All right, what's up everybody? We've got a full case of dynasty baseball picker not picker team two random players each I didn't even see the two last time Everyone gets two players on this list. Good luck. Remember cut autographs go to this cut autograph spot We do have some spots that have a couple players in there So we will be rolling the dice and we're gonna go eight times That works out Anyone watching live would get it It's the same dice. All right one Two works out perfectly for me three four five six seven I That's a sigh of relief there and eight Joe Down to Leonard and eight times on the list of players 84 84 got it one two three four five Six and I'll check the chat after I finish this randomizer. Just want to make sure I got it right Eight times card a key boom. I'm not great at multitasking Down to Dustin Pedroia. So here's a list of players. I'll scroll through it I'm not gonna name all 84, but we'll scroll through it one time Then we'll alphabetize everyone's name and I'll also share the link in the chat Yeah, I think I've you know at some point we might do a gritsky giveaway You know the only reason why we're doing the Jordan is because you know the documentary and a lot of people You know hyped up on on Michael Jordan So I think that's that's been a big reason why those have been selling so so quickly All right, Aaron. Here you go Brad B Brandon Dave what's up? How's it going? I got those players plus any cut autos David S Dennis Diane we got James Jeffrey P. Jeremy s Joe a Joe L Leonard Mark We got Robert Hogan Rob W. Sean M and Stephen K So there you go. I'm gonna pause video see if there's any trades never know. I think Teddy's got a question for me, too All right, full case It's Dynasty. Good luck, and there's the seal on the bottom. I know I'm watching a Cowboys documentary And I'm not particularly enjoying it Train on MLB network instead All-time games is on what do we got? Yankees versus Rockies. This is an all-time game. All right. Good luck. What happens in this game? That's so special Slugfest it just says a 13 to 10 slugfest All right first card from dynasty. Good luck random player edition is five of 10 Ken Griffey Jr. Oh Reds edition, but doesn't matter. It still goes to the Ken Griffey Jr. Spot. Who's got that one? Dang Nice start to dynasty Brandon M has Ken Griffey Jr. Very nice Even a little signature on the jersey there game used five of ten such a sweet autograph too People always say about his Reds ears, but they actually weren't that bad He didn't get hurt could be in contention with the Homan record all time maybe If he hadn't gotten injured kind of like the Grant Hill of baseball Or vice versa. All right next one up six of Ten it is no more Garcia para comes no more Garcia para Was one of the best players I enjoyed playing with in a backyard baseball if anyone Ever playing that game. All right. No more is owned by mark B. That's one mark Let me actually write that name down so Can just Put it right in Last name B. Oh Really nice. I guess he still lives in LA right? He does the Dodgers what? Pre-game or something. I forgot for some reason he played on the Cubs. I don't know why Just picture him as a Dodger in Red Sox. All right. Here we go Seven of ten Chris Bryant. Wow the Cubs would have been hitting well in this one Chris Bryant seven of ten Who's got KB? James beat us. Nice. There you go James. Congrats Nice one James Chris Bryant little three-color patch action and the Final couple boxes here two more to go Want to see a one-on-one or at a five at least They've all been out of ten although pretty good players so far No duds for sure Revealed the card eight of ten Chris Paddock Padres I believe he's a combo spot Yep, James also gets that one Back-to-back hits nice one James and the final box. Good luck. Oh Nice Mac Yeah, I mean it's just like you know having a YouTube account You know and in order to chat in our stream you have to have a like a Google or YouTube account But that doesn't mean you have to post to YouTube, you know Same with Instagram. All right, what do we have here three of five? Noah cinder guard nice Little a Thor action Noah cinder guard three of five Who has the cinder guard spot Jeremy S? Nice one. There you go. Last hit of the break. Thanks everybody for getting in sorry for those who went hit list, but Some nice some nice cards for some of the winners here. Thanks everybody catch you all for the next break


I'm going to try and get these slides posted later. The biggest problem is probably going to be some of the screenshots and some of the screencast style recording. So hopefully those all come out OK online as well. So how many people have actually heard about Symphony Flex? OK, how many people have used it? OK, that's not a whole lot of people. So one of the things that I've noticed about Symphony Flex over the last year is that it seems to be difficult to really know what Symphony Flex is. A lot of people might look at it and think it might be a new Symphony version, but that's not really true. What Symphony Flex is, is a new way to manage and install Symphony applications. How many people are Symphony developers or work in Symphony projects? OK, so you're pretty familiar with how to manage Symphony applications, bundles and stalls and things like that. One of the things that Fabian looked at when he was working on creating Symphony 4 is how to build modern-day applications. Modern-day applications don't necessarily start with something like what Symphony Standard Edition starts with. The idea is that you want to start with small dependencies, just what you want, and then add as you go. And up until recently, the way that you would make that decision in the Symphony ecosystem would be to choose between Silex or Symphony. How many people are Silex users? OK, a handful of people. The problem with Silex is that it's Symphony-ish, but it's not quite Symphony. So you can't just take your Silex application and easily upgrade it to a Symphony application. It is, however, really easy to get running. Symphony, on the other hand, takes a little bit of work to get up and running on an application, especially if you start with the Standard Edition. You might have to remove some bundles. You have to look at a bunch of configurations that you might not need yet. There's all this stuff there. So trying to decide up front which framework you want to start with is kind of a pain. And really, the framework shouldn't be getting in the way. Within the Symphony ecosystem, it should just be easy to decide how to start an application. So about a year ago, when I saw somebody say, hey, should I try Slim or Silex? I don't have anything against Slim. But I thought, you know what? Why don't you try Symphony Flex? Use Symphony Flex to build your application. And with most things on Twitter, context is important, and being able to say the right thing and the right amount of characters is difficult. And I was quickly corrected and told, oh, but how can you compare Flex to Silex? It's really just a composer plugin. That is actually what Symphony Flex is. It's a composer plugin. So the pushback on this is correct and valid. But to say it's just a composer plugin sort of undersells how powerful Flex really is. If you read the documentation, the documentation is going to tell you that Symphony Flex automates the most common tasks of Symphony applications, like installing bundles and other composer dependencies. And if you're just reading that at a high level, you might be thinking, big deal. So what? We have composer for that, right? We can install bundles with composer. But if you think about the whole bundle install dance that you have to go through, it actually is a lot more complicated than just installing a bundle package. Typically, you're going to run composer require with the bundle. You're going to have to make sure and go in and register this bundle inside app kernel.php. You might have to add some routing. So you have to go into your routing configuration file and add the resources for the routes. You're going to have to go into the actual app configuration to potentially add some of the, I can't remember the word, but basically the semantic configuration language for that bundle. So you might have a top level key now with this bundle and different things that you need to set for it. Oh, and also if you have certain things that are install specific, like tokens and things like that, you have to go into parameters.yaml to try and update those. So you get this bundle all installed.  And now you've got all of those installed. Oops, you don't want it anymore. Do you want to remove it? How many people have tried to remove Symphony bundles before? How many people enjoyed that experience? Yeah, no hands, awesome. So the way you remove bundles is you do the same thing, but in reverse. You have to remember all of the configuration keys that need to be removed, because if you remove that bundle, Symphony is now no longer going to be able to parse your configuration files. If you leave the bundle in app kernel.php, that class no longer exists. So it's not going to be able to do anything with that. So your app may not work for a while while you try to remember all of the places that you have to go to remove that bundle. And this isn't really as rare as it might sound. If you look at all of the major bundles out there, they all have the same thing at the top, the same five or six steps of the things you need to do in order to install their bundle. So really what Flex was all about is trying to find a way to automate this. It really wouldn't make sense to automate Composer Require, because that's something that we're already doing already as developers. That should be maybe the only step that you have to do. Should we be able to automate bundle registration? Yes, we probably can, but it's going to require changing some of the ways that Symphony handles bundle registration. So these are changes that were put into Symphony 3334 and is now the default for Symphony 4. Similarly, route configurations are the same thing. These are things that can be automated if things change a little bit in the way that Symphony looks at how routes are configured. The actual service configurations, same story, and local configuration. Local configuration, in the case of Symphony Flex and Symphony 4, go into .emv. So it's following the 12-factor environment controls rather than doing things in the parameters at YAML file. So if we really wanted to still what Symphony Flex is going to have the most impact on for you, it's to automate the installation of removal of bundles. And it makes the whole process a lot easier to understand. And it's able to do this by leveraging the conventions and features from Symphony 4. If you have a Symphony 33 or a Symphony 34 application, you can start using Flex already. The only thing that you have to do is migrate the directory structure from Symphony 2 and Symphony pre-33 to the Symphony 4 layout. If you do that, then you can start using Symphony 4 for your Symphony 33 and 34 applications as well. A lot of the nice things that happen as a part of the whole developer experience behind Symphony Flex come from a lot of the features and conventions that came into Symphony 4. So we're looking at things like auto-configuring. How many people have used Symphony 4 auto-configuring? A couple of people. There's also some feature detection. There's auto-wiring, things like that. So there's a lot of stuff put into Symphony 4 that just go really well with the way that Symphony Flex is set up. So if we go back to this question of, is Sylex actually something that you could compare with Symphony Flex?  