Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories and cryptic current digital assets. Now break them down to bite-sized pieces today. Got some good stuff. First up, Fidelity Digital Assets touts Bitcoin credentials as publicly traded companies. Now hold over 600,000 Bitcoin. Ergo, they have almost 3% of the entire amount of Bitcoin. And what does this really mean for decentralization also? The IMF meeting was just held and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, updates efforts to create the digital dollar, says risks and trade-offs being thoroughly evaluated. This is the same song and dance I've been hearing for the last year. But I will tell you, Jerome Powell did have a couple of good points. And these points were actually echoed by Rao Powell from Real Vision Finance. He's going to talk about timeline of central bank digital currencies or CBDCs and the end of cash in five years. And finally, Ripple CEO suggests Chinese President Xi Jinping could roll back Bitcoin. And this is a false narrative with a twist. So we'll go over all that, but let's take a look at what's going on the market. So today, hey, it's a good day if you own Bitcoin. Bitcoin is up pretty good, and it's almost hitting 12,000. It is, what is it, October 20th, around 1pm, Texas time. So Bitcoin, again, doing great. And I think it could blast through that 12k mark. And hopefully, once we get past that, it'll be a level of support, not a level of resistance, but we will see. 2.2%, 24 hours and in seven day, 3.5%. So fantastic, great for Bitcoin, and everything else is falling to the ground. So Ethereum is down, Teth is down, XRP is down, Bitcoin cash. I mean, everything is down, except for Tron. Tron, whatever, 1.3%. So for all you Tron holders, fantastic work, you got a percent. I'm just kidding. I mean, whatever you guys want to do. Tron could be a good project. I don't really know too much about it. I know Justin Sun is a heck of a marketer, and that's pretty much about it. What else we got? Hey, OKB is up 5.7%, although it is down 22% for the week, because OKX Exchange had that issue with their founder, who apparently is the only one that can approve transactions and holds the private keys, which is insanity. And of course, OKB is the token for that exchange. So even though it's down 22%, it does up 5% for the day. So great. And as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong in the comment section. I believe you still can't take any cryptocurrency original assets off of the OK Exchange. Let me know. But as far as yesterday, somebody who was actually a member said, yeah, I can't do anything. RepBitcoin up 2.5, Leotoken 1%. Sure. Everything else is just majorly down. Uniswap. Wow. It took a big beat in 10%. Theta Network down 9%. My new favorite place. If you don't know, I'm doing live streams over there. Usually around 11am Mountain Standard Time. I try to go over just what's going on the day real quick. And it's great engagement. It's not a lot of people over there.  We get into good discussions. So if you've got time, check the description of every one of my videos. And it's just as follow Dan. And the first one is Theta Network. And then, really, that's about it.  This is a great day for you because has anything changed? Again, like I said before, has anything changed? Has, you know, Bitcoin been hacked? Has Vitalik Buterin come out and said, you know what? It's just a big scam. I don't care about you guys.  No, none of that's nothing's really changed. But there is what I think is going on as far as Bitcoin goes. And it's what we're going to talk about in today's first article. And I think it's going to continue as far as a trend into 2020. But there's bumps along the way. So let's just jump in. So that's what I'm talking about. Fidelity Digital Assets touts the Bitcoin credentials as publicly traded companies now hold over 600,000 Bitcoin. That's kind of a big number. So what exactly is this? So FDA, not the Food and Drug Administration, but Fidelity Digital Assets, says diversifying an investment portfolio with Bitcoin is essentially essential now when benchmark interest rates globally are near or below zero. Actually, Ralph Powell, in this video, it's very long, 34 minutes. There's just a snippet I want to talk about, which is CBD season and no cash. But he does talk about this very briefly and talks about how the dollar will strengthen. This is what he believes it to be. The dollar will strengthen over the next coming months. But as the IMF gets together and the global community starts to look at things and they say, hey, we need to actually get a better basket of currencies and not just have the US dollar as the reserve currency. They're going to start to look at a basket of CBDCs. And once it happens, things will greatly change. But the big thing was he talked about was stagnant interest rates or negative. Right now in Europe, they're looking at negative and they're stagnant right now. In America, they are just stagnant and they're talking about going negative. So once that happens, that is good news for Bitcoin cryptocurrency and general assets because, look, where else can you get a good interest rate?  So that's just something to look into. Anyhow, we'll get that later. But the opportunity cost of not allocating to Bitcoin is simply higher, explains FDA and its latest Bitcoin investment thesis. And it's very true. Look, you can lose everything in cryptocurrency, but the upside potential is massive. And that is called an asymmetrical investment. You put $1,000 in, yeah, you can lose $1,000, but there's a great chance, or there's a good chance, I'll just say, is that it could go up 2X, 10X, 50X, 100X, depending on what you're into. Look, if you're in the top 20 as far as market cap, it's a little bit safer. Now, if you're going to go into the 2,000 position, some kind of small cap gem out there, yeah, you're taking a little bit more risk. But really, what we're going to see over the next, I think next one to two years, when the bull run comes in 2021, I think it's going to be massive, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, FDA's assertions come as one survey, found that as many as 60% of investors survey believe that digital assets have a place in a portfolio. I personally believe it. That's why I'm invested heavily into crypto. And here's the interesting thing about correlations. The result from analysis of Bitcoin's correlation to other assets from January 2015 to September 2020, to the digital averaging 0.11. And what this really comes down to, I'm just going to blow this up a little bit, what it really comes down to is that if you have a perfect correlation, it's 1.00. The less correlated, the less the number. So if you take a look at Bitcoin to Bitcoin, of course, it's 1.00. It's perfectly correlated Bitcoin to Bitcoin. Same thing, US stocks to US stocks, US small cap to... So it's just going down this line here. So take a look at Bitcoin to US stocks. It's actually more correlated, which is kind of odd, but not so much than gold. I found that surprising. I thought that gold would be a little more correlated to Bitcoin, but it is not. It is the US stocks. However, it is poorly correlated. And we will see how that plays out as things take a walloping coming up as far as the traditional markets. But I found it to be interesting because they take a look at this all the way back five years, and this is what they found. So maybe. So moving to the meat and potatoes of it, in the meantime, the number of publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin as a reserve asset now has grown to 18. Let me read that again. 18 different publicly traded companies are holding a reserve asset of Bitcoin, which I found interesting because I'm like, well, right now I can really think of a handful. The big ones, MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, Square with Jack Dorsey. And then the new one, which was Stonebridge, which they put like 110 million. So I was like, what's the other 18? And it says here, 18 companies, they hold a combined 612,000 Bitcoin, which is equivalent to 3% of total supply. So if you take a look here, bitcointreasuries.org, and this is a great website, I'm going to link this in the description below. As a matter of fact, here's all the companies, and here's what's happening. So you got the big one that we've been talking about the last two weeks, MicroStrategy, they got in it. They spent around 425 million. It's now worth, as of today, 458 million.  And that's exactly why they do it.  Galaxy Digital Holdings, that is Mike Novogratz's company. They've almost got 200 million. They have 16,000 Bitcoin, Square, which I thought was kind of odd, that they only did 50 million, but whatever. They've bought 4,700 Bitcoin, Hut 8 Mining Corporation, sure, they're in the market. Voyager Digital, interesting. They bought an 8 million, now they're at 14.8. Not too bad. Riot Blockchain, Bit Digital, Coin Citadel, and on and on and go. And then as we get down here, we see other big companies like Block One. They have 140,000 Bitcoin. This was odd to me. The Tezos Foundation, they bought in too heavily into Bitcoin. They have 24,000. They spent almost 300 million, which is, you know, hey, if I would think they would put that more in Tezos, but I guess they had enough, because they're the foundation, so sure. And then the new one, Stone Ridge Holdings Company Group, which is private, which is now held by NY Dig. They bought almost 11,000 Bitcoin at 150 million. Look at those geniuses. They just made 15 million, just like that. Good for them. And then we have, these are, this is a little bit different ETF-like. You got Grayscale, CoinShares, ETC and CoinShares. So don't be fooled by these numbers. Grayscale is not buying and holding. Grayscale is buying and then they're selling off to their customers and they hold them for them. So even though it says 456,000 Bitcoin, I mean, yeah, it is what it is, but it's in the hands of their investors. So if you tally it all up, it is 785,000, which looks like a lot, but in reality, I just got to take these first numbers here and we're looking at about 3%. So when we talk about decentralization, not so much when we're talking about 18 companies. And that's scary. I mean, it's good for the market. It'll probably make the price go up, but if we're looking at true decentralization, not the greatest thing. Then to finish up the article states, the ongoing embrace of Bitcoin by large investors is very much in agreement with the FDAs or the Dell Digital Assets. Earlier thesis, which asserts that digital asset, the digital asset, Bitcoin, is an alternative store of value. Look, it started off as a currency. Kind of figured out we couldn't do that right now unless there's better solutions, second layer, or they do something with the code to make it a little bit more appeasing as far as transactions per second and then the cost can go down. But right now, it is a great store of value. I've always said that I believe that Bitcoin is the new savings account. Gold, silver Bitcoin should be in everybody's portfolio. Everybody's portfolio, especially with what is going on. If everybody does that, we're going to see some moon time. And yeah, let me know which thing in the comment section. Let's move on. Next up, I'm not going to play this whole thing, but it's a great video. It's from Jack Chappell. And it just goes up as far as history goes. And what it really just lays out in 18 minutes, I'll just paraphrase everything in 20 seconds, is revolutions. And the first one, 1700s, was the agricultural revolution. And