From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. Happy to welcome back to the program to help give us some insight into what's happening in AWS last week. And today, that is Corey Quinn. He is the cloud economist at the Duckville Group. Corey, I know it's always a pleasure to see me. Thank you very much. Is it always a pleasure to see you? No, it is always a pleasure to see me. Thank you for once again exhibiting remarkably poor judgment and inviting me back onto your program. Yeah, Corey, you've been on the program a few times now, including at some of the AWS shows, AWS San Francisco, AWS New York City, re-invent we see you, but this is the first time we've had you on online. So it gives a little bit about what that the impact of the global pandemic has been meaning to you. And more importantly, what you've been seeing from our dear friends at AWS. Sure, the fact that I'm not traveling anymore and spending almost all of my time at home means that I'm a lot closer to the edge when it comes to the content I put out because I no longer have to worry about someone punching me in the face. But other than that, from a business perspective, things tend to be continuing on much as they have before with of course different customer concerns. The more interesting question from my side has been, what is the effect this is having on people? Because yeah, we're working from home remotely. It's not really a fair test of how well you can do remote because I've been doing it like this for years. And there's a sense of existential dread that's hanging over people's head.  Now it's just that sort of dread that never goes away because they won't deliver the keynote if you'll pardon me of using a metaphor. Yeah, it's been really interesting to watch. Corey of course, I mean, Amazon is a big player in the industry before this. Amazon one that gets talked about a lot in the news. Amazon overall, when this first hit, they announced that they were hiring 100,000 people. Then they went through that faster than anyone could believe. You think about having to hire everyone remotely. My joke was, Alexa, please screen everybody and hire everyone. But then they hired another 75,000 and it's not just the warehouse and the whole food people because I've seen a number of people that I know getting hired by AWS too. So, you know, you talk it's all about the people that the number one folks are in the pandemic people. How's Amazon doing? What feedback are you getting for how they're doing? Well, I don't have too many internal sources that will confirm or deny things of strategic import because it turns out that I'm generally not cleared for those things. Who knew? Something I'm picking up on across the industry has been that if you're building a hyperscale cloud provider, you're not looking to next order. The investments you make today aren't going to be realized three to five years. No one is currently predicting a dramatic economic impact that's going to be felt for a decade based on the current situation. So, yeah, AWS is still investing in people which is always going to be the limiting constraint. They're still launching regions. We had two launch within a week past month and we're still seeing a definite acceleration if anything of the pace of innovation as AWS like today. Now, from my perspective, that's both reassuring that some things never change and of course the usual level of depression where, oh good, there's still more services to learn what they do, learn how the names work, find ways to poke holes in their various presentational aspects and of course try and keep the content relatively fresh. There's only so many times you can make the same joke where people start to plan. Yeah, absolutely. Corey, you bring up a really good point. Amazon, they have a long strategic plan there. If they're building new data centers, they're building the power infrastructure for these things. It's not something that they're going to change on a dime. They plan these things out far in advance and AWS does of course have a global scope. I really wonder from an operational standpoint, are there any pressures on them? You wrote an article relatively recently talking about one of the other public cloud providers that has had to prioritize certain customers and even had some performance issues. AWS seems to be running through this, dealing with the capacity. I've had phone systems that have problems. Everybody has, when they're working from home, and tension internally, even if you've got a gig bandwidth, when the entire neighborhood has children on the classrooms online for video, there's pressures there. So Corey, it seems from what I've seen, AWS operationally is running well and keeping things all up and running. Am I missing anything? Not at all. AWS is fond of saying there's no compression algorithm for experience. As I'm fond of saying, that's why they charge per gigabyte. But what that means is that they've gone through a lot of these growing pains and largest disruptional stories in 2010 through 2012. EBS outages causing cascade failures as everyone saturates links as they roll from region to region or availability zone to availability zone. They understand what those workloads look like and what those behaviors are and they've put an incredible amount of engineering into solving these problems. I think that anyone who looks at this and doesn't see this happening is in a very fortunate place because we don't have to. It's approached utility level of reliability. You don't wonder every time you turn the faucet on whether water is going to, and we're now at a point of seeing that with AWS resources. Now there are still going to be recurring issues and there have been basically since this thing launched. A particular instance size and family in a particular availability zone of a particular region may be constrained for a period of weeks. And that is something that we've seen across the board but that has less to do with the fact that they didn't see this stuff coming and plan appropriately and more to do with the fact that there's a lot of different options and customer demand is never going to be an exact thing to predict. We are seeing some customers dramatically turn off capacity and others dramatically ramping capacity up. It comes down to what is the nature of this current pandemic on their business? Yeah, well, this absolutely does put some of those promises of the cloud test. I should be able to spin things down.  I'm curious what you've heard on changing demand out there, Corey.  But when something like this comes up and they need a major change, you know, are they stuck with a lot of capacity that they didn't necessarily want? Sometimes it comes down to a lot of interesting variables. For me, the more interesting expression of this is when companies see demand falling off a cliff as users are no longer using what they've built out, but their infrastructure spend doesn't change. That tells me that that's not a particularly elastic infrastructure. And in fact, when people are building elasticity into their applications, they always interpret that as scaling up rather than scaling down. Because the failure mode of not scaling up fast enough is you're dropping customer requests on the floor. The failure mode of not scaling down fast enough just means you're spending extra money. So when you see user demand for an environment cut by 80%, but the infrastructure cost remains constant or the infrastructure usage depending, that's a more interesting problem. And you're not going to have a lot of success asking any cloud provider for an adjustment when, well, okay, you're suddenly not seeing the demand but your bill remains the same. What is this based upon? You need to actually demonstrate a shortfall first of, wow, you know how we normally spend a million dollars a month? Well, and now we're spending 200 grand a month? Yeah, about that. And once you can do that, there are paths forward. I have not yet heard stories about, frankly, any of the big three cloud providers, absolutely hanging customers out to dry in a cloud infrastructure company. I have heard whispers about, for example, with G Suite where they're not willing to, and this feels like a very dark way to go, but I'm going for it, where, well, we just laid off a third of our staff and we get a break on the annual licensing for those seats on G Suite. And the answer is no. That feels like it stings and is more than a little capricious. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, one of the things that the underbelly of Bass is, you know, oh, it should be elastic like cloud but oftentimes you're locked for one or two contracts.  So, you know, price inquiry, you know better than most, so. All right, let me spoil it for you. Every provider is going to give you a break on this because this is a temporary aberration as far as the way the world works. We are not going to start seeing global pandemics every year, I hope. And when this crisis passes, people are going to remember how their vendors treated. And if it's, well, we held your feet to the fire and made you live up to that contract, that sticks with people. And it doesn't take too many stories like that or people pulling lawsuits out of the pacer to demonstrate that a company beat the crap out of them to say, huh, maybe that's not where I want to make my sizeable cloud investment. Yeah, absolutely.  Then there's other services. You think, you know, VPN usage must be through the roof. Workspaces, you know, when first announced, you know, many years ago was a bit of a slow roll, had been a growth area for Amazon for the last couple of years. Are you hearing anything specific to new services or increased growth in certain services, like I mentioned? There are two patterns that we're seeing of all. One is the traditional company you just described, where they build out a VPN that assumes some people will occasionally be working from home at a 5% rate versus the entire workforce 40 hours a week. That model is straining everything. Whereas if you go back for the last 10 years or so and look at a bunch of small businesses that have started up or startups that have launched where everything they're using is a SaaS service or a cloud service, then there is no VPN. I don't have a VPN, for example, the fact that I have a wireless network here at my house and I'm at this location, this IP address isn't whitelisted anywhere. The only benefit that this network has over others is that there's a printer plugged in here and that's it. The identity model of I authenticate to these services via API credentials, via username and password, via, I don't know, enchanting something and they send an email that I click the link that winds up handling the authentication and identity and there's no bottleneck in the same VPN direction. I feel like this is going to be the death knell for a lot of VPN centric corporate IT architecture. All right, Corey, one of the other things about AWS is they don't stop. And what I mean is, you talked about them always being online, but every week there's new announcement. It keeps feeding your newsletter, it keeps feeding your feed, everything going on there. How is number one, the announcement train from AWS going and anything specific, John Furrier was interested in Amazon Appflow, something that was released relatively recently. The problem with a lot of these new services that get released relatively recently is that it requires time to vet out how it works, how it doesn't work, how it should have wound up being implemented to solve your particular use case or in my case, how they could have named it better.  Right now with everyone scrambling, most companies are not making significant investments in new capability. They are desperately trying to get their workhorses online and stay afloat and adjust to be very rapidly changing economic climate. And oh, they built a new data store or something of that nature is not going to be this sort of thing that gets people super excited in most shops. That time will change, but I do feel a bit of pity right now for a lot of these product teams who've been working away on these things for months or years and now suddenly they're releasing something into a time when people don't care about it enough to invest the effort that it deserves. Yeah, you bring up a really good point, Corey. There are certain things, if I was working on a project that was going to help me be more agile and be more flexible, I needed that yesterday but I still need that today. Some other projects might take years to roll out. AI is a technology that has been growing and maturing over the last couple of years where IoT solutions are a little bit more nascent. So is what you're thinking, it's a little bit more stickier knitting and the solutions and the products that you're leveraging today and some of the more visionary and futuristic ones might be a little bit of a pause button for the next couple of months. Exactly, if you're looking at exploring something that isn't going to pay dividends for 18 months, right now the biggest question everyone has is what is the long-term repercussion of this going to be? What is the year, what is it we're going to look like in three years? And because that's where a lot of these planning horizons are stretching to. And the answer is, is look, when I wind up doing a prerecorded video or a podcast where I talk about this stuff and it's not going to release for four days, I'm worried about saying something that's going to be eclipsed by the news cycle. I worry on my podcast recording, for example, that I'm going to wind up saying something about the pandemic and by the time it airs in two months, it's, oh, look at this guy, he's talking about the pandemic. He doesn't even mention the meteor and that's the place right now where people are operating from. It becomes much more challenging to be able to adequately and intelligently address the long-term when you don't know what it's going to look like week to week. Yeah, absolutely. For our viewers, when you hear my segment on Corey's podcast and you wonder why we did talk about Murder Hornet, it's because we missed that one week window that we are in right now when we are talking about Murder Hornet, not when we recorded it, not when we released it. So really good point, Corey. Talk to, Corey, data is one of the most important things. You've done a lot about data portability, all the costs involved, cloud, Amazon's trying to help people with bringing data together. I said in one of the interviews with Andy Jassy a couple of years ago, while customers were really the flywheel for AWS for a number of years, I think it is data that is that next flywheel. So I'm curious your thought is how enterprises think about their data and AWS's role there. Incorrectly, if you want me to be blunt. There's an awful lot of movement, especially as we look at AI and machine learning to gather all of the data. I've been on cost optimization projects where, wow, that's an awful lot of data. Sitting there in that S3 bucket, do you need it all? And I'm assured that, yes, all of the sales transaction logs from 2012 are absolutely going to be a treasure trove of data just as soon as they figure out what to do with it. And they're spending large piles of money on this. But it's worse than that, because it's not just that you have this data