And in order to dog food, Flex, and Symphony 4, he decided to move these applications to use Symphony 4 and Flex. And what he found was that he loved it. It felt just like Sylex, except it wasn't Sylex. It was still using the full stack Symphony framework. So really, the question no longer is valid. You don't really choose between Sylex and Symphony, depending on if you want a micro framework and you need to start smaller. If you have a huge monolith of an application, you can use Symphony Flex and Symphony for both. So really, we can say there's no Sylex. There really isn't. And if you want proof of that about just under a month ago, the Symphony team announced that Sylex is going to be end of life, I think, in June of this year. So there is not even going to be a question anymore about whether we're going to use Sylex or Symphony. It's all going to be Symphony. Another thing that people might think is that Symphony Flex is a new Symphony edition. If you have heard about the standard edition, there was this idea early on that there would be different editions of Symphony, or different distributions of Symphony. The Symphony standard edition was the primary one that people would start with. And if you look at the repository for the standard edition, you'll see that it looks like an application layout. It looks like what you expect from a Symphony application. If you look at something like the rest edition, you'll see that it looks very similar. There's a couple of things added, maybe some things removed. The big differences are the set of dependencies and the configuration that it's done up front for the things that are specific to the rest edition, as opposed to the standard edition. So Symphony Flex is all about starting small. At least that's what it can seem like. And if you look at the ecosystem that existed previously, it would be easy to say, oh, well, we already had the empty edition. The empty edition, of course, being something that doesn't have a lot in it. However, if you look at the way that the empty edition is set up, it looks identical to the others, almost, with a few differences. The big things are probably in the composer JSON file. It uses less things. But if you wanted to then upgrade your Symphony empty edition application to the rest edition, and then maybe the API edition, there's really no way to do that. And the problem is that these distributions, this notion of building a base application and then extending it as you go, is the wrong abstraction for what we really want to do as we're building up a project. What Symphony Flex does is promote composition over inheritance. This lets you actually build your application using pieces without having to just start in one place and then move on from there. And a really good example of this is to show the Symphony 4 skeleton. And the skeleton is probably the closest analogy there is to what we originally had as the standard edition. This is the whole project for a Symphony Flex-based Symphony 4 application. It's a single composer JSON file. And if we look at that file, it doesn't have a lot in it. It has the Flex extension, it has a console, it has Framework Bundle, and it has YAML. Those are the only really big applications that are going to be in there. Of course, those have additional dependencies, but at its core, this is what we're looking at for starting a brand new Symphony 4 application using Symphony Flex. In order to create a new project with Symphony Flex, you use Composer, just like you normally would for many other projects out there.  So even though this project starts out with just a Composer JSON file, if you look at what you actually end up with in your project directory, you're gonna see something similar to what you would have seen from the standard edition. The directories are gonna be a little different because they're now based on Symphony 4 conventions, but it's pretty much the same thing that you would expect to see if you're already familiar with Symphony. The important thing, and I'm gonna mention this a few times, is that the files that you do see here are all created based on the packages that were installed using Symphony Flex. So the framework bundle, for example, you'll see there's the framework YAML file under config, that is there because the framework bundle was installed. If you didn't have framework bundle, that wouldn't be there. Framework bundle wouldn't not be there, but if it was another dependency, it wouldn't be there unless the bundle was actually in place. So the files that are created, all of the boilerplate, all of the overhead of installing bundles is now handled by Symphony Flex, and it's handled on an install by install basis as you install bundles. If you wanna build another kitchen sink style skeleton, you can totally do that. This is the website skeleton. Again, it's just a composer JSON file, and the only big differences here are that it has a bunch of new dependencies. We see things like the security bundle, we see the serializer, we see Swiftmailer added there, we see Webpack on core. So we're adding additional things to this. And the creation is the same way. You would specify website skeleton, and the project that you end up with has a lot more files in it. And these are all files that are created by Symphony Flex because these additional bundles have been installed. So for example, we see the Swiftmailer YAML, we see WebProbFiler, we see monologue, we see some doctrine things. So all of these things are depending on which things you add. And it's not just at creation time, if you add these bundles after the fact, or if you remove bundles, these configuration files will just start showing up and going away. So really what Symphony Flex does is it removes and replaces a Symphony installer. There is no such thing anymore. Flex is the installer, but it's just a composer plugin. It also replaces and removes the Symphony additions. So these are all really awesome things, but how does this actually work? Like what is Flex actually doing? Flex works with something called recipes and packs. These are the main things that we're going to be looking at. And recipes will be the first thing because they're the most important. Anytime you run a composer require and then some package name, if Symphony Flex is installed in that product or in that package, it's going to look at symphony.sh and it's going to look to see if that particular package has a recipe available. So if we go to symphony.sh right now, we can type in Framework Bundle and we'll see that Symphony Framework Bundle is indeed there. You can then go to the recipe, which takes you to the symphony slash recipes repository in the Symphony Framework Bundle directory. That top level 3.3 means that there's a recipe available for a minimum version of 3.3. So 3.3, 3.4, 4.0 are all going to use this same recipe. And within that directory, we're going to find a manifest.json. This is actually the recipe itself. So from this recipe, it defines all the things that need to be done within the symphony application to get this bundle working. The first thing at the top, you'll see bundles. You'll see that it says that it's going to install the Framework Bundle and it has all. All means it's going to be available for all environments. So whether it's prod, dev or test, this one's going to be available for all of them. If we look at the website bundle, if we look at the web skeleton-based project we've created, we'll see Framework Bundle at the top. And all of these bundles were added automatically by flex. So as bundles are added or created, if the recipe has a bundle's line in it, it will add the bundles appropriately. And we'll see some of these here have different things than all. So for example, debug bundle is only available for dev and test. So if you install this in production, the debug bundle isn't going to be there. So this is one of the major changes to the way that the bundle stuff is handled for Symphony 4 so that we're able to programmatically add and remove these things a little more easily. The next line we see copy from recipe. And what copy from recipe does is allows you to copy files from the recipe repository itself into the application once it's created. So here we see that we're copying files from config, public, and sourcer. So if we want to look at the Symphony 4 front controller and where that comes from, that ends up in public slash index.php. So if we look at the repository for the recipe, we see there's public slash index.php. So this file is copied into the applications index.php file in the public folder. And if we go into the project that was installed, we'll see that that is where index.php lives. So it lives in public slash index.php. Recipes can also include composer commands that can run after install or after update. So in the case of Framework Bundle, every time you do a composer thing, Framework Bundle is going to make sure that the cache is cleared and the simulates are updated. There's also the ENV section. So this defines the things that will end up in your .env and your .env.dist. If we see here, we see app.env is set to dev. So by default, the application is always going to be in dev mode. AppSecret has a special value there. If you don't know how easy that is to read, but it's a special string that says generate secret. And what that does is it will replace that environment variable with a unique ID. And if we look at the project and look at our ENV, we'll see here that at the top, we see Symphony Framework Bundle, app.env equals dev.appsecret, and then there's a randomly generated value. So the application is able to, or Flex is able to create the stuff for you so that you have a working, mostly working dev configuration environment without having to go in and update everything for you. And if you notice the little bits above and below each of these sections, this is how Flex is able to programmatically add and remove things as bundles come away. So for example, if we wanted to take the website bundle or the website skeleton, but we don't want to do anything with Swiftmailer, we can compose or remove Swiftmailer, and it's actually gonna remove the environment variables for us as well. Likewise, there's a get ignore section that does the same sort of thing for get ignore. So here we can see we're automatically ignoring the .env, public bundles, var, and vendor. If we look at the next one below is Symphony Webpack Encore. It's ignoring public builds and node modules. If we decide we don't want to do Webpack Encore anymore and we remove the Webpack Encore bundle, it will remove that from the get ignore for us, programmatically based on the recipes. Symphony Flex also adds a notion of aliases to composer require. With Symphony Flex, you're able to do composer require twig and it works. And the way that that works is that the recipes, if you look up the recipe for twig, you'll see that there's a alias listed for twig bundle.  