Hey, we're back, we're live on a given Wednesday with Tax, Tax, what are we calling this show? Talking Tax with Tom, Tom Yamachika of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, he's the president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, I'm Jay Fiedel, this is Think Tech and we love this kind of discussion here on Community Matters. So we're in a great space right now, Tom, we're between the end of the session and the veto practice coming in, what, middle June or so I guess. That's right. And they finished, they had their little ceremony which was incomplete I think, they had some issues about who was going to come and not, and the issues about the conference committees too about who was going to come or not, it seems like there's a little bit of friction going on in the ledge this year, and it reflects itself in the substance of the result of their efforts also doesn't it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there are a couple of new things that happened this year, one is that there are a lot of more instances where the House just didn't appoint conferees, and then so the Senate was like okay, we're here, where's our House counterparts, they're not there, they're not coming, okay, so are we going to move this bill and concede to what the House has done or are we going to say, you know, heck with this and we're going to kill the bill. So what happens when they don't come? When the Senate has those two choices, either agree to the House amendments and move the bill forward, or not agree, and the bill dies. That's not good practice is it? Yeah, it would be better. You're so modest. Yeah, really, I mean, not showing up at a meeting really seems unforgivable, that's my reaction, you know, you've got to participate in the process, that's when we pay them the bigger bucks for bigger now, yeah? Oh yeah. They gave themselves an increase, and I suppose that means they're more committed than ever to doing a good job for the public, right? We would hope so. One would hope, okay? Tax bills? Yes. What failed, what succeeded, and what's on the deck? Okay, so with regard to the stuff that passed, and it's on the Governor's desk now, there's a number of things to worry about. We already talked about some of the bills that have already become law. There is the estate tax increase. So if you have lots of money. That doesn't count unless you have, what, $10 million or something? Yeah, a $10 million taxable estate. Don't assume that it's all going to go to the kids because it won't. The government will take quite a bit. Theoretically, the state gets more money now. Right. The tax increase was at a rate after the $10 million. That's correct. Okay. Yeah, the top rate's now 20%, which is way up there in terms of the country. If you look around the country, yeah, not a lot of states have 20% on your taxable estate. Yeah, I think we're tied for the top with Washington state. Yeah. But what about the $10 million? Is that common also, or are we ahead or behind on that? I'm not sure. Okay, it doesn't make too much difference. It can't be more than a handful of people. Yeah. Tax them. Tax them. Okay. What else? Okay. We talked about the READ bill, the real estate investment trust bill. Surprisingly, it went all the way through this time, which is kind of the first time it's ever made at this far in the past five or six years. It's now at Governor Ege's desk, and there is talk that he is not in favor of the bill, but whether that means he'll veto it, that's a different question entirely. Yeah. He has three choices. He can sign it, he can veto it, or he can do nothing and let it pass. Yeah. And then it becomes law without a signature. Yeah. But he must be under pressure from the READs on this. I mean, I would imagine every READ in the state is going to be on him, they're interested in the issue. Yeah. I think he's going to face pressure from the other side as well, because there are grassroots proponents who think that the READs are enjoying a loophole, the benefit of a loophole, and they think it should be closed. You said you thought that maybe he was not in favor of the bill, but there's an inclination procedure, isn't there, where he announces inclinations of what he's likely to veto, what he's likely to sign, when does that happen? Yeah. It's toward the ending of June, it's called the Notice of Intent to Veto. So by that date, he has to come up with a list of bills that he could veto. Anything that's not on the list is going to become law. But things that are on the list, he can either change his mind or he can veto them. He definitely should circle back at that time and talk about that list, because I think there's really a big issue of whether he's going to let this become law or not. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff out there, not only the READ bill, but the Airbnb bill, so-called, generated a lot of high drama. Yeah. Back to the READ bill for a minute, Joe. How much money does the READ bill mean for the coffers here in the state of Hawaii? Well, that's in dispute. That's in big dispute. The tax department has it at generating like maybe $3 or $4 million the first year and $10 million every year they're after. The proponents of the bills say it's more like $60 million. So that really should be something we know about. Yeah. And the methodology for doing the revenue estimate isn't really clear. There was a study that D-Bit came out with that was supposedly in consultation with the Department of Taxation, and that's where the proponents got the $60 million. But now, EOTax is saying, well, the READs could have had some