And I'm like, what's the timeline on the declaration again too? That was going to be. Well, I think we wanted. Council to take it up their first meeting after the election. Right. So we still have a couple of weeks. Yeah. I think if we can. And if I might, um, sorry. So. Um, So just sort of logistically, um, some of the things that we've been developing within the city manager's office is that the first meeting after, um, the election. So that would be the eighth will be really a sort of, um, housekeeping kind of meeting. Um, so really the, the, the first meeting that would be available would be the 22nd. Um, and maybe even perhaps the first meeting in April, I think we're going to be able to, we're going to be able to, um, we're going to be able to have everything that they need to make, um, decisions and things like that. And so there are things that are starting to. Line up in the queue. And I know this is an item for sure that's been kind of on the radar. Um, but I just wanted to kind of update the group on, you know, what that might look like. If we're not going to make any decisions on this call, maybe Pellin and maybe Michael will be joining, but so maybe we'll be able to get a quorum, but it can, can we just get those that quick update? Yeah. Yeah. So what should we wait till that's like in a, in a meeting meeting? Space. Does that make sense? What, what update, Shayna? Of the, um, what the, the. The city manager's office has been working on. Uh, so I'm, so that's pretty much it. Oh, okay. That's it. Sorry. I thought.  Um, and, you know, we're kind of looking ahead and looking. Towards a new group of counselors and, you know, uh, quite a few members at that. We want to make sure that. You know, this first, um, meeting that they do have on the eighth is probably really, it's really shaping up to be more of a kind of like. Um, a sort of, a regular meeting orientation type of meeting. And then, um, the 22nd, there are a few items that they'll probably take up that. Um, have been sort of queued up strategically. So people are definitely getting in line. Um, to get in front of them. And so logistically we just need to be aware that I know that this is important. It needs to, you know, go to them. March or the first meeting in April. 20 second of March. April. Okay. Wasn't there, I mean, it was the folks that joined us to talk about the organization that, that started the whole project to get all the towns in Vermont to sign on. Didn't they have a, they have a deadline, don't they? They're on deadline of like May or something. Yeah, right. So there's still a little bit of time to get it on this city agenda. But not that we want to keep pushing it forward. Yeah, as I recall, they were thinking like May, right? Um, so that makes sense.  Hello. I forgot that there was a meeting today, which is why I never sent out a reminder or anything else. I apologize. But we're just talking about for the declaration of inclusion. If we want to finalize that and get that on the agenda that they could review it March 22nd, first meeting of April, and that would still give them enough time to be putting it in, in May, but just if you had any update from talking with folks in Highgate. I tried to reach them four times. Nobody would respond. The article that Jeremy sent was helpful, but I'm still not sure what was going on. The spokesman who said, you know, read all the way down to the bottom as if there was a coded message in there. I read all the way down to the bottom and I still couldn't figure out what the objection was. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't either. I, my sense from it was just that. Somebody feels like they would be tied into like taking some action if they sign on to this. Heaven forbid. Right. So I like, I think we're, we have the finalized language. I feel good about that, right? Like, is that. Does anyone have any other concerns with raising it forward? Can we kind of like check this off the list for, for moving it. Just to city council. I don't, I'm, I think it's. I think we took a fine tooth come to the language last week. I think it's ready. For council to weigh in on. Cool. And so do we, do we want to spend some time today looking at the strategic plan then too? I don't know. Do we need a motion to do that? A motion to bring it to the city council. Good question. Let's just do it just to be safe. I make a motion to bring it to the city council. Jeremy, do you second? I second that. All in favor. Hi. Awesome. Any opposed. Thanks, Michael. Just. Check in. I appreciate your. Your. Good process. While we're approving things, we also want to approve review and approve the meeting minutes from the last meeting that Michael sent. I'm going to pull them back up here too. This is why I pull everything together the night before. So sorry. And you sent it on the 18th. Move that we approve the minutes from January 18th. Helen, do you second? Second. Okay. All in favor. Hi. Hi. Any opposed. Awesome. I got to find that again. And so. Can I do this here? We can put the link in the chat. Strategic plan. Great. The strategic plan. Thank you, Jeremy. Pulling it up from the agenda pulls it into a document that like doesn't have any header bar for me and stuff. And I'm always like, why is this. Silly looking. And so I think, yeah, we've had a chance to look things over, but this is like primary prioritizing. And so, you know, we've had a chance to look at the council members post-election presenting to the new city council early on, you know, focusing on meeting with all the city councilors is part of the public engagement is working on growing committee membership, advertising the city application. Doing an outreach session more in the late summer, early fall. Or I think it's actually doing it in the fall in partnership with the city council. I think it's doing it in the fall in partnership with the city council. And then. As part of the ongoing. Education. Helen started that like list of. Like DEI trainers for people that keep asking us for them and things like that. I'm rolling out these different opportunities for other committees and, and staff. I know. Yeah. Participation to get a plan for next year. But I. Yeah. I mean, you're having this. I've not thought about how we're, how to facilitate this session, but maybe just like open it up to like. Reactions. Reflections that people had. And then take it from there. So Shayna. When I look at the, like each. Months or couple of months. Goals. Which are. The city's responsibilities, which are ours. So. So. Should we put something like that? Or we don't need anything like that on the. Document. Like, well, I guess. Is there an example that you're thinking of? I'm not fully advertising stipend, right? Is the city is. Responsibility. Let me go back to. Sorry. I think this is more of like meeting with other committees. And continuing to do that. Outreach committee members. If you look at the city, I think we have a lot of other. Identity-based and issue-based organizations. And we're looking at the tactics. I do think that's on us. Okay. That's why, yeah, that's why I was. Suggesting should we put anything like that or this document will be internal anyway, so we don't have to mention it. Just checking. Tuesday council. I'm not sure. Yeah. I don't remember four and the tactics of first of the first where we commit ourselves at least one member of this committee is going to attend one meeting extra meeting a month. Is that really going to work.  I know it's like Michael now that you're not on every committee anymore. What you thought I'd do that. Just be on all the committees you could just report back and now we've got to actively seek them out. Yeah, I mean, I think I was really just thinking about these two but if other things come up right is one meeting. Yeah, that's pretty arbitrary. It's like as needed, right. I know like the outside just did another round of things and I wasn't able to go to any of them but like if there are other opportunities. We want to be intentional about that right. Like has anyone been going to the outside. I went to the one on Saturday. Yeah. I plan to go to the others that are going to be just some compliments to that so I won't go again. Yeah, I attended the meeting they did on zoom. Yeah. Yes. So done check. We've done that for Q one. Okay. Can you get telling Michael can you offer a little bit of commentary on what those meetings were like as far as I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. You want to do that. After this. Whenever. Okay. Well, I'm curious. I would say we let's finish this, this, this work with the plan and then I'll tell you what I saw. And her. Yeah. And the other like. I think this is. This is our like pull. What am I trying to say? This is a plan. Right. So like this is where we can like set our agendas for the meetings and help us provide some direction for our work and. Because I think that's what we've been feeling a little bit directionless. And so is this accomplishing that goal do we want to approve it. We want to work on building our monthly agendas off of this plan. If there's anything else to say around that. It sounds good. Yeah, I feel there's more detail to get into, of course. I'm. Again, I'm feeling like what is the relationship with city council. And how do they have a level of awareness and how do they want. What are they going to prioritize. So we're kind of in a holding pattern until the new council and the new mayor come in. And we're going to need to. There's going to have to be some kind of orientation for them about what C deck is. As well as individual meetings that we'd like to do with council members. So that feels like. There's a few steps there around, I guess, education and. Just relationship building. That seems important. Lauren does very, you know, she does great job in the city council meetings and she always. We have a very, very important part of how say Jack is important. The decisions. City council makes. I think we can put more on the agenda or there's a city council report at the end of the meeting. Maybe. Lauren and I can mention whatever you want us to mention to the city council. council. I think we can do that, but Lauren really mentions every single time. If something is related to say Jack's agenda or activities. Yeah, or I wonder too, if just like after the presentation to the city council, like if we just want to circle back like at the end of q2 just to reevaluate this plan and like have a come like see where the direction of the city council is going to be and if we wanted to like re re-up it, you know, we can just build that in if that makes sense. Oops. I'll just put that in the top one here. What am I saying. Just like updating the strategic plan with updated priorities from city council. I like end of June, early July. And since now, non citizens but Montpelier residents can vote in local elections. Do you want to, you know, have any goal about reaching out to them or that's a inclusion to so I