And if we look at the manifest JSON for it, we'll see that at the bottom it says aliases, twig, template, and templates. What the Symphony SH thing does, it also offers the Symphony core team some level of curation of projects. And the way that the packages are broken down are into official versus contrib. The official packages are packages that are endorsed by the Symphony core team. And the contrib packages are just those that aren't. So these are community packages that people want to register because they want to have flex recipes to install their third party bundles, but they aren't necessarily things that the Symphony core team has spent a lot of time working on or approve. So this lets the Symphony core team be a little more opinionated. And especially since the official bundles I think are the only ones that can define aliases, it means that we can do, or the Symphony core team can do things like composer require admin. So rather than having to go to packages and look for symphony space admin and find which one you want to install, if you want to install the one that the Symphony core team recommends, all you have to do is require admin. Same for things like ORM. If you want to get doctrine ORM, you can just do it by doing composer require ORM because that's the official project that Symphony is backing. Earlier I mentioned there were recipes in packs. Packs are really just metadata packages on packages. So if we want to look at the Symphony ORM pack, you'll see it just has a composer JSON and its whole job is to define the dependencies that are related to the ORM pack. So there isn't a whole lot else there that does that. If we look at ORM pack on Symphony SH, we can go check out its recipe and all it really has is aliases. So and its aliases are a little interesting. Its alias is ORM. What this means is that if you compose or require ORM, what it's really going to do behind the scenes is compose or require ORM pack, which behind the scenes is essentially going to require doctrine ORM, doctrine bundle, and doctrine migrations bundle. So by requiring just ORM, the pack allows you to do some interesting things. But it doesn't necessarily work the same way as other composer packages. So we're gonna take an example here of the composer JSON of a freshly installed Symphony IV application with no other dependencies. We're gonna require ORM and we can see right here at the top it says requiring Symphony ORM pack. So we can already see that it's resolved that. And now we're gonna look at the composer JSON after install and even though it installed like 30 packages or 20 packages, it only says Symphony ORM pack in composer JSON. If we remove, we're gonna see it's going to remove a bunch of these packages, all of the doctrine packages and some Zen framework packages. It removed them all. And if we look at the composer JSON, it's back to where it started. So if you start working with Symphony flex packages and you end up seeing things that don't really make sense sometimes, it might be Symphony flex doing this magic of creating these packs where the pack gets installed, it installs a bunch of stuff because of it, but it doesn't show you that. It's just showing you that you installed the pack. It can be a little confusing if you don't know what you're looking for. Another downside to the contrib recipes is that they are not installable by default. So even though you can search for them on Symphony SH, your application can't actually install them. In order to be able to install them, you need to set a configuration value to allow contrib to true. So once you do this, when you start trying to do recipes for these contrib recipes, it'll let you install them. An example of a contrib recipe would be for UUID doctrine. You can see by the little orange label there that that is contrib versus the green official label. So we've taken a look at this now, kind of like a high level, sort of what it's doing. So what I'd like to do is walk through coming up with a really simple Hello World app using Symphony flex to bootstrap a project. So we're gonna go ahead and get started by creating a project called My New Project. We're gonna create it based on Symphony Skeleton, so it's gonna be the minimal framework. One of the things that it's going to do here is install flex first. It's the first dependency that's going to get installed. And what we'll see is shortly after that, we're gonna have this prefetching thing that you might not have seen before. This is Symphony Flex's way to say it overrides the downloader for composing. Composer so that it can do asynchronous requests, so it's gonna do it like a curl multi-type thing. So it can download all of the packages before it actually tries to install them. So it can speed up that part quite a bit. Toward the top there, after it generated the autoload files, you're gonna see that it's found four recipes. So there were recipes for Symphony Flex, Framework Bundle, Console and Routing. So it's actually gonna do some configuration for those. And then it gives you a little bit of help. And this little bit of help comes from a file called postinstall.txt that lives inside the recipe. So this was inside the recipe for Framework Bundle. And this is actually where I get to do my first bit of deciding how I want to work with things. It's going to tell me that I can go ahead and go to the directory that I just created the project in, and I can use PHP's built-in web server. So I can do that pretty easily. Or if I want to, I can require the server. So I can do...Composer requires server in dev mode so that I have console commands for server start, server run, server stop. I think server status. But I don't need any of these things because I'm using Laravel valet. How many people are using Laravel valet? Okay, cool. So I have Laravel valet set up between all of my Sculpin projects, all of my Laravel projects, all of my Symphony projects. It's all going through the same place. So I don't need this. So I'm not going to actually do that. So I'm going to load up the directory structure next and see exactly what was installed visually. So I'm going to run the tree command, and I'm going to see that all together with excluding the var and the vendor directory, we've created eight directors and 13 files. So this is the bare bones Symphony application. And if I load this up through my web server, I'm going to see a debug error message that essentially happens if you hit a Symphony application in debug mode without any routes displayed. So I'm getting that sort of error message here, which makes sense. I don't actually have any routes anywhere. This application is empty. So I'm going to want to do something a little nicer than just working with strings. So I'm going to use twig. So I'm going to jump back to my project now and I'm going to require twig. And what we're going to see is that it's downloading. It's prefetching the dependencies again. Then it installs twig for me, twig bridge and twig bundle, and then it configures twig bundle. It's also going to warn me that files may have been added or edited. Every time we do these commands, if you look, it says some files may have been created or updated to configure your new packages. We know those are there. We're not going to take a look at them, that any time you do one of these things, there might be things that you need to add to get. So I have twig now. My next step is going to be to create a controller. I don't really want to go in and remember how to create a symphony controller right now. So I'm going to use the new maker bundle.  So I'm going to composer require maker, and everything's good to go. So what I'm going to do now is do console bin, make controller, home controller, and everything should be happy, right? But it's not. And this is getting to another sort of feature that is available now because of the way that Flex works, is that the symphony packages no longer have to be super strict about what things they actually depend on. So the maker bundle itself relies on the annotations bundle, or relies on annotations in the case that you need annotations for what you're making. So if I were to create a twig extension, I might not need annotations. So I would totally be able to use this without any other dependencies for some of the things that I can make. But for controllers, I actually need annotations. So I'm going to accept this. So I'm going to go ahead and run the command to require annotations. And here we can see annotations as an alias for sencio framework extra bundle. So that's at the very top, so we can see where that's actually resolving too. And it installed seven packages, installed a bunch of document things, and then sencio framework extra bundle. So now I should be able to hopefully create my controller. So once again, I'm going to do bin console, make controller, home controller. And what we get is a nice little success message, which is awesome. So we're going to go now to our project and open up the source directory. The controller directory now has home controller. And what I'm going to do right off is change the path on the route to just slash, because I actually want this to be the slash route. I'm going to leave the boilerplate body that they gave me that uses the maker demo page, twig template. And I just want to see what it looks like. So I visit the site now, and it works. It gave me the slash route actually renders something. It's rendering the demo HTML code, but it actually works. So the next thing I want to do is actually customize this output. And this is really going to be bare bones, hello world type stuff, but it should work. So we're going to hop back into the IDE. And we are going to change from the maker bundle to use a template called home HTML, our home HTML twig. Remove the other junk around there and create a file called home HTML twig inside the templates directory. If you're new to Symphony 4, the templates directory is where all of the twig stuff goes from now on. Previously it was in other locations, but this is just a top level templates directory. You'll see that also as soon as you install the