deductions that they otherwise weren't taking, so. Interesting. So it's a net thing, anyway. It's going to be the net profit from the READ in the state of Hawaii, what the READ is doing here. Right. Not everywhere in the world, just here, and it's only the net after expenses and deductions and what have you. Oh, of course, yes. Yeah. Okay. What about the B&B thing? You mentioned that and certainly that has been the subject of high drama. Yeah. The first event in the high drama happened I think Friday before the legislature was about to adjourn. They took a vote on the bill and it failed in the Senate, 12 votes for, 12 votes against, and one senator didn't show up. He had a health issue or something, but he said he was going to vote no anyway. And then the Ways and Means Chair came back and said, okay, guys, we really need this bill for some revenue, and if you're not going to do it, then I'm going to pick some bills and we're going to recommit them. What does that mean? What that means is you may think it passed, but we're going to change our mind and unpass it and kill it. Oh, wow. So if you're a senator who wanted one of those bills to pass, it could be undone. There's nothing sacred here. Yeah. And all they needed was for one guy to change his mind, and one guy changed his mind. And they took a re-vote. I think it was on Tuesday, 13-4, 12 against. It passes. Oh my goodness. Okay. That's high drama. It is high drama. So the concern about that one is it sets up a procedure where platforms like the Airbnb, SlipKey, the Homeaway, VRBO, those kinds of things, the platforms are supposed to collect and pay over the GET and the transient accommodations tax because they're handling the money any. And the platform would be Airbnb, the organization that establishes the tenancy, sort of, that places the tenant, as opposed to the homeowner who allows the tenant to come into his home. So that should be more efficient. Yeah. What's the big objection? The objection has always been county zoning. A lot of these transification rentals are not legal in the area for which they're zoned. So this would effectively override the zoning, no? No, it doesn't. Whether you're doing business illegally or legally, you still owe tax. Ah. Do you guys remember how they got Al Capone? Right. They got no tax. Right. Maybe that's how they're going to get Trump, too, by the way. Maybe. But the tax law doesn't really care if the economic activity you're doing is legal or illegal. But as long as you do the economic activity, you owe the tax. Well, this is a serious problem for the, I guess, the homeowner now who was renting the home and violation of zoning laws, because Airbnb is presumably going to pay the tax and identify this home as in violation of the zoning laws. It's easy then for any government agency who wants to enforce the zoning laws to nail this homeowner, right? It's all there on the record. It's a slam dunk at that point, no? No. No, because the current version of the bill doesn't provide for information sharing with the counties. But what it doesn't do, it doesn't hide the ball like in the 2016 version. Okay. That would have allowed the platform or the homeowners to use the platform's number in their ads and so forth, thereby hiding their own number. Okay. Yeah. This version of the bill doesn't allow that to happen. So the homeowner's got to have a number and advertise with that number. And if the homeowner doesn't have a number, then we know there is scoff law. I'm laughing because this issue had to be in the mind of everyone involved about the interrelationship of the zoning and the tax. They go together. I mean, they're related. Use of the property this way. Well, it's actually not because the state imposes the tax. The county imposes the zoning. They're two different governments. It's the government. It's the sharing between governments. That's the problem. That's right. So anyway, that's very interesting. And I wonder if that'll change going forward to make it more transparent from one government to another government. The status of this is it passed. It passed. And we have any idea what the governor will do about it? I have no idea. There's going to be a lot of pressure on him. Yeah, from both sides. We would think. Yeah. So I guess the counties were differently unhappy. Yes. I guess Aaron B and B wants to see this. I don't know. I don't know if they were happy with this version of the bill either because they were still opposing it to the bitter end. But they were. The people who really wanted it to pass. Were the people who needed revenue. The homeowners. No. The politicians. They had problems. They had programs and services they wanted to provide. More money from the government. Yeah. Yeah. They said we need revenue raisers. I mean, that's what Senator De La Cruz used to try to beat people up and have them change their mind. One guy did and that's all that he needed. He just needed one guy to change his mind. Well, assuming it's signed, then Airbnb collects, that's very efficient. And we already know there's a lot of these vacation rentals going on in the state, whether we pay tax on them or not. Then this presumably would increase the amount of revenue to the state government, right? That's right. And then if the locals have a concern about property being used in this fashion, they got to get on their county government's case to enforce the law. About the zoning. Yeah. Yeah. And that leaves a single issue inside of a double issue. Right. So the tax is what? It's regular gross excise tax we're talking about. Not TAT or anything. TAT, yes. This is TAT. So this comes