Hey everyone, welcome to the life. What does the narcissist do when it's all said and done? When everything's been said, when it's all finally over, what do they do? They'd like you to believe that they've moved on and they're so happy now without you and everything's going great. Yeah, they'd love you to believe that and they will do whatever they can to make you believe that. They might post pictures on social media trying to mislead you, trying to sell you this mistaken impression of their lives. They really want you to think that they're so much happier without you because if they can get you to believe that, it's just more supply for them. So yeah, they will try and post pictures on social media, whatever they think will get your attention, whatever they think will get your mind overworking, thinking about them, but you really need to take a step back and look at it for what it is. You really think someone like that could ever be happy. Just remember what they were like when they were with you.  And that's when they were really at their worst. You really think someone who treats people like that could ever be happy. It's such a contradiction in itself. I'm sure you will remember in your own experience that when you feel really good about yourself, that's when you are able to treat the people around you the best. That's how you'll know that they were never happy. They were never happy when they were with you and you might think that it was to do with you. And of course they will do whatever they can to make you believe that it was your fault. But if you could look back into their lives, you would find that they were like that anyway.  They thought that you would fix everything for them. They thought that you would change their lives. That's what they were expecting. But of course we can't really fix anyone. We can only help people to help themselves. The narcissist doesn't understand that though.  They'll make it seem like you weren't good enough for them. But if you look at it carefully, they're so quick to blame you for everything. But it's like, what did they ever do for you? What did they ever bring to the table? And then they want to make you believe that they've moved on and they're so much happier with someone else. It's just the same story again and again. It's like it never changes. They were dependent on you for their happiness and even if they do find someone else, they just end up trying to depend on them again. It never changes. But they're never happy because no one can really make you happy anyway. Happiness comes from within. And that's why no matter what relationship, friendship, whatever it is that they get into, they're never satisfied because they're always dependent on other people.  And that's just a recipe for disaster. No matter how much you may trust someone. It's never a good idea to just put your life in their hands. But narcissists, people may think, narcissists are very paranoid and hyper-vigilant. So how can they even depend on us so strongly? How could they trust us with their lives? It's like it doesn't make any sense at all. But then it does make sense. It makes perfect sense because the narcissist will trust anyone more than they trust themselves. Sorry about that. Mine's just went off. Bit of special effects there. Yeah, they will trust anyone with their lives more than themselves because they've only got a look at where they've got themselves so far in life.  One disaster after another. It really is. They want you to believe that they've had these perfect childhoods. Everything was fine. There was no abuse. But dig deep into that. And that happened in their childhood. Horrific things. Little childhood abuse. And it really traumatized them. It caused a lot of problems for them mentally and emotionally. They don't admit it. They want to talk about it to you or anyone else. They just want to pretend like everything was fine. They pretend like everything was perfect. But by doing that, they've only prolonged their own healing. Quality of your life isn't determined by the things you have on the outside. It's not determined by material things. Such as money, designer clothes, a handsome man or a beautiful woman. The quality of your life is not determined by those things. Determined by your state or condition on the inside. The greater your state and condition on the inside is, the more that you are going to be able to enjoy those things anyway. You can have it all.  And these narcissists, they might be out there trying to obtain whatever they can to display this illusion of happiness. But they're never really happy because they've got all of these wounds inside of them. And it's killing them inside. But they deny the wounds or they'll just project it on whoever's closest to them. But that doesn't make it go away. Shame continues to grow within them, eating them from the inside. And that is why when it's all said and done, they don't just move on. That bitterness and resentment that came from you never being good enough, their impossible expectations, that's still there. It doesn't matter if they walk away. It doesn't matter where they go. If it's five years, 10 years, that's still there because they don't know how to heal it. They don't even have any desire to heal it. But that part of you is still there inside of them. And they take it with them wherever they go. It's like a trauma, justifiable trauma at that. In their delusional minds, it is justified for them to experience all of that bitterness and resentment towards you. After all, you didn't save them and they were expecting you to do that. But yeah, when it's all said and done, they don't just suddenly walk away and then everything's right again in their lives and they're just so much happier without you. They've met their perfect soulmate and they've got everything they want in life now. They would love you to believe that. And I've had so many clients, you know, when they all say the same thing, you know, the narcissist looks so much happier with this new person. They've moved on and they've forgotten about me. It's an illusion. It really is. Just remember everything you did for them sacrificed your life for them just to make them happy. But were they ever happy? Were they ever satisfied with what you gave to them? And do you really think that anyone would be willing to give to them even a fraction of what you gave to them? Well said and done. Just go back where they belong.  But then since they got with you, they started becoming really arrogant then. They started to think maybe they could do better when in reality they weren't even deserving of you. You were way too good for them. They just never once you do to know that. That's why they kept you down all of that time. When it's all said and done, they just go back to the hole where they belong. It's like when they meet you, staying at this five-star hotel where they can five-course dinner, their mains. The canapes, a selection of desserts, maybe even some tea or coffee afterwards. They've got everything they want. And then after that, they basically go back to a B&B. A bed and breakfast. Back to the standard that they're used to because you were a high quality source of supply. If you're watching my videos, the odds are you were a Grade A source and they don't just forget about their Grade A source. They'd wish they could forget. Once you've figured them out and they know there's no way they can come back. There's no way they can get you to see them in the way that you used to. They'd wish they could just forget about you. But they can't. They can't just do that because they expected you to save them. And the bitterness and resentment is still there and it's never gonna go away. It's always gonna be there. Eating away at them. But yeah, when it's all said and done, they just go back to where they belong. They just go back to the standard they used to. And maybe five, ten years down the line, you're that person they're telling their friends and family about the one that got away. And then maybe 30, 40, 50 years later, they're telling their grandkids about you. This amazing special person that they never forgot about. You're that person to them. Because of everything you gave to them. Because of how you made them feel inside. People will forget what you did for them. But one thing they will never forget is how you made them feel. And when you first met the narcissist, you admired them. You respected them. And that is something that they will never forget. But at the same time they know that you're never gonna see them in that way ever again. So they've got no choice but to keep walking and try and find you in someone else. But they never will. They'll always be dissatisfied. They'll always be looking for something more. They'll never really find in what they're looking for. And that's just how it is for these knocks. All I can say is just be grateful that you're not one of them.  The way they just give their power away depends on everyone else for the happiness. That's no way to live. Maybe if they just knew that our power comes from within. And if they were able to harness that power, they probably wouldn't even be knocks anymore. But of course we can't expect miracles. We've just got to focus on ourselves. Keep bettering ourselves, focus on our own lives. And together we can heal from all of the things that these knocks did to us. I do have another channel as well that's more focused on healing as well as spirituality and self-development. So I would highly recommend checking out that channel. It's called Spiritual Secrets. If you just go into the Knock Survivor community page, scroll down a bit and you should see a link to go there. And if you're interested in joining a community that we have outside of the channel where we can discuss narcissism and I'm also answering questions on there as well. I do have a new support forum on the Knock Survivor website. So do check out www.knocksurvivor.co.uk. I have recently purchased the knocksurvivor.com domain as well. So that address will be available very soon too which will be easier to remember. But yeah, thank you for joining me tonight. I hope that this message resonated with you and there are going to be more original knocksurvivor premiers from now on. So that's something to look forward to on the channel. Thank you all for joining me and have a good night.