twig bundle, it gives you a baseline base HTML dot twig. So that's there. So this little hello world thing is going to extend the application's base HTML twig, which I'm not going to do anything to right now, but that's where you would go build the shell of your application. So running this through the web browser gives you an incredibly awesome hello world, which might not seem super impressive, but we've done zero configuration. We've gone from nothing to templating to creating a controller and having everything work without having to actually do any Symphony configuration. Flex did everything for us to make this actually possible. And this can get you far. Maybe you're going to take this hello world application. Now you're going to build out a couple of, you know, splash pages, landing pages, something like that, up until you want to actually start building your database layer. Or maybe you want to build some sort of front-end that does some interesting stuff. What you would be able to do then is go into your application and require the ARM. And it's going to download everything that you need, configure everything with the exception of the... in the ENV of being able to choose the driver type that you want to use and making sure that the doctrine version is correct for the MySQL version. You can now start building your front-end application and start building, you know, entities. Now it would actually make sense to use the Maker Bundle to make an entity. You can go along like that until all of a sudden you realize you need some back-end stuff. So you don't want to build your own custom back-end just yet. So you want to use the canned admin functionality. So what you can do is composer require admin. And now it's going to create an application that lives in slash admin on your application. And it's installed, it's configured, everything is right. You'd have to go in and modify one configuration file to list the entities, but otherwise it should work out of the box. And once you get to the point where you've created your own custom back-end, all you have to do is remove it. Composer remove admin and now you no longer have to deal with the admin package at all. And you can move on with your own application. So Symphony Flex, it's really about making the developer experience a lot better for managing your application over time. It doesn't really do anything new or exciting except does some stuff that was probably really boring and error-prone automatically for you so you don't have to do it anymore. And a lot of this is possible thanks to the direction that Symphony 4 went in in terms of changing how some of the default structures were handled, how bundles were handled, that sort of thing. But again, Symphony 3-3 and 3-4 will support this as well. How many people have 3-3 or 3-4 applications that they're working on? How many might consider changing your directory structure to try Flex? A couple people? Cool. So yeah, definitely this is all the default for Symphony 4 right now. It is optional, but it is the default way to handle installing and managing Symphony 4 applications, and it is all possible to use in Symphony 3-3 and 3-4, but it does require more work. That part's not super easy right now. And that's all for now.


This is the VOA Special English Technology Report. Smartphones, tablet computers, and e-readers have become a part of everyday life for many people. They have also led to an explosion in the number of mobile applications. There is an app for just about anything you can think of. And more and more apps are being created every day. Robert DeNazi is a Hollywood movie producer. He is perhaps best well known as the executive producer of Flightplan, the 2005 movie starring actress Jodie Foster. His most recent claim to fame is as co-developer of a new app called VoiceCal. It is a mobile calendar app that uses voice recognition software. Users are able to enter appointments into their iPhone calendar without having to type in the information. He said, although he has a mobile phone, he had to stop what he was doing to put things in his calendar. In his words, it got to the point where I just wasn't using the calendar on my iPhone and neither was anybody else that I knew. Robert DeNazi decided there had to be a better way. So he teamed up with a friend who is a developer. The two used voice recognition software from a company called Nuance to build VoiceCal. He says, when you use VoiceCal, you can say any event you want to put into your calendar and it will appear there. If you have two or more events to add to the calendar, you separate them by using the word also. Mr. DeNazi says all of this can be done hands free. In settings, you can make it fully automatic, so I don't have to touch anything. He says, Robert DeNazi says there is a great need for an app like VoiceCal among busy businessmen like himself. He hopes the app will be successful over the long term. He says, in the movie business, you can do all the advertising in the world and that can get you a great opening weekend.  So really what supports a film just like what supports an app is word of mouth. Matt Kozlov is the head of a startup technology company called Moonshark in Los Angeles, California. The company makes game apps for mobile devices. It's an exploding marketplace right now, he says. There are hundreds of millions of devices out there right now that we can reach. Jennifer Lopez is helping Moonshark with a finger break dancing game called Dance Pad. The company is also working with film director John Woo on an action game expected to be released at the end of this year. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villareal.


So, I didn't say a lot about EESI at the beginning of the Expo or the policy forum, hello Bob, because Senator Reid was with us and we wanted to hear what he had to say. But just a few words about EESI for those of you who might be new to us. We were founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide educational resources to policy makers. At that time it was mainly around environmental and energy topics, and then over time that sort of evolved to be environment, energy, and climate change topics. And so a lot of what we do, I would say most of what we do at EESI is really oriented around giving the congressional staff person the information they need to answer their boss's tough questions. I worked in the Senate for six years and while my boss was the nicest boss of all, sometimes at 4.30 on a Thursday, jet fumes in the air, they come by with a question, I got to find out about this. What's the deal with the extreme heat? What's the deal with the wildfires? What are we doing about emergency management? Have you ever heard of the conservation reserve program? Have you ever heard of the rural energy savings program? My goal at EESI is for when a congressional staff person gets that question, they say, sure boss, have a great flight home, and then they go to www.esi.org. Because I bet that there is a resource on our website, whether it's a briefing, an article, a podcast, a fact sheet, an issue brief that deals with those issues. And our job is to provide nonpartisan science-based information to help that staff person do their job. Now over the years, we've also ventured out into rural areas working specifically with rural utilities, co-ops in particular, or cooperatives, and helping them develop inclusive financing programs, on-bill financing programs, and accessing USDA rural energy savings program. And so this panel is one that's sort of near and dear to EESI's heart. Rural issues have long been a big priority of ours, and so it is a real thrill to have clean energy opportunities in rural communities today. I am going to introduce our first speaker, and then I'm going to have a seat, and then I'll introduce the rest of you. We'll have basically the same panel as before. So if Jamie or others have great points that you want to ask clarifications about, well, we also have backup in the form of Bob Coates here from USDA of any technical questions. But save your questions. We'll do our best to get to them. As you can see from the last panel, we'll get to as many questions as possible. So with that, I'm going to introduce Jamie Jackson. Jamie is the Senior Advisor for the Rural Utility Service at the USDA. Jamie, thank you for being here today. I'll turn it over to you. Can you hear me? Yes, great. Thank you EESI for inviting USDA to be here today to engage in this imperative discussion on clean energy opportunities in rural communities. I am excited to be here. I'm Jamie Jackson, Senior Advisor at Russ. And to give a little bit of history of USDA, we recently celebrated our 150th anniversary on May 15th. And although President Lincoln signed into law USDA in 1862, two years later he called us the People's Department. And I'm fortunate to see every single day how this agency embodies that name. And that's through our commitment in the nation and that's via our programs. So today I'll discuss some of our programs. Two of our new ones that are in the news quite a bit via IRA funding. That is PACE, that is Powering Affordable Clean Energy. It's a $1 billion program and that is eligible to almost everyone except for individuals. But we have more programs for that. But with this program and the application, the LOI stage just opened on July 10th. With this we are, it's a mix of loans and grants and to ensure that one category is not dominating more than another. The first category is up to 20% loan forgiveness that's open to everyone. The second category is up to 40% loan forgiveness that's open to energy communities, distressed, underserved communities. And the third category is open up to 60% and that's open to tribes and U.S. territories. So that is a really great combination of mixes of loans and grants. And then we also have our new error program, Empowering Rural America. That is our $9.7 billion program. And this is a great time for us to engage in this discussion because that window opens on July 31st. And with this program, it is targeting electric cooperatives and existing borrowers. And that is to create more renewable energy at affordable rates. These grants can be up to 25% of the total project loss of the total project loan. We have treasury rates of interest of 2%. And in terms of the loans, if we are going to refinance a stranded asset, it can be as low as 0%. So we're really making it affordable and accessible for cooperatives and the communities that we serve. We also have our REAP program, that's Rural Energy for America. That's a $2 billion program and it provides loans and guarantees to producers and small businesses. And that's in communities that are 50,000 or less. And these are for energy systems such as biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, wave, ocean. We really just want to run the gambit of what's available out here so we can be