to more than TAT would be. Definitely. And is TAT going up this year? No, no, no. It's 10 and a quarter. Okay. So it's all right. So they'd be treated like hotels, which is essentially what they are anyway. Yeah. The transit accommodations, that's what you got to pay. And some people aren't doing it. Yeah. Well, this has the prospect of sorting things out. It also has the prospect of being vetoed. And the can kick down the proverbial road. Yep. Only to come up again next year. And maybe. That's Tom Yamachika. He's the president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. And we're talking tax with Tom here. We'll take a short break and come back. We'll find out about some other bills that you may know about or maybe not. Aloha. I'm Lauren Pair, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health. Whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. You got to know about tax. Tax affects us all. You know, you think you can get along without knowing about tax. Mistake. That's why I should look at this show. Talking tax with Tom, finding out what's going on in the square building about tax. We are not just doing it once this time, but we do it all the time, every few weeks. And that way you can actually look back and see how these things have evolved over the session. So you can talk about the electric vehicle tax. Yes. What's that one? So the Department of Transportation, the one that fixes our highways and byways and bridges and stuff like that, they are getting concerned because a large part of what they take in comes from the fuel tax. And with the advent or with the continual progress of market penetration, I should say, of electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, alternative fuel vehicles. The fuel tax ain't going up as much as they want it to. So. This will be much stalker in the future. Yes. And there are more electric vehicles on the road. Right now, it's not all that dramatic user term. But later on, it might become much more significant. So you might have heard that the Department of Transportation is going out to the public to test the waters on what they call a road usage charge. What that would do is it would tax drivers based on how much they use the road as opposed to how much fuel is in their tank. Okay. And that is getting, I guess, some mixed reviews when it goes out in the community. Some people, some people hate it very much. And probably nothing very much in between. It would be an increase for a lot of people. We don't know that. We don't know. I mean, if you have a gas guzzler now and you're paying a lot of fuel tax, that would go away. So you may be better off under a road usage charge. It would be an increase for people who have electric vehicles. Definitely. Yeah. But if anybody ever really likes a tax of any kind, much less an increase. Yeah. So if you went out to the public and say, do you love this tax? Do you love this increase? You're never going to get a really good answer. Yes, Tom, we love this tax. We love that you don't get that. It would be kind of hard. But I've seen stranger things. But anyway, and an interim measure. Okay. The registration charge for electric vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles is going to go up because the legislature has approved and has sent to Governor Bill saying, we're going to put a $50 surcharge. This is per year on electric and alternative fuel vehicle. That means hydrogen, I guess. Yeah. Hydrogen, biomass. I don't know what else. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Biodiesel. Yeah. That would be another one. Yeah. So what is it now? Is it the same as a conventional vehicle? Right. So right now, all vehicles pay one charge. I think it's $45. But starting I think next year, the alternative fuel vehicles and the electric vehicles will pay $45 plus $50. So it's a $50 increase. What's the, oh, I see. This is to make up for the fact that they're not paying the fuel tax. That's correct. Why do I feel funny about that? Well, you probably feel funny for the same reasons that the environmental groups do. They're saying, well, come on, guys. We're trying to encourage use of alternative fuel vehicles, get off the fossil fuels. We have these clean energy goals for the state of Hawaii. All of this is counter to our clean energy goals. So why should you be disincenting the use of alternative fuel vehicles or electric vehicles? And go a step further on that, you know? We used to have a tax credit when you bought an electric car. I don't know if that extends to a biodiesel car or hydrogen car, I'm not sure. But you used to have a substantial state tax credit. It expired without renewal. And now, I don't know where the federal is, but the federal may be expiring too. But in any event, you don't have the state tax credit to incentivize you to buy an electric car. There's all kinds of changes rolling back the benefits of owning an electric car, including this $50 surcharge. I think they're changing the rules on the number of stalls and parking for an X number of hours at the airport and the kind of thing. So all in all, the benefits that were originally conceived who stimulate the purchase of electric cars in our state are disappearing, I'm sorry to say. And what's more interesting yet is that we only have like 7,000 cars out of a million cars that are electric cars. So we haven't even gotten to first base yet. We're already pulling the incentives out. What does the legislature think will happen? This is going to de-incentivize electric cars. No, I think they think people will buy the cars anyway. I mean, typically when you enact a tax credit it's supposed to stimulate some intended behavior, and then once it starts kind of getting on a roll, then you can pull the credit out because people need to get it anyway. Theoretically. Yeah. I mean, why do you need to incentivize something that people are going to do anyway? Well, but that hasn't shown to be the case. It has not shown to be the case. They're not doing it anyway. 