Well, good afternoon and good evening, thanks for having me here for this meetup. My name is Bernardo David and I'm an assistant professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and IOHK Collaborative Research Chair on Blockchains. As part of our work with IOHK and on the Cardano project, we have developed in the partnership with Edinburgh University and University of Connecticut in the US, the family of Uroboros protocols which are used as the main consensus protocols in the Cardano platform. So what is so special about these protocols? What makes it different from Bitcoin and from other blockchains that have been proposed in this space? Well, the main feature we have is that we are based on proof of stake or POS instead of proof of work or POW. And in this talk, I would like to tell you a little bit about the advantages of working with POS instead of POW and how we make sure this is actually secure. So in this talk, I'm going to cover first an introduction on the differences between POW and POS, focusing on the several issues that POW has and then tell you a little bit about the basic structure that we want to get from a POS protocol. Then I'm going to delve into the Uroboros protocol which was the first provably secure POS consensus protocol based on blockchains and show you the differences between this and the next level which is Uroboros praos. The next paper we published this year in Eurocrypt 2018 showing how to improve both the efficiency and security of the original Uroboros protocol. And then just a quick word about Uroboros Genesis which is the latest development in this series of papers and POS protocols which basically achieves all the characteristics of the Bitcoin blockchain while achieving the same security. And finally, I'll give you a little bit of a conclusion with thoughts for future works. Now to start this discussion, let's think about the issues that we have in POW based blockchains such as the Bitcoin blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain and other blockchains that are based on the original Nakamoto Bitcoin consensus protocol. Well, first of all, there's a clear distinction between the coin holders and the miners. In any proof-of-word based system, you have people who have actually invested their money in the system by buying tokens or even mining tokens occasionally and the professional miners, the people running professional mining farms where they generate new blocks and obtain some kind of profit from generating these new blocks. What happens is that the people who are generating new blocks who are running the mining farms are not necessarily the same people who have invested their money on the blockchain, on the POW based system. If you invest money on that, it doesn't mean you can generate the next blocks, it doesn't mean you can steer the evolution of the system, it doesn't mean that you have any control on the working of that blockchain. The people who actually control how the system works are the miners who can simply decide to run a 51% attack, destroy the blockchain or make it grow, make policy changes, change in the format of the protocol hard forks and so on. So there's a clear distinction between who controls the blockchain and who actually invested money on the blockchain. That happens with POW with all the POW based systems. Another problem is there are diminishing rewards for mining. We know that every many years the rewards for mining a new block are halved so you cut in half the rewards for the miners and that takes away their incentive for actually spending huge amounts of electric energy and of money in buying specialized hardware that makes the systems work. So what happens when these rewards reach zero or close to zero, when there's no more incentive for people to mine blocks? What happens to those systems? Nobody really knows. And more than separating the control between the miners and the people who invested money on the system, the control is not only separate from the investors but it's also very centralized. We now know that the whole Bitcoin network is controlled by a handful of Chinese mining pools. So if the great firewall of China decides to close on those miners or if they come obliged by the Chinese government to take certain actions, that could be the downfall of the Bitcoin system, for example. So it's not nice to actually have a decentralized system that is controlled by a very centralized pool of people. These are the main issues that we can find in current POW-based systems. And then we think what could we do to solve those issues? Well, an obvious direction is shifting from POW to other mechanisms to achieving blockchain-based consensus. The main mechanisms we know these days are proof of stake and proof of space and their variations. As the title of the talk says and as the Cardano project indicates, it's obvious that I'm going to focus on the proof of stake-based solution. Now, why do you want to do that? Well, first of all, proof of space is also a resource depletion proof. So you're proving that you're wasting your physical resources, in this case space, as you would prove that you're wasting your computation, computing all those hashes for the proof of work. And we would like to move to a model where we don't have energy waste, where we do not waste our resources, but we actually employ those resources to do something useful for the system, for the blockchain and for the community. So that's why we chose to focus on proof of stake early on in the development of the Cardano project. Now, let's compare a little bit of the advantages and the disadvantages of proof of work and proof of stake. First of all, with proof of work, you have something like, if you have more resources, if you have more hardware, if you have more electric energy, you have more control over the blockchain. If I have enough electric energy and a specialized hardware to mine more than 50% of the other people in the Bitcoin network, I can take it over. I can take over any other proof of work-based scheme. So the more resources you have, the more control you have. The more physical resources, mind you, not more financial resources on the system, not more investment, but the more physical resources of computation. It generates a huge energy waste. There are estimates that the whole Bitcoin mining pools spend more energy than the whole country of the Netherlands per day in mining blocks, which is not good. We do not want to spend precious natural resources and generate more pollution by running our blockchains. And also, as I said before, it can become quite centralized. On the other hand, in proof of stake, the more investment you have on the system, the more money you invest on the blockchain itself, the more you can control the system. So if you think some blockchain is good, if you think Cardano is a good project and you go and invest your hard-earned money on that project, you can actually be sure that you're steering the way the project is going and that by investing that, you get the voting power, let's say, to make the system work as opposed to having some random miner control the future of your investment. Also, it's energy efficient. All you need to generate a block in a proof of stake-based system is a signature in a couple of cryptographic operations that spend no data or energy at all. In fact, it could be running the Cardano system on my phone. The protocol is so lightweight that not even on my phone, this is a good phone, it could be running that on an old phone, on a raspi, on one of the first raspis. It's a very lightweight system. So you do not waste resources unnecessarily. And finally, the actual users, the investors, are the ones controlling the system, are the ones making sure that the system works to generate profit and to generate value and to actually make sure that the blockchain grows. Now, I've said all those good things about proof of stake, so let's get into a little bit of the basics of what you want from a proof of stake system and how it should work on a high level