How's everyone doing? How was lunch? Good? Yeah? I thought maybe the after lunch group was going to be tired because you get that dip after lunch. Because it'll look like you're awake still. So that's good. So yeah, we're going to talk about the whole process, whole web of the process today, hopefully cramming this into the next 35, 40 minutes for you. So from discovery all the way to design, we'll talk about all that different stuff collaborating along the way for a user-centric website. So just a little bit about me. Obviously, you heard a little bit. I'm a UX UI designer. I started as a print designer. Kind of came over to the website of things just because I like to have my hands a lot of stuff. And lots of that involves a lot of that deeper thinking, analysis, which I like as well. So kind of bringing that together with the visual design, too. I work at a company called TealMe.com a lot on nonprofit and ad-libs website. So that's some of the stuff you'll see here that I'm talking about when I get into some examples. So just a little background of that. So collaboration. Who likes to talk to people? Who hates to talk to people? Yeah, 50-50. Me too sometimes. So it sounds like we have lots of different types of people. A designer in the crowd. All right, awesome. Who's the developer? Awesome. Who does like UX, the, oh, good. Awesome. I know, right? Yeah. Let's see, let's do. So who's worked on a web design project before that went bad? Yeah, yeah, most of us probably. So a lot of times when those projects go bad, it's because there's not a lot of collaboration. There's not a lot of talking, working with clients, working with the rest of your team along the way. So that's why it's super important to do that in order to have a successful project. So we're also going to talk about user-centric design. So what does that mean? Anyone? Yeah, yeah. So we're really thinking about what the, there we go. All right. We're really thinking about how are we creating this website for our user. So little definition, this might be Wikipedia. I can't remember, I got it. But user-centric design is a framework of processes in which a user's characteristics, habits, preferences, and goals are given extra special attention at every stage of the design and the development process. So we're doing that in order to create the best user experience possible. So that's what is critical of this whole process. So why do we need to collaborate for user-centric design? As my mom says, because I said so. Just kidding. Does anyone else's mom say that? It was always the reason why we couldn't do stuff. So when clients, users, and creatives. So I've highlighted these in different colors because those are kind of like the big buckets of people that are really critical to the whole process of creating a website. When all of those buckets of people have common consensus, then decisions become obvious. So we start to get away from, well, I want this. And I want this. When we start to talk about what are the user needs? What are the user's goals of the site? Then we're focusing on that. And decisions are always geared towards how is this going to be the best experience for the user. And then decisions start to become more and more obvious as we go through that. So looking at just kind of a general web design process, these are the steps that we're going to talk through. Discovery, starting out with that research and gathering our information, doing some user mapping. I'll get into all the details of this stuff. Mapping how is the user interacting with the site? What are their goals? What do they look like? IA or information architecture, UX, is that user experience? So that typically comes kind of in that wire framing phase. And then we'll get into some stuff about visual design. So step one, discovery. Like I talked about, anyone do a lot of the discovery research stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Super important. Not always the most fun, unless you really like that stuff.  So doing things like their needs, what are they trying to get out of the website? Designing a website, you might ask them what their pain points are on the current site. Also surveying stakeholders. So your client that's maybe paying for this whole project, they probably have some goals of their own. It's more organizational type of goals. Doing design surveys. So colors, we need to stick to. Branding requirements, things like that. Looking at Google Analytics or any other sort of analytic data. Maybe looking at other competitor websites. Kind of seeing what's out there. How do we make our site better than what's or at least stand out from other websites in the space? Usability testing. We could do some testing on the existing website. And just observing people using the site. Seeing where they're getting hung up. Establishing what pain points might be and what goals might be. And then after doing all of this research, it can take weeks, months maybe for larger sites. Really, really good thing to do is have a written website plan. That's hard to say. Written website plan at the end of it that says, here's what we did. Here's all the stuff we found out. Here's our goals. And then coming together with your team. Maybe asking your client for sign off even. So we're all on the same page before we go to the next step. So we found out some stuff. What happens next? So the next step would be user mapping. So that's thinking about who are we designing for and what do they need? So we're going to go through some of these things together looking at some user personas, empathy maps, and journey maps. So this can be a really good way to help put some color and some flavor around who you're designing the website for. So who are we designing for? What do they need? So this is Arthur. Arthur is an aficionado of superhero stuff. If you guys are not big into the superhero space, today is a national superhero day. So did I lose my thing? Uh-oh. Someone's taken over my. I don't know who this is. I know. I'm plugged back in. OK. I'm not sure what's going on here. OK. Someone is really getting into this collaboration aspect. There you go. Nice. So now it should just be in line. Is it? Right. Well, I'll tell you a little bit about Arthur as hopefully they can get me back up and running here. So Arthur, I had this set up in kind of a persona light. So yeah, cool. We'll see if that works. So a little bit about Arthur as we try to get this working again. Arthur is a 44-year-old computer data engineer. So as we're thinking about our users and who we're building this site for, I think I got distracted, forgot to mention that Arthur being a superhero aficionado, we're going to build a website for him for superhero stuff, Heroes of the Month Club. So Heroes of the Month is going to be, go along with me here, a subscription service. There we go. Awesome. So Heroes of the Month is going to be a subscription service for folks like Arthur to sign up and get a new superhero program every month. So that's our task. So we're going to pretend to build this website today. So this is a little bit of a persona about Arthur. We've given him a picture so we know what he might look like. Some information about him. He's 44 years old, computer data engineer, perverted, would not like this collaboration workshop here. He's socially awkward, but has a serious girlfriend that he met online. High-focused on what he cares about. Everything else is just noise. So as you can see, he spends a lot of money on superhero collectibles. This is his passion. And he really loves dressing up in superhero costumes to impress his small group of friends when they get together. So what is it like to be Arthur? Now that we kind of know, oh, we'll be Arthur joke. Now that we know who he is, let's think about what it's like to be him. And these exercises that I'm kind of running through quickly, like developing a persona. And this is kind of an empathy map exercise. I recommend doing these types of things with your team or with your client. Then we start to really, like, again, collaborate with that common understanding of talk through the prizes along the way. So Arthur, in this empathy map, is showing a little bit more about him, some of the things that he might be feeling, some outside influences that he might experience, what his pain points might be, and his top goals. So we'll kind of chat through this a little bit together. Thinking and feeling, so he might be thinking and feeling that I want to have the best costume for the next party. Hearing and seeing, he likes to watch movie talk. There's a lot of drama going on about the latest Marvel release not being true to the comics. So he's got some outside influences that are affected. What is he saying and doing? He's looking at other websites, superherostuff.com. That's a competitor of our new website. Looking at that, considering that instead. Pain points, he's swamped with work. He doesn't have a lot of time. And then his top goal would be that he wants to find what he needs very quickly and then move on. So does anyone else have maybe some ideas of what he might be thinking and feeling or experiencing that we could kind of add to this list as we start to think about Arthur? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that's like a motivation. He wants to kind of impress some of his friends. Yeah. So along those lines, we want to make sure he's wearing the right brand. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, he wants to be authentic. So it's got to be really good quality stuff. Price point, yeah. Thinking about that. Because he does well as a data engineer. But he spends a lot of his money on other stuff. Anybody else? Maybe one more? Yeah. Along those lines, we might be looking for something that nobody else has. Yes. He wants to wear something that nobody else is wearing. Yeah. Yeah, so that's really great stuff as we start to think about content and how are we building this site for our user that's really concerned about finding a really good costume, an authentic costume, looking at cost and price. Awesome. So what does that experience start to look like for him? So now we know who he is. We know his pain points, his desires, maybe some other influences he's experiencing. So this here, if you can see it, is kind of a journey map. So we're mapping out his journey. And of course, as a user, we should also be thinking that he's probably not everyone is going to go through this exact path through the website. But this at least starts to get us thinking about content, functionality, coming back to what the goals are with our team as we go through these exercises. So starting with this first step here in this map for Arthur would be discover. So he discovers the website somehow. So how might someone just discover a website? Search, yeah, Google, Facebook. So they still your answer? Search, cool. Yeah, convention or trade show ads. Yeah, yeah, that's really good too. So thinking about how your user is finding your website can really drive some of that strategy as well and maybe even some additional marketing strategy behind the scenes. So once he finds the site, he calls the site and he starts to engage with the site. Just initial step of getting familiar with the site, getting familiar with the brand. So I first come to the website, what might I as Arthur do on the site? What might I be looking for? Look for costumes. Yeah, so he probably wants to search or shop. Yeah, he might be looking for. He even wants to sort by different, yeah, by different ever. Anybody else? So that's like how he's getting there. He wants to, we have to have some sort of functionality to allow him to search for stuff or to understand what we're doing on the site, what we're offering. Once he gets familiar, hopefully he likes what he sees, we get to the next step of converting, so conversion. So he's ready, he found a costume, he likes the site to allow, yeah, that's super smart. Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about that. Awesome. Great, so he's put his costume in the shopping cart, gone through the checkout process very securely. So he's happy with his purchase. So then of course, we're hoping that, we're hoping he's happy. We're hoping that then he comes back and we're retaining him as a client. So he might want to buy again or kind of re-engage with the site. So if we're thinking about content or functionality for what might be different from the time you come to the site. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah, so like other people bought this or something like that. We're seeing at this like mental level of what we need to have on our website. Also that he advocates or shares this website with his friends so we'd want to include what? Or this offer, yeah, really good stuff. Okay, so a couple of pro tips. As I mentioned, empathy maps, journey maps, creating a persona. Really important to do this with your client. Otherwise you're just talking at them and they probably don't get it. So if you go through this process with them, they have to actually like the shoes of the user and really understand why we're doing it this way. Because the user add this to the shopping cart really fast and then check out in a seamless way. And it's not so much about what your client wants. It's more about what the user wants. So putting yourself in the shoes of the user, forgetting about personal preferences, it's always difficult, always a point of contention. Thinking about the user's experience from different angles. So that could be that maybe he started his shopping experience on his computer and then he got distracted. So later he's on his phone, goes back to it. Maybe he started through a search and then when he went back he just clicked on a promotion that was on the home page to get to a product. So there's different paths to improve as well. And then of course documenting all of this stuff and getting sign off before moving on to the next step. So step three, information architecture. So this is really where we start to think about how are we gonna take all these ideas that we just started talking about and thinking about the user journey. How are we gonna make a logical sense? So this is a simple site map that I had used on another project. We've got our home page and then we've got our top navigation at the top, this client resources and tools, trainings, reports, et cetera. So we're looking at what's the most important information? What are those key landing pages gonna be? And then what lives in all of those sections? So this is just a really high level breakdown of how to organize your site and the pages of the site. So if we think about Arthur and our, was it Heroes of the Month Club? What, we'll just talk about kind of top level sections of the website. What might those sections of the site be? I don't like the key student or the star student of the class. So the top would probably be like, I don't know if I can think of this in my head, but I might be on the, uh-huh, shop and discover, anybody else? Yeah, sorry. Community, okay, so like community space where he could talk to other people. Okay, cool. Categories, yeah. So ways to shop, but then breaking that down. So maybe it's like, I'm in, searching by men or searching by, you know, different type of Marvel versus DC and just dropping on my superhero knowledge today. I mean, else that we missed. Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important. A lot of times that's either like the first go-to thing that people wanna see or they, so just like basic information. How does this even work if this is, for example, a subscription service type of site? How does that work? You know, how do I sign up? You know, information like that too. So a couple of tips here in the architecture, information architecture, making that time in the project schedule to iterate, to go back and forth because what I find really critical is that as a web design expert, I think I know what I'm talking about and then I go share this with my client and they're like, nope, that's not it because they're the expert on their subject matter. So I can kind of guide the process of how to organize information but there's probably gonna be stuff I forgot or if it's really a complicated subject matter I might just not get it right away. So making that space and time to go back and forth. Thinking page template. So as, you know, talking WordPress, web design, single page, if you make it to you. So thinking about, okay, this is like the search page and we're gonna use this type of page on multiple areas of the site. So just having that frame down and then you could change the headline and change the body copy or whatever but using that same page layout will be important. So thinking about where we can reuse stuff. That sort of thought process starts to come in in the site mapping and information architecture step. Making sure that you're accounting for all the pages in the site. Okay, under tools and resources, we need this, this and this. So making sure we have everything accounted for as well. And then as you are just kind of making this outline of how your site's gonna be organized, just making like bullet points of, okay, I need to search function. I need social media sharing function, just bullet pointing those things out and checking in with your development team, making sure that we're not coming up with some crazy functionality that wasn't scoped in the project to begin with. All right, so user experience. Of course, the whole thing is user experience but a lot of times we think of user experience as this wireframing step. So these are some wireframes that I've worked on by recently, I think. So wireframes are really, really important for getting hierarchy of page information together. Make sure we have all the content on a specific page account. But we're doing this in a fairly quick way. You can see this is all black and white, grayscale. So I'm kind of like blocking out like, okay, you know, a hero image up here and then I'm gonna have this map section down here. You know, so I'm kind of chunking out information just to make sure I have it all in the same way. And I'm starting to think even more about functionality and about actions. Yes. Somewhere in Illustrator and I've been using Sketch lately, yeah. Yeah, Sketch is great, I'm just, I'm new at it but it's good. So yeah, and then, so typically the projects that I work on we don't have enough budget to do like a full on grayscale prototype but that's always an option if you're working on a large budget project. You can actually, there's tools out there where you can actually like build your site in an interactive way without having the design elements on there. So it's like black and white and kind of clicking through from page to page to make sure that the content is all there making sure that the navigation makes sense. So a lot that you can kind of expand upon there. Oh, and one other quick thing. So I tend to work in pretty detailed with pretty detailed wireframes but you don't have to. You can just do like simple, here's a box for this and then the box for call out and that kind of thing. So it really can be a big range. So real quickly, if we're thinking about our superhero website, this is obviously a very scaled back wireframe but let's say we've got, we wanna be sure to have space for like a big, beautiful image up at the top. We wanna have a headline and then we've got some call outs that we're gonna put on there. So what might we just have for like those three main call out boxes? Yeah. Discover what's new. Discover what's new. Yeah, that's great. We talked about that. You got an idea? What was that? Oh, like a graphic that says like shop now or something like that. Yeah. Sales, yeah, that's a great idea. So we're thinking about, okay, what are the three most important things that I want Arthur to have access to right away and then putting those on the homepage, front and center. So then we've got obviously the rest of the content. And then I just did a little mobile thing here too. We wanna of course be thinking about how does this stuff translate to mobile as well. That's gonna be really important because a lot of times you don't think of it and then you start designing stuff in a minute, that's not gonna go well at all. So making sure to think about that really. It's gonna be interesting. So I've heard the concept. Yeah. I myself have not designed that way. Mostly because where I work, our clients are primarily desktop, like their users. It's like 85% of users are desktop. So we tend to design desktop first. But I think it's an interesting way to do it depending on who you're designing for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if you guys are here, what was your, Dave? So Dave was working on a project where they started with desktop. And then once they got into that, they realized 60% of their users were on mobile. So that's where it's really important to do that discovery step even and look in, you know, like, how are people gonna be doing this? So yeah, that can help, you know, minimize those kinds of things. So I'm gonna cruise through the rest of this. Couple of tips here. Prepping clients for what wireframes are, what they are not. Tends the feedback I always get is, it's so boxy. It's just a wireframe. So it's not gonna be annotations throughout to help it to your client and also to your developers. Working out the major content issues, features, functionality, doing that in the wireframe stage, because then you're not getting hung up on like design details all the time. High fidelity I talked about. And then I always like gut check developers with my wireframes before I even show them to the client. And then once again, like right before we start design at a minimum just to make, okay, we on scope and crazy, that kind of thing. So getting into design. As a designer, you're often involved in most or all of these steps.  So it's your job to advocate for the user and also sell these ideas to the client to convince the client that this is what they wanna do. So a couple of things to think about is that you're using consistent design patterns.  