7,000 cars out of a million cars. And furthermore, I'd like to say that you watch television at all times. I think we had this conversation. Have you noticed that in the past couple of months, maybe since the beginning of the year, there have been an enormous number of car ads on television? Yes, I'm trying to sell cars so much, so hard, so fast, so vigorously, because car sales are down. That's why they're putting all the ads on. But among the ads, there are zero ads for electric cars. What does this tell us? Well, I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a lot more alternative fuel vehicles and electric vehicles and hybrids on the road these days. The Teslas, the Leafs, the Priuses, all these vehicles. Just a couple of years ago, it was very rare to see even one of them. Now they're all over the place. I should move to your neighborhood. I don't know. I don't know if it's a function of neighborhood or whatever, but that's what's happening. So what's the status? Up to the governor. So pass the legislature up to the governor. Expectations? We don't know. We'll circle back on that. House Bill 333. This is an interesting one. It establishes the state highway enforcement program. So if you're guilty of parking a violation on a state highway, and I think they have a problem in Kauai with people parking in state highways. When you park along the road, along the side of the road? Yeah, along the side of the road. In addition to the current penalties, you have to pay an additional 200 bucks. That's for parking. It's a parking ticket, so to speak. A state parking ticket. A state parking ticket. Part of that, well, half of that's going to go to the Department of Transportation so they can fix the roads and bridges, like I mentioned. And then half of it's going to go to the county. Wow, that sounds like cruel and unusual punishment. Confiscatory what? It's just very interesting that it's only targeted against state highways. So you have also county highways and no comparable penalty. You park at the H1. That's not a state highway. Really? It's federal. Ah, okay. Then the state rule doesn't apply. So it only applies to state highways. So you expect a nasty surprise if you're parking in a state highway. It gets complicated because who enforces this? This would be the same county police department that enforces this. Yeah, but they get halves. Okay, well there's a motivation feature there. Definitely. So did that pass? That passed. It's on the way to the governor's office now. You know what they say, taxes never go down. Yep. I talked to you about the rental vehicles or charge tax. Go ahead.  And you pay $5 a day if you're not. You don't have a Hawaii driver's license. That's right. Why do I feel that creepy feeling of unconstitutional in my mind? It is unconstitutional. So this year they changed it so that everybody's not going to pay the $5. There's a solution. Yeah, it solves the discrimination. You were complaining about the other guys, now you can have the same treatment. That's right. Exactly. And that's on the way to the governor too? Yeah, it's effective upon approval. So as soon as he signs it into law, then it's $5 for everybody.  I mean, never go down. They never go down. Okay. Did we talk about partnership withholding? No, let's talk about that now. Okay.  And this bill applies the same rules to actually a little bit harsher rule to partners in a partnership or beneficiaries of a trust. We get distributions from the trust. Okay. And all to collect the state income tax. Estimated tax. Estimated tax. Yeah, it's a withholding mechanism.  So you're supposed to file Hawaii return. I guess some people don't. So in that case... There's no option about it. You must. Yeah, the partnership must. And since it's a partner who's going to receive the income, the partner has to pay tax on that distribution. Am I right? Yes. Mid-year. No, no, no. I did the regular time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. And the rate is the same as the... What is the rate? The individual rate. Same as the individual rate. Yeah. Is this intended to encourage business in the state of Hawaii? I don't know. It's designed to encourage us getting the fair share of income that we're supposed to get anyway, but maybe people aren't complying with the law. So it's an enforcement thing. Yeah. At the end of the day, the tax is the same as it would be without... It's just like wage withholding.  And at the end, it's supposed to be... You compare that against the amount on your return. If there's a difference, you get refund of the difference. If it's not enough withhold, then you pay the balance. Is this the same concept? The only difference, I suppose, in that effect is that you wind up with more paperwork to do and more periodic obligations to handle. Yeah. But they... But they ought to say people were supposed to file those tax returns anyway, because that's the law. But I guess maybe they didn't. So now we all get to pay. That's right. Thank you, Tom. Tom Yamachika, talking tax with Tom here. He's president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. Talking tax with Tom here on Community Matters. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Next time soon.