don't know how many people will come and vote but now they have rights to do that. Yeah, and that's been something that's like was on our last strategic plan that we haven't been able to really incorporate as a bringing it like I'm more thinking about like English as a second language. So I'm thinking about like, you know, we're going to have a lot of people vote in the city council. I think that we're going to have a lot of winners and working on how can we continue to do that outreach. This is like a kind of a specific project. I don't really know what that looks like if you have a thought on that Pell in for doing that outreach but I'm intrigued. And ask him to if someone I think should ask him to put a letter into the newspapers into the bridge into Times Argus, reminding folks that they are eligible to vote. I mean, well we we could do it, but I think it's really his job but you know he claims responsibility for taking care of the election so I think we should ask him, you know, formally ask him to do it if we want to make it as a motion or something like that but in formulas okay. How does that sound Pell in. I wouldn't hurt somebody from C Jack right letters to the editor or put it on which for him for him but I think the burden is really on city clerk. Right we can be a helper but we're not like owning that project that's on the city. Yeah, yeah, I just want to double check right if we need to do anything about it or it's just like, not our job so. Okay. And Kelly like I don't know if you can or if I should reach out of just trying to like hear about what the plan is for doing that in the city city clerk's office. So is this specifically about the language conversion of reminding like aspiring citizens that they can vote in Montpelier in this next election. Yeah. So yeah I we could certainly reach out to the clerk. And I mean if that's something that you'd like me to help but I can. I can get I got on my to do list that sounds like I got it. Thank you. Because I saw that already. I didn't one citizen. She posted this news on front porch forum. She was doing it because she was very happy about it right she's American citizen but she just want to share this good news with rest of us, but I haven't seen or heard anything coming like a more formal way. That's why I just want to check with you. I think it's a good idea to to have the, you know, somebody make make it very clear in the newspapers, which is, you know, still one way of communicating with people. You know that this is actually passed all the barriers that were thrown up against it. So, this along as it gets done. You did anything else we should add or adapt on this strategic plan. And it's going to be a living document but we want to lock it in between between calls. That's the minimum. Should we take a closer look at the, the Q one items and see what we want to do within each of them. That'd be great. So I mean it's the first thing I see here is around participate and support outreach for Elk's log project. I have ideas about what that means. I mean, some of us are able to attend the engagement sessions. Are there other things that we want to do around that. And I think we at one point we had tried to, or maybe I missed it. We had a meeting with the person who's managing that outreach. Is that true. Josh and with him. I've met with him a couple of times. I can't remember if he came to the committee meeting. Did, did anything come from that in terms of how they need. So the meeting I attended, they talk about their ideas, right. They propose three different plans. And I think they are just explaining this to the public, right. One is, Oh, have housing, use this land to have more houses so it will help affordable housing. Second plan is just have recreation center use all the land for that. And the third plan is a do mix, right, some housing and recreation. And they are explaining these three different plans to the public and I think whatever public votes. It will be the next step as far as I understood then they will decide what to do with the land. I don't think that the vote that the voting was they passed out these little dots to fill in, you know, how do you want to use these, these various locations on on each map. I don't think that these are binding on anybody. They are advisory only so I mean how other people vote. Just as a as one marker for their progress but I don't, I don't think it's there's anything binding about it, any of those votes. And I guess I think the person we've been talking about is Josh Jerome might he's the city's representative on this committee or he's the he's the city's person doing that right. Josh is the lead sort of planner for this project. He's the city's economic development specialist.  And so I think she came to a committee meeting, the couple back is to kind of introduce yourself. And I know that so there are two more sessions within this winter feedback loop where really what they're trying to gain from this input is, you know, what, what they think you know might be good uses as as we've mentioned but then also sort of direction on what will be proposed and sort of the final report and in those next steps and so. And Michael, the dots, the exercise there was just to, you know, to kind of see, you know, where people would end up. I will know, which I thought was pretty interesting as they did have a component to that exercise, highlighting Abinapi Abinaki lands, excuse me, sorry about that. Lands for just use because there were some artifacts that were found on the site. And so there is some thinking about, you know, making sure that, you know, we are including people of the land. And so that that is happening. And so we'll see, you know, at least, you know, what what output comes from that with the input. So, if you can, the other two sessions are on the second from six to eight, and then on the ninth from noon to two. If you wanted to participate. Thanks Kelly. Shayna, I'm wondering. So, equity, who can participate who can't participate in these kinds of sessions did anything come up in talking with Josh around concerns around. That was exclusively what I remember talking about and it was maybe more like the phase one was of like, who should we be reaching out to how should we reaching out to them. I shared about our stipend process and tried to figure out if we could use the stipends for participation in these processes it seems like that didn't come from anything because I haven't seen anything advertised from it. But that that that was like I'm like, I don't feel like I have opinions on what this property should be used for but I want people who have opinions to be able to like offer them in that like create a different opportunities for having them in that space and I think coming out of that was like having that like be on property and like doing the walkthrough as well as having zoom meetings at different times and things like that. So, but yeah, that was I hadn't participated in this kind of, I think, I think it was like phase one and then like research and then this is phase three if I'm remembering correctly this is off the top of my head. And so I think I was more involved in like the phase one of doing the outreach and I have not talked to anyone in phase three yet but maybe we can also circle back and see if there's more updates there. Are these meetings over the next couple of weeks and then get kind of a report back, or is it more important that we just try to support turning people out to these. Again, recognizing that this is like the next round. I'm thinking out loud here processing out processing externally sorry. So, well, I didn't hear any hesitancy at the meeting that I was at that people getting up and talking and their concerns, which we're getting people to these meetings were getting people other opportunities who who may not feel as comfortable as more what I'm concerned about Michael. Okay. Right, I mean, or was was there new people like you haven't seen at other meetings at them too. I don't know. But you know I think one of the highlights that we did notice the staff at this this first session in this winter session is that there weren't a lot of folks with families there. And because you know the timing of it was from 10 to 12. Well basketball was running. You know, and there was also a cross country meet outside and, you know, so for any number of reasons, you know, we just didn't get the draw for that population. I do following this meeting have an internal meeting with the team. So I can certainly mention it. Just to make sure that you know you're sort of still on the radar and, you know, so I think that trying to get you know a variety of folks from across the city there is still something that we can work on that being said you know there are two meetings in different mediums there's one that was all in person there's one that's a hybrid and then there's one that's fully. So, I'll just mention this because it's something I think about all the time is one of the one of the things that gets missed is often is when you're looking for family, you know, families to participate especially if it's in person and sometimes even on zoom is if they don't have childcare, they're not going to do it. And so, you know, it, and it's easy to overlook and say well if they really want to do it they'll figure it out but it that's to me a huge equity issue. I mean we even see it in the Justice Center where parents, you know, are participating with one of their children and then they've got three or four that are in the background and they're, you know, it's an issue. Yeah, I'm just thinking too about various ways in which you might solicit input from different groups within the community, I mean the these sessions are one thing. You know there's also other kinds of ways you can get that those opinions that are more diverse than whoever just shows up at a community meeting. And it's not to undo the processes already been laid out, because I think we're probably a little bit late to have a lot of influence in that but I'm just curious. When decisions are made. Maybe I don't know who makes the decision I apologize that I don't understand the process because I should understand it better but when decisions are made. Do the decision makers have a comprehensive understand from a range of perspectives in the community what matters to us with that development. That would be the guiding principle is is there anything there that we can help shape so that, because I mean, we're talking about housing like I want to hear from unhoused people about that I don't want to hear from folks like me, who are privileged white well off stable housing people. So that's an example so that's that's what I'm wondering about. What, what that triggers for me Jeremy is going where, you know, meeting them where they are. So where, who, where, who are the groups that are already meeting where, where are those people that we want to reach right it's it that's the perennial with us as