Thinking about interactions. Are there any animations? Hover instances, thinking about that kind of stuff. And then usability and accessibility. I think there's a talk on that afternoon. Color content, can people with disabilities use my website? That kind of stuff. So just a couple of quick examples of stuff that I've worked on just show translated from wire to visual design. Most of these are straight forward because I like to work out issues of even, you know, some layout type of stuff with the client before adding in color and style and that sort of thing. So any quick ideas on design elements we might wanna use for this guy. Comic book stuff, yeah. So maybe even like cartoony style or something. Anybody else want more? Yeah. That's a great idea. So a lot of, since a lot of the costumes might be really colorful and you'll get noisy, the design can be very simple to allow like the photos and the, you know, costumes to really stand out. So again, advocating for the leaving personal preferences out of it. If it loves blue, you're gonna have to deal with that. Using as wisely so it should experience, not annoy people. Thinking about how you're gonna translate this to code. Maybe even thinking about like content types. How are they gonna even build this? Being very, very prepared to and you should never just email it over without any explanation because 95% of the time they're not gonna get it. So and then every decision should be intentional, have a reason behind it. Of course, got chatting with development along the way. So then handing this off, handing your design off to your development team and it's used as a designer to translate the user's needs and goals into that design. And then you have to make sure that your developer can do all this, understand what you're into were. So making that really clear and doing that with, you know, some sort of handoff development specs or something like that. So I've done this before where I've just done bullet points in a Google doc but being very specific on, you know, I want it to do this, this and this. Giving them the design file and just adding little annotations of, you know, okay, this is the navigation and when someone clicks on it, it should just take them down the page or whatever. So adding in those details. So for that handoff, nothing should be a surprise at this point because we've been collaborating hopefully, got checking with development along the way. Talking, like I said, about content types, how those might work, interactions, any of those animations, sharing examples of how you want to, or maybe doing a mock-up if you have any animation skills, desktop and mobile specs, how are things going to convert to mobile? And making sure to have time to QA the site, design audit of the, just develop and provide to your client. And this is maybe the most important thing. Be as nice as possible to your developers for you. So, got a few minutes for. So like different parts of the work. How do you tell your story to your user? Yeah. Be as a home fan. Because I'm a lot of a fan. Right. So when you're saying that, you're being the most important thing kind of a way. Yes. But everything else, how would you usually keep people like that on you? Yeah, so that's a great question. I was asking about how do I place calls to action or the important stuff on my homepage on the website. So that's where we can start pointing back to that discovery stuff that we did at the very beginning or the surveys, user personas. We should all know, by the time we get to wireframes and design, we should all know what the number one goal is for the user. And that should be the biggest thing on the homepage. It's often times that once you get into visual design, then the client is, oh, but I wanna say this, this and this about my organization, front and center. It's like, well, that's not what they're looking for. So that's again, where you can keep pointing back to, well, we've already talked about this. We've already come to this consensus. So a follow up question. Yeah. If you have a site where people, I think for example, the school site, where teachers are gonna have to be ones with the big action, respectively, most schools want a big marketing, respectively parents wanna come to this site. Right. Or invisible. Yeah, yeah. So I worked on, the question was, how do you balance serving multiple audiences, I would say, or multiple users? I've worked on a lot of sites recently where there are three or four types of audiences and they're all equally important. And we've kind of started playing around with like a curated experience type of thing where I come to the homepage and it says, I am a parent. There's a box for parents. I am a teacher. I am a prospective student. So then on the homepage, it's a little bit as a parent. And I get to almost like a sub-site of that, that's just information for me. And then you can kind of follow that typical process of, okay, then this is the most important thing for the parents, that sort of thing. Yeah. Yes. Very messy. Yeah. I started as a print designer, but I was always really interested in web and recognize that it was going to be sticking around for a while. So I did, I don't know. Almost 15 years ago, probably like just taught myself dream weaver. That was like the thing at the time, you know, from a book. It was dream weaver in a weekend. So I did that kind of learn some stuff and then growth for me was just getting a job at a web design agency and learning their process and learning from other people. So like finding those groups of people that you can learn from. Do you have a question? Oh, how do we, participants? Yeah, that's always, it's all hard. We typically try to ask the client to provide, however many they can, yeah, and then we would done some stuff where it's like onsite user testing where we, you know, have a checklist and kind of try to have people complete a task, see if they will or not. I know there are different websites too that you can do like even usability tests. You can probably do some more background research of computer sites as well. Sometimes it's hard to get. Uh-huh, right.  So you can work from a small sample size if that's all you have, to at least some, inform you. And then it's, you know, really important to go through those steps of like, the, I'm gonna try to pretend that you are that user and like go through that process instead of going through it just like as yourself too. So I think that's about it. I'll be hanging out in the back if you guys wanna ask me more questions, but I got some more stuff, more sessions. So thank you. Thank you.


U.S. Army medics with 3rd Infantry Division artillery, provided winter first aid training during a winter camp for Latvian children, held near Yelgava, Latvia, Jan 6, 2024. The medics taught classes on preventing cold weather injuries like frostbite and hypothermia, demonstrated applying pressure bandages, and using a litter. The 3rd Infantry Division's mission in Europe is to engage in multinational training and exercises across the continent, working alongside NATO allies and regional security partners, to provide combat-credible forces to V-Core, America's forward-deployed corps in Europe.


Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here today. Since the beginning of the legislative session and long before that, it's been clear that housing must be a top priority because it's part of the solution to the many challenges we face. You've all heard me talk about the numbers and how we need to build thousands of units a year just to meet demand. As you know, over the last few years, we've invested hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in housing. And what we've learned is that money alone is in solving the problem. And we also know we need more investment from the private sector. It's clear the most impactful way to get results is to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to build and restore the housing we desperately need. Despite legislative leaders agreeing we're in a housing crisis and that housing is a priority, the House chose to instead pass a conservation bill, H687, which, as it stands, would expand regulation, making it harder for communities, many communities, to build the housing they need. On the other hand, the Senate Economic Development Committee way back in February passed a very strong housing bill, S311, which over the last two months has been stuck in that Senate natural resources because they didn't have time due to their work on battery recycling and the Fish and Wildlife Board. Over a month ago, I told you what I thought they were doing. I said they were going to take the house version of the conservation bill, H687, throw a few pieces of S311 into it and call it a housing bill. I was hoping I'd be wrong, but unfortunately it looks as though that's exactly what they're doing and what they were going to do. Last night, my team once again went into Senate natural and asked they pass 311 as a standalone bill because it has broad bipartisan, tripartisan support and took a lot of work to come together. My guess is they came to the political calculation, conclusion and we'll keep them together because that's the only way they can get their Act 250 expansion bill passed. If that's the case and they insist on a merger, I will only accept it if it actually moves us toward our goal to build and repair the units we need, which means adding all the reforms and tax incentives from 311 coupled with substantial changes to the house's version of H687, which again will expand Act 250 and limit growth throughout Vermont. Failure to make the changes needed to give all our communities a chance to thrive would be a failure to meet the moment and a failure to deliver on an issue I think we can all agree is a top priority for all our constituents. It should be a surprise to no one that it will not accept any bill that makes it harder, slower, or more expensive to build housing because we need to do the exact opposite. But it shouldn't come to that because almost every lawmaker in office today began their campaigns promising to address housing. So with that, I'll turn it over to Secretary Curley to talk through her testimony last night. Thank you, Governor Scott. Good afternoon, everyone. Vermont is in the throes of a housing crisis. The dearth of housing in Vermont touches everything and affects all of us. The lack of housing available across the economic spectrum is our greatest barrier to affordability, growing the economy, and creating safe communities where all Vermonters can thrive. Earlier this week, I saw a presentation by VHFA that showed only 6% of renters in Vermont could afford a median priced home. That is alarming. It should alarm all of us. The dream of home ownership is slipping away from too many of Vermonters. All Vermonters need more housing options for renting and buying. We need them for young people just getting their start, families with kids who attend our schools, older people who are looking to downsize, individuals and families experiencing homelessness, as well as people who want to move here and share the Vermont experience with us. It is our obligation as leaders to increase Vermont's housing stock for all Vermonters. Part of what's driving our housing crisis is the added time and expense required to navigate Vermont's current permitting process under Act 250, driving up costs for renters and buyers as well as taxpayers who contribute to affordable housing efforts.  