that was China-India, and they pretty much controlled the big lion's share of that. Then in the 1800s, we had the first industrial revolution. This was by Great Britain. They invented machine-powered factories, could work more than 1,000 people, steam engines, metal factories, military, et cetera. And just remember this, which whoever adopts the first technology wins for the next 5,200 years. Then in the 1900s, the US took over. The second industrial revolution. We had electricity, red roads, petroleum, combustion engine. Again, whoever adopts first usually wins for 1,500 years. Then in the 2000s, the third industrial revolution came about, again by the US, and some may say Japan, and maybe even Russia, but computers, electronics, nuclear power. And again, whoever adopts first wins. Now we're getting to, and things are kind of speeding up. Now we're in the 2020s, going into 2030s, the fourth revolution is here. And that, from what this video talks about, and I truly agree, is artificial intelligence and the financial system to paraphrase. So when we talk about who really wants to be the first one here, it's important to put your best foot forward and be the one in the lead, because you could be in the lead for the next 5,200 years. And this is what's concerning about the US right now. I mean, we've been in the front for a while. We have the reserve currency. That could be coming to an end, because we are dragging our feet. And let me know what you think in the comment section. That's just how I see it. And the IMF meeting was just taking place, and this is a great little snippet story which states that the Fed chairman Jerome Powell updates efforts to create the digital dollar, says risks and trade-offs being thoroughly evaluated. Of course, they're always thoroughly evaluating. This is the same song and dance I've been hearing for a long time, for at least a year, if not more. But I'll give the benefit of the doubt. So this is what Jerome actually said. He states, we do think it's more important to get it right than to be the first. And if we've just seen anything as far as history goes, it's important to be the first and to be right. And getting it right means that we only look at the potential benefits of a CBDC, central bank digital currency, but also potential risks. And also recognize the important trade-offs that have to be thought through carefully. Look, I'm a business owner, and my big thing is let's just stick things against the wall, or just throw things against the wall and see what sticks. If it doesn't stick, doesn't work, we'll work around it. However, I am not in charge of the monetary policy of an entire nation, so that's probably for the best. So for Jerome, I will defer to him in what he says. However, it is very concerning because I haven't seen the same things forever. Anyhow, he states we have a responsibility both to the U.S. and to the world that any steps taken for U.S. digital currency be taken safely. We're absolutely committed to soundness of the dollar and to safe and efficient U.S. dollar payment system, and blah, blah, blah. And this is the same thing he said six months ago. Excuse me, eight months ago. Right, then this was a, he states, you know, Bitcoin surges at the Fed chair Powell, declares that the U.S. is working on a digital dollar. And he was testifying before Congress is in February. He states, hey, we're working real hard. We have a lot of projects going on, lots of efforts going on right now. We'll get to it. Same thing. And here we are, you know, eight months later. Where are we? We're in the same position.  However, I will say this. It's not the government is really forthcoming with all their information. Maybe if they are doing things, they're just keeping under wraps. However, I don't have much faith in the current system. So I will just leave it up to the comment section and see what you guys think. I have to be rational, and he does make a good point, which is so in addition to assessing the benefits, and there may be benefits, there are also some quite difficult policy and operational questions that need to be thoroughly evaluated. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of bad policy that's being put out there. And of course, not only do the central banks want this to maybe to happen, but if I was a commercial bank, this is not my best interest. He states, just to mention a few, I would mention the need to protect a CBDC from cyber attacks. All right. Counter-fitting and fraud. Well, if you do things in an open environment, decentralized, that's a Bitcoin can't be counter-fitted, and there's no fraud because it's never been hacked because there's so many nodes out there. So maybe if they do it in a way such as, I don't know, they take the commercial banks and like, look, we don't really need you guys because we're going to go straight from us to the consumer, just like China's doing. Maybe they use those commercial banks as nodes. I don't know. Something like that might actually help. But again, I'm not the policymaker. Thank God. The question, he states, of how a CBDC would affect monetary policy and financial stability, and how could a CBDC prevent illicit activity while also preserving user privacy and security? So I'll talk to the first part first. How could a CBDC prevent illicit activity? Well, I don't know. But right now the US dollar is what is being used for by terrorism. It's what is being used for by the cartels and all the other illicit activities. So you can't do much worse than what the US dollar is doing right now. But while also preserving user privacy and security, and that's interesting, because if you take away the dollar and everything is digitalized, as much as we like to say that the dollar is awful, let me tell you right now, in my sports facility, sometimes we take cash. And with cash, very hard to, I'm not saying that we do this, but I'm just saying that if we're so inclined, cash could be under the table because it's very hard to track in small amounts. Now, no one's paying us $20,000 a pop to go play in a league, but cash in that regard is pretty easy to be private and secure in all those good things. So it's gold if you want to pay in gold, but no one's doing that for me. So this leads me to Raul Powell. And he's got a great new video up and he talks about monetary policy, physical policy, what's going to happen. But for this context, there was a 30-second snippet and I want you to listen to it. He's talking about the timeline of CBDCs, which is interesting from what Jerome Powell just says and how cash is going to get phased out and the problems that come on with that. So let's take a listen. The central bank digital currencies, I think will come over the next two years. I think we're already seeing in China, we're already seeing in Sweden, Singapore's ready to launch a number of, and they'll go slowly. So you'll be able to open a wallet with the central bank. You'll be able to make some transactions and then you'll be slowly forced into the system and then the whole system will be upon us. So I think by three years, there'll be mass adoption. By five years, there'll be no cash. So that's a problem, because if you get rid of cash and everything is on this digitalized ledger, then the government, the central banks, and everybody else, I mean, really can take a look at what you're paying for. However, think about it this way. Do you use a debit card? Do you use a credit card? Do you think those aren't being monitored in some way, shape, or form? Well, it just depends on who you ask. I personally believe that they are. So in all reality, it's just easier for the government to actually or big brother take a look at you now. Cash, again, you can still use it in that transaction. Gold you can, but again, I'm not using gold coins. No one's using gold coins to me. No one's paid me in silver in, let me think, ever. So maybe those privacy coins like Monero and Zcash and others, maybe those could be the future. I haven't really checked into them, but after this little talk we're having between us, I think I really should. Anyhow, let me know what you think in the comments section and let's move on. Last up, Ripple CEO suggests Chinese President Xi Jinping could roll back Bitcoin. This is an interesting prospect. So there's one part here that I just don't agree with Brad with, kind of. And the second part I totally do. So this is what is going on. This was a virtual conversation during this year's DC FinTech week conference, and I'll blow it down. This is what Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple said. He says, what happens if Premier Xi, Xi Jinping loses a million dollars in Bitcoin? Let's just say he bought a million dollars of Bitcoin, apparently. And even though he's the president, for some reason, he loses his analyzer or he forgets his passphrase. I don't know. And he loses a million dollars. Brad states, you don't think that the Chinese Communist Party has the opportunity to affect the change to the Bitcoin blockchain and make a reverse Premier's easy, a million dollar loss of Bitcoin that might have been hacked. So what he's saying here is that if, and I get the context, right? He's just, this is hyperbole. This is his way out there. The president loses a million dollars. He's like, hey, I lost a million bucks. Roll that back. Roll the whole thing back. And the way that we're going to do it is because we have so many miners in China.  I'll get to that in a second. His arguments mirror the controversial op-ed by ex-Ripple CEO, Chris Larson, has been widely criticized by Bitcoiners. What did he say? Let's just get to it. So this was a little op-ed piece in the Hill where Chris Larson, ex-CEO Ripple, I guess he's moved on, but it's still probably an advisor. Here's what he said. He said, look, the Chinese government is also subsidizing the vast amounts of energy needed to fuel cryptocurrency miners in the country. Mining is one way to verify blockchain transactions where individuals or companies solve complex mathematical problems for crypto in return. At least 65% of cryptocurrency mining is concentrated in China, which means the Chinese government has a majority needed to wield control over those protocols and can be effectively block or reverse transactions. So if this was eight months ago, I would have totally agreed with this and I would have blasted Bitcoin for that. However, on this channel, I like to dig into the comments and I like to do premieres and I like to talk to people. And what I had was a lot of miners who were mining Bitcoin said, that's BS, man. And they told me this is what's going on because I'm not a miner. I don't know if you are. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is what the miners have told me and they've been telling me this for months. They say, look, our job is to find the mining pool with the cheapest electricity. That way we can get the best rates for selling our Bitcoin. Great. China has pretty good grates in Xingxing. I forgot which province it was, but they have a lot of hydroelectricity and it's super cheap. It's like less than a penny for kilowatt hour. So they go, what we're going to do is we're going to connect to those mining pools and we're going to connect our rigs to them. And then we can turn out Bitcoin and make a profit. That's great. But we can at any time, any moment disconnect from those pools and go to any other one that we want to. We can go to one in America, we can go to Kazakhstan, we can go to Iran, whatever, it doesn't matter. Wherever the mining pool is, that's where we can connect to. So when they say that, oh, well, China can definitely reverse these things, they can't. They can't because it's not where the mining pool is located, which they are. A lot of these mining pools are located in China. This is an old one, but you have to get the gist of it. So pool in 18% of blocks based in China, F2 pool based in China, BTC.com based in China, and pool based in China. So you're looking at a big wide swath, right? Looks like 63% or whatever it was. However, just like I said, the miners themselves, they can connect to these pools, but they can disconnect as well. So for them to say that China can do this, not so fast. However, there's two caveats. So I asked them this, well, if the job of the miners are to find the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is in China, why wouldn't everybody's go to China? And they said, yeah, I got a point, we do do that. Which is true, right? It's all about making a profit. So if you're looking at the place for the cheapest electricity, which is the biggest determining factor, then you probably go to some of these Chinese pools. So that's one option. However, they came back and said this, look Rob, if they are using our rigs to do a 51% attack and they are reversing transactions, that will destroy the whole system. If they destroy the whole system, then the price of Bitcoin goes way down. So all the different things that we're doing for mining, we're mining Bitcoin, we want to sell this for a profit. So if it goes from $10,000 to $2,000, that's not good for us. So we're going to disconnect and we're going to go someplace else. So I was like, that's also a good point. So anyhow, that's the whole mining situation that we have. Let me know what you think in the comments section. But there was one thing that I had to really think about with what Brad said. It comes down to play in the very end. He says, CBCs don't solve the problem. And he said, when asked to weigh in on the rise of CBDCs, which we just talked about, Garlinghouse called it a very positive dynamic. We'll also argue that they do not pose a threat to Ripple or XRP. Let me say that again. They do not pose a threat to Ripple or XRP. So you think, well, how is that? He states, just having a central bank, digital currency, still doesn't solve the problem of settling a transaction, settling a payment between the Argentinian peso and the Australian dollar. And he's right. He's right because blockchains are great for security. They're great for decentralization. They're great for censorship, censorship, resistance. They're great for the future. However, what they're not great for is talking amongst themselves. So you can't get the data from one blockchain or the blockchain. So if you have a CBDC and they're all on a blockchain, well, how are you going to have the digital yuan talk to the digital euro? How are you going to have the digital peso talk to the digital dollar? We're going to need something to settle those transactions. That something could be XRP. Could be, I will say. Well, there's another ace in the hole. It's called on-demand liquidity.  So here's an example. If I want to send $1,000 to Mexico, I can do that. But my bank has to pre-fund those banks in Mexico with dollars or pesos or whatever. And it has to be done vice versa.  So with XRP, don't have to do that. It's on-demand liquidity, essentially meaning that since the transactions happened so quick, less than five seconds. I mean, they're very fast. I will give them that. You don't need to pre-fund anything and you can free up that money and do whatever you want to. Now, that is just one factor. I know some people love XRP and some people hate XRP. So I'm not going to get in between that environment. I just want to tell you what it is. Me personally, I still own XRP and I also own Stellar. I don't know which one's going to win. I exer- Stellar's got some great news recently as they are part of the IMF in the meeting itself and they just announced support for the USDC. So Stellar's going to be able to- or USDC's going to be able to use the Stellar network for transactions and that is big news, I think. So look, that's it. So I want to say, hey, thanks for sticking with me through the entire video. Really appreciate it. Also, if you've got time, sometime, come over to Theta. Take a look at the description below for all my videos. It's going to say follow Dan. There's going to be a link for my Theta channel and we do a lot of livestreams. We try to do one every day around 11 a.m., 12 p.m., Mountain Standard Time. And we just talk about things that are going on right now but also a lot of interaction. Get to ask questions. Get some great insight for what people are telling me. So stop on by if you've got time. Really appreciate that. So that is it. If you like these types of videos, there's going to be two months going to pop up on your left and right, not sure which one. YouTube kind of controls most of that. And check those out. So that's it. Thanks so much. See you on the next one.


Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Keely Akina. Well you know as they say the only thing you can count on for sure in life is death and taxes. At least during the legislative session you can count on taxes and that's what's going on right now. Our state legislature is convening in 2019 and we are taking a look at what's going on in terms of talking about taxes that may be increased, taxes that may actually be created and imposed upon the people of Hawaii. My guest today is an expert in the field. He's Tom Yamachika, the president of Tax Foundation of Hawaii that does a lot of really good work of educating and informing the public of what's going on in the tax realm and also educating our policy leaders. I love the fact that Tom is always down there at the legislature explaining what a bill does, what its intended and unintended consequences may be and talking about how it's doing as a practice perhaps somewhere else in the country. But our guest today has a lot of keen insight about taxes especially during this legislative session so please join me in welcoming to the program Tom Yamachika. Tom good to have you back on the program. Thanks for having me on the show Keely. Well you're not just an expert out there, you're also a friend and I appreciate the work you do for everyone in Hawaii. It's very important work. We try hard. Now Tax Foundation of Hawaii has been around about how long? 60 years. 60 years? You don't look that old but you were there at the beginning. I wasn't there at the beginning no. And basically you've been with the Tax Foundation about how long? So I started in 2014 so about five years. Is that right? And you were with the board prior to that of the Tax Foundation. So you jumped in when one of your very respected members of the community passed away. That's right my predecessor Lowell Kalapa. Everyone knew Lowell Kalapa. Yeah yeah he ran the foundation for decades. Well what does the foundation do Tom? Well what we do is I think you summarize it very eloquently. We try to educate people and politicians alike on what the tax laws they are trying to vote on actually accomplish or what they actually do. So sometimes you know taxes are tough subjects so sometimes people know what they're voting on. Sometimes they're just following others and we want to make sure that they're educated enough to exercise their independent judgment and you know vote purposefully as opposed to just blind. And we also of late have been trying to do the same thing within the court system. That's right. Yeah so we've been getting involved as friend of the court in a number of significant cases. In fact I appreciate the fact that we've been able to go hand in hand Grassroot Institute along with the Tax Foundation. It's been good to work together on a number of issues even in terms of amicus briefs in the court. Speaking of which there's a very famous case that has been going on perhaps a little longer than you'd like and that has to do with the general excise tax being having a 10% amount being skimmed by the state for administrative purposes as it relates to funding the rail. You want to summarize what that case is and where it's at? Yeah as originally enacted when the half percent surcharge on our general excise tax took place you know ostensibly to fund the rail one point that you know wasn't really talked about too much was the fact that the state was skimming off 10% off the top presumably for administrative costs but it turns out that what they skimmed off was far more than any administrative effort would require because they skimmed off 25 million a year and that is comparable to the entire budget top to bottom of one whole department of taxation. So in order for them to administer just one measure they were going to be collecting enough money to fund the department all over again. That's right so so that's why we kind of stepped in and said this is excessive guys something's something's wrong here and you know we filed suit and the suit wound its way to the Supreme Court of Hawaii we argued the case a couple of years ago and we're still waiting for the decision. Well I think that some people would have liked that skim just have gone unnoticed but then Tom Yamachika blew the whistle and what are you waiting for now what's the latest status of the case? We're just waiting for the opinion. Okay well we'll be waiting very eagerly to see what the result is. Yeah and we appreciate the fact that the National Institute are going to make us in our case. Well you know one of the roles that you play is as a watchdog so to speak is taxes can be complex it's often difficult to understand them and they often have unintended consequences not only that they may be promoted as achieving one end but what's not said is what the negative things may happen for example we've got a GE tax surcharge being proposed in the state legislature now about half a percent in order to increase the monies that go to our department of education schools and the UH and the University of Hawaii that's right but so the so the bill proposes to basically hike the tax rate half a percent so from four to four and a half percent that would be the base rate so then you add individual county surcharges so in Honolulu for example we already have a half percent surcharge so that would bring it up to five percent the same would happen on Kaua'i on Maui it would go from four to four and a half on the Big Island it would go from four and a quarter to four and three quarters so that's what's being proposed now I think what happened is you know we had a whole publicity campaign this past summer about you know raising more funds for education through the property tax and the you know the big issue had been not so much that you know there wasn't a problem in in our public schools could there was a problem okay but the way in which the ballot measure was worded it was it was very you know misleading and deceptive and and that's what the Hawaii Supreme Court found and that's why they they kicked it off the ballot well you know what's interesting here is that things are not always what seems to meet the eye the people of Hawaii the good people of Hawaii all of the people certainly are sympathetic toward the importance of providing good salaries to our teachers and quality education to our keiki and so the measure you're talking about this past summer in terms of using property taxes to fund the Department of Education had a lot of sympathy with the intended ostensible outcome but it's not always a case that a measure that is proposed will have that outcome let's talk a