Hello, I'm Sandy Alnach and I'm an artist and I bit my subject. I wanted to paint one piece of chocolate this time. This is my second of my chocolate videos. Paint it in both gouache and watercolor and continue the conversation we started in the last video about how your art does not need to be perfect and tidy when your nose is right up on top of it. In that video, I did a whole box of chocolates and it's from a printed image so you can go and purchase the printed image and just color right on top of it. You can paint it with gouache, use markers, pencils, whatever you want. But I showed you how messy my coloring is until you pull back from it. And I want to talk a little bit more about that in this video by doing a single piece of chocolate. So let's get going on that. I began by biting my subject which, you know, I'm taking one for the team. Happy to take a bite of chocolate for you. This photo is on my blog if you'd like to download it and paint it up yourself. But I bit into it and then I let my teeth drag on it so that I would end up with that kind of drippy sort of look of caramel. Because this was not the gooey kind necessarily so I had to kind of pull. And then in Photoshop I added a black background because I love me some drama. And you can go get that photo for free if you would like to paint it up yourself. I'd love to see what you create if you do. So in gouache what I have been learning in my oil painting class is to try to start with the darks and work toward lights. I am a water colorist. I paint from lights to darks. It's just completely the opposite thinking. Here I decided to separate the caramel and the chocolate at least and not really worry about the dark value in the caramel yet. And for the chocolate portion I mixed a little tiny bit of white into the color that I used for the chocolate and made it a little bit lighter so I could start defining some of the drips that go across the chocolate. Just little by little. It's going to add a whole lot more later but this just at least gets those things set. And as gouache dries it dries differently. Some colors dry darker some colors dry lighter. So I moved on to start putting in some of the general shapes in the center in the caramel.  But what you need to tell your brain and train your brain to start to think and to see is in shapes and values. When you see in shapes and values you start not worrying about whether or not it looks like caramel right now because otherwise you're going to be telling yourself I don't know how to paint caramel I don't know how to make it look drippy I don't know and you're going to get lost in that thought train and you need to just pick a shape whichever one you're going to paint next just pick one and look at what the value is and paint it. Now starting with your darks is good but here in the caramel I had started with that lighter yellow ochre type of color and value and then I started putting in some of the medium shape medium colored shapes medium darks and then I went in with the very darks the reason I did that was because I was trying to separate the caramel into zones so that I could look at just a smaller zone instead of focusing on the entire blob of caramel so there's a little hangover ledge at the top and then a hangover ledge at the bottom so just the way that the caramel separated in in the the bite that I took and then I could work on each of those sections individually and not have to really stress over trying to think through the entire thing at once I could think of about just a tiny portion of it at this point I realized I probably should have put my background in so that the drips could be painted over top of it I am terrible at painting a nice smooth background in light colors I can do it in darks but in lights I struggle with that so you'll see me mess with the shadows underneath here and there. Once I at least got this much established I now have that shelf at the top that has a couple sections to it that hang down then I took my yellow ochre color which is kind of the original color plus a tiny tiny bit of white to brighten it a little bit and started adding in all of the little textures that are hanging off that top shelf and then I started doing it at the bottom just working through one little section at a time not stressing about the entire thing and when you're doing a macro view of something like this this is a super important thing to train yourself to see because if you start thinking too much about the big picture you'll get lost in it so look little by little at tiny sections and say I'm gonna I'm gonna look at this shape and what is the shape of it and how thick is it how how does it relate to the shape that's already next to it and I started seeing things like the chocolate almost separating from the caramel in certain places really dark areas right next to the caramel where the caramel and the chocolate join almost as if there's a separation between them and just noticing those tiny things is what's going to make it look realistic as you start painting so here I am trying again with the background I was debating whether I was gonna make those little rivulets in the insert from the Valentine's chocolate box and I would try it I would let it dry and then it would dry terribly and then I would try it again yeah that's just how I work in gouache we're trying to do all that stuff I was enjoying the chocolate much more than I did the shadow background but while that dried I started brightening up the caramel so there's some areas where it's yellowish and almost orangey and depending on how the photograph is lit it can be all sorts of colors in there and at one point in here I actually pulled an orange into my browns to try to brighten them up because I was looking for both the value I wanted it to be the right mid-tone and I think of the mid-tones in terms of you know is it a 30% tint of whatever that original color would have been or is it like an 80% and that's that's how I kind of think through the values and as I start painting there's a lot of times I'll paint a few strokes of something that I thought I mixed properly and then it goes on the paper and I'm like oh that's too bright and then I go back and I mix in something darker so it's constantly going back and forth to my palette to figure out exactly what value I'm gonna need to paint that tiny section that that little bit and I don't get to a pure white until the very end if at all sometimes you don't even need a pure white sometimes just white with a little tiny hint of yellow in it is gonna be what you need now here's where the background made a big difference because you can see the color of the chocolate is bloodstone and the color of the background is an actual black one of the Jane's blacks and that's where it starts kind of making the difference