Vermont has some of the oldest housing stock in the nation. Every year, hundreds of homes fall into disrepair and out of our housing stock. Current estimates show that we need to add roughly 6,800 homes and apartments now just to get to a healthy housing market. So my team is doing everything it can to get more units online. Vermont did not get into this housing crisis overnight. It took decades of underbuilding. And none of us know exactly what the Silver Bullet is, but there is undeniable evidence that modernizing zoning and land use regulations, reforming the appeals process, increasing tax incentives, and making targeted investments, all combined will move the needle. And I've said repeatedly, just like the governor, we cannot buy our way out of this, meaning we cannot solve this housing crisis solely with state money and programmatic investments. As I told the Senate Natural Resources Committee last night, it has always been the administration's position that we need a housing bill that addresses the immediate housing needs of Vermonters. The moment requires legislation that will help jumpstart the creation of new units in addition to rehabbing others that have fallen into disrepair and offline. Don't get me wrong, Act 250 needs updating. It's 50 years old and should reflect the needs of our time. Permitting and appeals are an important part of the process, but overhauling Act 250 is a massive undertaking. As currently drafted by the House, modernizing Act 250 would require a significant on-ramp time and investment. It would take years to build and even longer to get off the ground. We can't wait years. If we don't act now, it will exacerbate our housing crisis. The exact opposite of what we need to be doing. I understand the likelihood of getting two separate bills is slim, but I want to be clear that the administration wants a comprehensive housing bill like S311. We'd like it to contain the following. The adoption of immediate interim Act 250 exemptions for housing built in designated downtowns and village centers and areas with municipal water and wastewater. Build on the Home Act passed last year with increased housing density by making it clear that those density requirements are for places with water and sewer. We also want to update parking by-laws. Update Act 250 appeals should stay in the environmental court and not be redirected to a separate land use review board. We should also add another environmental judge to speed up the review of housing appeals. Change the appeals process to require higher threshold for participation. Right now, any 10 individuals from a municipality, regardless of their standing in a project, can file an appeal. S311 includes a provision to raise that bar to a more reasonable threshold. Limiting appeals in areas planned for growth in dense housing as long as they meet the planning goals of their community. A freeze on property tax valuations on blighted properties to incentivize the rehabilitation of these properties into permanent housing. And rather than the state collecting the property transfer tax on blighted structures being rehabilitated or converging into housing, which will allow buyers to use that money to fix up those properties. We firmly believe that we can preserve the beauty of our state while also encouraging growth in the areas where we want it. We can protect our rural working lands and key natural resources while supporting the rehabilitation of blighted housing stock and adding new housing units. So I want to echo the governor and say to those lawmakers who want to boost our housing stock, please help us seize this moment. With that, I'll turn it back over to the governor. Thank you very much, Secretary Curley. And I'll open up to questions. The climate naturals move forward with merging these bills. They included many of the provisions in 311, interim exemptions, all the tax incentives, things like that. So why is it important to you to keep these bills separate? Well, first of all, I don't know as they pass it out. Maybe you've seen something that they... The client to pass it out later too. I'll believe it when I see it. I'd like to see what's in it first before commenting fully. But what I've seen over the last 24 hours is actually moving the wrong direction, moving backwards, making it 687 even more difficult. So unless they have all the changes we want, S311 is really important to be in there. It had unanimous support in Senate economic development. It deserves to have the full Senate at least weigh in on this. And for them just to piecemeal it, just add the small pieces here and there. I don't think it's fair to the body. It's not fair to Vermonters. It's the only housing bill that is viable that I've seen moving through this legislative process. So I just think they should be separated, but if they're not and they're merged, it's going to take the whole thing as well as some changes to 687. Can you be specific about the sticking points for you in 687? Well, they're numerous. And again, I'm not sure what they've done thus far, but it's first of all, and I'm going to let Secretary Moore weigh in on this, but it's taking too long. It's over a long period of time. We need immediate relief now if we want to get addresses housing crisis. So that's one area. And it just puts more restrictions on everyone throughout Vermont. And I know that they claim 1A will give exemptions to many communities, but only the big ones, not the rural communities that need our help. So with that, Secretary Moore, can you describe some of the other challenges? Sure, I do have to do that, Secretary. I think there are a number of places where, frankly, it complicates some already existing challenging processes. For example, if separate survival cases, the appeals process, and with Act 250 appeals heard by the Land Use Review Board, where they and our permits would continue to go straight to the e-court, it actually repealed deference and our technical determinations, which to my mind creates a significant amount of regulatory uncertainty for anyone who is subject to and our oversight. It requires any jurisdiction interested in that tier 1A designation to have wildlife planning bylaws. And it is my understanding that no Vermont communities currently have those in place. So there are a number of places, and that may just be a starting set, but where there are either additional requirements, changes in process that actually further complicate rather than streamline and simplify our existing regulatory system. Sure. Just to clarify, too, the interim exemptions that were added into this from what was intended in 311, this is very different than what was in 311. 311 was much broader in their interim exemptions, and I think more akin to what we would need over the next several years while we're laying out the land use mapping and gearing up with the new tiers. And so to scale way back on that and then put in very modest interim exemptions does not meet the need of what we were advocating for nor what was seen in 311. One more, if this merged version of 687 continues to advance, do you expect to veto it? Well, it depends on what's in it. And again, if they will include all of S311 and accept the changes we see are necessary in 687, then maybe not. But as it stands right now from what I've seen, it would very likely reach a veto. But we'll see, see what happens. Long ways to go. If there were exemptions for smaller towns, Barnaby, et cetera, what's your confidence level that developers would actually build there?  Yeah, again, I'm concerned about the smaller communities, but I'm also concerned about S311 also had some tax incentives in there for developers, whether they continue to keep those in and that's why it's so important to take all of S311, make sure that's the body of the legislation. And again, it would be much easier, simpler, and give us a faster results if they just separated the two and took them up at different times and had the body weigh in on them. Because I would suspect, again, based on everything I saw in the last election with everyone pretty much universally saying we have a housing crisis on our hands and we need to fix it. 687 passed, I think the House would be 89 votes, which is not enough to survive a veto. Should it come to that point?  I think it could go either way. You know, it's, I don't want to move us in the wrong direction. We need immediate help and if this doesn't provide it, then we'll just have to soldier on. But from the House version, and again, from what I understand and what I've seen, this is evolving in the wrong direction. 687 was bad enough, I think, coming over from the House and now they're making it worse. So we'll see what happens. Maybe some of those same House members that were supportive of 687 may say today with whatever comes out of a conference committee or whatever comes out of the Senate, they may say, I'm not supportive anymore. Especially when they figure out it doesn't really help their small towns. Governor, sort of a blunt question. Do you think that 887 shows more concern about their habitat and conservation than about building new homes? 687, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I would characterize it like that. I think there is a measured approach. They're looking at the big picture, the long picture, and they're trying to include everything in it. And that's exactly my point, that we need relief now. And this really doesn't do it. 687 is something that's going to evolve over a number of years. So again, pitting one against the other, I think you can have both, but not in this timeframe. Not here, not now. Developers, I spoke with this to be very free of you. So it's very frustrating when they're running these appeals. They can take anywhere up to 18 months in an environmental court to get it figured out. And they said, they don't necessarily know if this new board's going to work, but it's something different than what they're dealing with right now, which is super frustrating. So I guess what would be your kind of response to that, like them saying? Well, again, let's discuss that. I mean, that's a minor portion of this. Although it's important to sum, we are adding an environmental judge that will help the process as well. So don't mind discussing some of those issues. Obviously we want developers to develop and because most of the housing is built by private entities, not by government. So we need to work with them to make sure that we're doing everything we can to help. Secretary Moore, is anything you want to add to the, I don't know if you heard the question or not? I'm trying to mute the mute button. I think you cover the bases largely there. I do worry that there are a number of smaller pieces in there that just add to the complication that would further slow the e-court review process. Okay, yeah, sorry. Deputy Secretary Tapeworks for the agency of commerce community development. Just want to touch base and grab your question about appeals. I think it's also important to realize that over 20 years ago, there was a board that heard appeals and appeals for municipal permits, ANR permits, Act 250 permits went all different places. And one could probably imagine, speaking with somebody who is building homes out there, oftentimes they'll need to get a local permit, an ANR permit, and if it's going to trigger Act 250, an Act 250 permit. So what we're seeing here within H687, and certainly being discussed and debated down in the Senate House Natural Resources Committee, is that by splitting off the appeals, the Act 250 appeals, separately pulling them out of the environmental court and putting them to a separate body. Now you have somebody who's trying to build a home who not only needs to get approved and get signed off from the environmental court, you're now gonna have to have a whole separate entity also in agreement. So it kind of provides an opportunity for opponents of housing, two opportunities to kind of shut down those projects. What is it means committee that is set to advance the yield bill to tax hikes in it? I know you've said you've opposed, but sets up a study really to look at the future of education, funding and financing. What's your read on the yield right now? Typical legislative reaction. I don't wanna address the issue right now. We're gonna put a study, we're gonna study it. Meanwhile, Vermonters are going to be impacted by up to a 20% increase in the property taxes that they can't afford. And I think again, raising taxes isn't something that we should be doing, especially these days, and with everything that I've seen on the other side of the aisle there, this is concerning. So we've known about this since December, and I think we have to be creative.  