that's costing you money, that's almost a byproduct. There's risk to an awful lot of forms of data with regulation that continues to expand. Data can become a toxic asset in many respects. But there's this belief of never throw anything away. That's not really ideal. Part of the value of a same data management strategy is making sure that you can remove all of the stuff that you don't absolutely need. Right now with AI and ML being where they are, there's this movement for, oh, keep everything because we don't know what that's going to be useful for down the road. It's a double-edged sword. And enterprises are, at this point, not looking at this through a lens of this thing could hurt me so much as they are, this thing could possibly benefit our business in the future. All right, so Corey, I've really noticed over the last few months, you've spent a bit more time talking publicly about some of the other clouds that aren't AWS. So while we are covering AWS Summit online, give us what you're hearing from Microsoft, Google, and others, any strategies that are in view, any customer movement that is worth mentioning. Sure. I think that we're seeing customers move in the way that they've always been moving. People made a bit of a kerfuffle about a blog post I put out with the extremely clickbait title of Zoom chose Oracle Cloud over AWS, maybe you should too. And there were a few conclusions people drew, understandably, from that particular headline, which was, for example, the idea that AWS had lost a workload that was being moved from AWS to Oracle, not true. It was net new, Zoom already has existing relationship with both Azure and AWS by their own admission. But the argument, what I took that particular change to be in my case was an illustration of something that's been bugging me for a while. If you look at AWS data transfer pricing, the publicly posted stock, which again, no one at this scale is going to pay, it is over 10 times more expensive than Oracle Cloud. And what that tells me is that I'm now sitting here in a position where I can make a good faith recommendation to choose Oracle for cost reasons, which sounds nuts, but that's the world in which we live. It's a storytelling problem, far more than it is a technical shortcoming. But that was interpreted to me in that, oh, Oracle's on the rise, AWS is in decline. Zoom is a very strong AWS customer and has made public commitments that they will remain so. Right now, this is what we're seeing across the board. You see Zoom doing super well. They're not building out a whole lot of net new either. What they're doing is just desperately trying to stay up under crushing unprecedented demand. That's where the value is coming from right now of Cloud's elasticity. And they're not doing, oh, you know, we're going to go ahead and figure out if we can build a new continuous deploy process or something that makes on call a little bit less brutal. That's not what anyone's focusing on. It's here, wow, this boat is sinking. If we don't stay up, grab a bucket, start bailing. And that is what they're doing. The fact that they're working with every Cloud provider, shouldn't come as a surprise. Yeah, well, it's interesting. I'm thinking about Zoom and one of the things that I've been watching over the last couple of weeks, everybody has is the daily updates that are happening related to security. Think back, six, seven years ago, Amazon had, this is our security model. We're not changing it for anyone. Now, Amazon has a much more flexible and nuanced security position. There are still violent principles that Amazon will not and cannot shift. So to be clear, they have different ways of interfacing with security and different ways of handling data classification, but the rules that you knew are not changing. It's not, well, surprise. Now suddenly every Amazonian who works there can look through your private data. None of that is happening. I just want to be very clear on that. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's more security getting more attention even than ever. And it was already coming into 2020 before everything changed was one of the hot topics. Corey, I'm curious, we're looking at a virtual event for AWS. Have you been to some of these? Are you getting burnt out from all of the online content? I'm sure everybody's getting tired of you. So are you getting tired of everyone else? I don't accept that anyone would ever get tired of me. I'm a treasure and a delight. But as far as online events go, I think that people are getting an awful lot profoundly wrong about them. For example, I think that people focus on, well, I need to get the best video and the best microphone, and that's the thing that people are going to focus on rather than maybe I should come up with something that someone wants to listen to. People are also assuming that the same type of delivery and content that works super well on a stage for 45 minutes is not going to work when people can tab over to something else and stop paying attention. You've got to be more dynamic. You've got to be able to grab people's attention. And I think that people are missing the forest for the trees here. You're just trying to convert an existing format into something that will work online. In the immediate short-term, everyone is super sympathetic. It's not going to last. People are going to get very tired of the same tired format he tropes. And there's only so much content people are going to consume. You've got to stand out and you've got to make it compelling and interesting. I've been spending a lot of time trying to find ways to make that work. Yeah, I had a great conversation with John Troyer. He said, we can learn something by watching some of the late night talk those. I think there's a new opportunity for you to say there's a house band. You have a small child at home. Give her a tambourine. There's your house band. You can have a lot of fun with it. Oh, absolutely. Especially during a tantrum. That's going to go super well. I'm just going to watch one of her meltdowns about some various innocuous topic.  And I'm sure we can wind up tying it back to something that is hilarious in the world of cloud. But I'm trying to pull off a little bit longer before I start actively exploiting her for internet points. I mean, I'm going to absolutely do it. I just wanted to get a little taller first. All right. Well, Corey, I want to give you the final word, AWS, the online events happening. Give our audience what they should be looking at when it comes to their AWS estate. Cool. As usual, pay attention to what's coming out. It's always good to have a low level awareness of what's coming out on stage. But don't feel you need to jump in and adopt any of it immediately. Focus on the things that matter to your business, just because something new and shiny is announced on stage does not mean it's a fit for you. Doesn't mean it's not, but remain critical. I tend not to be one of the early adopters in production of things that have potential to wind up causing challenges. And I'm not saying, oh, stay on the exact old stuff from 2010 and nothing newer. But there is a bit of a happy medium. Don't think that just because they released something that, A, you need to try it, or B, it's even for you. No AWS service is for everyone, but every AWS service is for someone. All right, well, Corey Quinn. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining with you, joining us. Thank you, Stu, as always for suffering with LinkedIn arrows. I appreciate it. All right, thank you for watching, everyone. Lots of coverage of theCUBE at the AWS summit online. Check out theCUBE.net for all the offering. And thank you for watching.


