right and then I can come back to a clean room because I feel like every time I go out my room Just randomly becomes a disaster because I just throw my clothes everywhere I can't wait to put on some comfy clothes and just feel clean get in bed watch YouTube videos Sounds like a perfect Saturday night for me. So I think I weighed too much on this side And not enough on this side. Wait turn to the side. My back is burned Okay, turn more Good morning guys, it is Sunday morning and today I got to sleep in which felt so great today is a full-on KD day which means that we have a Girl Scout event So I'm gonna be filming at that and taking pictures and then we have a council meeting later and then chapter so pretty much my whole Sunday is gonna be KD and Honestly, some people like might think that's like a little excessive or like people might like hate that But honestly, it gives me something to do and I actually really really love just being involved in just having Things to do because at least I won't be like in my bed all day doing nothing Right now. I'm gonna take some trash out I've been having this like big bag of stuff just like piling up just so I could like go and take it To the trash bin but after that, I think I'm gonna do my nails I kind of want to paint them white, but I know like every time I try to paint them white It always looks like white out So I think I'm gonna get like gel white for spring break I think I'm gonna test out this white first and see how I like the white on me But we'll see which color I actually end up picking. I bet I'll just go with the nude All right, let's go. Guy is so blue today Such a pretty day So I just painted my toes with this color. It is the OPI infinite shine in the color Alpine snow So it's just a white color. I think my toes look really good I just like have to like sit still because I always mess it up somehow. So now I'm just gonna do my nails I think I'm just gonna go with the same color because why not make it matching? Comment down below what kind of style you like your nails to be. I like it to be like that square kind of like shape I don't know. I've never really liked round nails on me, but comment down below. What's your favorite? I started to get hungry. So I came into the kitchen and I just cut up some bananas and I'm having that with peanut butter I've been craving this for so long. So it's about time. I had it Hydrofrost and this is me I told you guys I got a choker and shoes and I totally forgot to show it to you guys So this is the choker that I got kind of like that Druzy kind of beads But it's just cute little choker And then these are the shoes that I picked up and these were $15 and I think that's such a good deal And also these are pretty comfortable like Given I only wore them for like five minutes when I was trying them on So me and charlie decided to come to bento for a chapter and everything like that And I'm excited because I ordered bubble tea. Did you order bubble tea? Guys, it's so good. I always get extra spicy cream sauce Ordering them so like I had like we ordered from them, but they came in like so like So like the smalls are kind of a dark color. It doesn't matter. I'm really worried She's vlogging What is that?  Okay. Yeah, sure He's really huge What else did I do? I just kind of branched at this new place. I'll let you guys know how it is We're all studying in the study What oh Yeah, I always say I'm studying when I'm like editing but I mean I still have homework, but I'm editing right now I finished editing the vlog and now I cannot wait to get in bed and get all cozy and watch Greek I'm still watching Greek guys like I'm on season 3 now Which is really sad because there's only four seasons and I really like the show But comment down below if you guys have started watching Greek or have watched Greek because I know a lot of you Like ask me where to watch it and by the way, it's on freeform.com If you guys didn't know so that kind of sucks because you have to like watch the ads Even though I pay for like Hulu and Netflix like okay and YouTube bread But also comment down below if you like these weekend in my life vlogs I do like vlogging but not every weekend is as you know fun and adventurous as You saw my little trash clip, you know had to put the inspirational music over to make it a little bit more Adventurous our Greek life here at UCF is on like this moratorium thing And it was like a dry moratorium for six weeks So basically like we couldn't really have that many events and it's crazy because basically my whole social life is You know sorority related events since there are none like I don't even know what to do like on the weekends You know because I'm just so used to like having something like every single weekend to do So we still can't have any wet events, but we can have like dry events So hopefully like people will start planning like philanthropy events or literally anything I just need to like interact like with other people and just like have things to go to and things to do That's all I want. Hopefully things get more exciting and I am also going to Destin with Ryan and his family this spring break again So like last spring break, I'll try to link the vlogs down below if you guys want to watch those But I'm really excited because I love Destin I have literally gone to Destin for spring break ever since like seventh grade So that location has a very special place in my heart. I love it so much But anyways, I'm gonna stop talking and take off my makeup and get into bed and upload this vlog for you guys So I will see you guys in my next video. Bye guys