So I would advocate that we do something now, not study this. Let's do something to fix it. State treasurer said the proposal that you and Cushar brought forward to essentially having payments over time, said that that could have a big concern, a big effect on the state's credit rating. I mean, have you seen that, have you thought about that, and what alternative could there be? Obviously, I've been concerned about that throughout my legislative career as chair of the institutions committee when I was in the Senate as the lieutenant governor, and now as governor. Our credit rating is very important. But, having said all that, I'd like to see the numbers as well, because here, and the word you use was could, could. The rating agencies haven't waited on this. We might suspect that they would look unfavorably at this, but if there was a plan in place to reduce costs in conjunction with this deferment, it could work.  I'm confident this will have an adverse impact on every single Vermonter here, because of this education spending bill. And I don't know what the rating agencies will do with it, but again, I know what it'll do to Vermonters. So I'm gonna be on the side of Vermonters on this one. Should we stop to uncriterate the agencies to ask? Isn't the time, they don't have all the, that's not what they do. We will be meeting with them as we typically do on a yearly basis, and that will probably come up, but they're not going to give you their opinion at this point in time. They wanna see all the numbers. They wanna see everything that we've done or not doing, and then they'll arrive at their conclusion independently of one another. So that's just not how it works. Are you still suggesting that, would you still recommend that legislators move forward with the proposal that I have on Friday, despite this concern raised by HECCHEC? I'm saying we need to get creative. If we ignore this and we don't at least contemplate at least contemplate this, we know what the impact's going to be. It's going to affect every single person in this room in a negative way and all across Vermont. So we know that. So we better do some, I think we should do something about it now. What we could, the treasurer could do is tell us what the, if, if, if, and that's a big if, if the bonding agencies decided to downgrade our credit rating, what's the effect? How much will that cost us? And then weigh it out about from, and in relationship to what we know is going to impact the $200 million is going to impact Vermonters versus what is the, what is the negative effect on Vermont? So we're saying that we think that a downgraded, a potential downgraded credit rating might be worth that. I don't, I'd like to see, I'd like to see the analysis. I think we have to weigh that out. I'm sorry. But your administration hasn't asked for that analysis? We have not. I, I didn't know that the treasurer was going to come out and oppose it. So I don't think there's been enough time, but that's something that maybe he could forward. Did you talk to the treasurer? I didn't talk, I didn't talk to him personally, but we've had conversations with him. Is there any leadership happening on cutting school spending, either from the administration or the legislature or the advocacy groups? So I looked at Spalding as an IT director, just a supervisor as an IT director and five separate IT people in the supervisor level. And each school has its own. I just wonder, are you kind of talking? Well, there's no doubt. You know, we have local control in this state. They're going to do what they need to do. The school boards have worked really hard to put budgets together. I think there was another, what, seven that went down yesterday? Six. Six went down yesterday. So some are getting there and it is having a positive effect on, lowering the burden on Vermonters. I think it went from 240 now down to maybe 200. So that's working, but it's not going to get us far enough. So if there are measures that we put into place, we, being legislatively, that have a negative effect on the costs or have increased costs on school districts, we should be looking at that. And I know they did. We worked with a group over the last month or so and with our folks at the tax department and came up with all kinds of ideas, ideas that we had contemplated over the last eight years and brought forward and they weren't well received at the time, but they're looking better, I think, to legislators at this point in time. And they want to study them. That's a step in the right direction, but I'd say, you know, we need immediate relief. We need it now. And we don't need to continue to study this. We ought to do something. So if there's something that we've done, like universal school meals, if there's something like that that we did that costs $30 million, then maybe we should take a look at that. I remember in 2022, everyone was running on housing. You mentioned that people were saying we need to build a more house, we must do this. And I guess, maybe you could explain a little bit to us, but what happens to everyone signing that when they're running for office, then when they get into this building, it seems that the whole thing changes. Where does that go from, we need to open more housing, but then we're now still talking about the housing we need to build and nobody wants to do anything. Yeah, I'm as mystified as you are. I have no idea. Is it ideologically driven? I, hard to say, you know, I would ask them individually. And again, these are based in some of the committees as well. So, S3-11, something that would have a positive effect on housing in Vermont, something that we need, sorely need, was passed in a bipartisan fashion in the Senate Economic Development Committee in Animas. So, that's good news. And then it gets stuck in Senate natural. And I believe for political reasons, trying to marry it up with another bill that's not as palatable in hopes that they can get a little bit of both. So, is it ideological? Maybe, but I don't know as all legislators have had an opportunity to weigh in on this yet. So, until they have a bill to work with, that's actually viable, then I don't know as we can cast judgment on them individually. Thank you all. Oh wait, did you have something on? Somebody on Teams? Oh, yeah. Okay. I hate to have to do his job for... I was looking at a watch, wow, it's a full one, yeah. I'm going to say Kevin, seven days. I may regret this, Kevin. Go ahead. I saw you on mute for a second, Kevin, it looks like you're re-unit. There you go. Oh no. Gotcha. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thanks Governor, I appreciate it. So, I hope you don't regret taking my call. But nonetheless, I'm going to ask you a tough question here because you said that H687 would, it is problematic for you because you felt it would limit growth and it would make it harder and slower and more expensive to build. And my question is, if you're going to make it cheaper and faster and less expensive to build in the areas where we want development to happen, what is so bad about limiting growth, making it harder to build, slower to build and more expensive to build in areas that are environmentally sensitive, fragment forests, damaged wetlands or otherwise, it creates sprawl. I mean, that's what I understand. The purpose of marrying these two bills together is to do both at the same time to develop where we want to develop and make it harder to develop in areas that would be problematic. Some of the conditions within H687 would really adversely impact some of the rural areas of the state that need housing too. So, it might help Burlington, it might help some of the bigger communities but it would do little from my understanding to help some of the rural communities that again, need our help and they need housing. They need to be, they need a revival as well. So, those are some, just a couple of the things that are problematic from our standpoint. I think Julie had talked about some of the other ones earlier in this conversation but maybe Julie would like to weigh in as well. I'd be happy to go, sir. And I think it is that we're not meeting just the moment we're in, that the additional environmental protections that are contemplated by H687 take a medium and long term view in part because we have a whole series of new definitions that need work and contemplation and evaluation. And while we're in the moment of doing that work, we need housing right now and the balance isn't there between those two. In addition, as I noted earlier in the press conference, H687, whether intentionally or simply by virtue of people losing track of components that is more than 200 pages, creates real and immediate complications around appeals, around deference being granted to the agency and our current regulatory studies and is going to add time and confusion to the process in the near term even as it seeks to provide additional regulatory requirements in the long term. Governor, may I add to that? And Kevin, I think just to clarify, we in concept agree with the idea of this location-based jurisdiction where you have exemptions in certain areas, focus, development there. The complication here is that tier one has certain requirements, especially tier one A has requirements that even the Burlington's and the Muruski's, the big communities, they'd even have a hard time reaching some of the standards that are set for such as wildlife protection, bylaws, and other things that go above and beyond what was ever in a compromise. And so it goes beyond restrictive for allowing that type of development. So I think Secretary Moore said it best that that balance just isn't quite there. There are tweaks we can make and we're ready to offer those changes as Secretary Curley did last night, but it's just not there yet. Thank you very much. I understood. Thank you very much. I have a different question on a different bill, Governor, if that's okay. Sure. So H72, this is the bill that would allow overdose prevention sites in the state, which you've expressed opposition to. Has that been modified or is in the process that we gather of being modified to only provide funding for a single site? Everyone presumes that single site would be in Burlington. I believe even your health commissioner has said that he's not terribly opposed to the idea of a single pilot site in the city of Burlington. And given that there's a mayor, new mayor in Burlington has expressed support for this and there seems to be support in Burlington. Where does your opposition of that bill stand if it's just for a single site for Burlington? Yeah, my position hasn't changed at all, Kevin. I'm still opposed to it from a financial aspect and philosophical aspect as well. Thank you. I have Newport Daily Express. You can. Okay.  