bit about this GE tax is there any assurance that increasing GE tax revenues to the educators I mean to the educational establishment in our state is going to result in better salaries for teachers not at all there wasn't even any assurance that more money would go to the Department of Education and and let me let me explain why the you're talking back about the property tax measure of both both okay because the current GE tax yeah because both the property tax measure and and the current one on GE tax would establish a special fund that's to be used only for education so you're telling me that this bill is up for voting on in the state legislature soon potentially and it doesn't say inside of it that if it passes the money will go to give higher salaries to teachers no of course not it doesn't say that no it's it creates the special fund that can be used for education right and only for education you know I mean that's perhaps well and good but the reality is that the DOE gets maybe two billion dollars of of general fund money as is well to me that sounds like an excellent idea if the DOE has already shown that with the billions it has received it has done an excellent job you always want to give more money to institutions that are doing well with the money that they have already but has it been shown that the DOE has done an outstanding job with its funding already well hasn't that that's the second issue so the first issue is will the under either bill would DOE get more money not necessarily so because like I mentioned they have that two billion dollars already being appropriated and you have this special fund coming into existence it it would be very easy for legislators to say okay well let's let's cut some of that one that that two billion for general fund money and and repurpose it we have other priorities in the state we have invasive species we have the homeless we have you know all these other things we want to be a sanctuary city you know a sanctuary state all these things we have to you know deal with climate change all these things we have to accomplish so if let's say quarter billion dollars goes into the special fund what's to say that a quarter billion dollars of general fund money won't be repurposed we don't know okay that's that's problem number one problem number two is there's there's some dispute about whether the department of education is is effectively and efficiently using the two billion dollars that it does have one of the things that we pointed out on in an article that that came out to you know during the summertime was hey there's federal money available you know first for certain things that that most school systems in the u.s. are pulling down specifically you know we provide for mental health services for you know for needy kids and there's federal money available for that right most states pull down you know 40 to 60 million dollars we pull down 500,000 500,000 is that because we're not qualified for more or is it because we simply don't in the proper way go after it and I think it's because we didn't go after it properly um there's a lot of paperwork that has to be or a lot of bureaucratic steps that have to be jumped through to you know access that that federal money um I don't think we did it let's talk a little bit about the mechanism being proposed to raise funds for the department of education quite apart from whether it actually needs that money what is problematic about increasing the g e tax and and how does that really impact the all residents including teachers in the state well um as as you are probably aware the g e t is not only our sales tax equivalent but it goes deeper than that and um so whenever you go to the store whenever you buy a service or a good or almost anything else you're going to be you're going to be charged some g e tax because that's what your store gets it's hit with and they pass you know and and they pass it on to you so the number itself somewhere above four sounds very small as a percentage point but it's very pervasive it's everywhere it applies to everything it applies to goods it applies to services applies to rent applies to royalties uh it applies to interest which you know most of those ladder things sales tax systems elsewhere in the u.s. don't touch them they usually focus on sales of tangible personal property you know or sales of goods you know they don't touch the services they don't touch the royalties they don't touch the rents ours does so it's not limited like an income tax to what your income happens to be you get hit with the g e t every single time you make one of these purchases right it's it's imposed on the business so whenever the business makes a sale tax needs to be paid doesn't doesn't matter whether the business makes money or loses money about on the gross price about how much of our state budget comes from the g e t roughly half about half of it now that's an astounding figure you know when i share that with people for the first time they're shocked imagine that there's this one little tax instrument that funds half of the state budget how is that so well like like you said it applies everywhere so it's very easy to hide not only is it stated on the receipt when you buy something but it's also brewed in the costs and and it's included in the in the gross price of the goods and services that you buy for example um when uh when you go down to this this big store and that big store has to pay rent g e t is imposed on the rent so it gets built into the store's costs well you know tom when you come back from a break i'm going to ask you how that impacts those earning lower amounts of income a lot of times it's said that our teachers aren't earning a lot of money that they're not at the high end of income earning how does a g e t attacks those at the lower ends of income earning my guest today is tom yama chica president of the tax foundation of hawaii we're having a very interesting talk about some of the taxes down at the legislature we're talking about education and the g e tax now but we'll come back and talk about some other taxes as well don't go away aloha this is winston welch i am your host of out and about where every other week monday's at three we explore a variety of topics in our city state nation and world and events organizations the people that fuel them it's a really interesting show we welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows um you got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well so i look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics you're going to learn a lot you're going to come away inspired like i do so i'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on monday afternoon aloha i'm jay fidel of think tech our flagship energy show among the six energy shows we have is hawaii the state of clean energy it plays every wednesday at four p.m come around and see us learn about energy keep current on energy on think tech hawaii dot com welcome back again to hawaii together on the think tech hawaii broadcast network i'm kelly akina my guest today is tom yama chica president of the tax foundation of hawaii we've been talking about the taxes down at the legislature being considered to this term and one in particular seems quite onerous and that's the increasing of the g.e.t we ask tom an important question um people say raising the g.e.t won't be felt it's just a tiny fraction of a percentage it's uh a tax that is so small that it's almost unnoticeable how does the g.e.t really impact the consumer especially those who don't have a lot of income well um you said it kelly it's uh death by a thousand needle tricks oh i see you read my grassroot column i do actually um the thing is as as we mentioned the g.e.t applies to pretty much all sales of goods and services uh even those those goods and services that we would consider necessities so you go to the supermarket you buy food um you know uh you buy clothing all that's taxable okay uh and does it does it affect everybody equally no because people who don't have as much money still have to pay for food and and clothing and other other necessities pay rent um and that turns out to be a larger proportion of of of what they make so uh some you know there there's a study done a couple of years ago that said the the tax burden here in hawaii falls upon uh you know the poorest of our population basically double in the proportion that it falls on the rich people like so uh a rich person would pay maybe seven percent of their personal income in state tax but the the poor people would pay 14 percent and the reason for that is the g.e.t so if one of the problems that we're trying to solve is the low wages that our teachers get raising the g.e.t is actually going to make the economy more difficult for them to live in and it's going to impact them more than it will impact those who have higher wages this is what we call regressive isn't it that's right that that's uh the g.e.t is a regressive tax well i'm glad you're down there at the legislature helping to instruct our legislators about the regressive nature now there's another issue that's often thorny and it has to do with transient accommodation vacation rentals and i think a lot of times the public doesn't realize the difficulty is because we're dealing with different jurisdictions we're dealing with the state and we're dealing with the counties and they're not always in harmony what's going on in terms of some legislation being considered in this area oh sure um for the last several years there have been you know constant bickering between the state and the counties because uh you know in in the old days when the transient accommodations tax was established the counties persuaded the state to you know give them give them some of the money so uh in i think the early 2000s the state began giving them a percentage of the g.e.t collections and uh that that money grew over time and the tax rates grew over time and you know finally uh in 2013 or so they said well um we you know we really want uh a revenue source that is stable and predictable that was the wrong thing to say because they then gave them a fixed number that didn't rise with the you know with the g.e.t collections and the rate went up too so that's that's that's when that's when um our g our transient accommodations rate went up to nine and a quarter now the counties of course are saying that the state makes out like a bandit but the counties are left without income that they need for their roads for their services and other things that visitors actually use there's a bill now in place sp 631 i believe what's it trying to propose well you know how uh the counties can enact a surcharge on g.e. tax and you know the uh Honolulu did that for rail uh the other counties have jumped in kawaii now has the same amount as Honolulu and uh big island has a you know half of that amount and Maui hasn't surcharge anything yet but the bill proposes to do the same thing through the hotel room tax so that each county would be allowed to surcharge the transient accommodations tax you know within certain limits and those limits aren't set yet um but that's basically the idea you know rather than coming to the state and comply you know comply uh complaining and crying all the time you know fine take your destiny in your own hands you enact your surcharge you collect it see how it feels how should the public interpret what's going on here what are quickly the pros and the cons well uh it's always kind of going to be a push and pull between the visitor industry and and kind of you know the rest of