description. Oh, I'm sorry for the slides, whoever is into the Gibburi, the Japanese studio called the Gibburi Studios pictures, might recognize Totoro and Porcoroso and Chihiro. I had a very bumpy flight to the Netherlands, so it couldn't adjust the slides to something more Dutch friendly, but I hope this will go. Now, let's look at how those guys are going to interact in order to run a proof of stake based system. Now, we see that Totoro, the big mythical creature here has nine coins. Porcoroso in the middle has six coins, while Chihiro is very rich because she worked on that crazy God spa in the movie and she made, well, 15 coins. And as I said before, whoever has more coins in the system, whoever has invested more should be able to generate more blocks in a POS based system. But how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to run a lottery. We're going to run a lottery where the people who have more coins have a higher probability of winning. So Chihiro with her 15 coins to the right should have a much higher probability of winning this lottery than Porcoroso. And that's how the lottery is going to work. In order to generate a block, we run a lottery. Let's say it's selected Chihiro. So she gets to generate the next block. And that's what she does. So generates the next block, and now we need to figure out who's generating the next block after this one, block two. So we run the lottery, it's selected Totoro to the left, and he generates block B2. And we keep running this lottery every time we want the blockchain to grow. So instead of solving a proof-of-work puzzle, we are running a lottery that selects people who have money invested in the system, and they have a higher probability of winning that lottery, the more money they have invested. Yes? Exactly. That's a very good question. And that's what I'm going to tell you in the next few slides. So there are several ways to run the lottery, and nobody should be running the lottery centralizely because we want a decentralized system. So we're going to use cryptography to make the users of the system themselves run the lottery. If you think of it, those are techniques that come from the early 80s. And we have, of course, largely improved on them in order to make something that is efficient enough for something as large as Cordano. But that's a very good question. You cannot have a single authority or a single entity running that lottery. It must be decentralized. But now let's assume the lottery comes from the sky. The sun gives you the lottery, and that's how it works. And we keep running the lottery every time we want to grow this blockchain. Of course, Chihiro, to the right, is going to get elected more often. She's going to win the lottery more often than the other people because she has invested more. That's the first assumption we have. And we repeat this lottery over and over again for every block. So this is a basic mechanism of proof of stake, whereas opposed to proof of work, we're running this lottery that by now we're assuming that comes from the sky. Now, just a little bit of terminology. I guess you're going to read that in the Cordano documents and in the forums. The person who generates a block is called, in our protocol, a slot leader. So for every block to be generated, we say we have a time slot. And during that time slot, somebody gets to generate a block. So let's say that every 20 seconds the block should be generated. So we have a 20 seconds long time slot, and we select people through the lottery to generate the block that corresponds to each 20 seconds slot. And we call these people the slot leaders. And the lottery, we call the slot leader selection process, which is basically what it's doing. The lottery selecting whoever gets to be the slot leader and generate blocks. So what have we done towards making this reality, towards making this system truly secure? There have been several approaches to proof of stake-based systems in the previous years. Those systems have been discussed in forums. People have proposed ideas on how to implement them. But they had one really big problem. None of these proposals had a mathematical proof showing that they're actually secure. With the Bitcoin blockchain system, we can actually come up with a convincing mathematical proof that shows that as long as you have secure signature systems and cryptographically secure hash functions, we can achieve consensus. On the other hand, for the previous POS-based proposals, nobody was able to come up with that proof. And there's a very good reason for that, because it's actually a very complicated proof to write. So what we did in the course of the past three years or so was coming up with a system that is not only claimed by us to be secure, but can be proved mathematically to be secure and verified by other experts in the field that can check these proofs and make sure that what we claim to prove is actually true. Now, the first thing we came up with was a formal model for proof of stake-based system security. That's a paper we had in crypto 2017. That's one of the major cryptographic research conferences that's been running for almost 40 years. And we showed how to construct the first provably secure POS-based blockchain consensus protocol, which we called Uroboros. Uroboros in ancient Greek means a mythical creature that is basically a serpent that's eating its own tail. Why we call it that? The way we do the lottery, the way we construct this decentralized lottery, basically entails that the blockchain is generating new randomness for the lottery from its previous states. As if it's constantly eating its own tail to speed out more randomness. Now, this first paper was fine. We had a nice protocol, we can prove it secure, but it still had several caveats. And we solved them this year with the Uroboros PRAOS, which improved both the efficiency and the security of our previous proposal. And then you think, what is PRAOS? Again, from the ancient Greek, PRAOS means calm or relaxed. And this is the case because in the previous Uroboros protocol, the original one, we basically have to assume that all the users are online all the time and posting their messages as fast as they can. Basically, they are nervous, they have to act fast. Now, with the new proposal with the Uroboros PRAOS, we can have users there in a more real world setting where they basically go online and offline at times. I mean, you're not going to keep your cell phone or your computer running 24-7 just to keep Cardano running. So we have found out a way to keep security while achieving this more real-world scenario. And the current protocol using Cardano is still the first Uroboros. And we have plans in motion to move it to the next version of Uroboros PRAOS. And as I'm going to tell you in the end of the talk, we actually came up with an even better version called Uroboros Genesis. Now, what is the deal with Uroboros, the original protocol? First, we have to assume synchronicity, which means that we assume that everybody, whatever in the world they are, they have synchronized clocks.  