President Muammar al-Buhari on Tuesday in Abuja pledged that Nigeria would continue to support the African peer review mechanism, APRM process in the country, because of its benefits to good governance and democracy. Buhari gave the assurance at the launch of the Nigeria's second review country self-assessment report and flag of the validation of the report at the six geopolitical zones of the country, including the federal capital territory. Describing the review as timely and handy, President Buhari explained that the present administration, with its change mantra agenda as overhauled, revitalized and institutionalized its machinery for a successful conduct of the second peer review of the country. The president recalled that Nigeria was first peer reviewed in 2008 and since then has recorded tremendous success in the implementation of the national program of action as recommended. It is a self-monitoring tool to enshrine good governance in our political system, promote political leadership and encourage democracy through tracking and monitoring the implementation of sustainable development goals and agenda 2063 of the African Union in the continent. Several activities were carried out including country support mission, board sensitization, consultation and training session on sharing experiences for the conduct of the second peer review, signing of the MOU, visit of the review validation team and various sectorial consultations among others. Your Excellency, we are happy to report that Nigeria hosted the first country review mission in 2008 and subsequent peer review in 2009 and further submitted two progress reports on the implementation of national program of action. It was on this basis that Nigeria requested for the second review mission to assess the country during this year 2021. As we are aware, the review is timely and handy as the present administration and its change mantra agenda has overhauled, revitalized and institutionalized its machinery for a successful conduct of the second peer review of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Agenda 2063 is a strategic framework for the social economic transformation of the African continent over the next 50 years with a strong mandate on the part of an African peer review mechanism. This is an attempt to build on and seek the acceleration of the implementation of fast and present continental initiatives for the growth and sustainable development of the African continent. Use updates.


Hi, I'm Jay Fiedel, this is Think Tech, and we're doing Think Tech Tech Talks. That's not a redundancy, it's a reality. And here we are at the two o'clock rock on Tuesday with Matt Darnel. Matt is the president and CTO of Comtel Hawaii, which is a very important company on Bishop Street and through the business community doing communications and telephony. Am I right? Absolutely. Welcome to the show, Matt. Thank you for having me. Tell us about Comtel. Tell us how you got into it. Tell us what it does. You want to set the stage and see what you do all day. Absolutely. What I do, I have fun all day. All day long. If you enjoy what you do, you're not working, right? So Comtel started about 20 years ago doing base telephony type of things. My father and I started the company and it's real interesting, the evolution that we've done where we started with out of a spare bedroom in his house. Really? I love this story. I remember thinking, boy, I wish we had an office downtown. That was the ultimate goal of when we made it when we had an office downtown. So we got to go to the office downtown and that was probably 10 years ago and we've kind of moved farther and farther away from town every five years, but every week. That's where the market is. It really is. And so we have been doing those kind of things and this last iteration of what we've done, it started about a year ago, we have figured out that our business needs to change and our business as it stands is going away. And the analogy that I use with folks is it doesn't matter how much money you made or how successful you were, if you made horse and buggy carriages around the turn of the previous century, right? When those Model Ts started rolling off the assembly line, you either changed your business model or it went away. Oh, you're toast, yeah. Absolutely. So this is really an interesting issue and dilemma as a matter of fact. Because as the telecom provider, I mean, we used to sell, they used to be a telecom manager.  That's nobody's job. Unless you're a Fortune 500 company, you don't have a telecom manager. It's all under IT. And we were in a position, we were called a trusted advisor, where they wouldn't make a move without asking us, should I do this, should I do that. And about five years ago, it started happening where we call someone, they go, oh, golly, we changed our phone system. Our IT guy recommended this, so we just bought it. No different than if they recommended a backup solution or a server, that IT person displaced us as the trusted advisor. I mean, they didn't go for other quotes, they didn't even ask us, they just kind of switched over. It's a new paradigm for them. And they figure it doesn't, in this world, it's in that world. So they go to the IT guy. Yeah, and it is getting to the point that voice is just an application on the local area network. And just like printing or file sharing or email, it's sitting right there. So we started feeling back then that we had to do something. Well, about a year ago, we made a very strategic decision. And we've been doing this. We're relaunching as comtel.cloud. And that's kind of the outward manifestation. That's why we're here today, comtel.cloud. Absolutely. And we're telling people, it's a whole new comtel. We still have all the things we knew, all of our core competencies over. We've developed the last 20 years, we still have that. But now we're doing so much more.  