creative and innovative in our financing. And in addition, this can be for energy efficiency like the panel that talked before us on heating and cooling our homes, on our ventilation as the women in the audience discussed earlier. And then also just the fans, especially as we're seeing this heat. Our next program is Rural Energy Savings Program. That's our REST program. And I am joined by my esteemed colleague Bob Coats who oversees that program. So if you want to discuss it more afterwards, we are available for that. And that window remains open. So with these, there are at least three of these programs that are open. So this is great time again to talk about it. And when I have observed recently and talking with cooperatives, tribes, developers, businesses, is that there is an overwhelming amount of federal funding that's available. So where do we go? And recently we hosted a webinar, a cross agency webinar with DOE, EPA, Treasury, to discuss how you can pair our financing together. We wanted to make our programs, we designed them to be parable, especially with the recent Treasury guidance that came out. So at the end of this summer, we are looking to create a cross agency pocket guide that should be on our website at the end. And it can discuss how to pair this information and the funding. So again, I thank you for having me. USDA is amazing. And I hope to work with more of you in the future. USDA is amazing. That's a good point. I can't rebut that. Thank you, Jamie, for joining us today. Next, we will hear from Kerry Anand. Kerry is the Executive Director of the Biomass Power Association. Hi, Kerry. Hi, Dan. It's on. Appears to be working well. Good. So Dan, thanks to you and to ESI for having me here today. I am the Executive Director of the Biomass Power Association. We represent members across the country that are producing power from organic materials that are otherwise unusable. So what does that mean? Our members are located in largely rural areas that are forested and or have agriculture nearby. Our members typically get their fuel from within 75 miles of their facility. These materials are, you know, and talking about forestry in particular, you can't use the fuel that we use for any other forest products.  Some of those can be used for lumber or paper. Parts of the tree can be used for different materials, different forest products. We take the leftovers of that. Tops, limbs, thinnings that you take out of the forest to help the rest of the trees grow.  And Biomass is as much about putting power on the grid as it is about using materials to their highest potential and getting something out of them to the very end. So, you know, in terms of the industry and where things stand today, the past 10 to 15 years have not been particularly kind to our industry. We've seen power prices go pretty far down. Wind and solar have proliferated. Natural gas has come online to a large degree. And those power producers are able to offer power prices that are lower than a Biomass power facility that pays for fuel and labor. But the great news is there are a lot of federal programs out there that can help our industry. You know, we don't get paid in general. You know, you have REX and other sorts of credits. But, you know, when you're talking about purchasing power, you don't take into account the environmental impact and benefits that come along with that in general. So, you know, for Biomass power, things like the PACE program, we're hoping to see some more Biomass power built from that. Programs like the PACE program or the Obama Stimulus Program 2008, those are the types of programs that we see enable the growth of the sector. So really glad to see that. Looking forward to working with Jamie on the PACE program and hoping that our members take the USDA up on the very generous offer. And then ERINs, that's something that's very important to our industry as, you know, and, Dan, I don't know if you want me to talk about this now or save it for later. I think it would be, I think that's an acronym. ERINs, electric RINs under the renewable fuel standard. No, go ahead now, that would be great. Okay, so the ERINs, I bring it up because this is the top policy priority for our industry. When Congress passed the RFS-2 law back in 2007, they actually had the foresight to say electricity, when it's used from renewable feedstocks that are permitted under the program, and then that electricity goes to power electric vehicles, then that power producer should be eligible for RINs, just like an ethanol producer is today. And in 2007, there were not EVs to speak of like we have today. There were a few on the road, but now, 16 years later, we have a large and growing EV fleet, but the EPA has not yet implemented an electricity program to enable the counting of electricity in the RFS program. This is very important to our industry. The ability to generate credits from the power that we're already providing to the electric transportation fleet is something that will help our industry be stable. And we are hoping to see this finalized by the end of the year. He actually proposed a program after many years of pestering them about it. They proposed a program back in December, but they didn't finalize it with the recent 2023 to 2025 set rule. So we're still hoping that it can happen by the end of the year. I'm happy to talk more about that later, but I will stop talking now and turn it back over to Dan. Thank you, Kerry. Next, we will hear from Keith Dennis. Keith is the president of the Beneficial Electrification League. Hello, Keith. Thank you for having me. We have a great partnership with EESI, which I'll mention a little bit later. With the Beneficial Electrification League, I'm the president. Our organization was started in 2018 when we supported the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. You leave the place for a couple years and it's harder to say it, right? Lots of words there. And we work with a lot of electric co-ops. So we go around the country supporting the electric co-ops on the great USDA programs and everything else related to electrification. And when we talk about beneficial electrification, we're talking about using electricity in new ways to improve quality of life. And it's something that's not new. You hear kind of about this trend of electrification, but electricity has been improving our quality of life since it was invented. If you think about now we have, you know, products that help us wash our dishes and help us wash our clothes and fans and air conditioners. These were all things that greatly improved our quality of life. Now we have things like electric vehicles, electric trucks, electric buses, electric, more electric space heating and water heating. This is just a continuum of electric products improving our quality of life. So we are seeing some challenges and some opportunities around that and we're very interested in making sure that the transition to more electrification is successful. So to do that you need to not only add the kind of things you see like electric vehicles and solar panels and other things, but also the infrastructure behind it. So I liken it to kind of being on the back roads and adding Mack trucks to a neighborhood and then making sure that you also invest in the roads and the bridges or else the roads and the bridges are going to crumble when these trucks run over it. You can't just drop electric vehicles all over America without investing in what is essentially the roads and bridges of the country for the electric sector, which is the poles and the wires. And so we get kind of caught up in some of this spending on the end thing, the solar panel or the renewable energy thing or the vehicle or the bus, but we are not necessarily thinking about all that goes into that and all that goes into that involves a lot of rural America. A lot of our resources come from rural America, the wind, the solar, the ability to make sure that we're not having wildfires when this happens, that the power can get from one place to another. And to do that investment is very tricky because the folks out there that run the grid are dealing with storms, trying to keep your power on, trying to get your bills paid, but not trying to figure out how to do federal grant programs and federal loan programs and keep up with everything and then also compete with very well-resourced people in urban areas who got lots of messaging around getting this money. So it's important to dedicate some of the funding specifically to rural infrastructure so that as this all kind of shakes out at the end of the day, we're not here in five years and being like, why didn't any of the infrastructure get improved? Why are we still in the same spot? All the money kind of went into the urban areas and we tried to do this kind of solar roof thing in the cities, but we still didn't really solve the energy problem. So one of the things that I just kind of iterate for folks is that there's probably a hundred programs, I'd say more than a hundred programs that people can look at. There's 401 and 1D, there's GRIP, there's school buses, there's USDA, there's PACE, there's REAP, there's NEWEAR. This is just with the USDA. With DOE, there's ERA, there's EECBG. Just so many projects and so you start sending these emails to rural folks, oh this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, get your letter and get your letter and it's just noise. They've got to run their utilities. So we try to digest things through actionable items that folks can apply for. I think a really good example was the first round of the school bus program. It was a simple application, a rebate program that rural folks were able to participate in. The grant programs through this bus program is a little bit harder. It's sort of deprioritized the rural areas. You need a certain minimum amount of buses. We'd like to see just when people are designing policies to keep in mind that these folks in rural areas are not going to have an easy time applying for this stuff and to have set-asides to make sure that you're getting what you want done, done and to have the process be relatively easy is going to be really important. And I just say, you know, we're working on the new ERA program and the PACE program and USDA has been extremely helpful at getting this stuff together.  