It's the same thing. We assume that everybody has their computers running some synchronized clock so they know when to send their messages for making the lottery work and for generating blocks. Given this assumption, and given that we have standard cryptographic assumptions such as secure digital signatures and hash functions and so on, we prove that as long as the adversary does not control more than 50% of the whole stake in the system, meaning that the adversary does not own more than 50% of the tokens that exist in this system, we prove that the system will be as secure as Bitcoin, which is what we want. We want to be at least as secure as Bitcoin, right? We don't want to get something that's less secure. And we also need to assume, of course, that the adversary, in this case, does not get to automatically corrupt people. What does this mean? This means basically that once the adversary hacks into your computer, steals your secret keys and starts impersonating you on the protocol, you need to wait a little bit until he hacks into the next computer. That's basically this assumption. I guess you might be thinking, but this doesn't make any sense. People would just hack into my computer. They're not gonna wait for some delay. And, well, clocks on the internet, they are not synchronized. How can you properly synchronize a clock without very expensive technology? Are you gonna trust the NTP clock protocol? No, nobody trusts that. So those are not very good solutions, but we're gonna overcome that with Roboto Sprouse. Let's just take the simplifying assumptions for a moment and try to appreciate how we can use those to first build a simpler protocol and then go from those to a protocol that does not need to assume any of that. That just assumes the regular internet scenario. Now, the lottery. That's the main deal in POS protocols. How do you do the lottery? How do you select the people who get to generate the next block? We do that using this procedure called follow the Satoshi, where we get some random value, which I call here the seed, and having the seed, we evaluate the seed through a cryptographic hash function, H. That hash function is going to give you some outputs, and I'm assuming here that this output is between zero and the total number of Satoshi's in the blockchain. So the total number of the smallest division of coins in this blockchain. In the case of the Cardano project, let's think of it that the output of the hash function is something between one and the total number of ADAs, of ADA coins in the blockchain. Now, let's say this gave me ADA coin number I, and there's a guy who owns ADA coin number I, and there's a transaction in that block right there that shows that he owns ADA coin number I. So the guy who owns that ADA coin is the one who gets selected to generate the next block. Now, let's look at this process. If you select a number at random that represents each of the coins in the system, and the person who owns that coin gets to generate the next block, what does this mean? This means that if you have more coins, there's a higher probability that you will be selected by this process to generate the next block. These numbers I, that are being output by this process are completely random. So anybody has a chance to get selected. Any coin has a chance to get selected. All coins are selected with equal probability. So if you have more coins, you are going to be selected more often. So that's the idea of this process. But still we have a problem. How do we generate this random seeds? Where does this randomness come from? We cannot expect this randomness to fall from the sky or to come from the nest or to come from other organizations. We are running a decentralized system. We want this randomness to be decentralized by nature. Well, we're going to resort to great old blooms coin tossing by telephone protocol that's a protocol from 81 that allows any number of parties who communicate through the internet or telephone or any remote channel to generate uniformly random numbers. And we're going to use this idea to generate these seeds. So let's look a bit at the structure of the Autobotus protocol. Yes? Sorry, what if you select this random new block producer on another line? The block is not produced. That's it. So if you select somebody and they're not online and they're not respond within the slot, that block is not produced and you go to the next slot and if a block gets produced in that slot, it links to the previous two slots block. Let's see. So we need people to be online and that's why we have designed this feature called delegation where you can delegate the power to generate a block on your behalf to a third party. The third party cannot spend your money. The third party cannot do anything with your money or your coins. All it can do is represent you in the block generation and you're going to get part of their rewards. So the rewards are split between you and the third party and that maintain security. Does that answer good? So let's look a little bit at the protocol and that touches on the question you asked. We have the protocol divided in epochs. So we divide time in several epochs and we further subdivide these epochs into slots. So each epoch has a number of slots and on each slot, a block is produced. As in every blockchain system, we start from a Genesis block, the block that was there before the beginning of time. So we have block B zero, which is going to include a description of all the coins that are available in the system and the people who own those coins. So you have a description of user number one owns this many coins. User number N owns this many coins. That description is hard coded into the Genesis block and furthermore, the Genesis block is going to include randomness that fell from the sky that we can't get rid of. As in Bitcoin or in other protocols, we need to assume we have an initial block that tells the truth and we're going to assume that in this block, we have this randomness that came from the sky. Now, what do we do for every block, whoever is elected by using this randomness in the follow the Satoshi process, meaning hash this randomness through the cryptographic hash function, get a number between one and the total number of coins in the system and let the person who owns that coin generate the next block. We do that and we generate the blocks for this one epoch. In the first slot, nobody was online. The guy who was elected here wasn't online. No block was generated. So we go to the next slot. This guy was online, a block was generated. The next guy was online, a block was generated. Again, the guy wasn't online, no block was generated and you proceed with the protocol. We have one problem here. We are using this list of people who own coins and this fixed randomness to select the people who generate the next block. But people are going to be conducting transactions and exchanging coins between themselves. So this list is going to become out of date. I say here that user one has this many coins, but let's say that in this block, user one transfer all his coins and now he doesn't hold any more stake. But throughout the end of this epoch, he will still be selected to generate blocks as if he still owned, as if he still controlled all these coins. We need to do that in order to achieve security. That's a cave yet we have to deal with. But of course, we don't want this out of date list to persist through the whole protocol. And that's why I divide time in epochs. The idea is by the end of this epoch, we're going to update this list and we're going to generate a new random value. Updating the list is very easy, right? We have the list of transactions in every single block. So we just read all the blocks in one epoch and we know whoever owns the coins. I'm not going to go into details on how this randomness is generated. I just want to tell you a little bit about how this is an extra Japanese expression that says, well, Mendoza, explaining this proofs is too complicated to do now. But it actually is. We have 40 pages of mathematical proofs in the paper. But well, these papers have been published in major cryptographic conferences and people believe, other experts believe they are correct. So that's how we get assurance in these cases. Yeah, it's peer reviewed by other experts. So let me just tell you a little bit about what we improve because I had a lot of caveats in the first protocol. So first of all, in Roboto Sprouls, we don't need this synchronicity assumption anymore. We can just work in a regular internet model. Everybody's desynchronized. Nobody knows what time is in the other end of the world. Nobody knows that the computers have a synchronized clock. And also, we can assume that we have hackers that hack you instantly. You have hackers that can hack up to 50% of all the stake that can gain control of up to 50% of the stake immediately and adaptively choose who they're going to hack, which is the real world. So now we can work in the actual internet while retaining