One goal is we didn't want one server anywhere. It was either going to be in the cloud or in a data center somewhere. It's a much better arrangement. Yeah, and from our phone system, it's in our private cloud. It's not in the public. It's in a private cloud. We have that at a data center here.  That paradigm, internally, to me, 20 years ago, that's all I wanted. The office space, I felt so envious of people. Now it's 180 the other way. Absolutely. And parking and all the things associated with that. So that took a long time to plan, to think about, to talk to employees from marketing. How are our competitors going to use that against us? And that's sales people. They're the ones in the cloud. You don't need them for what's terrestrial situations. Exactly. And it used to be like phone systems where all there was wires going everywhere. And we needed a lot of technicians for that. And we needed what you call a roller truck. Somebody had to get in a truck and drive to fix something. But now, most places we go, we're not responsible for the infrastructure. We've got some little bit of handsets, which if you can plug in a lamp, you can plug these phones in. And we have one server, maybe two, in the closet. If a phone stops working, 99% of the time, it's got nothing to do with us anymore. So our need for technicians and engineers has gone down. And 95% of the times, we used to have to roll the truck to fix a problem. Now, 95% of the time, it's remote. So how do you spend your time? I'm on the beach. I'm enjoying life. I don't believe that. But quality of life is a big part of it. We have people that work at Comteldit says, if I couldn't work at home, I would have retired a long time ago. So I really feel good about that, that they're so productive. They're such an important part of our company. They provide so much good for the community that if they had to drive into town, and come into town, an hour going home, they would have retired by now. This is a company of the future. But what do you do all day? What do I do? How do they do? Yeah, absolutely. So there are, we still have to install things. So we have people that go and install, and they'll take phones and boxes and run cable and data drops, those kind of things. Within a facility and off of the river. Yeah, absolutely. So in a place like this, you want jacks around the wall, we can do that, install a network switch. But we set everything up so that we don't have to come on site to fix things when they have get wrong. So I do have kind of, I'm very active in the community from on various boards, scholarships. You have to see a Hawaii Educational Foundation on the scholarship chairman. We give about $83,000 in scholarships. So anybody in STEM that's looking for a scholarship, if you're a Hawaii resident, I encourage you to research that. From coaching football, I get to walk my son to school in the morning.  But I'm learning. I am coaching. I'm teaching. I'm going on sales calls. We're setting things up. We're rethinking how we do things. And we're bringing up a VMware form. And so VMware form would be a servers where let, right now, our cloud is just for us. So we're going to be letting other companies run their applications in our cloud that we have. It's a DDR fortress. And so with that, I mean, do we buy our own? A TDR fortress, by the way, is an amazing place. Here at the airport, it's got walls of concrete that are three feet thick. It's prepared to last in any eventuality. It's where you have co-location servers. Absolutely. It takes care of your data in a safe way. So as far as, so we do the applications for that there. So we allow people to do that. But do we buy? Do we want to do something here? Do we do it on the mainland? I mean, rack space on the mainland is a lot less expensive than rack space here in Hawaii. Why do you do it here when you can do it there? Well, we're going to be doing a hybrid. There are some things we'll talk about here with software-defined WANs that are very timing-sensitive, like voice and video. But there are other things that if an email takes an extra five seconds to get from me to you, no one is ever going to notice that. So maybe take advantage of an inexpensive cabinet and power and internet there for those types of applications. And the things that we need here on the island, we want to have close. We want to go ahead and do that. Yeah, it was a level of comfort. But let me tell you what I would call you for based on the four corners of this conversation. OK, I don't want to have an old-fashioned network, an old-fashioned PBS system. I don't know if anybody remembers that. But the PBS system kind of thing in the inter-corporate office, I want to use my cell phone. I want to use VoIP phones. I want to attach the VoIP phones to my computer.  I want to minimize the risk. I'm going to have to have trouble and pay attention to maintenance and replace things.  And I need you to help me figure out the logic of my answering system. I mean, my reception system and my message giving and all that stuff. Email, voicemail rather, it wasn't longer. 