The last time I asked you a question was about whether you would consider state-wide teacher contracts and also for support staff. My question today is with the new secretary about the UCF education on board, is there any consideration to consolidating supervisory unit districts and make them more broadly regional as a way of cutting back some of the administration and some of the overlapping functions? I would say basically yes. I believe that I believe this for quite some time that we should be thinking about the structural problems we have and not just the educational financing but as well as in the structure itself. And it seems as though we are a top heavy in some of the supervisory, superintendents, number we have in the state compared to the population. That number hasn't decreased dramatically over the last couple of decades when we did at one point reduce it but not far enough. So I think we talked to some of the education leaders in other states and they have one district that has more student population than we have throughout the whole state. So I think again, I think it all should be on the table and we should consider anyway we can to lower the costs and put the money, any savings possibly towards the student themselves so that we deliver a better education for them without using it up in overhead. Is there going to be, is there still going to be a need for the state board of education? Do they turn into the future? I think there has to be some sort of entity. So I would say in some form, sure. Thank you very much Governor, have a good day. You too. Keith, Rutland-Herald? Rutland Towns select board met last week and one of the things they were talking about was a rumor they had heard and they acknowledged it was a rumor but they seemed fairly concerned about the idea in any way. They seem to be, somehow they got wind of the state was looking at the Cortina Inn and maybe possibly some other ends to lease or maybe purchase, I don't purchase but at least seemed like it might be reasonable. You just basically get control of that building to use it as some kind of homeless shelter type of thing. They were very concerned about this to the point where I think they were going to invite someone from AHS to come talk to them about it. I was wondering if you knew what might be going on there, what they were hearing, what the actual fact of the matter is? I don't know, have any of those details at this point in time, Keith, but be happy to get somebody from AHS or DCF to contact you directly. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. Tom Davis, Douglas Vermont. Thanks, Jason. Governor, the Affordable Leap Act, S5, is set to go into action in January 2025 subject to one more legislative vote. Some fuel and propane suppliers around Vermont have been issuing letters to their customers to warn them of the incoming service charts that they will be seeing and they're estimating it's gonna be around 70 cents per gallon of propane and or fuel load. And I want to know if, notice those letters have come out, have you seen any reaction from that from the public? And also, do you have a sense whether or not the legislature is gonna stick to its guns and go ahead and implement this in 2025? Well, as you know, Tom, I vetoed that bill and was overridden, but the 70 cents doesn't surprise me. Maybe it might even be a little light, I don't know, but we'll see what happens when they get through their process and it comes before the legislature and the next session. So I have no idea whether they'll move forward with it or not, I think it'll all depend on the realities and what the impact will be. But again, this is all predictable. It's something that we've been talking about for quite some time. When we see this cliff that we're facing with the Education Fund that was predictable, something we talked about since my first day in office and that offered solutions to that, we have apparel taxes being going into place in July, we have 20% increase in DMV fees, we have all kinds of taxes being proposed by the legislature at this point in time. It all adds up. It's like this drip, drip, drip, and it's increasing the cost of living in Vermont and forcing people to make decisions about where they live. And it's not just the affluent, it's I'm more concerned about those who are struggling, struggling now. And this is just, when I'm moving in the right direction, affordability is an issue that all of us face and I think it's something that some seem to forget when they get in here and the natural reaction to the legislature to any problem, any jerk reaction is let's just raise another tax and fix it. Well, sometimes that's the easy way. The more difficult way is to look at the structural problems we have and fix them.  And I think that we were a little void of that here in this body. With those different increases in those costs, the fees and the taxes, has the feedback into your office increased from Vermont? I don't know if it's increased, but there has been a steady, steady. I think people are scared to be honest with you. I mean, they just don't know what they're going to do because they don't know where to go and they know these fees and taxes are coming right down on them. Some of them last year, some of the taxes that were imposed were regressive. They talk about taxing the rich, rich and last year they taxed the poor as well. So they're just scared and we'll just have to do all we can to prevent it from happening. Other questions, thank you. Governor, we have tens of millions, really I guess hundreds of millions, committed in telecom and emergency communications planning. Are you satisfied with the planning and oversight of this process? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I know that like with any planning, nothing's perfect, but we're moving forward in a measured way. Not at the speed I'd like to see, but not everyone thinks the way I do. I wanted to make sure that we had a dispatching that was universal, that could be utilized by everyone throughout Vermont. But I've wanted that for over a decade and through different administrations, that hasn't happened. So it all comes down to who's paying in, who's not and who's supportive, who needs it, who doesn't. And it's just not, it's a difficult, it's a difficult concept to move across the finish line. It's complicated. Back to education, do you have any concerns about Zoe Saunders' confirmation? I know some folks have expressed concern about the background in charter schools. Yeah. Well, I think the more that Zoe gets out and meets all of you, and if you haven't had an opportunity to interview her, I would offer that you should call us and or call her and set it up because the more you get to know her, you will see the strength she has, why she was our top pick and the benefit she will bring to Vermont if she is confirmed. So I think the more you get to know her, the better you like her. I had a follow-up to what Kevin was asking about. Drug policy, as overdoses are still currently high, we don't have year-end data from last year, but potentially setting new records. Oregon recently rolled back measure 110, which was the decriminalization of all drugs to get people into treatment. They rolled that back. There's still a bill kicking around here in the state house which would decriminalize personal amounts of drugs.  Well, I think we can always learn from other states. And if Oregon rolled theirs back, there was a reason for it. That's why I'm opposed to the safe injection sites. I think more money should be put into treatment. We know that works, and we've seen elevated overdose deaths, unfortunately, but I attribute that to fentanyl and xylozine and what it's being, other drugs being laced with it. So highly addictive and very deadly. So we're doing all we can in that respect, and some of that comes on the public safety sector as well. And so that's why we've been trying to do everything from all different approaches to lower the risk. But treatment is something that we can't let our foot off the gas on this one because we need to get them in treatment when they're ready and get them on a better path. Is our hub and spoke model able to keep up to it with fentanyl and xylozine, you mentioned? These are really, I mean, lethal drugs in some cases. I mean, how do you crack that enough? Yeah, some of it, of course, they have to be ready for treatment as well, those who are addicted. So that's always a challenge. And what we feel if we want to broaden the hub and spoke program and find any efficiencies we can there and make it as user-friendly as possible to get those who are affected into treatment and then into recovery. Well, yeah, to be clear, does your administration have any plan B if legislators don't go for? Well, I don't know what the plan B would be. If they're not willing to do anything right now, then they're part of the problem. They're accepting this 20% increase, which I'm not accepting. So alls I can do is have my one vote. Great, but do you have an alternative plan for something that they could do instead of? I mean, you're saying that they're not willing to do anything, but do you have? Well, how can I get them to do something when they're unwilling to do it? I mean, you could draw other options. Well, what's wrong with the option that we put out there? Well, then they ought to get creative and figure a way to make it work without affecting our bond rating. They're smart people. They're smart people. You're smart too, so what about a proposal? Look, again, I want to tone this down a bit because I think there's a creative approach to this. We just have to think it through. And I don't accept that we can't do anything. I just won't accept that. I don't think Vermonters expect us to do that either. They're counting on us to fix this. So we need to fix it. And if we have to implement something that's uncomfortable, then let's do it. Okay, there's uncomfortable, but then there's also, if our credit rating is downgraded, that costs money. What is it going to cost us? How much is it going to cost us? I don't know. Well, I don't know either. So I think we should have that information before we shove that aside. Shouldn't we have that information before we put this thing in place, though? Sure. Do you think that if you move forward or if the legislature describes what they have potentially rates as, or downgrades their credit rating, and then Vermonters pay for that in the long term if our borrowers are increased, isn't that just shoving the cost burden down to future Vermonters? It really depends. It depends on how much it is, right? And this is an if they downgrade. They don't always downgrade because of some approach we've taken. I think the treasurer would agree if we had cost measures in place, and a plan, a real plan to lower costs, then I'm not sure that they would downgrade. I think they would take that as a solid plan that you understand where we're at. If we don't do anything, it's gonna keep increasing. And so when it starts affecting the economy, I think those same bond agencies, other rating agencies would have a problem seeing our whole economy start to erode because we're taxing too much. They worry about those kinds of things, too.