between the two you see the separation and then I can go back and tidy up the outside edges of the chocolate against that black and then if I paint too much of that I can go back in and paint some black around it and I love that that you can constantly fuss around with gouache and you know make little changes to it I wanted to warm up the chocolate a little bit instead of being such a cold color so I added a little bit more to it and it's just a process little by little of changing things up so that it starts getting the roundness that I'm looking for and it always wait for it to dry before I make any final decisions on what to change next so so there's the gouache version which from a distance looks great from close up just looks very messy but let's take a look now at a watercolor version of this and how to approach it in the opposite way of thinking so I began by putting some color into the caramel some yellow ochre and dropped in some Indian yellow and a little more yellow ochre so I'd have that glow at the end at the tips and then mixed up a brown with transparent red oxide and French ultramarine to start to paint the rest of the chocolate now what I wanted to do was join the chocolate and the background a lot of times I see people painting and they're like yeah I'm just gonna paint this part of the the subject matter here and then I'm gonna add the background and they don't really consider how it's going to join to it I wanted to have no white at the top of the chocolate and the way to do that is to join the background right now and you'll see how this turns into a black background later but for the moment I just wanted to get rid of that white up at the top and establish that background so that the chocolate and the background at least exist in the same universe because otherwise we're gonna end up with a hard line around the outside edge when we try to join the chocolate color and the black color later on in the painting so I've added in the shadows underneath as well so I can have a very light shadow on the table dried it completely and I always make sure I feel it to make sure there's no warping left there's any warping that usually means there's still some water in the paper even if you don't feel wetness and then I started painting in my chocolate now I'm gonna be painting a couple layers of this there are people who can choose the right exact right brown in the first pass and be satisfied with that I am not that person because I'm always adjusting things but that does mean I have to be more careful so that when I paint over top of it that I don't get a double edge for each of my shapes so it's worth trying to learn how to do that on the first try rather than on the third and fourth try like I do so just kept mixing up various types of browns as I went using the same colors that are already in my painting because I didn't want to add anything new and I've just looked at the photograph to get those same dark shapes establishing that top shelf and bottom shelf with their dark areas in them and I'm a little looser with it of course here than I am with the gouache because it's a little less controllable when you're talking about watercolor but I also love the fact that all these colors are just mixing together and blending and kind of looking drippy just because they are watercolor and that gives the the interior of the caramel just kind of a little exciting feel to it because it's got all this mixing of colors but now I can switch to a smaller brush and then also to thicker paint and that's going to start establishing some of the real darks in the chocolate itself and I I do the first pass as much as I can with a bigger brush because the bigger brush you use the looser your painting is going to be and I like a looser touch to my painting I like it when the detail doesn't come in till later and then I can control exactly where it is rather than ending up painting everything with a tiny brush which just makes everything look like it's been labored over and as soon as I get to large areas I switch back to my larger brush so establishing these really nice darks as I go using the brown and then dropping in where needed some pains blue gray that is one color that I added in I could have mixed a dark you know dark grayish black color using the transparent red oxide and the French ultramarine but decided for the sake of speed because I wanted to keep this painting moving while it was still wet then I would use pains blue gray and that's one of the things that I often will do is just that's why I have pains blue gray in my palette is when I try to work quickly and I just need a quick dark that one works and I I find that blacks tend to feel really dark and black and they feel a little bit dead in my painting so working through adding more darks into the rest of the caramel section so that I can start pulling pulling together the fact that this is stuck into the chocolate that it's on the inside so it has to have some areas that are as dark but again I'm looking at the shapes in this one since I've already painted it in gouache and I also had already sketched it in pencil before I even started any of this I'm very familiar now with these shapes and the gouache really helped me to solidify what a lot of this looks like in my brain so by the time I got to the watercolor then it was much easier to work on now sometimes I do a watercolor sketch before I go to gouache because gouache takes me longer than watercolor will but in this particular case I knew I could get really lost in trying to do something crazy with this watercolor version if I didn't do the gouache first so I needed kind of a slower study the black color I'm using here is a mixture of again the same colors I used in the chocolate using the French ultramarine blue with the transparent red oxide and I painted it around negative painting around the top of the chocolate so that I can end up with that edge being a hard white edge but on the right side where I want that dark part of the chocolate to be part of the background to disappear into it I painted that right over top of the chocolate and that allowed me to join those two pieces you see how that worked out to have that initial painting in the first place so that it starts to just pull it all together and things don't end up looking like a sticker because some edges can disappear into the background this way now I'm going back in with a little bit of a brighter color with more of the brown in it rather than just the brown with the blue so I could get a better color for the chocolate and using my smaller brush I can start adding in small details small leaving small highlights while I darken other areas and put all those finishing touches into the painting so I've added in a reaffirmation of the shadow shapes and stuff that