20 years ago voicemail was a hard sell in any company. Now it's 25 maybe. But now you've got to have you have everybody as ubiquitous on every cell phone. So I want it all connected and I want the smartest possible apps to run on my VoIP phones and on my system in my company. And I want a really sweet voice answering and leaving brands on everybody. Well, if you like. They're really sweet voice. I can do that. So any of it. I want you to consult with me and give me the true path. So I don't have to do the path more than once. And I want you to tell me how I can stock the necessary equipment so that I can change the phones and I can modify the software to the extent that I would like to modify the software. And sort of leave me on a kind of an automated basis. Am I right in my expectations? So what I heard you just say is one, you want some kind of predictable cost for your technology. I kind of inferred what you were saying. You never want to hit with a big bill. Cheap. Or if it can't be cheap, predictable. Or you can budget for it. You know what it's going to be. I'm getting this value for this amount of money. Like when you consider an expensive camera, I consider ultra expensive. So there's lots of relativity in phone systems. So you want predictable IT spend. And I think that's pretty common across the board. You want something that's managed. You don't want to be responsible for this card dies or this PC dies or this server dies or something goes where all of a sudden you're faced with what do I do? There's no support for it. Do I buy something? Well, we don't have a fries down the corner. The best we got is Best Buy or Industrial Electronics. Maybe you can go there and pick something else. No, it's hard. It's very hard. They carry consumer but not business. And you can't find the stuff you need to run a business at Best Buy. Sorry, Best Buy. I love Best Buy, but not at that level. Absolutely.  But that's for the most part gone. So you want those kind of things. You want mobility.  It's not a place. No matter where you are, you want to be able to work. I mean, when I was waiting in the green room earlier, I was on my phone, I remote desktoped into my PC. So I was able to forward some pictures for this presentation that we didn't get earlier. So there's nothing I could have done at my office desk that I couldn't do from my phone. That's the thing. You're dealing. You say that you've got to be careful about the buggy whip phenomenon. You're saying that everybody has a cell phone. There are all these apps on cell phones.  And then you talk about the relationship of the cell phone and the computer and all that.  Then the question is, with all of that, with all that cell phone tech, where you don't need to go to Hawaii and Telcom anymore, you don't need it. And people, you know, by the thousands, I believe, or at least by the hundreds, are giving up landlines here these days. They don't need them because they have a cell phone with them all the time. And so given that, given the computer, the laptop usually, right, and the cell phone, why do I need Comtel? Absolutely. So you still need, even if you have a lot of automated things, a lot of things to run them. So there's always going to be changes that need to do. There are always going to be some kind of issue.  The other half, I think, I mean, if it was easier, I would be out of a job, right? And cell phones used to be a very complicated thing. You know, where you had coverage, which care you wanted to go with, how many SMSes, I mean, you paid per text message, those types of things. And now it's just, you don't need a consultant to help. I mean, there used to be people that would look at your phone bill and figure out where you're overpaying, and they just got a percentage of... I remember that. It wasn't that long ago either. That was a business, right? But now it's flat rate, here we go.  So some things are getting a lot simpler. And that's what has enabled us to grow, to identify that, to take the good and make that work for the benefit of the people. And as far as who I tell ghosts, I mean, we need who I tell me. There needs to be some glue holding together, all that from E911 to all that interconnect between all the carriers, that type of thing. So they'll always have a place, but I don't think it will be with landline telephones. I have a Hawaiian tell at home for internet and TV, and I'm very happy with that. I don't have a landline, that's for sure.  I mean, do we know, how do they down 911 if they have problems? I mean, that's a little bit off the beat track. But so there are, I'm happy to talk to people about that. I mean, what are their pros and cons of getting rid of a landline? I mean, it's not for everyone, my mother-in-law. Don't answer that yet, because we're gonna take a short break, Matt. This is Matt Dardell. He's the president and CTO of Contel, Hawaii. And when we come back from this break, we're gonna talk about the pros and cons of giving up your landline in the year 2017 and the 21st century. We'll be right back. It's me, Angus McTech. Wishing you to welcome and join us to see us on Hibachi Talk on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join my co-hosts, Gordo the Texard and Andrew the Security Guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech and we'll have some wee bit of fun.  Aloha. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Chang, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. We'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. I told you we'd come back and we did, like MacArthur. Okay, that's Matt Darnell. He's the president and CTO of Contel, Hawaii. Matt, so the cliffhanger, who's so excited about this. What are the pros and cons of giving up your landline here? Yeah, and for obviously for different people, it has different applications. And two people that are near and dear to me. So my mother, she does a lot of faxing, right? And voiceover IP and faxing don't go well taken together. You know, you need special equipment and different protocols. And so she likes to fax, she gets a lot of faxes. So for a landline that is the single most reliable way to make and receive faxes from a fax machine that you buy Costco. Hard wire. Hard wire, absolutely. So for her, that is the difference between having a home phone and not having a home phone. Where my mother-in-law doesn't really like cell phones and technology and cell phones she takes out when she thinks she might need it for a trip. But otherwise it's just put away in the desk and she just wants a home phone. So I mean, it does kind of break down that way that there is a real generational gap. That if you look at who has a landline, it's people that grew up with a landline, that have a landline. I know people that if I call them without texting them first to ask them if I can call them, I mean, that's an insult. So they're not used to having a landline. We were at a hotel on a vacation last summer and we had two adjoining rooms, one for my wife and myself, one for my two boys. And they had never used a kind of phone where you lift it up and you get a dial tone.  