I'd first like to talk about why I've created a simulator. Now, it's all good and all, we have this architecture and we say we've written a compiler for it, but we want to see code executing, staring at assemblies just not good enough. And the way that we do most of our testing early on in a project is through GCC's regression. And typically this consists of several tens of thousands of small C programs that have represented corner cases in the compiler over the years. And generally any good port of the compiler should be able to compile them all without blowing up. And the way that these are executed is through a tool called Dejauguinu. Dejauguinu is a generic given a program compiler to run it somewhere tool. And for deeply embedded targets like ours, this is typically done through GDB, which is the debugger. GDB then talks to your hardware through what's called a GDB server, typically via TCP or some other socket, and over a communication via RSP.  So this could be say Dan's FPGA implementation from before, or alternatively my simulator which I will move on to. As I said a moment ago Dejauguinu is very generic. It doesn't need to talk to GDB, it's just a very typical way of doing it. An alternative way this is done is by talking to the simulator itself directly, and really as far as software is concerned these two parts are exactly the same. And I will talk about how this is designed at the moment. So to start with as an aside, I want to go into a bit of detail into how instructions exist in a compiler, or more specifically LVM. When porting LVM, LVM has this language called table gen, which you hopefully can see on the screen, which is a language for describing classes of instructions, what they do, and their encodings. So you can see here that I have this class of instructions, it's 32 bits long, and that register RD, the destination register, is split up into two chunks between bits 8 and 6 and bits 24 to 22. And throughout porting your compiler, you'll build up hierarchies of these classes, eventually getting down to the point where you can write small declarations like this, which say I have an instruction called add. It is a ALU operation, so it inherits the ALU opcode stuff. It has opcode 1 in your assembler you type add in order to generate it, and for the compiler's purposes, it is an add. And as part of building your compiler, you take this definition file, which could be several thousand lines long depending on how many instructions you have, and the compiler spits out multiple things. For the compiler as itself's sake, the most important thing to it is it generates an instruction selector. So the way that many compilers work is it produces a graph of your programme and then pattern matches your instructions to the things it has and essentially replaces this graph with a graph of your instructions, and then moves on to later stages. But being that I've defined all these bit patterns here, it also generates a couple of other tools for you, the first of which being an instruction encoder so that you can use your compiler as an assembler. And also, if you can go one way, presumably go the other, it also generates you a disassembler. And being that I've already created this file and I already have a disassembler, one of the first pieces of building my simulator is to take binary and turn it into instructions, so I want to reuse this disassembler I've already created. Now, my simulator is your typical fetch decode execute loop just continuing until the end of time. And it needs some stent for keeping track of the registers and the programme counter, and also some sort of control for talking to the outside world because presumably it's all good just seeing that your processor is busy but you may want to have some more interactive interaction with it. So, and I'll go through these two bits in turn. So, the first, the fetch and decode bit is almost given to you for free by the compiler. For the disassembler to work, it has an interface which goes given a blob of memory and an offset into that memory give me an instruction. So, I use this up here in order to get me an instruction. The only subtlety being everything inside the compiler is byte-addressed and our instruction is a word-addressed, so I need to shift the programme counter by one to give me a useful offset for the compiler. And assuming I'm given an instruction, I can then calculate, and one of the things you get back from the compiler is how big the instruction is just decoded is, so you can calculate what the next instruction should be assuming that you don't branch. So then all you have to do is execute your instruction right back the programme counter for where to next fetch the instruction. I just continue to do this. One addition is this get instruction function can return false if what is in memory is not a valid instruction, and presumably in that case it's more useful for the simulator to stop than to just simulate nothing and just continue doing who knows what for the rest of time. So, the execute element of this is takes this instruction object which has been given to me by the disassembler, and I just need to extract the operand fields from it. One of the nice elements that the LLVM disassembler has given me for free is that, so AAP has these two variants of the register-add instruction. The short variant which can access only the first eight registers and a longer version which can access all 64. Now, to the disassembler, it just generates me an instruction that says the first operand is register 3, the second operand is register 4, for instance, and it has already done that mapping for me, which means I can save a bit of time for all purposes just treating these as the same instruction. So, my simulator takes register A for an add, takes register B, adds them together, and stores a result back. And in addition to this, I need to care about overflow bits for arbitrary precision math, for instance. So, I do a small test to check for overflow and save that back in the simulator state. And then say that the instruction is done. One element of the instruction container is this get-op code field, which returns me an enum for my instruction. So, execution is essentially one long function with blocks of code similar to this. The final piece of the simulator is how to talk to the outside world. Now, we've done something similar to what OpenRisk does, which is where it has a knob instruction where the operand does something special in the simulator. We've extended that a little bit by also adding a register so that you can have more precise control over what you want to execute. So, for instance, so here we do the same load register and we get the immediate from the instruction. And based on the immediate we do an operation, so knob three will print a particular register to the screen. Knop two will tell the simulator, I have finished execution. Please stop. Knop one we have as a specific, as an actual knob. And knob zero we treat as a breakpoint. This is useful as the encoding for knob is all zeros. So, if in the simulator all memory is zero, initialize, and I go branching off into the middle of nowhere, I know I will stop one instruction later because I will execute a breakpoint. And now, hopefully, I can show you everything working. So, on the left-hand side you will see a game of life simulation running in the simulator. And on the right you see a trace from a execution of a game of life in the simulator. So, if I pause that, you can see that I am executing add instructions and that I am reading R59 and R57 and storing the result back in R57. And various instructions here, making use of the simulator knob to print out to the screen so that you can see this here. And yes, does anyone have any questions?