well like how do we attract people with lived experience and from marginalized communities who have a totally different perspective of the criminal and justice system right like that I hear you and it takes a lot more effort to make you know first of all to identify then to like make the connections and then to for those of us with privilege to say oh I'll go to that place right like that's, that's, that's what it is. I think like, I had, you know, shared all of this stuff from our like equity assessment and like was like based on this here are some things that I think could be cool ideas of like having it available, you know the materials and the surveys available in different languages advertising to have one of the be simultaneously interpreted, you know, into like the most common languages spoken at Montpelier elementary school, you know had kind of some of these like specific outreach ideas that I don't, not that I'm like I had a hero's like my list and I expect them all to be implemented, but like I'm not, and like in the, in the stipends and other things I'm like I'm, I feel like those were all ideas that I had shared kind of as the C Jack chair and then I'm not seeing those implemented and so I think like we can circle back to, you know, feel like saying like I mean once tomorrow so I don't know what that means but right if, if, if what was the participation in those and if it's not reaching these key audiences that we identified in our equity assessment, then do we want to do some additional do we want to encourage them to do additional concerted outreach. I think yes, that wasn't a question, I think we want to ask them to do that additional concern outreach. Yeah, I think maybe it does make sense. I'm going to circle back with. I don't know who the right person is, or people are but just to be the constant voice of equity in this process. Because it's probably going to take multiple like reinforcements. Another issue, it was discussed the meeting I attended, if recreation center moves this new land. And there's a discussion what will happen they are buildings at downtown. So there are different ideas about it maybe it is good for our committee to follow that discussion. And to offer like more ideas from equity perspective to use those buildings because now they are talking about like office places. So, probably we can offer other ideas right for people who need, you know, to have some plays. But I think it is good for us to follow that discussion to not only new land, but also all buildings of recreation at the downtown and their future usage. Well, for one small observation here I guess it's a significant window. All the discussion that went on last Saturday was talking about the number of housing units in in various parts of the, this, this property and clustering, clustering them by size pretty much. There was no discussion that I heard, and you were there also Kelly so you about people who don't have who can't afford to buy any homes. And, and all and Carol that's your that's an important point that that that issue just did not come up. The assumption is that these are all going to be affordable housing, one way, not all but they'll be affordable housing sprinkled around the map or actually clustered around the map that was one of my objections that they were the plan. Three creates three separate social economic communities. People living in the high rise people living in the, the five plex and then the three plexes and then a few single family, lots. So, I was concerned about that, and at least mixing it up rather than segregating those those kinds of units, but I didn't hear anything about rental. In those discussions.  That was an absence. There was an absence of discussion about that. That that's thanks for sharing that Michael because it makes me think of another possible role for C Jack so there. We've been talking about how can we influence outreach engagement who participates in the process. But I'm also wondering about our role as kind of reviewers with the equity lens like at some point further down the process when plans become more finalized is there an opportunity for us as a committee with our equity and justice hat on to actually review those plans and and point out just the thing that you're talking about Michael of. Well that doesn't really ring. That doesn't like this aspect of the plan. You know, there's some equity concerns here because of x y and z and not that we're experts in land development and and housing development, but we do have, I think we can ask good questions. Which could be useful to those development plans as they move further down the line. I mean too that there's somewhere that they are doing analysis about what type of housing the city actually needs right like who do they do they need housing for middle income folks that we know they need we need housing for homeless population. So like, and it seems to me that that would be information that developers would have and create their plans based on what the actual data says about what the city needs it's you know it really I don't think it's going to be coming from anecdotal information from, you know, people with with privilege with living work in Montpelier making the decision. I think it's going to be it's, you know, I'm part of business decision. Who, who are the developers you're attracting who are able to put together the plan that is going to best suit what the city actually needs. Yeah, good point. I, I've attended one of the housing discussion forum, and they mentioned in that I think it was like three weeks one month ago. Montpelier there's an interesting thing because most of the people, you know, living on the streets, they, they do this by choice. So they don't want to rent a house they don't want to. They don't want to live in a house, but they need some place to be safe and warm. So I thought it's very interesting because they were talking about other cities, but it's the Montpelier case. So people, you know, they, they choose to be live like that, but they need support. Right so it was very interesting to me to learn this fact. So what are our next steps here is it to bring Josh to, or like, we'll review the proposals after our next meeting and then bring back responses and feedback. Is that where we're at. I don't know if that's where we're at right now I think I think we should focus on the, the outreach engagement angle. Yes, my, my last comment was just like further down the line. Once the opportunity for public input maybe is less. We might want to review plans. Somewhat superficially probably but just looking out for any equity issues that we're fine that we're seeing but I think it's still the focus is on encouraging them to be more inventive around outreach. Yeah. So do we want to invite Josh to come in our next meeting and we can ask some of these questions about who has come to this meeting and how, how does that look like and yeah. And hear about how they think they did for outreach. Yeah. I do want to be mindful of time here for looking through the rest of the things thank you so much for getting us started pyramid but yeah is there anything else yeah I think we've got yeah for next steps for Elks Lodge. And I think this city council meetings are happening after the election. No pre election, haha. Yeah, I didn't I didn't quite understand that pre election timing. Can you remind me what why that is. No, no, I read it in my head as post election when I was reviewing it right now. It seems like we want to wait for the new crop to come in right. Yeah. I'm not involved in elections but I don't I don't think that's our role. And we can't. Okay to move it to post elections. Like yeah just like meeting with people right after they get elected. Okay and then for the next one for stipends I actually just got a message late last night from someone from Tom from the bridge about wanting to do an article about how the stipends are working and stuff and that he was talking to Kelly as well but continuing to get the word out about the stipends and how they're how they're working and then we have them for next budget does that make sense. Anything else on that. And then growing our committee, something I've really not been thinking much about and here we are q1. We probably should like this is why we haven't been recruiting for our committee and anything else and now that we have more of a sense of what our mission and our vision is as a committee and that we're sticking to our kind of initial plan we're not expanding it out. How do we want to grow our committee membership. The first thing that comes to mind and I I'll take this on as a task is, I think a quick, you know short kind of boilerplate blurb that we can use as notes and conversations or emails to individuals or groups. So it's, D Jack is mission is this we have some successes that we can point to as a committee that I think could get people excited and we have some things that we're still focusing on. So that's how I'm thinking about just a brief description of the committee and a call for for new members. And I think it's, I mean we've done these things before but it's still working our contacts in the community like, hey, you would be a good fit for this, or do you know anyone who can be a good fit. I'm also thinking of different groups that I'm aware of that it might be useful to send these kinds of, you know calls out to. I mean that's other than that I don't have any other kind of outreach ideas I don't think that's good. Do you have any thoughts here too, or anyone else. Sorry, but. I apply to this committee because I saw the announcement on front porch forum. Yeah, so it will be another way all like try right spreading the word posts on there so people might be aware that we are looking for new members. I applied because I went to apply for the public restroom committee. This was posted next to that I was like, oh, I'll just click both boxes and here we are and the public restroom committee still hasn't met so funny how that works. You made a good choice. Yeah, I think so. It was funny. Ready for the public restroom committee to finally meet. That's good. Good memories. And still people need to use the rest. Yeah, after all these years. Do we, did we skip over this one about updating the committee application process. Did I miss, did I miss you mentioning that one. No, I skipped right past it. I forget we had a specific thought about that but I cannot remember it. So this was Lauren and of incorporating the stipend application in with the committee application and getting demographic information like now it after it's done you can click the button and then fill out demographic information, but very few people who are filling out applications do. I think this is like something we just like have to be the watchdog for this and like making sure like keeping this on our plan to make sure this happens but this is not. I think something that we have to lead on if that makes sense to Kelly. Maybe