The rules come, you have to work really fast because of the way the system works but making it easy for folks and explaining it and coming around the country and talking to folks. We've been to Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida. We're going to Kentucky and Indiana. So with senior staff they're making themselves available and really appreciate that. So I also really appreciate EESI for putting together the BE Toolkit and I look forward to any questions you have. Shout out to John Michael in our livecast audience. He'll be around a little bit later today actually. Last but definitely not least, we will hear from Aliyah Ned. Aliyah is the director of government relations at the National Cooperative Business Association Clusa International. Aliyah, take it away. Thanks so much Dan and a huge thank you to you and the EESI team for holding this expo and great and important conversation that is very timely. As Dan mentioned, my name is Aliyah Ned and I am the director of government relations for the National Cooperative Business Association Clusa International also known as NCBA Clusa because that is a bit of a mouthful. NCBA Clusa is the umbrella trade association for cooperatives across all sectors. I thank almost everyone of my fellow co-panelists here touched on rural electric co-ops. We also represent farmer cooperatives, food cooperatives and the like. Food, agriculture, rural electrification cooperatives are represented in every sector of the economy and NCBA Clusa has been doing this work of representing cooperative priorities for just over 100 years. We've heard about all of the new resources that are coming down the pike, not only for rural electric co-ops but for clean energy investments in rural communities and the challenges that folks have in navigating this and we've also seen how RECs have been highlighted as a core strategy as we saw they were with the passage of the Rural Electrification Act that prioritized cooperatives as a core driver to providing energy and now they power over 42 million individuals and households and touch on addressing some of the key persistent challenges being over represented in terms of powering 92% of persistent poverty counties, 56% of our landmass is served by rural electric co-ops and the benefit of cooperatives just to highlight why RECs have been so crucial for rural communities is that cooperatives by nature are democratically owned and governed so it's not some of that extractive strategies that we've heard about in the past I think Carrie and Keith both touched on that earlier but instead provides those benefits directly to the individuals within that community and we're very excited about how these new resources coming down the line can be coupled together Jamie talked about how they're working in a whole of government approach to see how you can pair these programs which is I think incredibly crucial for rural communities because they're incredibly diverse if you've been to one rural place however we know that 68% of persistent poverty counties are in rural areas that energy costs nationally is 3.3% but for rural areas that's 4.4% for low income households that goes up to 9% and continues to multiply when you look at black and indigenous communities within rural places and also economically they're diverse for some folks you know agriculture is the core backbone of their economy for other rural communities they might be focused on more of the tourism industry so that flexibility just to provide an example of that diversity is what's needed and the timing we know that we need to secure energy as a resource for as a key piece of that infrastructure and also building that infrastructure from start to finish as Keith touched on and rural is well positioned to be at the forefront of leading that charge as we see populations increase in some areas there's a wide breadth of land mass so how can we continue to incentivize folks to take advantage of these programs while also making the process from start to finish as streamlined as possible because we hear a lot about how complex some of these applications can be or not even getting to the application yet but where do we even begin to start how can this program be leveraged for our community and so NCBA Clusa you know we have seen some really interesting things happening across cooperative sectors with that so democratic control and ownership of these businesses and cooperation among other cooperatives coming into play for example with the rural energy for America program we see rural electric co-ops who are well versed in navigating these programs then reach out to the farm co-ops in their communities to say hey this is a really great opportunity to help you reduce your energy cost on farm lower the amount of inputs that you may have to do to efficiently address some of the concerns that you have around having a secure energy source and so that level of collaboration is something that we see from a community level but I don't want to get ahead of other things that we might talk about here and also the rural energy savings program as folks said RECs are being helped by Keith's folks as well as the folks at EESI to help leverage and navigate and better utilize to provide affordable affordable energy efficiency upgrades and I you know given some of the statistics that I outlined earlier you know we think that affordable piece is key so we think there's a real opportunity now with the current resources we have to improve on that in upcoming reauthorizations of programs for example through the farm bill but I will stop there and kick it back to Dan and once again I'm going to do the Q&A from up here so I have a better perch so Aliyah just mentioned the farm bill all of the programs that have been discussed so far I think we have resources about but I'd like to call special attention to our farm bill side by side by sides so the idea here is on the left hand side of the sheet is the sort of the existing text and then we get the house and senate marks hopefully later this summer and we'll use formatting to help staff quickly understand what's changing what's being proposed to change and how also the house and the senate farm bill language compares to one another and so those are available on our website you can view our farm bill resources we also just wrapped up a farm bill briefing series that cover all of these topics as well so if you want to learn more we have Q&A so that's number one but also if you want to go back and check out some of our other resources we have that so speaking of Q&A I'm going to keep an eye out for our audience with questions Nicole has the mic so she'll do her best as well but I'd like to kick off the discussion by sort of talking a little bit about some of the capacity constraints that rural communities face Keith you talked about the idea that you know the emails one after another they just can't keep up now as an organization that never sends too many emails I don't know what that's like but rural communities face capacity constraints and a lot of those capacity constraints are most severe especially where energy burdens are higher how can we deploy more resources in rural and under resource communities that would help them overcome barriers that are sort of specific to those communities Jamie happy to start with you and we can go down the line I'd love to learn a little bit about your thoughts on that that's a great question Dan as Leah just said when you've been to one rural place you've been to one rural place and because of that the programs need to be flexible enough to address that community engaging in these conversations on a regular basis to increase your curiosity and to communicate the urgency that is needed at USDA one of the things that Keith touched upon is we have an active outreach in the community to educate about the programs so we have our regular webinars we have our office hours we go in person and meet with cooperatives we talk with businesses we talk with farm owners and all of these communication is to help with filtering what's available how to apply we also have grant funding for technical assistance to assist with applying for our programs and we try to make it as accessible and equitable as possible so our websites should be user friendly I know no foes can be about 200 pages long it's a lot to digest so we have FAQs on our website but some of the initial barriers in rural America are the upfront costs but as well as the resources of people to have the time to research and apply and see what works for them so we focus on that Carrie? Yeah, thanks Dan so I think I'm going to take your question in a slightly different direction for biomass power our problem is probably more that there's not enough capacity you know when you're thinking about for instance forest fires out west and you know we work with the US Forest Service quite a bit because they see us as an important part of the solution because we're using the so called hazardous fuels that are being removed from the forest and why not use them rather than dispose of them use them for energy production so you know things like the Forest Service is testing out a pilot program to subsidize the the transportation of fuel from further to you know from say further than your 75 mile radius but to biomass power facilities specifically so you know I think in addition to just being able to grow the industry and have more biomass power capacity to be able to take on the fuel that needs dealing with it that needs disposing of you know more programs like that to be able to make sure that we have access to the fuel that we need and that you know poses a risk as well as important to us well that's certainly a thing we struggle with and working with hundreds of co-operatives you know we do our best one thing is you know just making sure that things are filtered and targeted to folks who can actually use them folks in the agencies get really excited about their program and they're like do this do this you know and then it comes to a small area and they look at it and it's just like I don't even I'm reading this 200 pages I don't even think I could win this like I don't know how I'm going to meet all these metrics they're asking us to have huge transmission you know implications but also like really big social impact and we need to have partners from all over the place and it looks like if I started this today I'd be done in a month and then I wouldn't win it and they get a little discouraged I think folks get a little discouraged when they put the effort in and they don't win and so there is a little bit of the boy who cries wolf situation that experience with the federal process and so I really think focusing on things that folks can actually win and are tailored to them and are kind of carved to set aside for them is going to be key and then also the way that cooperatives in particular are structured they have statewide organizations and generation transmission organizations to try to help some of this so really flowing through their natural networks is something that just works for them and so understanding that like USD understands that is really important because you know going to 900 individual cooperatives and dealing with those people and getting them all worked up sounds like a great thing for like grassroots and everything but it really doesn't work that well other than to gum up the situation where folks need to focus on what can they do and