And they're back and forth. There was such a revelation to them that you pick it up and you hear something and then you put numbers in and you don't hit send and their whole life has been cell phones and that type of communication. Change the world. And the iPhone is what, barely eight years old or something like that. Think about 10, I think this is a 10 year anniversary. It's not much. So it's changed our society everywhere in the world. It's changed our psychology, our sociology. It's changed the way we do business. Really amazing. Steve Jobs wasn't kidding. This was totally disruptive. And Query, will it continue to be disruptive? Probably yes. So to the extent that you want to avoid the buggy whip syndrome, you have to keep on moving. Absolutely. You have to keep ahead of it. And what a trend that we see today that I don't think has really hit Hawaii because we're kind of insulated and we don't have a lot of choice as far as carriers go is this software-defined WAN. And WAN's wide area network. Wide area network, a local area network is what happens within your four walls. A wide area network is generally how you would connect to someone outside of your walls. It might be your own company or it might be the internet or it could be salesforce.com or Gmail or anywhere outside your global organization or your staff is in India, for example. Absolutely. And so it doesn't really matter where you are. And those got started about in the mid-80s. There were things like x.25 and frame relay which you might remember those terms. I'm too young for that. You're too far too young. And they were expensive. They were from this point to that point. It was like a hose. What went in one side came out the other side and vice versa. Very little intelligence built into the network and took a long time to install. Extremely, extremely complicated. But then the internet happened. And all of a sudden people needed to get outside to this what's the world wide web? HTML, why do I have to type www? Because you can answer any question you can ask. That's why. It can't today. And so then they had two connections. They had one connecting two sites together and then one connection going out to the world. And that was just very hard, very even more complicated and very expensive. So then the technology called VPN, a virtual private network happened where I have some internet connection and you have some internet connection and we can make a tunnel between us through the internet which is wide open. I mean, that's just gunfight, shoot them out, whatever you have right there. Anything goes on the internet. You can't control that. But we can connect to each other. So our email is encrypted. If you have a software package that I need to utilize, again it's secure between us and we're not tied to any particular carrier. You could get carrier A, I could get carrier B and we could be anywhere. This makes me think that we should look at your photos. Am I right? Absolutely. So we want to go ahead and do that. So this is an example of a two, two, two branches of the same organization and they have this we call SD-WAN, software defined WAN and you hear that a lot, that term SD something and that just means we're separating the software from the hardware. We're a common example we all know is a cash register. When you put a square, which is the credit card reader on an iPad, that is now, the iPad is now a software defined cash register because I've just taken some generic hardware and I've made software, how have it be something else? So we have this generic hardware and we can have multiple carriers that connect to the same location and I can do all kinds of things from buffer to meaning that I can slow things down and speed things up. So if I have two connections, like if we had in that image, what it allows me to do is A, I have two connections, I want all of my internet traffic to go over one connection and all of my email traffic to go over the other connection but this device is smart enough that hey, if link A is slow, it'll move traffic over to link B and have that kind of technology. Now you as a, I just said integrator, would know the pieces and you'd be able to analyze how they would fit together and how they would serve a given business or situation from the point of view of functionality and connectivity and for that matter, security. All those things would play in your analysis and your recommendations to your clientele and I take it from what you say that you can be, although certainly Apple has been very innovative in this and so has Samsung for that matter, although once in a while they get into a little tiff about who invented it first but in any event they've been very innovative and what I take from your comments is that people like you, innovators, I mean integrators can be innovative too. You can find the ways to do this in a efficient way, a secure way and great connectivity and functionality dedicated to a certain kind of business or operation and that's where your creativity comes in, am I right? That's very