let's check in with Lauren about this because I do think this was right. Michael you're looking skeptical or maybe that's can't remember what I think if we if we want to review the app. Look at it and see what what it is that we think is missing or is unnecessary. Just so that we can make some specific kinds of recommendations if that's what it is. I don't remember any specific comments about that at all and I don't think I recorded any in the minutes. I remember we talk about there is like questions about education. People might find it like an obstacle to apply. So we talk about people who have experience might be beneficial to our committee we don't. We talk about or should we you know get rid of that education section or like oh your job and relation instead of oh I have a lived experience right so I remember those things from our discussion so making application itself more accessible for people who have ideas to apply instead of oh I don't have enough education I don't have enough for experience. I think if you're just asking an open ended question that is what what do you believe you would bring to the group, you know, based on what the charge is for the committee then, you know, that removes the stigma and allows people to answer in the way that they want to or can and then you don't have to, you know, have an evaluation based on those other items. That's great thanks for reminding us Pellan. I wonder if a task for us is an upcoming meeting to review the application together and make some offer some comments about how we can make it more accessible. Kelly, can we do this only for our committee but or it should be for what what's the procedure about it. Shane I'm muted. I'm playing the application overall like I don't think it's a separate application for any committee. Well then city should change or. Yeah, all applications. Right. I just bring up to that one of one of our newer volunteers emailed actually emailed Kelly to ask if if they stipend was available to CJC volunteers and it's not because the policy is that it's only for city appointed volunteers. So, that's a thing. And, you know, if it, I mean, to be honest, like we've got 50 volunteers, if it were that we needed to have all of our volunteers appointed by city council, it would really slow down, you know, the onboarding and getting people ready to be able to actually participate in our on our panels. But I just wanted to raise that because you know he was asking the question, and he indicated that he would not ask for the stipend but he was just curious about whether it was available to our volunteers. And so that's really the skipping down there to the budget disbursement and this is something else that Lauren raised up is that we have more budget in between CJAC budget and the stipends we have more than we're going to be able to spend this year. And there's this request from all these other committees for doing trainings and we're like we're not doing trainings but we want to support other people for doing trainings. And then also can we use this stipend money for not just city committee participation but for these other opportunities for participating in the Elks Lodge project or just like what you're talking about. I don't know what that like I don't know do we want to put together like a proposal for what that would look like and then bring that to city budget people or what the process for that would be. Well that feels like a one time action, based on a surplus this fiscal year. Carol your comment. It's for me is we created the stipend program as a pilot. It started in July, we're coming up on July. Well, eventually. And I think we need to build some process of evaluating the pilot and making some decisions around how it evolves moving forward because Carol to your point. We had to put some boundaries around the program as a pilot. But we're going to have the opportunity, you know, a year out to evaluate its effectiveness. And we can take into consideration questions about was it about only appointed committee people or other other volunteer situations where it really makes sense to offer that stipend. I think there's there's two issues there there's the, we've got reserve we've got surplus, can we use that money, however we want. And in July, we need to build a little bit of a process around just evaluating the pilot pilot. I appreciate that. And, you know, I think especially for this committee, and committees like the homelessness task force like if you want people with lived experience right we want those people to show up and it's the same thing with our panels. You know our panels in our COSA teams it's just if you can offer that, then there's an ability to make it realistic for a lot of people that we aren't going to get who are just going to respond to a front porch forum post. And just to clarify, I do think this was thinking about this year but then also like changing how C. Jack is budgeted, and so that we can kind of lump some and then we can say this is for stipends and for training offering trainings to other commit you know we can like have it be more flexible funds essentially that we can just spend on like equity stuff. And more for it for the public for committees and you know and recognizing that city staff has their own line item budget for that professional development equity work. Yeah. And then for creating a list of trainers Pellan you started that what's the next step for that do you want us to review that. Is it bringing in other experts. Maybe, as a comedy, we can check those things that I received a couple more I can share them with you. And I receive names, not the company so I can also share with them. I think we should decide. I don't know, budget issues or something you know because each one I think charges differently so I don't know what do you want do you want to pick only one company or person, then go from there. So I definitely think we want to offer many different options for folks right because I think that's the problem that people have been saying I found I found this group and I reached out to them and they can't do it because they're booked up through next year and yeah I've also got a run but okay. Um, let's continue. Okay, so I think we've got on our next meeting agenda. We are going to invite Josh to come. We're going to review the committee application. And finalize our review of ongoing education next steps for our strategic plan. So that's all good. Yeah, can we also just clarify because I can work with Mary Smith on getting the calendar invitation if it's yeah if we meet every other week or if it's twice a month. I mean, it's been every other week so I think let's just continue doing that so that next one would be February 15. Okay, so I will. So I will just connect with Mary just to make sure that that goes out to everybody on the list and that it's, you know, for like the next six months that it's on the calendar. Yeah, thank you. I need to go to so. Yeah, and I send that out loud. Okay, and Josh speak. And committee application. Okay. You're feeling better soon. I'm feeling so much better. I'm not, I don't like have a fever or anything anymore but this cough just will not quit and I got like real drugs for it and it's not anything so thank you. Was it COVID? No, it's just a cold. I tested negative for everything. Wow. Knocked me out for a full week. Yeah. Take care of yourself. Thanks. Drink a lot of tea. Yeah. Thanks all. Thank you.


The Ukrainian city of Sferodonetsk remains under Ukraine's control, but still faces heavy Russian shelling, and civilians have limited services. A Chinese delegation led by Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrives in the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati to discuss issues including fisheries as part of an eight-nation trip. In Senegal, President Mackey Saul dismisses the health minister after a hospital fire killed 11 newborn babies. And North Korean state media reports the country's COVID-19 cases are decreasing, but experts question official numbers because few treatments are available.


Yeah, I'm Ian Shuler with Development Seeds. We're a shop that does a lot of work with open data and open source. And I'm here to talk to you. I guess we've heard about water. We've heard about air. And now we're going to talk about land from space. So we'll have basically everything covered by the end of the presentation. Let's see. Imagery data, whether it's from satellites or drones, is some of the most valuable open data that exists. Location-based data in itself, GPS data, is estimated, depending on who you talk to, between a $40 to $100 billion dollar year industry. And the data that comes from satellite images is just as valuable for uses in everything, from agriculture to forestry to mining to public safety and others. And so there's tremendous economic value and social value to be derived from imagery. But it's been very difficult to work with. It's been a set of data that has been in the hands of a few. And some of the things that we're trying to do is to make it much more widely available. So every day, there are 175 Earth observation satellites that circle the Earth and take pictures. Take pictures of things like this and like this, all throughout the world, blind to borders, blind to economic ability, constantly collecting information. Some of that data is coming in as raw pictures like these, but also satellites have the ability to see a spectrum that the human eye can't. So you can look at ultraviolet light. And you can look at infrared light. You can look at soil moisture. You can look at elevation. You can look at other things that tell you really interesting things like the health of vegetation or where might be areas that are prone to landslides or where areas that there seem to be economic development. And that data together is of tremendous value for understanding the Earth and understanding the Earth's populations. This data is tremendously valuable to people who are trying to understand the effects of climate change, people who are looking at conservation of forests of sea, people who are managing wildfires and trying to work through disasters on the ground, again, whether that's wildfires or whether that's understanding the effects of flooding in areas that are most likely to be impacted by upcoming floods.  