us on goods and services uh sure we want our counties to have adequate funds to you know maintain our roads and fix our potholes and uh bridges and you know give us good city services take our trash away and that kind of stuff um and uh at the same time we don't want you know to to um scare all of our visitors away so that they go to you know Bermuda or Mexico or or Puerto Rico or you know someplace uh with you know similar kind of uh climate but uh and not here right now there's some fuel tax measures that are a bit confusing to the average person in fact to the legislature i would say that i'm confused by them too but there's one in particular SB 1463 that is talking about shifting from taxing barrels barrel tax to taxing carbon emissions you want to explain what that is all about and give us your background right now we have you know a number of different tax systems that operate against fuel okay so we have a fuel tax which is um applied at certain specified rates on gasoline for example uh and and and the thing about the fuel tax is state can impose one the counties can impose one right um but the but the rates are set for each type of fuel okay so you have a rate for gasoline you have a rate for kerosene you have a rate for a diesel fuel you have a different rate for evasion fuel you have a different rate for um you know other kinds of things but the the one unifying theme of all of that is it's for road usage right so uh it doesn't apply if you're using the fuel to do something that's not using the highways for example generating electricity or working in the farm okay you operate a you know farm tractor you're not using the roads so so there are exemptions for you know for both of those reasons now let me just on top of that interrupt you before you go on to your point there what what's the relative usage between fuel that is used on the road versus fuel that is used not on the road um which is the larger group category i would think it's on the road but uh but i haven't seen those figures in a while sure well you go ahead you're saying on top of this so on top of that they have this thing called the barrel tax and what the barrel tax was initially supposed to do so it was to you know collect money for a uh a disaster fund to be used in case uh we had an exon valdez type disaster and you know have had all this crude washing up on our beaches um but over time it it kind of morphed and you know got a lot bigger and and is now basically imposed whenever you have a fossil fuel that enters the state and uh even if it's not um used whether it's used in the highways or not is irrelevant by the way has this barrel tax which was ostensibly put in place in order to protect us from an environmental catastrophe has it created a fund that we have sitting in our bank at the state several different ones it feeds several different funds some some in the department of land and natural resources uh some in department of health and you know they're like i think five or six different earmarks on the fund and are those funds just sitting there waiting for the disaster uh no they're being used they're being used for other purposes they're being used to protect food security they're being used to protect the environment um the uh uh the department of land and natural resources has conservation officers you know somebody has to pay their salaries you know that's one of the so it's become an important part of maintaining the budget of the state yes well i cut you off here if you continue to tell us about sure so the proposal the proposal is for a carbon tax and what that would do is it would replace the two taxes that i talked about the fuel tax and the barrel tax and it would replace it with a carbon tax which is based on the carbon content of the fuel that you're burning so there's a higher rate for coal different rate for diesel fuel different rate for kerosene all pegged to the carbon emissions that happen when the fuel is burned is this a good measure it depends you know um there are going to be winners and losers one of the losers may be the electric companies because uh electric companies have this big exemption from fuel tax because they don't use the road but a carbon tax doesn't depend on whether you're using the road or not how is the taxpayer ultimately uh if ordinary citizen well if for example the uh the electricity burning is taxed uh it'll it'll find its way to your electric rates sooner rather than later so everything affects the individual of course everything trickles down well tom there's more taxes to talk about unfortunately than we have time and hopefully their legislature won't go on and impose too many hikes on us thanks for being with us today thank you kili appreciate it i do appreciate having my guest tom yaw and shika president of tax foundation of hawaii with us i'm kelly iakina at the grassroot institute until next time aloha from hawaii together on the think tech hawaii broadcast network


And today I'll be interviewing my dad, Jamie Rossick, who's a poultry farmer here in Coffee County.  We currently have eight roller houses on our farm and then I helped oversee my brother's farm also. He has a total of ten houses. And how many chickens can each of those houses hold? Well, we'll just use my farm for reference. Those eight houses, each household is 37,000 birds, which is a total of 296,000 birds per flock. We get six flocks per year. That's a total of 1,776,000 birds in one year. That's a lot of birds. So what does a typical day look like for you on the farm? Typical day starts out with checking inventory of feed, water meter recordings from the day before, see how much water was drank, resetting any alarms for that day, going through daily maintenance, everyday stuff of picking up dead mortality out of the house. We usually start around seven o'clock in the morning and we'll be through with picking up birds usually by two o'clock in the afternoon and then it's grass cutting and everything else the rest of the day. So how many workers do you employ on your farm? I have one full time and two part time, plus myself. And you said you get six batches each year, correct? That is correct. And what company do you grow for? I currently grow for Wayne Farms Enterprise. And does Wayne Farms supply for any restaurants? The main restaurants that this plant fills contracts far is the biggest one is Chick-fil-A. Wendy's Outback Steakhouse is the main ones, but Chick-fil-A is probably 75% of the breast meat that comes out of the Enterprise complex goes to Chick-fil-A. So when we go eat Chick-fil-A we could be eating your birds? Very possible. What type of feed do you use on your farm? We use, have an antibiotic free, which is RWA2, which stands for Raised Without Antibiotics. There's currently four different feeds that Wayne Farms feeds, but for our complex we use the RWA2. Okay, and what is the average weight of a finished bird when they go head off to the processing plant? Average weight, our target weight is 475. That's usually achieved within 38 to 40 days. That's usually the length that we keep them. And, you know, you may be over. You may push 5,000, which if you do, that's just that much better. You get paid by weight, so the higher you weight, the more money you make. That's an interesting fact. And what is the average cost of your house? One house, rough, that's including dirt work, built in the pad, the house, the equipment, the whale that supplies that house, you're roughly somewhere right around $400,000 per house. Gotcha. And have you ever won any awards for your farming? We have. In 2016, we were awarded the Alabama Poultry and Egg Association's Farm Family of the Year. And then also in 2016, we were awarded the Coffee County Farm City Poultry Farmer of the year. That's great. Are there any associations or programs to help poultry farmers? Yes, Alabama Poultry and Egg Association currently has, you know, different chapters throughout the state. We are members here of the Wiregrass, Alabama Poultry and Egg Association, which I am the current president of that Wiregrass Association. That's so amazing that there is organizations out there to help poultry farmers. And what type of equipment do you use in poultry farming? Well, the house equipment, I have hired hand controllers. We have chore time feed lines, lube and drinkers, chore time fans, chore time heaters, and then also you have, that's just the equipment for in the house and then for your clean-out equipment, which we have a clean-out poultry house clean-out business. We have 18-wheelers that have belt trailers hooked to those. We clean the houses out. You drag it to the front using tractors with hydraulic blades, lift-type blades. Then we have telehandlers that we use to scoop the litter out of the house, put it on the trailer, and then transport it to the field to be used for fertilizer. That's great. How it can be used for all things. And how long did it take you to build your eight houses? I built the first ones in 2008. Then we built two more in 2013 and then two more in 2015. And I know the birds like to be kept at certain temperatures. So what temperatures do you keep the birds on in the different seasons? When the birds arrive from the hatchery, you have to maintain 90 degrees for three days, and then temperature starts dropping an average of roughly four degrees per week. So then at day 38 to 40, when you're selling those birds, you're down to around 66 to 68 degrees, depending on the time of the year. Just like right now, we would try to achieve 66 degrees in the summertime at 40 days. Sounds like they like to be kept warm for a little while. Did you have any previous experience in poultry farming before you actually got started yourself in it? Yes, my daddy built three houses in 1982. My brother added two houses in 1990. And then I went to Auburn University and obtained a degree in poultry science. I graduated Auburn in 1997. I started to work with Wayne Farms as a field rep and worked for them for 15 years, during which time I built the first four houses.  So your major in college was poultry science? Yes. What would you say is the best thing about your job?  You get to see the end result of your hard work that you work for every day, not only in just poultry farming, but in row crop farming in general or cattle farming, watching the calves grow, watching their crops grow, it's just fulfilling to see the small things that you plant or start with end up in a marketable agricultural product. So you do a little bit of it all. You have chicken houses, you have cattle and farm row crops. Yes. We have roughly 150 head of mama cows. And then we have this year we planted almost 1400 acres of peanuts right at 200 acres of cotton, which we flip flop this year because of the market on cotton was not profitable at the time of planting. So we decided to go peanuts this year. And so far, hopefully crops look good and I think we're gonna have a bountiful, plentiful crop and harvest. Well, I hope that happens. But last question, what advice would you give youth interested in your job? That's a tough question, but, you know, work hard, strive to do your best every day. And you know, don't ever, don't ever give up on the dream. Farming is a hard life, it's, but it's a fulfilling life. It's enjoyable to be able to, like I said a while ago, get up every morning and go to work and enjoy something that you do, but just, you know, live the dream and reach for those goals. Great. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be on an interview with me. I enjoy talking to you so much. Thank you. You're very welcome.