Aloha and welcome to Ehana Kako. We're here every week on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kili Akiina, president of the Grassroot Institute. While we live in such a beautiful land, Hawaii and behind me we have the colorful Honolulu Hale, which is the city hall, the seat of the mayor of Honolulu. We have colorful people, we've got colorful landscape, and we've also got colorful politicians here in Hawaii. We're talking today about Billy Kenoi and asking a question, does his recent behavior that has come to light and been the subject of a trial constitute corruption in politics or is it just unwise behavior? I've got with me today a former mayor and city prosecutor. In fact, he is the third elected city prosecutor of the city and county of Honolulu, and the 13th mayor of the city and county of Honolulu. He's well known and he's certainly got a lot of insights into what's been going on with regard to the trial of Billy Kenoi. May, please welcome with me Mayor Peter Carlisle. Mayor! Carlisle is a pleasure, doctor! Mayor! We were actually rehearsing our names before we went on the show, just making sure we didn't forget. Absolutely, and it's usually a question at my age, I can forget anything at any time. So delighted you're joining us today. Thank you. So tell us, for our viewers' knowledge, we have people watching from all across the world. The big island constitutes an entire county in and of itself and city, and it's led by a mayor. Correct. And tell us what has gone on recently with Mayor Billy Kenoi of the big island? Well, there came an issue about how he was using something called the P card, which is for all intents and purposes a sort of a credit card. And that's for public officials? That's for, well, the public officials get them sometimes, but how they use them is strictly regulated here on Oahu and apparently less so on the big island, largely because Mayor Kenoi was using under the theory of making friends with people and allowing them to be closer to Hawaii and us closer to them. In other words, he would go out and entertain people ostensibly for city business. Oh, Molly, Molly, get together, talk, do all of those things, and that leads to relationships that are more powerful in Washington, more powerful here in the state. But there is a limit to that in my mind. And I think if you're starting to use it for some of the things that were used by Mayor Kenoi, where there's enormous amounts of alcohol, Crown Royal, a very expensive one, with that and Hostess Bars was actually also discussed at one point, although they weren't part of the indictment. He was indicted for theft at a felony level as well as a misdemeanor level, as well as tampering with documents of the government. That's sort of generic. And that led to his trial. And you have to understand that on the big island, it's a little bit of the Wild West out there. And I think that's a very good thing in a lot of ways. And sometimes it gets to be a little bit inbred. And Billy was very much a sort of a traveling party. And if you weren't part of the party, you didn't get to travel. And there becomes a line that's sometimes very thin between what's appropriate and what's inappropriate. Well, what does the law say itself in terms of what the mayor could do with his P card and what he should not do? Well, is it a clear cut? It's not that clear cut because he was allowed to use it in many different ways because they made up the rules. OK, so he's not only the one who uses the car, he's the one who's supervising in a sense. He's making up the rules. That or people who were working for him, who were very close to him, who had had all the benefits of him being the mayor, many of those people were making decisions. And so part of the problem here in trying to figure out what's going on is knowing exactly where the line should be drawn. Perfectly put. In fact, in his defense, he repeatedly stated that his intention was never to defraud the public at all and that his behaviors were suitable and necessary to carry out city business. And that's exactly correct. And the people who were with him, who were members of his staff, would say the same thing. And there were not people who were sitting there saying, you've got to be careful about this. We don't think that this is the right thing to do. And they were saying that you didn't have to make that public if you did it. Well, I want to ask you about making a judgment about that. But first, let's back up a little bit because you were a mayor. And you certainly had a significant responsibility to cultivate relationships for the benefit of the city. Correct. What kinds of behaviors were you involved in? Well, there would be dinners that would be held. There would be opportunities to go and speak at gatherings. There would be time to rub elbows with other late government officials as well as other mayors. Is it appropriate ever to have alcohol as part of the entertainment? If you it's not a 24 seven job. And so there are times when you are actually on the clock and sometimes that is clearly meant to be leisure. And at that point, is there any problem with somebody buying their own alcohol to drink? Absolutely not. Now, if it's done to excess, then it becomes a question of judgment. So as a mayor, you could legitimately entertain with alcohol, have wine at dinner or have cocktails at happy hour. As you discuss city business with people or or even just cultivate relationships. Certainly, that's true, but it can't can't go on inside of a government building. You're not allowed to drink inside of a government building. And so as a result, it would have to be somewhere out of that particular arena. So you wouldn't find people drinking in city hall. So what kind of judgment goes into determining the venue? For example, whether you go to a restaurant that has a bar or whether you go to what we know as a hostess bar. I think that it's fairly clear that under most circumstances, you can go to just about any reputable restaurant at any particular time, except after hours or something like that is a hostess bar, something that would necessarily fall in that category. I'm sort of skeptical of that. And I think it's it's doesn't reflect well on the position of mayor if you're going to a place that's got ongoing lap dancing and things like that. So when you talk about being skeptical, there's some judgment call that has to be made. Absolutely. I think that's that's completely correct. We're dealing with perceptions as well. And that's the same thing that's true for the criminal cases. I mean, there has to be judgment in terms of whether you proceed with it or whether you do not proceed with it. So there were some things that did not go forward that were in the purview of the knowledge of the Attorney General's office, but they decided that that was not something that should be pursued. Well, let's go to the trial itself. What exactly were the charges that Billy Canoia was brought up on? There were a couple of felony charges. There were a couple of misdemeanor charges, both of them involved theft. There were also there was also a tampering with government documents. There were also a few charges that the judge themselves threw out. Well, let's talk about the ones involving theft. Now, in this case, what was being charged and forgive me for using that term is that Billy Canoia used his credit card for personal purchases and would not have been inclined to pay them back to the city and county. Well, his his theory was that he was always willing to pay it back and was always planning on doing it, despite the fact that had been a couple of years and at least one instance before he decided it was time to pay back after he had been indicted. Well, let's let's talk about whether or not he paid them back. How appropriate is it to put the kinds of charges he did on his card? Simply, even if it was just a convenience, even if it was he had forgotten his own credit card, it's not something that I would have done. That's a different circumstance than what was going on in the Big Island. Is that illegal in and of itself? Not necessarily. So long as it would be repaid. No, not so long as it would be repaid, but so long as there wasn't an intent to deprive the county of Hawaii for that particular those purchases. Well, the amount of money that was involved in that. Now, this is an interesting legal point here because intent became an issue in the trial where the prosecutors had the burden of proving the intent of the mayor was to defraud and his defense was his intent was not to defraud. In fact, he came out and said his intent was always to pay back, whether timely or not. And that was essentially what was focused on by the jury and was disgusted by the foreman who sat there and said, you know, he was always planning on to returning this. And therefore, we couldn't find any intention that he was planning on depriving the county of Hawaii of getting that money back.  