are underneath of the chocolate and then we get off to my favorite part which is always pulling off the tape just getting those nice white edges makes me happy it makes me feel like the painting is done and so this one that I compared to my gouache painting and you can see they both look very realistic the backgrounds are different because watercolor just does a washier type of background instead of a solid one they both have different levels of detail on the inside of the caramel but they both look realistic the average person is never going to look at your artwork and put their nose right up to the piece of paper and say wow look at that blend that you didn't blend well no one's going to do that it's only you doing it so step back from your artwork I talked about that in my previous video as well that one's a little more beginner friendly so please do check that out there's a link in the doobly-doo and be encouraged that whether you paint whether you use alcohol markers whether you use gullard pencils whatever you do give yourself grace to let perfection go because perfection is not needed later on this morning in just a couple hours I'm going to be hosting an edgy zoom educational zoom call I'm doing one of these a month and this month we're going to talk about pencil and graphite give you some tips some tricks just little fun things for those who like to draw pick up the link over in the events tab at art venture and link to art venture is down below in the doobly-doo next up quick heads up for those at patreon who are in the $10 and up levels this month's watercolor video is going to be peonies a beautiful bouquet of flowers so check that out in a couple hours that's going to be on patreon if you'd like to join the patrons link in the guess where doobly-doo down below the video finally a little peek at what is coming in my next video is a little tiny box of treats that I got from a new partner that I am going to be working with this year I'm very excited to open this up and see what's in my little care package so come back on Tuesday and check it out with me I'll see you then take care bye


Hello, welcome everyone. My name is Sunil Ravi Pari. I lead Zero Trust initiatives at Anthem. Today's session is about federating trust in healthcare with SPIFI. Essentially, healthcare systems and data have been subjected to cyber attacks and ransomware since a long time. This session will talk about how healthcare systems and data consisting of PHI and PI will be secured with a new paradigm shift in technologies in cloud native Zero Trust solution to have workload identity and trust within healthcare systems and extending this Zero Trust to partners healthcare systems which connect with Anthem's health OS platform to securely authenticate and exchange data. So what's Zero Trust? Most of you might be familiar with Zero Trust, which could be defined in various ways. But NIST coined the definition saying that it's an evolving set of cybersecurity paradigms that move defenses from static network-based perimeter to focus on user assets and resources. Zero Trust architecture uses Zero Trust principles to plan industrial and enterprise infrastructure and workflows. And also it assumes that there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their network location. Authentication and authorization are two discrete functions performed before a session to an enterprise resources established. And also Zero Trust is a response to enterprise network and prints that include remote users bring your own device and cloud-based assets that are not located within enterprise own boundary. And also Zero Trust focuses on protecting resources such as assets, services, workflows, network. As a network location is no longer seen as a prime component to the security posture of the resource. Anthem Health OS platform harnesses millions of members of healthcare data of Anthem's members. And how can Anthem use its member data essentially? So the platform provides insights and also the benefits offered by Health OS is that its access and operating system to enable seamless health plan provider collaboration. So this healthcare platform can also extend or rather provide insights into the member data by giving external clients access to this platform. So the answer to this is to essentially federate across the clusters. So the benefits of doing a federated Zero Trust approach is that using SPIFI is that it provides a mutual TLS between services and does end-point verification and also integrates container orchestrator like Kubernetes. So the tech stack which does the heavy lifting is essentially mutual TLS. SPIFI inspire is Jot token and policy agents for authorization and for monitoring observability agents. Let's dig deeper into the architecture itself by taking here an example of a existing federated architecture with an external client Robin. So Robin is an external client would like to get insights of Anthem's member data through Health OS platform. So here we have Robin's EKS cluster and Health OS EKS cluster. So we required that there are a requirement set of requirements like it should be running on Linux and have ports open for TCP connections and the outbound ports and also there is a storage available on Kubernetes to have PVC. So once we deploy the inspire servers on both the clusters and the agents as well as the on-white proxy to do the proxy connection, the federated approach of SPIFI architecture would have the trust domain set up and then have the configurations on both the clusters set up to point to each other's trust domains and the open ports and then have the trust bundle exchange between the Health OS cluster and the Robin cluster. So that way the whole end-to-end federation is configured, set up and bootstrapped. So if you can see in the architecture diagram here, the spire server from the Health OS and Robin, they talk to each other to establish the trust and then the workload identity happens on each cluster for the workloads they're interacting with on Health OS. There are certain services like Health OS Gateway and Health OS authentication and on the Robin's cluster you have Robin service which would authenticate with Health OS Gateway through the on-white proxy and then once authenticated use the API to get member data and insights from the Health OS platform. So this is the high-level architecture and a high-level SPIFI federation use case with an external client from Anthem's Health OS to a Robin partner. But this could be replicated with multiple partners and set up the multiple federations and scale up for giving insights into help Anthem's member data. So going to the next, so once since we have this federation to establish now, if there are any other questions I'll be available on the chat, please ping me or you can contact me offline.