What is unemployment? And why should I care? Well on the face of it, it might seem like a simple concept. The lower the unemployment, the better for the economy, right? Well, not exactly. Governments do tend to like having low unemployment as they pay out less unemployment benefits, receive higher income taxes and benefit from more demand and therefore economic growth in the economy. In fact, investors like low unemployment too, as they see it as a sign of a healthy economy with sufficient domestic demand to support economic growth. However, low unemployment isn't always beneficial to the economy. Firstly, there is an issue of terminology. The unemployment rate only accounts for people searching for jobs and not those who are outside of the workforce. This could be for good reasons, for example, study or raising children or for necessary reasons, like long-term disability. However, people might choose to exit the workforce for more concerning reasons.  This is called the poverty trap. Now, terminology is important, as a country can have very low unemployment, but also very low employment, which results in a decrease in productive capacity, and therefore a decrease in economic growth. Far from being a good thing, low levels of unemployment might actually harm an economy. When unemployment is low, companies struggle to fill vacancies, resulting in lower economic output. And a tight labour market is also inflationary, as low unemployment forces companies to increase wages as they compete for a limited wage pool. This is called a wage price spiral. Now, economists love making lists, and they have come up with a wide range of different types of unemployment. Some, like frictional unemployment, are actually a sign of a healthy economy. Others, like cyclical and seasonal unemployment, are part of a normal business cycle. Others, like structural and regional unemployment, are more serious and suggest longer term issues in a country's economy. Finally, markets tend to react on the release of new employment and unemployment data, one of the most hotly anticipated and traded data releases are US non-farm payrolls, coming out on the first Friday of every month. Non-farm payrolls survey about 80% of the workforce, excluding all agriculture, government, private household and charity workers. Now, the markets want to know the month on month change in non-farm payrolls. In a tight labour market, if non-farm payrolls are higher than expected, you might expect to see equities move lower and the dollar strengthen on the expectation that interest rates might rise to curb the inflationary pressures of low unemployment.


As noted in a recent article in the Harvard Health Letter, up to three-quarters of men with cholesterol-narrowed coronary arteries have some degree of erectile dysfunction as well. There's drugs like Viagra, but they're a temporary and expensive solution that can cause hazardous side effects. Obviously, if your arterial system is that damaged, a more intensive effort that involves much more than popping a pill can yield longer-term improvements in both sexual function and cardiovascular health. Plant-based diets can not only reverse both conditions, but one plant in particular may be able to play a stop-gap role in the meantime. The way drugs like Viagra work is by inhibiting an enzyme that inactivates something called CGMP, which would otherwise dilate penile blood vessels. So enzyme inhibition means more CGMP, which means more blood flow. But there's another way to boost CGMP levels, by going to the other side of the equation and stimulating the enzyme that makes it. That's what nitric oxide does. Nitric oxide is made from arginine. Arginine can be produced by citrulline, so I wonder what would happen if you ate more citrulline. Oral citrulline supplementation improves erection hardness in men with mild erectile dysfunction. And where is citrulline found? Watermelon. How much watermelon would you have to eat every day to match the dose they used in the study? Three and a half servings a day, unless you eat yellow watermelon, which has about four times as much citrulline, so just one serving a day, one wedge, one sixteenth of a modest melon should provide the dose they used, allowing for a 68% increase in monthly intercourse frequency, which your heart should be able to handle, given how much lower your blood pressure will be with watermelon supplementation. Watermelons got it all.


Hey guys, it's MJ the students actually and in this video I want to talk about my crazy idea Which is how you can buy property over the blockchain with no need for a bank loan So how does this work? Let's pretend we have two people We've got the blue person and we've got the green person Blue person has got a house and the green person wants to buy this house So what happens is there'll normally be some sort of database and it will say, you know, which house is It's controlled by which person, you know, your title deeds or something like that Now in order to to buy this house this person needs to exchange money. So they would normally go to the bank Go to the bank and the bank will be like look, I've got a lot of money I will give you this money over here if you sign a lot of contracts and details and Then what you do is you then give your money to this person here they then give you this money over there and When it comes to to the database it gets swapped out with BAM new person comes in and It's not the end of the story because you now have to make these little payments to the bank You need to pay interest so you need to pay little chunks of money to the bank And it's normally a quite a high interest rates And if you stop making these payments then the house takes over the bank So as you can see in this story over here, the bank has a lot of power Now I was thinking is there a way that we can just get rid of the bank? Let's see if we can just get rid of the bank and this massive amount here It's this but no one really has lying around enough money to just buy a property They normally have to go to some sort of bank. So what if we just get rid of that big amount as well? once if we take the house and We create house coins or property coins Regarding this house here.   I don't know where they But this is the whole idea is that Sorry, the whole idea is that you slowly sell your property At a fraction because this has been one of the biggest weaknesses with property is that it's this massive large Chunk that can't be sold in and you know by cutting up and splitting it up And they've done this with commercial property in the forms of real estate trusts and On various stock exchanges they can buy a whole bunch of property dice it up and sell shares into it But the individual person can't access this cool financial innovation But with blockchain they can and what is cool about this is that you can sell pieces of your house You know at a time and then so what the blockchain will have is they will say, you know who owns which coin So let's say this person then buys it. Oh, I've just changed the whole color my apologies Let's see if this works here. Okay. Nice. It's all faces going green But you get the idea is that this would be the blockchain here It would say who owns each coin and then how it can it can work is let's say Depending on who's actually living in the house that person then depending on the amount of coins they have Pay, you know the remaining rent So they'll be so it'll be a little bit of a complicated cash flow because they'll be paying, you know capital cash flows One way and in this other way who's ever living in the house will also pay rental. So There'll be two cash flows moving It'll be for the capital of the house and then they'll be for the rental So this person can actually slowly sell their house So how that would work is if they slowly sold their house. This is scenario one is they keep Sorry They keep all the tokens and they slowly sell one for one in this scenario here They would then pay a little bit of rent to this person here So they would actually be another payment a monthly payment that they're then paying here for rent When they sell the second one and they get the second chunk then they will be paying two pots of the rent and then once they sold the third one They can then be set me paying three chunks of rent But it could also work the other way around where as let's say you want to sell the house And you want to get out of it because you want to go to a different country Then in this situation the house moves to this person here And not only do they pay you the capital for the actual house token But then they also start paying you the little rental amounts on top of that as well and depending on How many tokens they have so here it will just be actually here. They'll pay two Why is this thing not working? This is a terrible software that so now they're paying two at a time But as soon as they purchase the next house coin Then they rent decreases back down to just one And so you can see it will be a little bit complicated because there's capital payments and there's rental payments But the whole beauty of putting it on a blockchain and having this Integrated with the title deeds is that there's no more need for the big banks because there's a bit banks Just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and all they are doing is providing a financial service of taking a Big amount of money and dicing up into small chunks, which you can very easily do over the blockchain So anyway, that is my crazy idea. I hope I explained it well enough If you've got any questions, let me know in the comment section below If you've got any crazy ideas of your own on what to use with the blockchain specifically around financial instruments I'd love to hear them and like always thanks so much for watching and I'll see you guys for my next video. Cheers