How easy is it to go into court and prove the intent of another party? It's always the hardest thing to do. It can be proved by direct or circumstantial evidence. So there is nothing to matter with circumstantial evidence, but you have to look at that and determine whether that will show you what is called the mens rea, the guilty mind. You can see the guilty act.  On the other hand, the question is, what is their intent to do in terms of who that person might be? So if this is somebody who has just jumped through a window, came charging into the room and had an axe in their hand, you would be able to intentionally shoot that person, but you would be covered by the thought of self-defense. You would have to be able to show that it was self-defense. And frankly, in a case like that, it would never pass the police department or the prosecutors office. In the case of Billy Kanai, how would you have shown that there was clear-cut intent to defraud the people? Well, some of the things that might show that was something that's outrageously inappropriate, such as the hostess bar. On the other hand, if somebody had routinely said, no, you can't do this, and it was a person who was credible and it was somebody who liked Billy Kanai and wanted to make sure that he didn't get himself in trouble, that could be somebody who might be capable of saying, look, I told him over and over again, stop doing it. It's not appropriate. It's not even legal. And once you do that, then, and if he's ignoring that advice, and that's an absolute ground rule, if you had a rule that said, you cannot use your P card for A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and he violated that, then he would have been in significant difficulties legally. So before we go to a break, let me see if I understand this. The need and the case in order for the prosecution to win would have been to show a guilty mind, not a foolish mind, not an unwise judgment, not a selfish mind, not any of that, but to show that he actually was guilty of breaking the law. Well, it shows that there's not enough evidence to prove it. There's a big difference between somebody who is found not to be guilty as opposed to somebody who didn't do something wrong. I think we all know that. Well, when we come back from a quick break, tell us exactly how the court ruled, and we'll talk a little bit about that. OK. I've got Peter Carlisle with me, former mayor and city prosecutor of the city and county of Honolulu, and we're talking about what happened recently in the Billy Canoei trial. Please don't go away. We'll be right back after this short message. Aloha, everybody. My name is Mark Shklov. I'd like you to join me for my program, Law Across the Sea, on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Aloha. Hello. I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Aloha. My name is Reg Baker, and I'm the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcasts live every Thursday from two to two thirty. We highlight success stories in Hawaii of both businesses and individuals. We learn their secrets to success, which is always valuable. I hope to see you on our next show. Aloha. Welcome back to the second half of today's Ehana Kako on the ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Ehana Kako, does that sound familiar? It's like a Pule Kako. I know Mayor Carlisle knows that whenever a function is opened by a kahu or a minister here in Hawaii, we Pule, we pray. We say a Pule Kako, let's pray together. But Ehana Kako is what we say at the Grassroot Institute. Let's work together. Think of how terrible life will be here if we don't work together. We need to work together to build a better economy, government, and society, no matter what walk of life we come from. Well, we've been talking about the Billy Kenoi trial, and I want to get back and ask Mayor Carlisle, what was the disposition of the case? How did the court rule? Well, the court at one point ruled that there was not enough evidence to proceed on some counts. And the court, if it makes that determination that there aren't sufficient facts to uphold it in front of the jury at all, then the court can dismiss them. And that was done in a couple of counts. But once the judge allows it to go to the jury, then the judge has said that, in the light most favorable for the prosecution in this case, a jury could legitimately come back with a verdict of guilty. That did not happen in this case. Therefore, he was acquitted. He was found not guilty. But that does not mean outright innocence because outright innocence isn't what you're looking for. You're looking for somebody who's guilty or not guilty. Kind of like when President Clinton said, not guilty but responsible. That could be a fair thing to conclude. And it certainly wouldn't be something that you couldn't argue. Now, when the public is watching this, there's both confusion and outrage to some extent. There's a sense something isn't right here. The mayor didn't behave properly. And yet he's been declared not guilty. You must understand that disconnect between what legally is established and what ethically has taken place. Yeah, the ethics is different and beyond what we're discussing now. We're discussing about the basically the guilty, the not guilty, or the person who really never did this thing in the first place. And so one has to do with the standard of proof. One has to do with the finding of guilt. And the other one has to do with, okay, there wasn't enough evidence to convict this person. What are the implications of the ruling in the court? Or maybe that's not the right question to ask. Well, maybe I should be asking, what are the implications of this whole episode for Hawaii? Well, I would think that it requires a response that's more specific in terms of what you can and can't do. And I think that could easily come. I could sit there and describe somebody putting together a new standard for when you can and how you can use your P card. That is exterior to Billy Kenoy and the people who work for him. But no matter how many laws we come up with or nor how precise those laws are in terms of determining what is right and what is wrong or what is legal and what is illegal. Won't judgment always need to be a big factor in determining behavior? Absolutely. That's always going to be, well, it's not the behavior is the behavior. It's not determining the behavior. It's the consequences of the behavior. And if you have somebody who's done something that we all look at and say that's morally and ethically wrong, it may not be covered by some statute that would allow you to pursue it criminally. And if that's the case, then you're in a different set of circumstances than you would be if you had a document that says, okay, you can use your P card on these following circumstances and none other. Do we have widespread P card abuse throughout any of the counties? I don't believe so. But we have other kinds of ethical questions all the time. For example, the Ethics Commission looked into gifts that were being received by politicians from developers who gave them packages to go play golf and so forth. How prevalent is that type of practice? That was something that I think was done more frequently in the past. I think that's been cleaned up to a lot of extent, to a large extent. I do not believe that there is something necessarily wrong with three or four mayors getting together and playing golf together, but it shouldn't be on company time. I really do genuinely believe that. And we used to have, I remember when we played golf at the prosecutor level, which I take as to being the knights in shining armor, that we would all sign out. And we would not play that. We would take vacation time rather than do that and say, well, we were all talking to each other and we