what's the program and how do we do it and they're just getting a lot of noise so my advice is to kind of stay focused and I do want to highlight two things that Jamie, Carrie and Keith all hit on and I think that's that making sure that these strategies are locally driven that that local capacity is built because folks know what is best for their community how the households in their communities or businesses in their communities might be able to best leverage these resources so it's very encouraging and we appreciate the continued partnership with USDA and having folks on the ground to listen and then implement that to provide for that flexibility that folks need where a program might be a little bit of a good fit but not exactly right or there might be some constraints and some examples that we've seen with recent bills that were introduced is the Rural Energy Savings Act sponsored by congressman Clyburn and congresswoman Budzinski and Senators Welch and Murkowski you know this really response to that flexibility and what we've seen just in terms of for example hearing that a specific entity like manufactured housing isn't covered necessarily explicitly within the program so providing that clarity to help folks navigate some of the challenges I think like Keith said or incentivizing other entities like rural electric co-ops to leverage the resources that are out there by providing some administrative cost or other barriers that might prevent them from accessing the program but overall making sure they're flexible and facilitating that regional collaboration through existing networks that I think Keith touched on with some of the statewide rural electric co-op associations and not making folks go time and time again when there are other people who are better equipped or well equipped to have that institutional knowledge and capacity to leverage those resources Thanks Leah maybe we'll start with you since it's no fun to always go last and we'll move backwards through the line assuming we all agree that clean energy investments deliver multiple benefits you get the clean energy that's great but you also get other stuff too including things like jobs workforce development opportunities and community resilience are there things that co-ops do that you'd like to highlight and are there things that are maybe a little bit sort of are there greater opportunities for some things in rural areas that maybe we're not thinking of? Yeah thank you for the question Dan and for letting me take the first bite at the apple here you know we've seen some really interesting things I think I talked about the rural energy for America program and the significantly new resources that cooperatives and other folks within the cooperative ecosystem are looking to leverage that then incentivizes that workforce development particularly with the technical assistance component and how can the cooperative development organizations non-profit entities help train other folks through these grants or train other folks how to leverage these grants and navigate the rural development application process and partnership with staff at the agency to help build out those workforces in rural communities to create good opportunities that provides an affordable living situation where you're not choosing between covering your energy cost and your food or your gas for the month so that is one example of some of the workforce development provisions we've seen further I think in terms of gaps that you highlighted on some of that regional collaboration how can we look at existing models and expand that to cut across all of the rural energy programs or energy programs that touch rural places how can we help facilitate that regional collaboration of multiple entities that might already be working together to further build on that capacity and tap into that and I think we could do that further as we look ahead to the future and future policy implementation but overall doing things like expanding repayment windows or providing multi-year grants so that folks aren't going year after year after year trying to do this work on the ground or chase the resources but instead they can do that work on the ground of tapping into those clean energy resources Thanks Leigh, Keith? Yeah, well I'll just say local utilities are really good at what they do they're in mountainous terrain where there's storms they're in the hot areas they're providing power to any consumer that gets there the power's on most of the time they gotta climb up on poles and they keep power affordable and reliable every day so as energy gets cleaner and can be done reliable in a way that delivers cost savings to folks they're gonna be really good at doing that now there are external benefits that come from doing things a certain way especially as you have kind of an energy transition that's like do this, do that but at the end of the day it's really gonna come down to thoughtful folks figuring out when is this gonna be cost effective and provide affordable reliable power they're gonna keep people alive with the lights on and our business is running so I think these incentives to make this more cost effective more reliable, give money to invest in them, they will do that but it can't be just like I'm gonna expect this to happen and then think that folks who are really good at their job are just gonna do something that doesn't make sense and I think there's a little bit of disconnect sometimes especially folks in DC that see these policy objectives and say how do we get there and not realizing that to get there you need to make that investment that makes sense for the folks whose job it is to do what you're saying and I think that a program like the new era program and the PACE program are programs where we see if you're getting a 40% or a 60% loan forgiveness stacked with a federal tax credit you're talking about power for one cent and if you can put a battery with that to deal with the intermittent if you can win a grant like that you're talking about meeting some of those challenges the question is how do you get that to happen all across the country that really does take that investment Carrie, can you explain a little bit more about some of the workforce development and jobs and multiple benefits from biomass? Yes so biomass provides an incredible value the power that we provide might be more expensive slightly than some of the other power sources but what you get with that is rural jobs rural jobs and then the disposal of materials that don't have a home in an environmentally friendly way so biomass is a great resource and it's particularly prevalent in rural areas and we should do everything we can to support the growth of biomass And Jamie, what does it look like from your position how do you think about multiple benefits from these investments? I wanted to touch first on the community aspect and we are just very intentional about engaging local communities and part of the new error program is having community benefit plans we also have the Buy America prevailing wage provisions and these are to benefit the consumers right there in the area also in terms of workforce development I'm continuously learning more about USDA since being here and one of the things when I was looking into possible topics we may discuss today one was I saw how our National Institute of Food and Agricultural program where we have invested $1 billion $1.9 billion over 2600 grants in fiscal year 2023 and then last year we did $1.9 billion and 3500 grants and this is directly to target students and undergraduate programs postgraduate programs trade to that focus on disciplines that grow agriculture and also other areas that are similar to this and so we invested that over 5 different schools and programs recently and I think that sort of intentional intentionality and agency that's focusing on who our leaders are going to be increasing jobs and then when we have our programs here in rural America that does bring local jobs as well so those are some of the things that we're seeing and there's so much going on but yes we need a longer panel I'm looking for questions I'm going to keep going unless I see some you know the one of the things that we'll talk a lot about today is sort of this year's event is very forward looking it's trying to be very forward looking this is a Farm Bill year there are lots of programs rolling out with New Era and PACE things like that but to give each one of you an opportunity to kind of define if you come back for the 31st annual Renewable Energy and Energy Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum what will success look like what would have to happen in the next 10 years for you all to look back on and say oh wow actually we had an opportunity and we capitalized on it Jamie we can start with you and then we can go back down through the list and give Aliyah the last word rough question what will success look like one I think we're at a time globally where we're really seeing the importance of investing in clean energy and making it affordable and accessible and reliable success will look like not only is it federal funding that's going to making it a cleaner economy but also having private capital come in that is having policies that are collaborative and not contradictory on the previous panel I think it was Brian who was discussing the BEPS program here in DC and these are different requirements for resident owners and building owners but then how do they have the funding for it so in the next couple of years and five years which is a short period of time our projects that we're funding will not fully be operational but in that time we would have created more jobs we would have changed the narrative around clean energy we would have made the grid more reliant we would have more people interested in clean energy and bringing forth the workforce that is needed right now and lastly we will see a clear transition where we won't have wildfires coming as much and the air quality control that happened a few weeks ago while that's different for DC that's coming in so many places so I think that when we set a standard here it can be replicated in other places so that would be my personal view of success I think that goes alongside with others at the agency as well so as I mentioned before ERINS is the key to everything for us we see that as crucial for our industry it will the ability to generate credits for the power that we're already supplying to electric transportation will enable more investment in the industry and will enable the exploration of things like carbon capture which our members are very interested in but it remains a little out of reach for us right now but having more capital to be able to invest in experimentation with that and then valuing biogenic carbon that is captured from carbon capture processes over fossil carbon captured is important for us too