Hello everyone, this is Ahmed Dan of AhmedDan.com. Today I'll have another episode of Lounge Video and I'll talk about the Lounge Key increasing its entrance fee starting October 1st, 2019. Just a recent notification from MasterCard Lounge Experiences provided by Lounge Key that they'll increase the fee to enter Lounge each time from 27 US Dollars to 32 US Dollars. This is in addition to the free Lounge Entrances or Accesses you already have provided by your credit card. Not all credit cards provide free Lounge Accesses. Some of them do, some of them just gives you the Lounge Key membership. But each time you enter a Lounge, you have to pay 32 US Dollars so access fee starting October 1st. So for example, the BMO World Elite Air Mouse MasterCard gives you two free Lounge Accesses and BMO World Elite Regular MasterCard gives you four Lounge Accesses which is provided by Lounge Key Program. What it means that you can enter Lounge two times with their Miles World Elite Card and the Regular World Elite Card you can enter Lounge four times if that Lounge is covered by the Lounge Key Program then you don't have to pay anything but let's say you'd like to pay you'd like to enter in addition to these free entrances then instead of 27 dollars per visit you'll be paying 32 dollars US per visit if starting October 1st. I was kind of expecting this Priority Pass Lounge Access Program already has increased their membership to 32 dollars beyond the free visit about a year ago so Lounge Key is owned by the same company so they are going to increase to the 32 dollars as well. Most of the World Elite MasterCards have some sort of Lounge Program attached to it. Some of them offer free Lounge Accesses or Entrances and some of them just offer the membership but they do not offer the free Lounge Entrances or Passes. For example the BMO World Elite and the BMO Regular World Elite MasterCard offers two and four free Lounge Passes. Some of the cards just gives you the membership for example the Rogers World Elite MasterCard the Bream World Elite MasterCard and possibly the President Choice World Elite MasterCard although I'm not sure about that but I heard that they also have free they also have the Lounge Membership not the free Entrances. So what it means that if you have one of these cards for example Bream Rogers World Elite or possibly the President Choice MasterCard World Elite then you already have the membership you just need to pay 32 dollars each time you enter the Lounge starting October 1st up to that point it used to be 27 US Dollars. You might be asking whether this is or paying 32 dollars US to visit a Lounge. It depends if you wanted to have something to eat at a restaurant at the airport and then if you wanted to have a drink or spend some time at a restaurant then possibly you're going to be spending more money than 32 dollars US but if you go to a Lounge you can have free food, free drinks and sometimes free shower or free quality sitting arrangements and other stuff for 32 dollars. So for some of you it might make sense but if it doesn't make sense for you just spend 32 dollars to enter a Lounge then don't do that. But if you have a free Lounge access then definitely you should use those whenever you're traveling. Now I don't have any World Elite MasterCard that offers free Lounge entrances. I use a Priority Pass Lounge Access which comes with the Scotia Passport Visa Infinite and it gives six Lounge entrances so I don't need beyond six per year. But I do have some World Elite cars which have just a free membership but not the free entrances. Both of these two programs, Lounge Key and Priority Pass they are owned by the same parent company but Priority Pass has slightly more access to Lounge's and it covers slightly more airports and Lounge Key is just offered through the great cars. You cannot buy membership program via Lounge Key if you do not have that great card or if you do not have a great card which offers Lounge Key membership. So let's say if you do not have any great card you can still buy Priority Pass membership by paying annual fees and free Lounge entrances depending on what type of program you choose but you cannot buy Lounge Key Lounge Access program if you do not have a World Elite MasterCard which doesn't offer you Lounge Key program. So these are the two basic differences but at the end of the day they're almost the same thing. So that's all I wanted to talk about today. Thank you for watching this video. Forget about subscribing this channel. Forget about liking this video. I'll see you shortly.