were doing all that as you're driving around, having a beer from the beer cart on the golf course and having fellowship with your fellow prosecutors for most of the time of your friends. Well, some of these ethical quandaries crop up during campaign season or because of campaigning, especially with the need to raise money. I remember when you ran for office as a city prosecutor, you put a limit on the amount that you would receive from each individual contributor. I did, just because I thought that it made sense and I thought it would be something that I could also use to sit there and say, hey, look, it's not just a few people who are supporting me. It's people who want to have a change in the prosecutorial regime and these are the reasons why you should support me. It was very different in terms of the first time that I went because I was up against somebody who I looked at as being very ethical and actually a very nice guy. It was Dave Aracau who he and I are good friends right now, but you're still fighting to win that particular spot and so there was conflict, but it was done not only in a civil way but in an ethical way as well. When politicians take office, they make decisions that affect parties that are capable of contributing to their campaigns. Sure. For example, with the Honolulu area rail that is being built, many council persons have received contributions from rail developers. How do you draw the line between what is appropriate and not? Well, we have a system that allows people to contribute to candidates who they feel are worthy and they want to help and you don't look at somebody's occupation in terms of that being different, but the question is, was anything done illegally? In other words, did all of those contributors for one of these large construction companies, did they get there and say, look, I've got a million dollars, now what I'm going to do is cut that up and give it to each one of you people and I want you to say it's what you're doing and giving for this particular candidate. That can't be done, it's called bundling. But on the other hand, if people want to give to a particular candidate, they're free to do so. So the fact that a rail developer or contractor gave to a city council person isn't in and of itself something unethical, but what would have to be shown is that that city council person acted in a way that benefited that contractor. And then there would be conflict of interest. The operative word is quid pro quo.  Pay to play. Yeah, and pay to play is another way of putting it. Yes, if that's going on, that's illegal. On the other hand, if it's part of an ongoing ability to support somebody who is in a taking a position that's important to you, that's important for the community, and important for even their business, there's nothing wrong with that. Well, in the current mayoral race in this 2016 election season, an ethical question has been raised about one of the candidates who is a mayor of Honolulu now, but also sits on the board of a bank and is compensated quite handsomely. Yes, I'd say it's in a remarkable way. The only thing I get back from my banks is like 1.2% is my own money that's giving me that opportunity to get that. Getting $200,000 for like a couple hours of work a month must be really nice for his bank account. I don't know if that's really nice to have for somebody a mayor having that many different bosses. But the mere fact that he sits on the bank board and is compensated, is there any problem with that in and of itself? No, if there was, I'm sure it would have been taken care of by one, a prosecutorial agency here or two, a federal agency. What would have to be shown for it to be truly an ethical problem? Well, to show that it was truly an ethical problem, it would have to conflict with the city ethics and at least for one time it did not. And the question is, this becomes more the person who is the mayor. Is that something that he can do? Absolutely, yes. Is it something that he should do? In my opinion, if that was what I was getting, I'd first off be a lot wealthier person than I am right now, but I would sit there and say that shouldn't be something that's done. So we have a conflict of interest, but we also have the idea of- I can't say that it's a conflict of interest. Let me finish that for a moment. We have the concept of a conflict of interest. But we also have the concept of appearance of conflict of interest. And if I understand what you're saying, it's, as mayor, you not only have to avoid conflicts of interest, you have a responsibility to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. That's what it- I don't think we should get into what the responsibilities are because the responsibilities so far have been within the letter of the law. But the question is, is that something- Now, clearly there's a huge advantage for this place, territorial savings, to now have been known that they have a close relationship with the mayor and sometimes they're involved in giving him substantial amounts of money. And that makes you seem like you're on the in-crowd and territorial's got its claws in the mayor and the mayor's got his claws in territorial. And that's- There was nothing that said that was improper. But the question is, once again, is that something you can do? Yes, is it something you should do? That depends on who the mayor is. For my set of circumstances, I would not feel that was appropriate. So as we come full circle, talking about the Billy Kenoi trial, one of the defenses of the mayor was that ultimately he is the one responsible for determining what can go on a P card or what cannot. He's the chief executive. If in fact he used that term. Now, what we've come to then is that there's a difference between breaking the law and exercising good judgment. I would say that that's fair. I think that I would agree with that statement. And yes, the law isn't broken, but the shameful treatment by the Caldwell administration of Chaktato, a person who gave ethics to the city, who created an ethics commission, was in my mind distasteful and in a large way, something that makes you lose confidence in the government and the administration that's currently there. Peter, will the laws ever be sufficient to ensure appropriate ethics? No. Well, then what can ensure the best ethics? The change in the hearts of men and women throughout the world. And it's Pollyanna. It just won't happen. It's one of those things where there will always be this type of conflict. And you're going to have to figure out how you hire the right type of people who won't behave like this. And how we elect the right kind of leaders. Exactly. And I think right now that the things that we're seeing are going on in Washington, D.C., the things that we're seeing are going on in the mayoral race in Honolulu. You have to take a step back and say, how can we do this better? And how can we get people to vote people, not because what they're promising you or who their friends are, but for what their accomplishments have been and are those the types of accomplishments that you want to carry forward the business of the city or the business of the prosecutor's office? I would imagine with our low voter turnout in Hawaii, we have very little to complain about then in terms of the fact that we don't hold our leaders accountable. It seems like the numbers are going up. Well, let's hope so. I'm very optimistic that that will be true on a national level. I don't know quite so well how it's going to be at the local level, but everybody should get out to vote. You have the option of voting, yes for person, no for the person, or you can leave it blank to protest the caliber of the people you've been given. Well, that's a good note to end on today because as voters, we're the ones who hold our leaders accountable. Exactly. Mayor Carlisle, thank you very much for being with us today. Dr. Martin. Delightful to be with Peter Carlisle today and I think his life is one in which he can reflect upon a wonderful term of service to the people of Hawaii. And again, Peter, thank you so much for being with us. No offense meant to Mayor Billy Kenoi. We were more interested in talking about the actual trial and talking about the issues involved here. We wish him the best as well. I'm Keeley Iakina for the Grassroot Institute on Think Tech, Hawaii's Ehana Kako. Until next week, Aloha.