and we haven't talked much about carbon capture but capturing biogenic carbon basically makes your source carbon negative whereas you're capturing fossil carbon you're making it carbon neutral so that will be important too we hope to see that in five years and ERINS will help us get to that I think there's a lot of programs that are out there some of them are five years and last five years ten years so really execution is going to be really important and I want folks to have a really good experience great experience with the federal programs that feel like they weren't forgotten they got what they were promised it wasn't that hard and everything went really well if that happens that would be a big deal if the opposite people are frustrated they feel like they didn't get what they thought that's going to be hard that's going to be hard for the federal government it's going to be hard for these investment programs so really just making sure that this goes very well and that people are happy then they'll be eager to get more and I would say also for you all double down on the programs that are working and the programs that aren't working just you know they sound good but some of them it's like you get ten percent over here and do fifty times more work if you do less work people are going to start re-jiggering and the ones that don't work that's okay but don't hammer it down you've got to do this because we have it really double down on the things that are working and keep people happy and they'll invest in the country everybody wants a better planet everybody wants better infrastructure everybody wants affordable reliable power and if we can make these work and execute we'll be in a good place Aaliyah you get the last word on the panel today and I think my co-panelists have put it very very well and don't know that I won't be repetitive here but I just want to echo really addressing the needs of rural communities making sure that local voices are a part of that decision making process listening to the feedback of what works for folks as Key said and what doesn't but making that significant investment for rural communities that are far too often been left behind with some policy strategies so prioritizing and incentivizing for the most disadvantaged communities their access to these new resources and making sure that these folks are at the forefront of future policy strategies but I think that would be a successful next five years and we have a good opportunity with the Farm Bill Thank you Jamie, Carrie, Keith and Aaliyah thanks for being great panelists today I think they deserve a round of applause


What is going on everybody, Estas here. Welcome back to another video. So in today's video, we're going to be talking about why I'm personally buying dividend aristocrats heading into the middle of 2019, heading into the rest of 2019. So before we get into this, what is a dividend aristocrat for those of you guys that have no idea, right? So a dividend aristocrat is a company that's increased its dividend year in and year out for 25 plus years at least, right? There's companies out there that have done this for 50 years, 75 years. There are some that have even increased their dividend for 100 plus years and those group of companies, they are considered dividend aristocrats. So why am I looking to buy into dividend aristocrats, right? People may be thinking, aren't growth stocks the best way to go in this kind of economy? Well, that is something that we want to talk about, I'm going to talk about in this video. So growth stocks are companies that are growing their revenues, growing their profits at a rapid pace where they can't really pay a dividend because they are putting most of their money back into the business to grow that business through research and development, investing and maybe buying other companies, investing in products, hiring new people, stuff like that, right? So they don't have the excess capital to pay out dividends to shareholders, but some of the blue chip names, right? Some companies that have been around for years on top of years on top of years, they're not in the growth phase anymore, right? They're in the maturity phase of their business cycle, right? They have a lot of excess capital that they pay to shareholders in the form of dividends to really make the shareholders happy because a lot of people in terms of dividend investors, they want a consistent stream of cash flow, right? Some of these companies pay 2% annually in terms of dividends, some pay 3%, some pay 4%, some pay upwards of 6% to 7% annually, right? And when you get these dividends, you have a couple of options. You can either reinvest them into the company by more shares of stock and accumulate even more interest, more dividends over time, which is known as compound interest, right? Or you can just simply invest, you know, in these companies and collect dividends monthly, quarterly, and just simply live off of them, right? You don't necessarily have to reinvest those dividends. So why am I personally looking to buy some dividends here, buy some dividend aristocrat companies or let's say buy more, right? Because I already have some, but let's say why am I looking to buy more? Well, I have this sheet of paper right here and you're going to see a screenshot right on the screen of the S&P 500 dividend aristocrats compared to the S&P 500 in total over the past couple of years in this specific range are seeing 27 years. So take a look at recessionary periods that we do have here, right? From 2000 to 2002, the dividend aristocrats in 2000, the year 2000, gave a total return of 10.1% compared to negative 9.1% for the S&P 500. In 2001, dividend aristocrats gave a 10.8% return compared to the negative 11.9% return in terms of the S&P 500. And then the following year, the S&P lost 22% and these dividend aristocrat companies as a whole lost 9.9%. Let's fast forward a couple of years later to the great recession known as the time period between roughly 2007 and 2009. We can see here in 2007, okay, the dividend aristocrats lost 2.1% of their value in terms of return, right? Not of their value but in terms of return, right? And the S&P lost or gained rather 5.5%. But if we're looking at 2008, which was the big, big crash in the stock market, dividend aristocrats lost 21.9% versus 37% by the S&P 500. So if you guys haven't really grasped onto this, during recessionary periods, during the economic cycle where jobs are being lost, a lot of people are unemployed, the stock market's going down when the stock market is quote-unquote crashing, right? These dividend investments, these dividend aristocrat companies tend to hold up better than the overall S&P 500. So you maybe ask yourself, Stas, you think there's a recession coming? Is that why you are putting money into dividend aristocrat companies? I think there's a recession on the horizon. I'm not going to be here saying recession in 2020, 100% recession at towards the end of 2019. I'm just saying, in my personal belief, right, do your own research that we're going to have a recession here, whether it's in the next year, in the next two, in the next three years. And I feel comfortable buying companies, undervalued companies right now in my personal opinion. And if you guys want me to make a video on two companies that I'm currently buying that are dividend aristocrats, let me know down below in the comment section. I feel comfortable investing in these companies that are going to provide me cash flow through a period of time where we could potentially see a big crash and where growth stocks and the overall S&P historically, right, from the charts that we've seen, have done worse than these dividend aristocrats. I just feel comfortable putting my money into aristocrats. And this kind of gives a portfolio a bit more diversity, right? Because if you're invested in growth stocks, that's great, right? But during recessionary periods, those typically get hit harder and they don't provide a cash flow dividend where it can kind of weather the storm during a recession, right? Like for example, Procter & Gamble, right, Johnson & Johnson, these are companies that provide cash flow during a recession where you can take advantage of compound interest and then buy even more of those shares at a dip price so you can get in at an even better dividend yield and at a better average cost for the long term if your goal is to invest for passive income, to invest for cash flow in the long run, right? So the gist of this video, guys, is I am personally investing in a couple of dividend aristocrat companies right now to weather the storm of my portfolio because I'm more of a growth and a value investor in terms of my long-term investment strategy. There's a mix in there and I don't want to get absolutely crushed on the growth side in the next recession and I also want to have some cash flow where I can, you know, take the two, three, four, five percent yields, buy more stock or either maybe use it as income, right? But at this point in my life, I am looking to invest most of the returns in terms of dividends back into the companies to provide an even bigger return in years to come through compound interest. And this strategy, in my opinion, it just weathers the storm a bit and provides cash flow during tough times. That's the whole idea here, guys, because one more point to leave you all off with, I almost forgot to mention this, these dividend aristocrat companies, they've raised their dividend through the recessionary time period. So they've been there, they have the cash, they understand how to get in and out of recessions, right? How to survive it while still raising the dividend and providing that cash flow for investors and shareholders out there, which makes me super, super comfortable holding them. Although there's great likelihood that they're going to go down in price, but one outlier is McDonald's, guys. I'll throw a big screenshot here during the 08 crash. McDonald's literally, I think it might have went up, it definitely didn't go down. It might have just stayed the same, right, in terms of price compared to all these other companies that have gotten absolutely slaughtered. So that's one that actually didn't even go down during the recession and provided a nice steady cash flow through dividends. That's just one example, guys. So if you enjoyed this video, feel free to go down below and hit that like button. It really supports me and supports the channel in general. Drop a comment down below. Let me know what you guys think about this. I would love to know your opinion. And if you're not already subscribed to the channel, hit that red button, subscribe, hit that notification bell as well so you're notified every single time that I do make a video. I'll catch you guys in the next video. I appreciate every single one of you guys taking your time to watch this. It means a lot. Peace out.