true. I mean, every business is different. Every business has unique challenges but there are some constants. Everything we talked about that you want, I think every business should strive for. The lowest cost for the biggest bang for the buck and they wanna have something that's manageable, they wanna have something that's consistent, something that's gonna work and what we can do is we're not tied to any particular carrier, any particular technology. If somebody has something and they need, I need to do X, Y, and Z, we can find the right technology. I mean there are some large, they start with Cisco, that anything with the Cisco brand on it, it works great. If it's got that stamp on that. It's not a fraudulent copy of the Cisco brand, that happens too, yeah. Absolutely right, but if it has Cisco on there, then it's good that they sell it. Well we have more of a best of breed where we wanna look at the switching system. What's the best for that? What's the best for that? Reliability and all that stuff. Absolutely, cost, manageability, the company behind it, doing all those kinds. So if I take this advice and you give me reliable and long lasting equipment, then I'm gonna be better off and that's really the value added you provide for me. But let me ask you this question. Hawaii has been courting the possibility of being a call center for all since statehood. And we had one or two over the years. They never worked out. But if I come to you as a guy who can integrate all this and I say, Matt, build me a call center. Make it the most efficient call center you can. Make it better than anything in the Philippines or in India. Make it sort of an American icon kind of call center that will do it the way they used to do it when America was great. You remember that before? America's great. America's great. We're gonna make America great in telecommunications. Absolutely. So the question is, can you give me that now? Can you find, can you integrate equipment, including cell phone equipment and computer equipment and wide area network equipment that will allow me to have the most terrific call center right here? And Bishop, can you do that? Absolutely. But the challenge with that is with today's technology, you don't have to be a single place. I mean, we used to call follow the sun call centers. And Hawaii was very nice because we have business hours with Tokyo and also with New York City. It's one of the few places you can be in the United States and be able to say that. But we could, using the technology, you can have small pockets. So geography kinds of issues don't happen. A distributed call center. Absolutely. Everywhere. So could we do what you asked for? Absolutely. Would it make a lot of sense? And this is where, I get that a lot. People tell me, this is what I want. Make me this. And we say, wow. I understand that's what you want. But let's talk about why you want that. See, whether you should really want that. And what some of the other options are not, I'm not talking about outsourcing. Your employees, you control them, but maybe you have something in New York or somewhere on the East Coast that when people call it two in the morning in Hawaii, you have something bright-eyed, bushy-tailed that's already on their fourth cup of coffee to be able to do that. Let me ask you this though. We only have a minute left. So I'd like you to address the audience, that camera. Okay? So what should Hawaii do? Hawaii needs to be at the front end. We have to be relevant. We take advantage of our special geographical position in Pacific and with the straddle time zones and all that. And with guys like you who can integrate all this technology and make it work in a way that maybe the average man doesn't contemplate. What do you advise Hawaii how it could leverage? This kind of telecommunications technology with your advice and consultation for best effect on our economy. There it is, camera one. Absolutely. So I think the number one thing that people would be able to do is not so much focus on what they want the process to be, but focus more on the outcome. If you're trying to figure out here, what are my business goals? What is the outcome I wanna have for whatever I do? This HR policy, this technology policy, this piece of equipment I'm gonna buy. What do I want the outcome to be for my business, for my customers? And focus more on that. I think they'd be a lot better off. Avoid lock-in. I wouldn't wanna buy something where there's only one person I could go to for support for manufacture. We saw Avaya, a multi-billion dollar company who just bought out Nortel five or six years ago that they declared bankruptcy. You've been representing Nortel for decades and decades. And they were the world leader and they went out of business. And Avaya bought them and three, four days ago, Avaya declared bankruptcy. So... Well, I'll tell you what I get, okay? In terms of, I mean, where you are and where Hawaiian telecom is for that matter is you gotta be quick. You gotta be nimble. You gotta be at the front end.  You gotta be way ahead, like a century ahead of buggy whips. And it's very exciting where you are right now because you're in constant change, which is the best place to be. And with the comtel.cloud, I mean, that's getting our letting the community know that we are changing and we are involved. And that's what we tell people. And in the animal kingdom, it's not the smartest or the strongest or the fastest that survived. It's the species that has the ability to change. You know, that's what survives over time. And I think the same with business and that's why I think our future is very bright. Matt Darnall, president and CEO of Comtel Hawaii. Thank you so much for joining us. Been a pleasure. Thanks so much.


Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Joel Frugman from True Precious Metals. How are you today? I'm doing well, Tracy. Okay. You're sandwiched between two major players in the gold industry. Do I have this correct? That's right. We're right between Marathon Gold on the one side and Matador Mining on the other, both with significant gold deposits and our Golden Rose projects right in the middle of that. And of course, so this is why this news yesterday was such a big deal. Talk to me about this. Just walk me right down the road. You started, you commenced, 5,000 meter drill program to many of us. This is a big deal.  I think we're on the best street in Central Nathanland. On the ones that we've got, Marathon Gold, they've got over 4 million ounces of Valentine Lake, and they're on this, it's called the Cape Ray Valentine Lake share zone. So it's like a diagonal line. So Marathon's right up here. They've got 4 million ounces scattered across a series of deposits across their property. The next project over is our Golden Rose project. We've got 45 kilometers of strike length, meaning we've got a lot of coverage on the same road, on the same structural feature that goes through Valentine Lake. So there's a lot of exploration, high potential exploration across our property. And then on the other side below us, a company called Matador Mining, they're Australian listed. They have an 840,000 ounce gold resource, again, a series of smaller mid-sized large deposits across their property, and still a lot of exploration left there. So the theory is basically there's a string of pearls of deposits up and down this structural corridor, the Cape Ray Valentine Lake share zone, cuts right through our Golden Rose project, optimal place to explore. Okay. And so I'm assuming, and just correct me if I'm wrong, we've got all these analysts following these big players. Should they not all have their eyes on you with this drill program and these associated results for the Golden Rose project? We have previously reached out to some analysts because we're early and haven't even done our inaugural drill program on Golden Rose. It's a bit early to get analysts coverage, but that being said, we do know there's analysts watching the stock. We have institutions in our shareholder base, including Eric Sprott, a number of flow-through funds, Palisades Gold Corp. Altius is our second largest shareholder, it's TSX listed mineral exploration and royalty company. So there are a lot of eyes on the stock. We did a couple of financing back in March and then in June. One was more retail and high net worth. The second one was all institutional. We think analyst coverage would be great for down the road. For now, we just want to execute our exploration program and we think that the results from this should certainly drive better coverage, ideally from analysts, but also the broader market community. Once we prove up a bit of what we've got at the property. Well, perhaps my point was just that you've got the big players already having their eyes on you now for the rest of the world to hear about Golden Rose. Could you just give us a quick overview? I'm an investor. I'm looking at these Gold exploration companies and I may not be a geologist. Can you tell me maybe three competitive advantages or why you should pick the Golden Rose project for true precious metals over maybe one of the other competitors out there? Sure. I'm point number one, although it's not in no particular order. I'm a securities mergers lawyer, not a geologist. So we have some cost discipline here. We're not just looking to go blindly drill and blow through our treasury, which leads me to point number two, we're well capitalized. We still we had over 6 million bucks in the treasury at mid-year. We're deploying that wisely over the course of the drill program. We'll have significant money left at year end to do follow on exploration. Point number three, but again in no particular order, the Golden Rose project between these two significant players with significant gold deposits, you couldn't ask for better location for a junior mineral exploration play and that's a competitive advantage that no one can replicate is our land position and specifically this asset. And of course, those of you maybe newer to the gold industry, we are a Newfoundland Canada, correct? That's correct. Central Newfoundland Gold Belt. And perhaps point number four, we have one of the most articulate exploration CEOs in the marketplace. And on that note, what should we anticipate as shareholders and say the next quarter or two? I mean, when do these drill results start coming in? It's a good question. In terms of news flow, I mean, so drilling has started. I think we've actually got a whole completed by now. We'll look to roll our results when we get enough to that to make sense. We can start putting together the data and a good story. Probably would be maybe some results before year end, but the bulk will really come out over the course of Q1 2022. Because again, we need to compile data from a 5000 meter program. We want to be able to present the results accurately. In the meantime though, if we see anything very interesting, we're likely to put that out as news. So there's that in terms of intermittent news flow. Plus, we're still finishing up some service level exploration at the project. And when we've collected enough of that data back from the lab, we already have stuff trickling in. That would also be a good time to update the market. So we think there'll be bits and pieces over the rest of this year. And the bulk of the drill results really go public over the course of Q1. And of course, thank you so much, Joel Frudman, from True Precious Metals on your Golden Rose Project Drilling Program. Thank you. Thanks Tracy. Thanks everybody.