Hey, guys, I'm back. Well, I haven't been missing if y'all subscribe to the second channel, top link in the description. I'm uploading there real consistently.  Hey, so if you guys been paying attention, you might've seen me make a beautiful appearance on 2K TV. At least 2K hit me, I was like, hey man, you wanna do 2K TV with me? I was like, yeah, actually, I would love to. I was just coming off the whole Fredo incident and plenty of people that didn't know me that were just lied to were sending me hundreds of death threats a day.  Yeah, I'll do that. Then he told me Mike Wang is gonna be there. I went, oh man, because I wasn't invited to the 2K event last year. Mike Wang is gonna be there. Who would have been a couple of years since last time I spoke to Mike Wang? I was excited, man, I hopped in there. I kind of figured some of the conversation was gonna be 2K, 21 related because that's what everybody's excited about. But I did not know that the purpose of the interview was to ask Mike Wang questions. I had a cane way more prepared. So I was on the top. I was like, oh my God, what do I even ask? There's so many things to ask. So a lot has happened. Now there's some things I was cut out the episode that they didn't include. And I'm not gonna lie, I kept it in more things than the episode that I thought it was gonna keep in. Now I was advised to not say anything about things that were cut out. Even though one of those things, I asked Mike Wang, I was like, Mike Wang, there's anything you wanna tell people about 2K, 21, that was the time? And Mike sat there and pondered for like 10, 15 seconds. Then the 2K kind of just rolled with it and just started saying some stuff over here. And then Mike Wang was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I got something. And he dropped a little bit of news, but it didn't make it in the episode. Nah, I'm gonna tell you right now, nothing in the episode was so crazy that anybody would get gassed about it, but you might be like, huh, that's pretty cool. Hey, so there's a few key notes I wanna go over about that interview. And then I have to make a plea, man, cause it's getting scarce out here. Hey yo, y'all new to the channel? Then how come you haven't subscribed yet? Guys, I can't tell if I'm slowly losing my mind here waiting for news, but I think that's what's happening. NBA 2K on Reddit put together this compilation. Shout out to Agent for doing a great job with the interview and representing the community well. There's more details here. You guys are being nice. I came in there woefully unprepared, but I didn't think he was gonna answer any real questions. Turns out Mike Wang was actually willing to answer a lot of questions. They didn't look like that in the episode, but he was. Maybe because they just figured, like if we don't want it in there, we'll just cut it out. Probably. Okay, so let's go over. Development is still working from home, but now with 100% efficiency. True. Mike Wang mentioned there was some stuttering at first because everybody had started working from home, but they worked through it, and now they're back to normal. Current Gen and Next Gen are worked on by two completely different studios. Yes. I'm surprised that this made it in the episode. I definitely thought they were gonna cut that part out. Mike Wang is working on the Next Gen version of the game. When I asked Mike Wang questions about the game, that's why he was saying Next Gen, Next Gen, because he's not on the team with the current Gen guys. The thing he's working on is Next Gen. That's what he's excited about, which kind of concerns me a little bit, and I knew I wasn't gonna get a direct answer, but I really should have followed up and asked, did they divide the already existing team in two, or is there like an entirely different team? Did they hire people, but there's existing people at the same time? I really don't know. So for the remainder of this video and for that interview, I kind of just assumed any questions that I asked Mike Wang, and he answered them about gameplay or whatever, had to do it Next Gen. Safe assumption to make. A focus is here on how 2K can be more enjoyable. Devs wanted to find a balance between fun and realism. An example, Mike Wang was throwing the ball away on cherry pick passes. That's not something they wanted to fix. Okay, that was a weird example, Mike Wang. I can really just show you how to episode, but that take way longer, so this way's quicker. I'll leave the link in the description note to the whole 2K TV episode if you want to watch it. So this was actually the biggest point for me that I was like, oh man, Mike, come on, you're speaking my language right now. Balance is dope, you know what I'm saying? Make sure the game's not broken. But in the name of balance, a lot of times developers will ruin the fun of the game. Like when you think back to old 2Ks, like 2K 14, 15, 16, 16 was more balanced, but a lot of those games heavily unbalanced. Like there was demi-god glitches out that ass glitch here, glitch there, and none of them were addressed in the lifespan of the game. But when you're looking back, those are some of the most fun 2Ks ever. In 16, they kind of had like the perfect balance and fun, but in 15, 14 it was definitely more broken. Mike asked agent what he thought about competitive shooting. They know people complain about full whites and RNG. This is a simple question Mike already knew the answer to. LD2K was like, Mike, do you have any questions for agent? And Mike just sat there for about cool 20 seconds and they cut all that 20 seconds out. And I was just thinking to myself like, man, Mike, you know, you don't have to ask no questions, man. I know you didn't come here with a question for me. I'm not the one working on 2K 21. But he asked me a question about like competitive versus casual and I was like, oh my God, oh Mike, I made 20 videos about the topic, but here I go explaining it 21st time. All right, so you want to have a ranked, unranked, fully fledged ranked, unranked mode, just like every other game. Now, yo, so I'm used to this, YouTube stuff is far from industry, but 2K TV is kind of a little bit more industry. Feel what I'm going with this? So I didn't want to say in the 2K TV episode, oh man, while I'm playing Valorant, I'm addicted to the ranked, unranked mode. While I'm playing Rainbow Six or literally any other game I play has some kind of fully fledged ranked, unranked mode. I mean, even Pro-M has like a version of it when I feel like they need to work on more but just bring some more of that to the park. But he already knew that. He was just asking a question for the sake of asking a question. If you're going to have competitive sliders, you were going to ruin the fun for casual people, especially in a basketball game. There are games that are incredibly challenging that I've played like Valorant or Socom that you grow to love because of its challenge and the pursuit of getting better gets you hooked. I don't think 2K is one of those games. So just divide it up, man. Have the simple sliders for the people that just want to chill. Have the hardcore sliders for people that want to go hardcore. And you could choose which one you want to be, something you can go from chill to hardcore, back to chill, it don't have to matter. And a lot of people think when I'm talking about ranked modes, it means the competition's better. No, it means there's skill-based matchmaking. It means you're playing people at your level. So if you're getting punked over here in the unranked section, you can literally play ranked with people that are as garbage as you and probably have a better experience. Coincidentally, this was actually a topic most people were talking about on Twitter. NextGen brings everything you have in current gen version plus so much more. Now that's just like an industry. Let's get people excited about the next gen version of the game answer, so I didn't pay too much mind to it. WNBA fans will be very excited about what we bring next gen. And so hopefully that means some kind of my player integration, but it probably doesn't. But I'm not gonna get excited about WNBA news.  So that's because I don't play play now and neither do a huge majority of y'all.  So I hope that's what he means, but he didn't say that. He said WNBA.  So that's actually the first bit of news that we even have about 2K21. And interestingly enough, it's all next gen news which means we still know nothing about the game that's gonna release in a month's time. Now, in my experience, there's two ways to release the game.  There's the games like Valorant where you kinda just surprise people. There was one or two trailers that came out before the beta dropped and everybody was excited. Millions of people flooded to play the game. It was breaking records. Beautiful thing at the top of Twitch. But companies rarely take that approach because it's risky. If your game is not good and people don't get excited about it, then your game is going to flop. So what most companies do is a traditional marketing approach. Months before the game's launched, sometimes years at E3 they'll play a trailer and there'll be another trailer the next year. And then months from then there'll be like a bit tabular game play dropped. A good example of this is, what's the game called? I actually love it. Cyberpunk, damn, I forget that. Cyberpunk has had a trailer released two years ago and then the next year. And now we've seen like an hour of story mode gameplay. And so did it slowly trickling in news and then closer to the launch you get more news and then boom, the game drops. That's usually what 2K does. Now because 2K is on a yearly cycle, it usually starts like two to two and a half months before the launch of the game. Considering the fact that we're one month away from the launch of that game, assuming that it's still launching early September, they're not doing that this year. And yeah, there's a lot different about this year because there's a whole new generation cycle. But it's crazy because we've been asked to peer the game a month ago, but then we still know nothing. And the frustrating part is the guy who's at the head tippity tippity top, the leader in charge of the stuff is Ronnie 2K. And all we're seeing from him on Twitter is tweets like this, throwing it back to mid 2000s on my stream today. I'm bringing two NBA fan favorites to place in park, Q-Ridge and Drew Goodin. We're gonna talk NBA, like, Ronnie, all right, cool, bro. You have a stream, okay? Actually what people want from you is 2K21 news, believe it or not. And you can just talk about that stuff on your stream, but you could also just tweet it or post it onto, we just need something from anywhere. It could actually be on any platform and we wouldn't care, we would still find it. The official NBA 2K21 account on Twitter was like, damn it, it's enough, it's enough. Let's give these guys some news. And then drop the loading screen for 2K21. I have never seen a loading screen be used as a means of content, unless it was to make fun of the fact that in 2K17, Paul George pissed the whole community off. So at this point, Ronnie's like, oh man, I'm really feeling for these guys. You know what I'm saying? The game that they all love, they just wanna hear more information about, they don't know nothing about it and they're being asked to pre-order it. Let me drop them a quick little gem, man, just a quick little gem. And Ronnie put out this tweet, the official 2K21 soundtrack is here and features some of my favorite names in the business. Which tracks and artists are you hyped about? Ronnie, come on, you know we don't care, man.  