And moving on to other parts of Africa, sitting on her rooftop in Tunis, activist Fatima Jigam, said she and her comrades backed the Tunisian president's seizure of governing powers, but they would maintain pressure on him if their demands were not met. She was one of the people who organized a wave of protests across Tunisian cities on July 25. The protests were started by President Kai Said. Later that day, as he dismissed the prime and froze parliament, his opponents have called the moves a coup.


Along with the warmer weather spring also signals continue signings of letters of intent at high schools all across America. Today it was Pequot Lake's turn to send four of its athletes off to play college sports. It was a joyous occasion today at the high school where Cody Huss signed to Valley City State University for track and field. Quinn Cradeville signed her letter to play volleyball at Concordia Moorhead. Also Corinna Roode will be taking her volleyball talents to Jamestown College and Gage Westland of the Patriots baseball team is off to University of Northwestern St. Paul. Well I think it's just a chance to recognize these kids you know they've done a great job in their high school athletic career and if they uh they're lucky enough fortunate enough to continue their athletic career at the collegiate level I think it's important for us to recognize those kids and you know they've been great kids for us leaders on and off the field of competition and for them to just have a little recognition today I think is a big deal. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland public television.


What's up everybody? Jayce here for jaskierscasebreaks.com 2019 Panini Contenders football three box break picker team number two just sold out Here on our website and again, we're giving away the cardinals in this break So how do you have a chance to win the Cardinals? I gotta just buy a spot in the break The more spots you buy the more entries you get so if you bought one team you get one entry you buy two teams You get two entries, etc. And again, we're giving away the Cardinals Good luck dice roll it here here the custom names from Donald down to Phillip I just copied and pasted this way as you can see and We'll see who gets the Cardinals after One and a six or six one seven times number one gets the Cardinals one two three four five six and seven seven times and Matthew s at numero uno after seven times So Matthew you're gonna get the Cardinals and Are you out here? You see you have the Giants Plus sign there. All right now. Let's quickly print out the dock Are we watching Tour de France? Yeah All righty guys and here you go three boxes of contenders football stuff. It's hot guys, so Some really cool stuff you can get out of here There you go. Good luck everybody All right, you got five autographs guys one on card autograph followed by four stickers and of course There are some pretty big hits you cannot get out of here I'm not sure when what a Joe or Nick pulled in the first three boxes It could be some good stuff hiding in there. We'll give you your contenders Carla Murray and Alexander Matheson Is the on card? This first box, there you go rookie ticket Vikings it's gonna Tim you got Josh Allen Jaguars Going to Daniel Traveillon Williams Bengals going to Aaron Miles Gaskin and Will Harris somebody nice little playoff ticket Tim has a J-dog and that Detroit Lions is gonna be Aaron Followed by Luke Keekley playoff ticket All right next box guys. Yeah, J-dog. Well, that's that's that's the That's the right way to do it. Just just grab a team No matter how big or Small the team may be price-wise and and honestly gives you the same amount of chance to get the car That's kind of like the best buying obviously if you want to go get a bigger team like to say the Redskins or something Then of course, you know, you have a chance to get some big hits with that team and also so the entry to get the Cardinals, but That's a good that's a smart move some of the cheaper teams are a might not Sell for that much. You can go get the Cardinals. Maybe Makes sense. That's what I would do Josh Jacobs. All right, so yeah, let's do those mixers guys Yonte Harris That's a Saints Jack with that one too as well, I think Miles Gaskin Dolphins by the Benjamin and Kailin Saunders Famous James to 175 playoff ticket on card is Will Greer nice 13 out of 25 championship ticket very nice Carolina Panthers going to Tim Hess I actually kind of really like will Greer's autograph I think it's pretty cool Very nice and Josh Allen. Who nice to 99 as well. He's actually a really good player I'm not sure why he didn't make the on-card autopet the one there for the Jaguars Daniels All right, and the last box. Good luck. All right, last box guys. Good luck Josh Jacobs. Ooh, Marquis Brown He's actually on the card on this side.  We'll give that out to one customer in the break Larry Fitzgerald to 175 Not the on-card is gonna be on this side. I guess not All right, so 250 points been given out guys Let's give that out guys. There you go guys This is Pikachu number two number three and four on the website grab your spots guys We're giving away the card on the next two as well So here you go, let's get a dice roller Everybody here will have a shot. We're just gonna go by the teams and team at number one gets the 250 points after one and a three four times one two three and four Pithberg Steelers Which is Travis they go 250 points going off to Travis. Appreciate you guys again. This is number two Let's get the next one going


Modern internet technology, like Google Maps, has revolutionized doing prototype railroad research. Let's research the Reno, Nevada area in Google Maps to show how this NCO Trackplan article can come to life with modeling insight. I do a search in Google on RenoNV and then click on the small map image to get a full-page map of Reno, Nevada. I want to follow the NCO branch in the NCO article, so I zoom in until I can find railroad tracks. Ah, here we go. Here's some railroad tracks on the map and what looks like a branch curving off to the north. Let's zoom in a bit more. The satellite photo view is better, so I switch to it by clicking satellite. Okay, I can see the railroad tracks. Zooming in some more. Nice. I can see where the branch leaves the main and goes past the ironworks mentioned in the article. If I zoom in just a bit more, I get an oblique angle view, making it easier to identify the track and structures. This view is perfect for railfanning on your computer. The article talks about the old NCO brick station. This looks like it right here. If I click the right mouse button, control click on a Mac, I can select what's here. I get a map pin.  