the same security guarantees. And we do that via a number of new techniques of selecting the slot leader, whoever generates the block in a different way where you do not know who's going to generate the block in the epoch in advance. We need different cryptographic techniques for that. And we show that we can generate the randomness for the lottery in a different way. Now, let me jump the cryptography on that. That's a bit more technical on how we do that and get to the next step. So the robotics prowess, even though we solved those other problems, we actually still had one big caveat. We had to assume that the users that joined the system, the new users who just joined the system, they had not been running this blockchain before that they would need somebody that they trust to give them intermediate states of the system. So intermediate blocks so that they can check that the chains they're receiving are correct. And that's not so nice, right? We want to be able to bootstrap the whole blockchain just from the Genesis block and by knowing the protocol rules. And with the robotics Genesis, it's solved while also achieving this kind of security called universal composability, which means that the protocol can be running parallel with any other protocol and inside other protocols and so on, which is a more real world thing. The universal composability for this case is achieved basically by adapting the techniques from Urovoros, prowess, and security without checkpoints, meaning you bootstrap just from the Genesis block is achieved by using a different chain selection rule. So usually you use the longest chain rule where you pick the chain that has the most blocks. And that's easier to analyze mathematically and so on, but that doesn't give you the best guarantees. In Urovoros Genesis, there's a more sophisticated chain selection rule that allows you to bootstrap directly from the Genesis block without intermediate trusted checkpoints. So that's where we are right now. So basically we are at the same security level of Bitcoin, while using a tiny fraction of the energy and achieving much more transactions per second. The benchmarks, as far as I know, are getting to at least 100 transactions per second for the Urovoros protocols while Bitcoin does six transactions per second. And this 100 transactions per second was a benchmark run on a not optimized implementation two years ago or so. So I'm pretty sure that the current Cardano implementation is even better than what I used as a researcher to evaluate the performance. Now, this is basically the message that I would like to leave today, that we can get the same security as Bitcoin with much less energy and while achieving better performance. And we, how we do that by using a lot of cryptographic techniques, they're well understood and most importantly, mathematically proven to be correct. So it's not just me standing here and promising that this is secure. We actually have mathematical proofs that this is secure and those proofs have been checked by the best experts in the world who are in the program committees that select papers who get published in these conferences through a very strict peer review process. And if you're interested in more details about how these protocols work, of course, you're very welcome to send me an email and also take a look at our papers which are all publicly available in the ePrint server from the International Association for Cryptologic Research. We have all the original Uroboros, Uroboros-Praos and Uroboros-Genesis papers publicly available at these addresses. And we're always open to answering questions here or by email or by pigeon carriage, whatever you want. I'm very happy to talk about these protocols and to answer any concerns you might have. So that's it. Thanks for your attention. Thanks for having me here in Rotterdam. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to this session in which we will discuss property transaction for tax purposes. For income tax purposes, when dealing with any type of property, it's important to determine four things before we know the tax consequences of that property transaction. Now this topic is important whether you are a CPA candidate, enrolled agent or an accounting student. First, we need to know what type of property are we dealing with, the type and we'll have to discuss two, the basis. What are the basis of the property? And we will discuss this and we're going to discuss this much, much more in detail basis of property later on. Three, holding period. How long you had this property? And four, the acquired method. How did you purchase this property? Starting with the basis of the property in general, the basis represent the amount that the taxpayer invested in that property. What do you usually invest? Well, usually you pay cash for the property. Sometime you may pay a property, like you may pay for a property, purchase a property and at the same time, you assume some debt, you take over the debt of that property. That's also part of your investment because you really cannot own the property unless you pay off the debt. Sometime the value of other assets or services provided is the amount of your investment. So when you want to buy something, you don't have the money to pay, you provide a service. Well, the value of that service or you exchange it with an asset, the value of that is your basis. So this is the general rule. Don't worry, we're going to have to work much, much more with basis. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company, farhatlectures.com. Farhat accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation, as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today, no obligation, no credit card required. Why do we have to learn about the basis? Well, the basis is important in so many different ways. To compute depreciation for the asset, amortization or depletion, you need to know the basis. So there is no way you can compute those without knowing the basis. Two, if you have any casualty loss, which are losses resulting from unforeseen catastrophic events, you need to determine your basis in order to determine your loss. The amount of gain or loss realized from the sale, exchange, or disposition of the property. So when you sell this property down the road, or when you exchange it, or when you just simply dispose of it, you need to compute whether you have a gain or a loss. You cannot compute the gain or the loss without knowing the basis. So hopefully you understand the importance of the basis. So that's why we emphasize a lot the concept of basis. The holding period is something you need to be familiar with. It goes hand in hand with the basis, goes hand in hand with the property transaction. Simply put, how long you held this property? Now, why is that important? It's important for tax purposes because Uncle Sam, the government, they want you to either pay more or less taxes. Simply put, we have what's called short term and long term treatment. If you hold the property for usually a year or less, it's short term. More, it's long term. So you have to understand the holding period is important because after you determine your gain or your loss, you have to determine whether that gain or loss is short term or whether this gain or loss is long term. So that's why. So basis and holding periods are important, extremely important. And we're going to talk much, much more about the basis because remember, we can be exchanging properties. We can be buying properties. We could be assuming that. So we need to know how to compute the basis. The second important topic, not the second, but the other topic that we need to be familiar with is the type of property, which I believe this is the third. We talked about basis, we talked about holding period, the type of property. We break down the type of properties into two types. So it's two main types, which are real property or realty and personal property or personality. It doesn't matter. I'm going to call it real property and personal property. Now, we need to