Or you could look at use it from an accountability standpoint as well. So this is an example in Mexico where there were two hurricanes in a row that hit Mexico in 2013. This is an example of taking that historic imagery and comparing that to the locations of projects where the government funded reconstruction projects. So to see was that funding spent in places where it seems to be appropriate? And to be able for the public to be able to compare that public finance data with the actual storm events to drive additional data or drive additional information. Here's an example of using 20 years of open nighttime imagery to understand the development of India from 1992 to 2012. So there's a really great data set, the MSP, of nightly satellite imagery across the world. It's a data set that's messy in a lot of ways, but it provides a really, really rich set of insights into development across the globe and gives you the ability to look at specifically where is their light at night, light in the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. time when people are turning on the lights. And that allows you to see a lot of different interesting things. One, you can see Diwali from space, which is pretty cool. The festival of lights is actually visible from space. But another thing that's quite interesting is you can look at it to see how resources are allocated. And so here's an example of in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. The yellow line is the average light output curve over 20 years for the Uttar Pradesh or a constituency, Hardoy and Uttar Pradesh as a whole. The red line is one constituency within Hardoy. And so you can see that this period that spans between around 1998 and 2001, it bumps above the average. And so you can start to ask questions about, well, why did that area have a higher level of light output than others? And it turns out that that area, the MP from that area, was put in as the minister of energy for exactly that period of time, where there's a bump in the light output from that area of the country. And as soon as he was no longer the minister of energy for Uttar Pradesh, it goes back to normal levels until it bounces again at the more recently in the last few years. So we're not sure what happened there. Maybe a cousin was able to get the ministry at some point later. So what to do with all this data? Again, there are 175 satellites circling the Earth every day, generating tremendous amounts of data. What does this look like and where is this coming from? And to what degree is that data actually open? Well, the majority of open data still comes from government sources of one sort or another. For imagery data, and the RBG, the pictures of the Earth, a lot of that comes from the Landsat program, which has been in place since 1972, collecting more than 40 years of imagery that's been run by the US government. Exciting, there are one of the exciting things that's happening in the space is that the Sentinel program, the European Space Agency, is an ambitious program to launch seven different satellite missions before 2021, which will collect even better imagery, higher quality, higher resolution imagery. The Sentinel-2, which was launched last year, which is one of their main imagery gathering satellites, is already producing data. And that data should come online in a more programmatically way within the next few weeks. Other satellites that both the European Space Agency and NASA are putting out are looking at soil moisture, are looking at atmospheric conditions, are gathering information about more climate and weather effects. And so that will also be incredibly valuable data for researchers, but also for the public at large. Commercial, there's been a growing commercial industry around satellite data. There's been a bit of a revolution in how satellites are built and launched. You've seen the rise of small satellites, which are cheaper. They're easier to build. And you can deploy them in droves or in fleets rather than having one big satellite that's collecting once a day. You can have essentially continuous coverage or daily coverage of the entire planet. You also, the greater availability of launch vehicles has made it possible to do this. So with entry of companies like SpaceX, it's easier to get things into space, and that's creating a lot of data. To date, there aren't many companies that are providing open data in the satellite space. There are a few examples of this being the case, primarily around natural disasters. And so around Nepal, for instance, a number of satellite companies, Skybox, Planet Labs, and Digital Globe, each release publicly available imagery over Nepal to anybody for whom it could be of use. And so around disasters in particular, you do have a bit of an example or a bit of a history of providing open data. It seems that there's an interest in expanding that further, and it's likely to expand over the next few years. The number of companies have made commitments about data that they would release in the public. Skybox has a Skybox for a good program, and they are already producing, releasing imagery of developmental value or of emergency response value. Planet Labs recently, the United Nations Global Goals Summit, made a commitment to release $60 million worth of imagery. Akila Space is a company that's not only interested in releasing imagery, but actually the hardware designs to produce satellites, although that's being held up by regulatory issues. So you have people on all sides who are seeing the benefit of open in aerospace and the benefit of this open data. And I think that increasingly we'll see commercial providers also involved in the open imagery game. And interestingly, hobbyists, and this is a bit where drones come in, it is easier for people who are interested in providing imagery of their or wherever the world that they're interested in collecting it to gather that information and to provide it openly. Drones have become extremely popular as a hobbyist activity as well. And we're hopeful that in the same way that individual mappers and geographers and individual community organizers help to create an asset as rich as open street map of address and map data from around the world, that we're on the precipice of being able to do something similar where we can actually have an evolving picture of the entire Earth that's being maintained by people who have a commitment to open data in public domain. And so the hobbyist side, I think, is extremely exciting. The trouble is that imagery data is still really hard to work with. There aren't a lot of very good tools. It is very heavy. It is expensive to maintain. It's expensive to move. And so part of what we need to do if we really want to power an open data revolution around imagery is to make it easier for more people to be engaged in the process. Some of that starts with government and making those rich stores of government data, sentinel data, Landsat, and other data sets more accessible. One great example of this was earlier this year, AWS committed to taking the last two years of Landsat imagery, Landsat 8 imagery, and putting it on AWS in a way that it can be very easily programmatically accessed. And that takes it from being where it was technically available if you were willing to navigate the USGS's system and to learn how that worked and to go in and download that data yourself. It made it more programmatically available and easier to navigate and easier to work with. And that allowed us to build other tools on top of it that would make it more widely available to other audiences. Sentinel data is not quite at that point yet. I think sentinel data, well, the license is right. They have the license right for public use, for commercial, all the things you would want to have. The actual technical infrastructure to make it readily available isn't there. And so this is going to be a great thing for Europe to take on is to take that fantastic data that's coming in through the sentinel program and use that as an engine for geo growth in the open geo industry across the continent and globally by making that data more accessible. Currently, the situation with sentinel data is with still a lot of NASA and USGS data is that if you are a researcher, you're a scientist, and you have the time to learn how to use some very specific tools. And if you have the patients for dealing with the registering and getting approved and dealing with the system, then you have the ability to do some very, very powerful things of that data, but it's not accessible to everybody. And so some of the things that we were able to do, again, off AWS is to make it available to two very key markets, or two very key sets of people. One is individuals who aren't experts, who aren't GIS experts or remote sensing experts, but who want to be able to access this information, a journalist, or a community organization, or a company. And so building very user-friendly interfaces, this is an example of Libra, which is an entirely open-source tool practicing Landsat imagery. This makes it much more easy for people to find and begin to use that data, or make the data programmatically accessible, so it doesn't actually require a human at all. Another set of tools we built called Landsat Util allows you to script out the use of the collection, the processing, and the publishing of satellite imagery to give those building blocks that allow it to be more easily plugged into other things. And so with those together, we were able to build two very specific tools that we think are useful to this audience. One is Open Aerial Map, which is an index of openly licensed satellite and drone imagery around the world. And so here's an example. In the Philippines, a drum imagery that was collected after Haiyan could be put online to allow other people to use that as a tracing layer for OSM, or allow researchers to be able to look at past data and projecting future information. And you have all of that archive of data through time, so you can see data from different points, pre-disaster, post-disaster, just the evolution of an area over time. That is, again, is a place where you can collect available open imagery. This is particularly useful for drone operators who are gathering a lot of imagery, but don't have an easy way to make it available and make it discoverable to a wider audience. And so Open Aerial Map is an attempt to have a home for all of the openly licensed imagery. And this is something that we are a technical partner in, but it's being done in partnership with a number of other organizations, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team, Planet Labs, and a number of other groups. Another example is a commercial example of an organization Astrodigital, a company that took the tools that we developed in order to make monitoring possible. And so this is an example of setting up a way to monitor a shale field for any new imagery and do automatic processing of that imagery so that decision makers in the field can have access to imagery and data derived from that imagery immediately. And so that, again, gets the question that I had posed earlier today of how do we take open data and actually make it actionable, actually make it answer questions for people. So that's where I think we see the field right now. We think it's a really exciting time. If you're interested in joining, there's an event next week in Washington, D.C. for anybody who happens to be there called SAT Summit. We'll be discussing some of those things and anybody here who's interested in going can get a free ticket using that coupon code. Thanks very much. Fantastic. Thank you.