Yep, that's the old NCO station alright. I can drag with the mouse and look all around. Talk about amazing technology. Railfanning a location from my computer has never been easier. I can view a complete 360 and if I want to move to a different location along the street, I just click. I can look back and see the railroad crossing or I can move around and look back at where the branch curves around off the main, including looking at it from different viewing angles. If I right click, control click on a Mac, I can exit the street view back to the oblique overhead view and then zoom back out to the farthest oblique view. Okay, let's railfan some more of the branch by following the tracks. Right away we see the tracks cross over an expressway on a bridge. We can once again do a what's here to get the street view and look around a bit. We can look back the direction we came from or we can look to the right of the bridge crossing the expressway. Hmm, can't see much with those bushes in the way. Let's zoom back out and keep following the tracks. If things are in shadow, the tracks may seem to disappear for a bit, but we just keep moving along and eventually spy the tracks again. Here are the tracks cross valley road and what do we find? A turnback loop. Turnback loops or blobs is there also called are rare on the prototype but common on the model. The tracks here go around an apartment complex. Now there's an interesting scene you seldom see modeled but here it is. Tailor made for a model railroad. Let's keep going. Looks like we're crossing another expressway on a bridge. Let's see if we can do a street view and look around some. Here's the railroad crossing and looking to the right we can see the branch continues upgrade. Looking back to the left looks like there's a cross street here that might give us a better view of the bridge. Let's work our way down the street to get a good view of the bridge. Just a little farther. Yes, that's a great view of the bridge. As you can see Google Maps makes it easy to follow a track route and then find a nearby road to do a street view and look around. So back to the oblique satellite view and let's keep following the tracks. We know from the street view that this is probably upgrade. This here looks like a spot with a possible small bridge. But for now we'll keep moving and come back and study this later. Here's a couple of industry spurs and here's another turnback loop blob around more housing. Two prototype turnback loops on one route. Nice. Makes modeling this route look attractive. That's for sure. So let's see what other fun things might exist on this branch. Not much so far. And here we go under the freeway. Yet another turnback loop. Although there's not much in the middle here. Three turnback loops. Talk about a route that's just made for modeling. So let's keep going. Doesn't look like there's much along here. Back under the freeway. And now this looks interesting. Let's study this a bit closer. Looks like the track crosses Virginia Street and then feeds several industrial spurs. Let's zoom in closer so we can study the details.  And a spur that curves up to service what looks like an LP gas company. Then looking south we see a short double track spur serving this industry. And a much longer spur serving this industry. That could make for some interesting industrial switching on a layout. So let's see what other goodies we can find on this branch. Doesn't look like much out here. Pretty empty. From the article we know the branch here breaks off into two routes. One to the northwest to the old western Pacific main and on to Portola. The other north to an industrial park. Let's follow the route to the industrial park. Here the satellite caught a train on the line. Continuing on up the line it crosses back over Virginia Street. Curves under the freeway and crosses over Silver Lake Road. It continues on north then curves left around an industry which includes a spur that looks like it goes into the building. Continuing on goes past the JC Penny warehouse which looks like it had a couple spur tracks at one time that curved into the warehouse but since have been removed. Continuing on we pass another industry with a spur track filled with several cars. And this leads us to some of the most interesting track work on the entire branch. Talk about track work tailor made for a model railroad. One route is a Y that leads off to a warehouse area with a couple of switchback spurs including one that's a 90 degree curve. Then there's another set of tracks east of the Y that also form a complex looking switchback that goes to another industry. And finally we have another spur that crosses one leg of the Y. The Y area I notice has two different colors of ballast. There's like light colored ballast and a darker almost black colored ballast. The spur crosses one leg of the Y goes across a low wet slew like area on a causeway and into an industry that splits into a double track spur. The track next to the building has two loading docks and the track farthest from the building looks like a chemical tank or unloading area. Talk about something that would make for a very interesting industrial area on a model. This is one of those cases where who needs to freelance the prototype is just so darn interesting. Okay let's finish looking at the rest of this industrial branch. Now this is curious. It looks like the prototype put in an extra switch for an industry that is maybe expected to be built but isn't here yet. Let's keep looking. Here the track starts to curve west and splits one spur going to this large warehouse. And then the other track continuing on to the west splitting into some double track and then looks like we have another turnout for an industry that's not there yet. And that's the end. End of the line. As you can see you can use Google Maps to study railroad routes and to get a whole raft of insight about a prototype right from your computer. While this is the most valuable if you're a contemporary modeler there's also a lot you can learn about older routes including locating old building foundations and the like. So give Google Maps a try for your prototype research. You'll find it a rich goldmine of prototype insight.


I serve as a public officer because I enjoy helping people. Because as a public officer, I am able to ensure that persons are paid in a timely manner. Because one of the top qualities of being a public servant has been a team player, which is the quality I possess. Because being a public officer, it affords me the opportunity to serve others, which I believe is the better of public service. Because I take pleasure in reaching out and helping one another. Because being a public servant affords me the opportunity to make a difference in people's lives and create a better society. We find our true purpose when we serve others, the government of Sendusha and the citizens of Sendusha. Because it is important to coordinate and harmonize the work of all sectors to facilitate the functioning of the single economic space within OECS and CARICORN. Happy Public Service Day!


Another teammate coming back making his first old-timers day appearance you think mokin still throw Oh, yeah, I mean you see him when he throws out the first pitches every now and then that one pitch It's always a hard pitch strike. So I'm sure he's a pitch really well today. What do you enjoy about this day? I just all the guys, you know to be in a locker room and put this uniform back on and For the past guys that played in the 70s and 80s and the Hall of Famers and the current guys It's just an honor to put this uniform on and be out here today Does it feel like that much time has passed it does not when I think about it It's been you know well 20 years since our 99 team It's I can't believe that but a time flies, but I'm really enjoying it. What have you thought of this current Yankees team? I love it. I love this team. They might be a lot about our teams that when Some guys get hurt the guys come up fill in and do a great job and keep the team going in first place and It's an all-around team effort So I love watching them play they play with energy and they're fun to watch the guys on your former team Do they talk about this current team? Oh, yeah, you know talk to Paul and Neil about it You know and Jorge Pesardo will talk about it and how much we enjoy watching them I mean I'm gonna shell all the young guys come up Clint Frazier They play hard they want to win and they just they're just keeping this thing going. You know, thanks for the time. Thank you