differentiate between those two. It's important to understand both. What is a real property? Real properties are generally defined as land and building and they are permanently affixed to the, like they cannot be moved. They cannot be moved, affixed to it, to the land. While personal property, any asset that's not real property. So personal properties could include furniture, machinery, equipment, and many other type of assets, which is not real. Real, you cannot move it around. Can you move this desk around? Yes, yes, I can. I can move this desk around. Can you move this building? No, you cannot move this building. This is a real property. Can you move this van? Yes, you can move this van, but you cannot move the building. So the first thing I want you to understand is the idea that we have two types of property, real and personal property. That's the first thing. You also have to understand that personal property is different than another term, personal use property. What is a personal use property? Personal use property is any property, whether it's real or personal, that is held for personal use rather than the use in a trade or business or income producing activity. Let me explain. I have this desk here, right here. This is the desk. Well, this desk is personal use property. I use it in my office. Not in my office. I use it in my home. Let's not even call it. I use it in my office. If I use this desk to browse the internet, send email to friends and relatives, and just for entertainment, play games on this computer, use the desk for my personal use, it's a personal use desk. Or I can take the same desk and use it as my office. It's the same desk. Now it becomes personal property. So this desk could be personal use. This desk could be personal property. I could also have this desk. If I'm selling desks, this desk could be part of my inventory as well. So notice it's the same desk could be a personal use property, or it could be personal property used in a trade or a business or income producing activity. So it's not about the asset itself, it's the usage of it. So make sure you're aware of this. And if we go back to this van, I have this van. I could use this van for personal use, or this van could be used for business, for delivery, which become personal property. Okay, so just make sure you differentiate that you have to understand that the same asset could be used in more than just not just for personal use, it could be personal use and business use. Now, sometimes you might have a property, uses a property for business or investment purpose, and at the same time, for personal use, for example, your vehicle, you can you could be using your vehicle for business purposes, and you could be using the same vehicle for personal use. Under those circumstances, when you have those situation, the basis must be allocated based on the property use. So we'll deal with that later. But the point is you might be asking, what if I have the same asset like a delivery truck, and I'm using for both. Okay, only the basis allocated to the business or investment is the amount that's depreciable. And we'll talk about that much later on. I just want you to know that this is something that we have to be familiar with. The fourth item that we need to be familiar with is how did we acquire the property that matters? Well, how do we acquire property? We buy them, regular purchase or acquisition, we just go into the store, go online, go through the catalog and buy something. Or we can provide a service in exchange for that property. So rather than paying for it, I can provide you a service and in return, you'll give me the property. It could be you could get a property in an inheritance, you know, your, your, your uncle, aunts, grandpa, grandma passed away, and they will give you this property in a form of inheritance. Someone can gift it to you simply put giving you a gift, or it could be a like kind exchange transaction. Basically, you exchange your property for another property. And guess what? We have to be familiar with all sorts of acquisition method. So down the road, I'm going to have a session about a regular purchase, what's included in the basis, what's not in exchange for services and inheritance, a gift, a like kind exchange. So how you compute the basis for different type of property that depend on many things. What should you do now? Go to far hat lectures and look at additional MCQs, multiple choice exercises that's going to help you understand the stopping better.  Good luck. Study hard, stay safe.


Welcome to JSA TV, live from PTC 23, the newsroom for tech, telecom, and data center professionals. I'm Buffy Herakides, and joining me today is John Greenwood, SVP of Corporate Strategy for Lincoln Rack House. John, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you. Appreciate the partnership with JSA. Yeah, we appreciate it as well. Is this your first time here at PTC? No, we come every year, but yeah, so it's an annual event. So what do you think about this year, bigger than ever, huh? Bigger than ever, yeah, it's been great. It's definitely the best PTC ever here in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii, and so glad to have you here on JSA TV. So for viewers that might not already know, but I'm sure many of them already do, can you tell us a little bit more about Lincoln Rack House? Yeah, so Lincoln Rack House is the data center division of Lincoln Property Company. Lincoln Property Company was established in 1965, has 8,000 employees, about 80 billion in assets under management. It's one of the largest and most respected real estate firms in the US. And so we're building out a mission critical data center practice underneath that umbrella. But the good thing about that is that Lincoln has invested heavily in industrial side as well. And there is a strategy to combine in certain markets, data center and industrial together, for speed of delivery and access to new markets quicker. Yeah, speed is everything now in today's data center market for sure. Yeah, and you recently joined Lincoln Rack House among several other executives there. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your role and what you plan to do for Lincoln Rack House? So we're very focused on the next phase of growth for Lincoln Rack House. I'd break it into three categories. One is acquisition, acquisition of land to continue to build out data center hyper scale campuses, but also acquisitions of companies to round out our portfolio of services and capabilities and build scale. The second part of that is a build to suit capability that we can perform for clients really anywhere in the world because of our access to capital. And then the third part is an existing portfolio of data centers with really immediate inventory that's ready to go. So we operate in Dallas, Kansas City, Atlanta, Silver Spring, Maryland and London. And in each one of those data centers we have multiple megawatts that's ready to go moving ready tomorrow. And in today's era of supply chain headwinds and constrained capacity, it's an advantage for us to have that type of immediate inventory ready to go. That's definitely an advantage in today's market for sure. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about a recent development in Ohio? Yeah. So we are partnered with Harrison Street in a tract of land, 190 acres outside of Columbus in New Albany. And we're currently underway building a 300 MVA substation. Well, first tranche of capacity will be available later in 2024, but we're really excited about that market. It is one of the top internet cloud operation markets in the world. It is, yes. And so we're having, I mean, at the event today, a lot of conversations about partnering with various companies and having good conversations with end user hyperscale companies on that land and on the property. And we're just real excited about New Albany. Yeah, it sounds very exciting, especially in today's market where that region is definitely booming and you're seeing more hyperscale growth and more digital transformation across many different verticals and organizations there in that Ohio market. But aside from Ohio, there's been some activity for Lincoln Rack House in Atlanta. Yeah, Atlanta. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, so that's another really attractive market that's growing rapidly. And we made an acquisition of an existing site. It has five megawatts that's ready to go, but we're also, it's on a campus. So we're going to continue to build out that campus. Okay. Phase two is what we're calling it and that'll have another 10 to 12 megawatts of capacity that we add to it. But we're bullish on Atlanta as well and we'll continue to invest in that market. For sure. Well, it sounds like 2023 is off to a great start, especially having you as the corporate strategist there. Yeah. So congratulations on your role with Lincoln Rack House and we wish you much success. We're so happy to have you here at PTC and of course as a JSA partner. So is there anything else that you wanted to add? No, I think, well, yes. Lincoln Rack House I think is poised extremely well as we look at our 10-year plan and look down the road at what we're capable of doing inside this umbrella of Lincoln Property Company. So I'm excited to make some more announcements in the months and years ahead of growth. So we're really excited about it. The viewers should stay tuned for many more announcements coming in 2023 and beyond from Lincoln Rack House. So John, thanks again for joining us. Thank you. Where can viewers go to find more and stay tuned for some of those upcoming announcements? Yeah, just linkinrackhouse.com. Lincolnrackhouse.com, Twitter, LinkedIn. LinkedIn, Twitter, all of the above. So be sure to follow Lincoln Rack House on all of the above. LinkedIn, Twitter and Lincolnrackhouse.com. And thank you viewers for tuning in to another fabulous episode of JSA TV from PTC 23 in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii. Happy networking. Thank you.


All my life, I only had a job for about 17 months, and that was not even a proper job because I was fortunate to be treated like a king, which is unusual for most employees.  I hated it. Yeah, some of you watching this video may think that I'm lazy, and you're probably right. Maybe I'm lazy, but maybe I'm not wired to be an employee. In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you some of the reasons why you might hate your job, and I'll try to suggest a few things I think you can do. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe so that you won't miss other interesting videos like this.  In other words, humans are created so differently. I'm different from you. You're very much different from me.  The number one reason why you may not love your job is that maybe you're not wired to be an employee. This is the thing. Some people were designed by God in such a way that it makes them love everything about taking an order and being submissive to a boss. They love it and that's their life, but for other people, they hate to be ordered around. They hate to have any authority over their lives. They love control.  Think about this.  Of what you hate about your job is the fact that someone tells you what to do? It's not your fault. Maybe you're wired to hate being ordered around and that's fine. Stubbornness and freedom. Now, there's good news. Most people who love to be on their own are usually very stubborn individuals.   In my observation, people who hate to be ordered around are usually very obstinate and stubborn individuals. This is good news because being stubborn is one of the important attributes of every entrepreneur.  The bird that can't swim. One day, a farmer stole an eagle's eggs and added them to his hen's eggs. The hen hatched the eagle's eggs and the little eagles grew up together with the chicken. Since these little eagles never saw any of their assumed siblings flying, they never for once tried to fly. Unfortunately, all these eagles died without ever flying. This is what is happening today. Yes, not everyone can be an entrepreneur but too many people who can be entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs because like that farmer, the society and school have stolen them away from their rightful position. Many people who ought to be successful entrepreneurs are now unhappy employees because right from when they were three years old, everyone around them had always been telling them about good grades and good jobs.  However, if you're a grown up adult when you watch this video, you have a lot of work to do.  When people are seventeen, they are not only young in bones, their brains are yet to be permanently conditioned to believe certain things about life and money. When people are forty-five, they have spent more than twenty-five years as adults. These people have consumed all outlets of media where everyone blames the president of their country for their poverty. They have made friends with a lot of poor people who have unknowingly infected them with a lot of negativism. They have been through several schools where the only message is about good jobs. Now, the problem people have about being an entrepreneur when they're forty or forty-five isn't about their physical buddies, the real problem is about your mind because for you to learn a new thing, you have to unlearn the old stuff. You can't believe in a good job and at the same time believe in creating those jobs. You can't believe in an easy life where someone takes care of you and still believe in entrepreneurship where you take care of others. You can't believe spending money as fast as you make it and also believe in delayed gratification which is what entrepreneurship is all about.  Reading books written by entrepreneurs may be the best place to start. Waking up early and the problem with colleagues A few other reasons why you may hate your job is because you have to wake up early and run out or because you don't like the people you work with. Some other people complain about the fact that they feel that they are not appreciated enough by their employers. Some feel that they are underpaid. Unfortunately, not all of these problems can be easily solved. For instance, if anyone thinks that he is underpaid then that's a difficult problem to solve because it's about individuals.  You're also responsible for the fact that you're not appreciated enough. You're the reason why your employer asks you to resume work at fixed hours. Now that I've made a few people angry, because I blame them for what they think is not their fault, let me explain what I mean. You see, nobody cares about you. I say this repeatedly on this channel and most people don't understand what I mean. When I say nobody cares about you, that's not to mean that your mother, siblings or some friends don't love you. But here's the thing, you don't work for your mother and your wife isn't your boss. If a few people may like or love you when you're at home, that's not where you spend most of your time. Most of your time is spent right in the jungle, in the business world or at your work in place.  Being strong means having great value to offer. Being strong means having skills and knowledge which most people don't have. I am an employer and I can tell you this. Every employer has indispensable employees and treats those indispensable employees very differently. I've said it before on this channel and I want to repeat it. Your goal in life should be to become an entrepreneur or an indispensable employee. These two are difficult and tough but if you can't become either of the two, you'll have most things you need out of life. Go in conclusion.  Regardless of what the issues are, there are only two solutions. Build your own business or become an indispensable employee. These two require that you have skills, courage and determination which most people don't have. You can do it if you think you can do it. Did you enjoy this video? Then you'll enjoy our other channel about money. We call it Money TV. Kindly look at the description box to join the Money TV. We love you.