Let's play a little bit on the telos. I just wanna play on this for a bit. Given the fact that we're talking about simulation tech, we're given AI VR tech emerging, what's being unleashed with quantum computation. So ultimately it seems as though the way that a tree drops seeds and those become trees and the way that a zygote makes a human and humans procreate make more humans, the same way that a big bang makes a civilization and we make more big bangs. Do you see the recursion as the telos? Do you see this as a quine in a sense? By telos, do you mean some kind of like purpose to the whole thing? Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I guess my view, recursion comes in the kind of self-referential nature of things comes in with life and with it's crucial for consciousness with, you know, because we're kind of self-starting creatures where there is no, we're both the puppeteer and the puppet, you know, of ourselves. But I see, I think I see, that's actually really interesting prompt because I would say that I see the evolution of the universe starting at the big bang as rather than a kind of recursive process as quite a kind of linear process, like a kind of like a radial process of like a flower blooming or something where you have a big bang and then you have physics becoming, coming chemistry, becoming biology, becoming life and just increasing complexity. And it's, but this is very, I don't know, aesthetically, I like it as well. It makes me feel very like reassured that the world is just moving in one direction and it makes it things feel less loopy and complicated than the kind of quine picture because when you start getting interested in consciousness you really can't tumble down, you know, holes of solipsism and, you know, not knowing where the kind of floor is a reality. But I would say, yeah, actually, when it comes to, so when it comes to reality itself, there's a sense in which we kind of touched on earlier, you know, Newton had this idea that the universe is made of little separate things, little separate bricks that are truly separate. And then with quantum mechanics, we now know it's far more like an interwoven tapestry or like a house of cards where every kind of piece is dependent on all the other pieces. And consciousness is like that as well. I think this is how you can get consciousness arising out of a physical system because it's not like it introduces a new substance into existence, but at the level of information, a system can hold that the world is one way as opposed to another way. It can hold that something is hot versus cold but then there are correlations with like, well, hot things tend to be more red and yellow. There's like long wavelengths of light rather than kind of blues and greens. In this kind of self-referential process, you build up consciousness, you get this kind of house of cards of more this, less of that. And this is kind of touched on the Buddhist concept of emptiness. When you, in the West, we have ideas of qualia, the idea that redness is a thing, like the idea of qualia was supposed to be like an atom of consciousness, which I think should sound like a kind of nonsense idea. Red is only red with respect to everything else in consciousness. You can't isolate it and have just red. And so this is the Buddhist concept of emptiness. If you really look at red for long enough, it loses any sense of any intrinsic essence. It's all just this kind of mirage of relative change. So I'd say in that sense, I don't know if that's precisely in the way you mean this kind of self-referential structure, but I think, yeah, everything emerges in this way. And it's a feature of a holistic picture of things, a holistic nature of consciousness and the holistic nature of the physical world as well. Inevitably, it's going to happen with the West becoming more and more. And even China, you know, Japan is a canary in the coal mine in many ways with humans passing. I don't know if you've seen the husk, but the husk is the contraption now for the ultimate unit where you're literally just, you know, you've got your bed, you've got your computer, you've got your controller, you've got your whole setup. And soon it's just, you know, it's right in. It's connected directly in. And if you don't put on VR and use it for 30 minutes and then take it off and think to yourself, how am I not already in VR? Then you don't know. But if you do have that process, you take it off and you make the self-inquiry and you go, how is this not already VR? Then you know. And I think that that is the essence of where the modernized world is pushing and that the modernized world is going to triangulate on the exact same realization that 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, from everywhere across the world, to perennial spiritual wisdom has been triangulating on. So we'll see. And I do think that John Smart's Transition Hypothesis has a lot of potential as well. We've hit on so many awesome things. I want to talk about this for a bit. I think that you've had incredible guests on your show already. I highly recommend you guys to go and check out James's podcast. He's crushing it. Check out his YouTube channel. Kristoff Cock episode was so good. So was Donald Huffman, both such great episodes. If we take Huffman's perspective for a little bit, we were talking about this a bit before we started. It seems like a multimodal user interface and the video game analogy we were just talking about a moment ago. Those are basically anyone that has, anyone that goes through that process of self inquiry we were just talking about, inevitably comes to the realization that they themselves have a user interface that they are, they're in a reality. They have this user interface. There are fitness functions.  And now versus if you eat a salad, you're gonna feel great. You'll feel great tomorrow. You might have an extra week on. So there are these understandings of what you do in this reality is going to inevitably make you more peaceful, more happy, a better mate, more knowledge about truth, more a better mate for procreation. So I'm also curious where living mirrors theory could potentially synthesis with the multimodal user interface because in a sense that's what the cell does have. The cell has a ledger and an understanding of the world and then it's constantly updating that based on fitness. So do you see a synthesis of Hoffman and you and in a sense as well?  Yeah, so I think that's a really, really important point. So yeah, I would say when I was an undergrad, when I first was kind of introduced to psychology and neuroscience, it was taught that it was kind of a fact or almost a point of definition that colors are not out there in the world. Beauty is not out there in the world. Things are not objectively colorful, objectively beautiful. Those are qualities that exist in consciousness. And this was just like daily one of like talking about perception, let's get our definitions straight. If leaves are not green, you perceive them to be green, but that's in consciousness, right? So when I first saw Donald Hoffman's theory, it took me a while to understand what he was saying was radical because when he says a case of reality as the name of his book and he was saying the world isn't actually full of these colors, I was like, well, that's a fact basically. Like I think if you're thinking about the world the right way, that's something, yeah, that's true. But then it turns out he's saying something far more radical that like, you know, the moon isn't there when you're not looking at it, that kind of thing. I think there's something, even though it's not, it doesn't have the same appearance, like appearances happening in consciousness, I think there's some structure out there in the world that persists when we're not looking at it. But yeah, so this idea that the contents of consciousness are absolutely, and I would basically only tied to fitness payoffs is the term that Hoffman uses. But like, so there's structure in the world and you perceive, you know, when you're hungry you perceive certain food to be appetizing and delicious. And when you're not hungry, you know, if you eat too much chocolate, then the same thing can now appear disgusting, right? Like your conscious perception, the attribute of the thing in the world has changed.  Same's true for color, same's true for all these other things, which is, you know, that was the way I was thinking about consciousness when I came up with my theory because in my theories it's absolutely entirely tied up with the organism survival and the contents of consciousness are completely tied up with what you might call fitness payoffs. And also, I think to just get a feeling of this kind of the fact that what you perceive is an interface for the world, you know, like if you perceive, you know, based on your history and your kind of genetics and stuff, you might perceive certain foods to be appealing because of that history and because it makes sense for you. And in the same way, like, you know, imagine if, as well as us becoming this intelligent, technologically advanced civilization, imagine if slugs had as well.  I don't think I would be agreeing that the slug Hollywood celebrities are objectively beautiful, right? And that's a way of seeing that the perception, the conscious perception of beauty is not out there in the world. And as weird as it sounds, it's true for all of our senses. And we saw this with the hysteria around that dress that went viral, the complex. Can I talk to you about it? Beautiful. Good, thank you for that. It's a perfect example. I was very excited about that. I came up because I was like, this is what I'm interested in and this points to something fascinating about the nature of reality. Exactly.  It's like the biggest metaphysical thing. Exactly, exactly. And it's what you can do from that point. And the same thing was with that, that sound clip of Yanny versus Laurel. People heard it as these two different words, right? What you can realize that is that what you're seeing is not, perception is not like you're looking out of these transparent eyeballs to a freestanding world. James, just one quick thing on that is that you can change your perception on the Laurel Yanny, but you, because you can go back and forth like the Reuben vase or the Necker cube, but on, you can go back and forth, but on the dress, you can't, at least from what I've tested with people, they can't go back and forth between golden white and black and blue, which that I think is the most profound part of it. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting in its own, right? I think it might be to do with the fact that like with the vase face illusion where it kind of changes, there's some structure there that you can scan your attention around and you can, you have some model in your head of the two things and you can, you can kind of actively engage with the process, same with the Yanny Laurel, you can really try and focus on the high notes that sound like Yanny and all the low notes on the Laurel. With the dress, it's more, I think the thing that seems to account for which way you go is, is if you think you're discounting blue light or yellow light, I read one thing that's, I don't know if it was actually real data or if it was just speculation, but there was the speculation that men would see it as, I think it was black and blue, oh no, sorry, yellow and golden white because they played more computer games with blue lights. So their brain is used to being like, oh, like the room's drenched in blue light. I better discount some blue and then it pushes it in that direction. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's, that's what it's actually proven, but that's, I think that might be why it moves that way. But yeah, so what it shows you though is that this is not a pre-given world that looks the way it looks. There is a screen of consciousness and there's all these weird appearances inside it and you are, you are just another one of these appearances. You know, when I'm looking at my hand, it feels like this hand is inside me, but actually it's appearing in consciousness. It's visually continuous with the rest of the background. And that's when you can, your kind of sense of self can blink out of existence and there can just be this kind of light of consciousness and a bunch of phenomena happening. And you can realize that fundamentally that's what's going on. And there's a delusion when you take this bundle of perceptions and you say, this is me, these appearances of hands are me. And I'm saying there is an organism, but the organism is not the same thing as the concept of the self. And it's the concept of the self that all of our suffering is fed through. This was the kind of Buddha's insight that neuroscience is now kind of showing to be true as well, right? So it could be fair to say that there is a, within the living mirror theory, there is a, the living system has it's a coupling with the environment. And in that process, the multimodal user interface is what the living system uses. So there's that, that's kind of what the synthesis could be. Yeah. And I would say it's kind of important to, the interface idea is actually important because consciousness is not like you're being aware of the thing out there. What it is, is the thing out there is utterly beyond your boundary. You're here is this kind of bounded physical system. Photons might fall on your retina, but your insides, your brain, everything else is just utterly in the dark. And so consciousness is this active, creative, generative, kind of hallucinatory process. And when you understand that the world doesn't have an appearance, it kind of gives you an appreciation as to why it's possible for consciousness to exist because it's not like there's a thing and I have a symbol for the thing and how does my symbol become conscious? That's how a lot of people think about this stuff. They, you know, it's the kind of computer analogy. It's like there's some symbol over here and there's some real thing over here. Like say that there's a green object and there's a symbol saying green. Why does this symbol become conscious? Whereas in a computer it doesn't. Why doesn't the word green when I write it down? Why doesn't that become conscious? Whereas I'm saying no, like there is no green thing. There's patterns and then your consciousness is this fundamentally you're generating, yeah, like a simulation, generating an interface of beliefs about the way the world is that is this kind of house of cards of like saying it's this way as opposed to this way. So it's entirely generated within the organism. Well, through interacting with this environment but it's not, each percept is only cashed out in reference to all the other percepts. So this is like relativistic framework. I've really appreciated a way of perceiving it regarding when you're at an event where you're at whether it does literally just take any sports or music style event in a stadium and you're gonna have a different point of view than somebody sitting across the stadium. And when you also register that, you're gonna get that at a deeper level that it's not some, you gotta play game. I feel like you gotta, if you really dive in, like we didn't have the tool of games. We had it, but we didn't have, this is the game changer is that when you, it's literally the screen, like the screen as an analogy, the game as an analogy to this is exactly what makes us realize that when I go into the first person perspective and I'm playing the game and I'm walking around in the simulated world and I have this, the relationship between me as a living system and my environment and my interface and all of the stuff that I have in my parcel that I'm carrying around with me and that I have these quests and these objectives and that the more that you kind of follow that train of thinking, the more that you're gonna realize that James is also a player and James also has his little world that James is playing in as well and James is going to see things like you, is that it, is that your girlfriend or is that the fiancee or wife? What level are you? Yeah. Wife, okay. Wife, what's her name? Hi, Rebecca.  I don't have like a wife.  And so like that's something to like keep in mind, like somebody that's living in a completely different country is basically on, in a sense, their reality has a significantly different, like you're mostly in London and in the mountains of Portugal. And so you're, you're inevitably going to have a different map than California in the Midwest and stuff like that. So, but, but, but there's also, there's some, there's a synthesis between if we don't break it down into, there's a synthesis where it's like in order for us to have the zoom call, we have to respect the objectivity of the science that is occurring, that is enabling the computation, the electromagnetic communication. So you have a synthesis that's going on. If we want to agree that the H2O molecule looks a specific way or that the cellular respiration and the oxygen cycle on the planet happens a specific way for, for, for every person that inhales the, the O2. I think that that there's going to be a synthesis between those, those individual gamers and their worlds with the fact that all of those gamers are inhaling O2 and their hearts are beating 100,000 times a day, stuff like that. Yeah. I think that's the idea of being the kind of gamer with the headset on. You mentioned earlier the kind of simulation stuff which obviously is the name of the podcast as well. So maybe it's relevant to touch on that. But yeah, I think, I think it's interesting that I guess it's not something I've fallen very much because I think it's the thing we spoke about before where we're saying like as a scientist it's like I'll map out what's within my domain. Like, so before the Big Bang, we might be, you know I mentioned earlier ways of thinking about why anything's happening at all. And I'm happy to speculate about that. But then, you know, like what happened for the Big Bang is just kind of outside of my window what happens in the future is as well. So I think like, I guess I see scientists mapping out this little space we're in now and most people think it's the entire space, right? They think Big Bang, this thing and that's it. I suspect there's, you know like why wouldn't there be vast amounts of stuff going on outside of our window? I see no reason why you wouldn't think whether you wanna call it multiverses or simulations within simulations within simulations. For me, that seems absolutely, you know if not plausible likely, you know that something weird is happening. Before, I think before certain psychedelic experiences I would have said there's no reason to speculate. Like it's just speculation. It's like saying, am I a solipsist? And then you can have experiences where you seem to wake up from the simulation and that definitely gives you that kind of strange loop idea of like, wait like is this some, is this simulations all the way down and you know, you can kind of tumble through them through in some way. But I think I ultimately come back to kind of knowing my place as a scientist and thinking, I'm gonna, if this is a simulation it's a beautiful, pretty complex simulation that's really relevant for our day to day living. So I'm gonna try and understand this what as best as I can. If at the end I wake up, take my headset off and go, wow, I can't believe that was a game. I don't think I'll feel like I've wasted my time in trying to understand the game. Yeah, and which plays very beautifully into what we mentioned earlier on infinity making a infinite amount of illusory affinity and that plays into the multiverse perfectly. There's just, and it also plays perfectly in the sense of if you believe in yourself as infinite potential that there is every single possibility of you and is happening right now. And also every single possibility in a non anthropocentric way is also happening. So when you see all of these designer worlds that the video game artists are making all of those are happening as well. And we ourselves are going to become more and more like designers of worlds. And we ourselves are going to come to the realization more and more of what infinity truly is. I think that thing you said about nature is infinite possibility. Like I've been reflecting recently on I've not tried to put this into words, but there's a, so I don't believe I believe that kind of organism level to use that term, libertarian free will the idea that we can really choose exactly what we want to do with no prior causes kind of causing it. I think that's an illusion and it's trying to kind of make ourselves feel comfortable in our feeling of separation. But if you look at the kind of the freedom of the totality of existence and you consider the way that particles interact and anything happens from that perspective everything, the way that things interact is the perfect choice given what they are. Like this is kind of what a scientific picture of the world is. It's like a lawful thing. Given these things and their forces and what they are in themselves they will, the universe is utterly free to do exactly what is the most like lawful or most appropriate thing for it to do. So you can think of when you identify with all of reality as there being this kind of ultimate freedom, ultimate creative fulfillment of the process just moving forward in terms of what it is and what's best for what it is. Which is another way of discriminant determinism which is a weird thing to say is that like that from one side, from the human idea of separation the idea of the universe deciding everything is like, oh no, that seems scary. That seems like, I don't like that idea. But the idea of the universe being ultimately free and therefore manifesting what is most within its own nature is I think is a really, yeah, to me it gives a scientific way is maybe it's the scientific language adding to what you just said about identifying that kind of infinite potential identifying with that. And you're spot on too and I'm glad that you made content again everybody check out James' channel. I'm glad that you made content specifically about your entheogenic experiences. I think that's extremely important. The more that people feel like they are comfortable it's almost like we're having a species coming out of the closet. In a sense, around the use of unleashing the divine within via these sacred secretions of the planet. And it's extremely important. I'm glad that you've made content about it. You've been vulnerable about it. I think it's very important. And that's also going to triangulate right on that same nature of reality.