The only thing, I'll say this again, the only thing a soundtrack is good for is five years from now, when you hear one of these songs and these soundtracks is gonna give you serious 2K21 vibes.  Like, I think in 2K13, they had the Around the World song from Daft Punk.  Hi man, but if you cared, yeah, they got anywhere from NBA Brokeboy, Polo G to Denzel Curry, man, hallelujah. It's crazy how much worth they have to put in just to get the licenses to use all of this music. It's not worth it. At the end of the day, but they do it every year for tradition, you know what I'm saying? And I guess it's a selling point because it's the first thing they show. So let me give you a roadmap on previous years on what you could potentially expect. What they usually start off with is the cover and then they move into like soundtrack and I guess this year, loading screen news. At some point you might start seeing overall releases where Ronnie says if NBA players ask for their overall, we'll give them their overall and that's gonna show off some of the graphical improvements, et cetera, and plus get NBA players involved in the situation. Then what you're likely gonna see is some myGMI League news followed by some gameplay news, a lot of gameplay news, usually over the course of a week or two, and then you're likely going to see some myTeam news. And at this point, we're about a week away from the game's launch and we might if we're lucky because there are years where we literally didn't get any get some park news, right? A trailer, some kind of tidbit, et cetera. And then at that point, the prelude should already be out assuming there's a prelude.  But there's nothing that's going on according to schedule this year, so don't hold me to that. So I'm gonna end the video like this. Ronnie2K, guys down there, 2K publishing team marketing stuff, guys. Yeah, we kind of just want to know about the game that you guys are trying to get as hyped about because it's kind of difficult to get hyped about a game that you have zero information about. My biggest fear is that there's actually very little improvements on the current Gen 1 because they're saving them all for the next Gen 1 so they're just gonna put this half-ass attempt together as if everyone's gonna be able to get the next Gen systems on launch. That's my biggest fear. That is what happened when they made the jump from 2K13 to 2K14, but I'm hoping that's not what happens here and there's no real point in speculating further because I would just be guessing. There's no point in guessing. Hey, so I'm gonna end on that note, man. LD2K, thank you, man, for inviting me on to 2KTV. Leave the link in the description to that episode if you guys want. Also leave the link in the description to my second channel. Also, if you guys are new to this channel, you haven't already unpissed, you haven't subscribed, so help alleviate some of that pissed-off-ness that I have and subscribe to the channel. I'll catch you guys in the next video. I'm out.


Hi everybody, my name is Sarah Lean and I'm a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. In this video today, I want to talk to you about assessing your SQL Server databases in order to move them to Azure. If you're embarking on a data center migration project, the chances are you will stumble across a SQL Server database within your environment that has to be considered for a move to Azure. Now, there are certain tools that can help you along that journey and I want to walk you through some of them. Those include the database migration assistant and Azure Migrate. Let's dive into the video and have a look. Here we have our SQL Server and we have an instance of SQL Server installed on that server and we have several databases. Now, the database that we really care about is that Wide World Importers database and you can see we have a bunch of data within that. In order to assess it for a migration to Azure, what we want to do is dive into the Azure portal. The first thing that we have to do is create an Azure Migrate project. Now, we have to answer some simple information around that. We have to give it a resource group to store the project in. We have to give the project a name and we also have to pick a geography that we store this data in. Now, this is around the metadata that we are collecting. It's not around where you're actually moving those resources to. In this case, we're going to store the metadata in the UK. But if we were to move this SQL Server, we could actually move it into US East, for example, and it wouldn't be affected. The geography when you create an Azure Migrate project is really around that metadata storage and nothing else. Now, the next things that we have to address is which assessment tool we're going to use, and potentially which migration tool we're going to use. Now, as we're only doing the assessment piece at the moment, that's the only one that we are concerned around. We're given a couple of options. We're giving the Azure Migrate Database Assessment tool, and we're also given a third-party tool. We're going to use the Microsoft Ones, which is the Azure Migrate Database Assessment tool. Once the project has been created, what we have to do now is download the Database Migration Assistant tooling. Now, you can download that and install it onto the SQL Server that you're actually looking to assess, or you can install it on another server within your environment that has access to that SQL Server. Because we're using a non-production server, we're actually going to install the Database Migration Assistant on the actual SQL Server that we're assessing. Once it's installed, what we want to do is create off a project. We give that project a name, we tell it what our source server type is. In this case, it is a SQL Server, and potentially what target we're looking at moving it to. Again, we're going to pick the Azure SQL Database, but you have multiple options here, and you can run multiple assessment projects. You could do one against Azure SQL Server, or you could use one against the Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, or SQL Server on a virtual machine. There's a host of options there, and you can run these as multiple times. You get that full picture of what it would look like, and which one best fits your SQL Server Database. So we point the tool at the server that we want to assess, and again, we're only picking one server, but you could pick multiple sources if you have a bunch of SQL Server databases that you want to assess. After a while, the tool will come back with some information. Now, it comes back with two sets of information. The first one is SQL Server Feature Parity Information, and that will tell you any unsupported features at the Azure level or any partially supported features, and what impact that has on your databases or your objects, and gives you a detailed recommendation as well around how to move forward and how you could potentially solve that issue. Now, the second part of the report is actually compatibility issues. And again, it will give you detailed information around what those compatibility issues are, how they impact your database, and potentially how to move forward and fix those issues. Now, at this stage, you could export the assessment as a JSON file and use it to report on in whatever way you want within your environment. We want to upload this data onto Azure Migrate so that we can collate it with the rest of the server assessment details that we've collected around all of our server statement, all of our infrastructure, and then collate it together and report to our leadership team. Now, when you click on that upload to Azure button, you're asked about where you want to put that data, and you'll be asked to sign in as well. We're going to sign in and then tell the tool to upload the data to the Azure Migrate project that we created earlier on. Now, after a few minutes, the details from that report will start to appear within the Azure portal for you, and you can see, again, some of those migration blockers if there are any breaking changes, compatibility issues, database size, et cetera, et cetera. And from here, you can start to pull out that information and start to plan what your migration path would look like and the best way forward for your organization. So as you can see, we can leverage the Database Migration Assistant tool and Azure Migrate to assess our SQL Server databases for a migration to Azure. Now, remember, the Database Migration Assistant doesn't care where your SQL Server database lives. You could have the SQL Server database installed on an on-prem server, whether that be virtual or physical, or you could have it on a virtual machine running within Azure, or you could have it running on a virtual machine within another cloud platform. The tool does not care where that SQL Server database lives. As long as it can access that SQL Server database and have a look at what components and what features you have turned on in it, it can be used to assess your environment and then help you plan what would happen to the database within Azure. So if you have some SQL Server databases that are looking to be migrated into Azure, spin up the Database Migration Assistant today and feed the data into Azure Migrate to give you some rich, detailed reports you can use to plan that migration. Thank you for watching.