I mean just get like just fights in that Taking drugs. The kickstart program is just to basically get the young people off the streets on their own bikes The reason it started is because there's a lot of people driving off-road motorcycles on on the road Which is very dangerous, especially without a license I'm actually pretty glad that I was on a program because it's changed me because it actually like gave me motivation to stay out of trouble, so it's basically me Not going on my bike or staying at home and I'd rather be on my bike You know if you looked at me two three years ago I was a totally different person, you know what I mean? I didn't go to school or that, but I used to be a quiet person that but I'm a bit chatty now You know what I mean? Like I chat to everyone here asking how they're doing. The people here are absolutely amazing like they've led Such a long way to help me out and I just can't thank them more enough, you know next steps is to possibly get a trade in the Mechanical industry, just because I love motorbikes, you know a car just a motorbike and anything on an edge, you know That's just what I want to do in life, you know just fixed bikes, cars Motocross has just changed me because it's just a passion, you know I mean it's just something that I've always wanted to do and I've finally managed to at least Take a step in the right way instead of the wrong way Which is just constantly giving me more motivation just to keep going and just fight for what you want to do


My role as speaker, as is true of my work in the chamber more widely when chairing debates, is not to take sides, not to be on one side or the other, not in other words to be a player, but to serve as the referee of the match. Everybody wants to get the attention of the speaker. Whoever's in the chair, you know, whether it's the deputy, whether it's the speaker himself, and people to get noticed, stand up. It's very much for the chair to choose who to call. Members will stand up each time someone sits down. And I'm looking around to see who's standing up, and I then have to decide who to call. How do I decide? Well, I go back and forth from one side to the other, so there's a mix between government and opposition. I'm looking to call members of parliament from different intakes, not just from people who came in 40 years ago, but from people who came in two years ago. I'm looking to get a geographical spread, and to some extent I'm looking to call people expressing a range of different views. The speaker and the people in the chair referred to as Mr. Speaker or Madam Deputy Speaker, Mr. Deputy Speaker. There's very little use of individual surnames. That's because only the speaker will call a member by name. Other members will refer to people on their benches as my honourable friend or the honourable member for a constituency. Does my right honourable friend suppose? And for members opposite, normally is the honourable, may your gentleman, or again, my constituency. Votes in parliament are often referred to as divisions. At the end of a debate, typically the speaker will say, the question is as on the order paper, as many as other opinions say I, and people will yell I. Of the contrary, no. And very often members will yell no. And at that point the speaker in the chair says division, clear the lobbies. Voting's really exciting. And first of all, you have the division bell ringing and you have that all around the parliamentary estate. So wherever you are in parliament, you hear the division bell going and you have eight minutes to when the doors are shut. And so the doorkeepers who keep the doors open after the eight minutes have finished shout, lock the doors. And then if you're not, if you haven't made it, you've missed the vote. We divide and you either in support of whatever the issue happens to be. So you're going to the I lobby or you're against. So you're going to the no lobby. And that's how we divide. And we physically divide, by the way, i.e. we walk through the division lobbies and have our names noted off a big list of paper or all the MPs. At first, when I came to Parliament, I thought, you know, this is a cumbersome and clunky way of doing things. But actually now, after being here for two years, I find it an incredibly useful way for being able to get hold of a minister. Because if I have a particular issue that I would like to raise with that minister that my constituents are concerned about as a backbencher, it's one of the useful, less formal tools.


What is going on guys? It's your boy DPJ here today with another Destiny video and in today's Destiny video I'm going to put another exotic weapon on the line for a challenge put forth to me by a subscriber and I'll show you guys the challenge right now and the challenge is by Mr Mark for the win. Sniper only challenge, have to use a no-land beyond and Blackhammer, no melee or supers must get 10 kills if not all faction shaders and your fate bring out all icebreaker goals. Well I will put my icebreaker underline, I don't have 10 faction shaders to be honest I only have three so uh icebreaker will be underline it's as simple as that. I shouldn't be able to get 10 kills with no-land beyond uh and Blackhammer, I should be able to depends on the map please don't put me into the middle of a game because I will back out and search for another one but if you guys do have a challenge for me leave it down below in that comment section if you guys do enjoy these videos if you couldn't leave a like I would appreciate the support now I think it may put me into the middle of a game here as long as there's about two three thousand score on the scoreboard nothing more I'm happy with it.