Then you talk about, well, Cesar and CSB, they're different from each other. Yes. And they are used in the same way, like synonyms in literature. Yes. So I start with that. And from that, I outline that it's a problem, this usage. So yeah, I want to say why they differ, in my opinion. And could you find a topic sentence in this paragraph, the one main idea that you want to convey? Although literature has used the two concepts as synonyms, there are differences in how the construct are operationalized or... I think it's already conveyed here. If you read this sentence, it's very important to distinguish between the theoretical frameworks companies have regarding Cesar and CSB. So I think this is the main idea you want to convey. Okay, I should put it in the front. Yes, exactly. Because that the reader immediately knows, okay, well, you want to talk about the differences. So that's what it's going to be about. Another question I had about these differences was, you say it's important to make a distinction. But why? Because CSB is more about actions and how companies do CSR. CSR is more about what can companies do, you know, like for example environmental issues or social issues. So what I'm focusing on is the actions. So what are companies really doing to address societal needs? And can I find that back in your text? Why it is important? Is it mentioned? No. And I think you should be back in your... Yes. The main point I'm trying to make here is that you say it's important to have a difference, but you should always relate everything you write to your own research. So why it is important to talk about this or why you're using this variable, stuff like that. Okay. And that will make it relevant for your research and then easier to read for readers or for your supervisor, I think. Okay.


The Liberal Democrats have had a bad few months from believing Joe Swinson could become Prime Minister to Joe Swinson losing her seat. The party now languished with only 12 MPs in Parliament and at 6% in opinion polls. And this weekend, it got worse. So they were forced to suspend a candidate to be the mayor of London, the Lib Dem candidate or someone who was a prospective Lib Dem candidate for the mayoralty of London after an anti-Semitic video of her emerge. We're going to show you that in one moment. First of all, some background. So this is the now ex-candidate in question. It's Geeta Sidhu Robb. She's a millionaire health food entrepreneur who recently held the position of vice chair of the People's Vote campaign. So you can see how she would become a prospective mayoral candidate for the party if she's she's come straight from the People's Vote. But last Tuesday, so last Tuesday, they announced that Sidhu Robb would be on their shortlist of two to become the party's mayoral candidate for the for the London elections next year. So it was whittled down to two. I think Lib Dem members in the city were going to get to vote between Sidhu Robb and one other candidate. Now, her shortlisting originally caused controversy because of comments that Sidhu Robb had made on the Channel Five show, Rich Home, Poor Home. Remember, this woman's a millionaire. Let's go to an article in Politics Home, which sort of gives us some background as to what she had said on that Channel Five show. So in October last year, Miss Sidhu Robb appeared on Channel Five reality show, Rich House, Poor House, where she swapped her seven million pound London home for a two bedroom flat in a community housing project in Lambeth. During her appearance, the former vice chair of the People's Vote campaign said staying at the top of the council tower block was her idea of hell on earth and described leaving the safety of Chelsea as an edgy experience. The Lib Dem hopeful was also filmed alongside a friend struggling to use a can opener and saying she did not want to drink tap water. So far, so Lib Dem. And I presume there were many at the top of the EU flag waving party who were nonplussed as to why anyone think it would be problematic to put someone forward as a candidate for London mayor who had said such things about living on a council estate. However, a second video would be harder to ignore. So this is a clip from a BBC documentary called Campaign Confessions. It followed candidates in the 1997 election, one of whom was Sidhu Robb. She was then standing as a conservative candidate for Blackburn. Actually, I should give you also a content morning. There is racism in this video. Very explicit racism. In Blackburn, the message from one Labour van prompts decisive action from Gita Sidhu. Hello. The Labour Party is going around with a microphone at the moment saying she's against Islam. She's not Muslim. She's not one of us. Don't vote for her because she's against Islam.  So we're just going to pull the gloves off. I'm going to get a car and walk around to drive through town telling everybody Jack Stroll is a Jew.  That's it. That's what happened and that's what we're going to do about it. I didn't want racism and bigotry to play a part in anything that I had anything to do with. I object strenuously to it. I did it because I was furious. Um, so I must admit, I wish I hadn't done it.   I mean, it's racism on so many levels. It does, you know, that pause. And then she says at the end, I shouldn't have done it. And at the beginning, she said, I would never want to be involved in a racist campaign. That is the most overtly racist campaign. I mean, I've seen a clip of in a long time and she wasn't suspended from the conservative party either. She made it to two general election day. Obviously, she, she lost and she came second in that seat. It was won by labor and it was only after that video emerged this weekend that the Lib Dems, I mean, they had no choice but to suspend her. I mean, Ash, watching that, watching that video, I mean, this was in 1997 since then for the conservatives. Since then, this person has become a vice chair of the people's vote. She's then moved, you know, into quite high positions or potentially quite high positions in the Lib Dem. She was shortlisted to be one of the two people who would stand as the Lib Dem candidate for the mayor of London. This has come out and she's, you know, that they've had no choice but to kick her out. Well, I mean, what do you make of this story? I mean, watching that video, you're right, it's completely shocking. It's like spherical racism. Whatever standpoint you use to look at it, you see racism. It's racist against Jewish people and it's also racist against Muslims in terms of the expectations she has of how Muslims and Jews will relate to one another. It's horrible.  But I think what it demonstrates and I think what this woman demonstrates more generally is that what is often identified in the left as being a crank actually is not unique to one partisan political position. Here's someone who is pretty firmly on the centre right. She was a conservative. She moved towards the people's vote. She then became a Lib Dem. Right. That's a pretty, you know, moderate, quote, unquote, centrist political journey to go on. And throughout that, she's always had this kind of cock-eyed world view, whether it's her appalling behaviour on that loudspeaker or some of her other interests. She's been on the record saying that she thought that her son's vaccinations caused his eczema. She's interested in this kind of, you know, alternative nutrition kind of stuff. It's that real kind of, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow goop kind of thing, which I absolutely have no time for. And it's it's cranky in its way. It's cranky, except it's so it's seen as more acceptable because it's not on, you know, the partisan wings of the right or the left, but it's one hundred percent crank behaviour. I would say easy, Miss for Londoners, but whoever becomes a Lib Dem candidate, there is no way that they're going to win the the London mayoralty next year. So I mean, I think Londoners would always have been spared.


Hello there everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stock Swoosh and I wanted to let you know my market outlook for 2022. So one of the things that I noticed about 2021 is one it was very bullish year and two you could have traded the market last year in 2021 and had very little knowledge of what to do with trading and gone long stocks, many, many stocks, weak stock, strong stocks and made money. That is not going to be the case this year nor is it normally the case in any given year anyways. And I think a lot of people now are going to get hurt this year if they don't have a full understanding of how to trade or what to put their money in to make money in the market. And so it's going to be an interesting year. We've already seen the start off to the year as volatile. We sold off this week to begin the year. Again, you have to take a day by day when you're trading. But I will say this, a lot of people think that they know how to trade or make money in the market because of the bullish run that the market had in 2021 and because they went along many, many things and made money. And it wasn't a very difficult year to choose what to do in reference to the upside. But that is not going to be the case this year. We are going to have volatility this year. We're seeing it right of ways out of the gate the first week of the year and you're going to see more of that. So the best thing that you could do for yourself is to prepare. If you really want to trade and you really want to do this and you really want to get serious about it, then you have to learn how to do it, which is specifically a strategy that is successful in the market. So I teach my strategy on gas. That is how I make the picks. I will go long or I will short. Last year, we did not go long every single day. In fact, I prefer to short. We shorted stocks in a bullish market last year and did many shorts and many options and puts and they worked. So it's always good to know both directional biases. It's always good to know how to go long and go short, but it's more important than anything else in any market condition to understand what's going on in a strategy per se that you apply day after day after day. And it doesn't matter if you're doing long term or short term or options or day trades when you're using a specific strategy that works. You have to have something that is a set rule that you use. You apply it and you make the choices based on that strategy. For me, it's called the golden gap. So I get up in the morning and I look at 26 points in the daily chart and that's on making the determination whether or not I want to go long or short, whether or not I want to take it, whether or not it's going to come in buying or selling. Because again, that's how you make money in the market. But again, my prediction for 2022 is that many people are going to get hurt this year trading if they don't know how to trade because they're not going to be able to go long. Weak stocks and strong stocks in this year of 2022 and make money like last year. Last year was an anomaly. You're not going to see that all the time. In fact, it's very, very rare. So if you're interested in learning how to trade and you're interested in learning my strategy, I teach a class on my gap method once a month. Feel free to email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com if you'd like more information. Thanks everybody and have a great day.