3-9-0. Here's a first down pass. Deep for Julio Jones. And he's got it inside the 35 yard line. You know, help, deep ball. Julio Jones. Second down, Ryan hit by Adam's dangerous ball as it was fluttering for Julio Jones. And somehow, he came down with it. Here comes the Blitz. Ryan sees it, throws it, and it's somehow caught by Jones, who gets up and motors his way down to the 21. Julio Jones hauls it in. It's a pressure able to get it away and out to Julio Jones. And Jones does the rest. Jake Matthews also, good job leading the way. Little bit of a high snap. Ryan, is he going to run? No, he's going to try to dump it on the top, but he's got home. And now Ryan, instead of going conservative, he goes back to the air and finds Julio Jones. Goodness, fourth down and long. Ryan looking. Jones has got it. On a fourth and 13, Julio Jones, who just came back in the game with a bad hamstring, delivers. And the Detroit Lions, 9-0. Second down and four, play action. Ryan sets, and now he throws. It's complete for a first down. It's Julio Jones again. Dean plays to 31 for the Saints. Play action on first down, as Ryan goes deep. It's Julio Jones in Saints territory. And he's finally grabbed out of bounds, inside the 30-yard line. So on first down, over there for Calvin Ridley. Third down, adding 11. Ryan looking. Now he throws, and Julio Jones makes the catch. Run up ladder first down.


We took turns kicking at the old man's shoe and watched his leg shake for a second before it went limp again Yeah, I think this one's done said my partner Clarkson I reached towards the man's neck for a pulse and covered my nose to guard against the smell of rotten meat Left out in the sun for too long. I found nothing there But stillness and the odd sensation of cold skin I patted his pockets for a wallet something that might have been identification, but didn't find anything Clarkson reached for his walkie and called it in Dispatched can we get an EMS on scene? We're in the alleyway by East 4th and Drake across from O'Grady's We both took a step back and look the man over He was sitting on the ground with his back to the wall like he'd fallen and decided to remain there I noticed his shirt was unbuttoned and through the opening between the buttons I could see some swelling along his stomach. I reasoned it might be bloating from the body decomposing Nobody ever said that death had dignity I took a closer look and noticed dime sized holes littered across the flesh of his stomach What do you think that is? I asked Clarkson track marks or something Clarkson shrugged and rubbed his neck a few feet away cicadas chirped from a cluster of trees near the park Geez Remarked Clarkson those are so loud. I can't hear myself think that's a big 10 for I said We were both starting to sweat standing in the encroaching heat of the summer with our full gear on We were both tired and eager to go home as we'd been patrolling all night We were just about to close shop when someone called in about an unresponsive person Did you know cicadas basically wait for 17 years underground sucking on tree sap until they emerge?  I said wrinkling my nose and disgust They're supposed to be related to crustaceans and taste like asparagus You couldn't pay me to do that said Clarkson. I won't even eat asparagus normally I laughed and shook my head Come on man. What are you five? I'll eat beans peas lettuce spinach other greens like that But I don't screw with asparagus or kale or brussel sprouts for that matter It's all about the preparation. I said your roast the sprouts and some salt and butter add in some nice bacon or pancetta And you'll have a good time trust me Clarkson shrugged we were both tired and trying to keep our energy up Just as we started to get restless EMS arrived on the scene Two paramedics shuffled out of the ambulance carrying bags We exchanged some nods and motioned over to our guest They checked him over listened for a heartbeat and reached the same conclusion we had You know Said one of the medics Those cicadas are so loud. I thought I could hear them through my stethoscope Yep, they are loud as hell remarked Clarkson as he dug his hands into the neck of his vest Is hayward on duty? I asked he was our primary medical examiner The guy we called out to scenes when we couldn't be sure about what killed someone and the guy that transported the bodies to the morgue Well, not always directly Sometimes he had aids that would show up in a black van to ferry them away like the caron across the river sticks Clarkson shook his head Don't know I grabbed my phone and called up hayward. He answered after a few rings Yeah, I'm a bit preoccupied at the moment But if you don't think the guy was murdered You could just have the paramedics move him to the morgue and I'll swing by later to do an exam I looked over to our mystery person I knew the proper protocol was for hayward to come to the scene and look the body over before it was moved That someone should document the scene and take photos In case we missed something But I was so tired For all I knew the guy was homeless and died from heat exhaustion I turned to the two paramedics who were getting ready to leave Listen, I know this isn't what you normally do But could you bring this guy to the morgue?  He's the one who suggested it I guess that was enough They brought out a stretcher from the ambulance and set it down next to the man All right, help me move him over one of the medics said and got into position One of them grabbed the guy by the shoulders and the other one grabbed the legs What happened next? I'll never forget in all my life Two paramedics Lifting a decomposing corpse from the ground were the only thing keeping the body together Was the pressure of the wall which prevented the body's innards from spilling out in a heaping meat stew Because you see All the skin tissue and muscle had been mostly removed from the body's lower back It had been chewed through to the point that there were two Substantial entry points around the sides of their exposed spine Like a fishbone with the head still attached Oh my god Said one of the paramedics He dropped the body and took a giant step back The body slumped against the ground with a grotesque splat The other medic ripped her gloves off in revulsion and threw them on top of the dead body I gagged Clarkson vomited and that wasn't even the worst part not by a damn mile The same cacophony of chirping in buzzing we'd heard from the park was now emanating From within the body like it was a human cello I wasn't sure what the hell was going on. It seemed like the guy's whole body was vibrating And that's when his engorged stomach popped like a balloon or exploded rather And a swirling black mass of gore covered insects took flight into the air Not a damn person fully understood what was happening Not until one of the paramedics hightailed it to the ambulance The other one raised her hands to protect herself They swarmed around one of her hands and at first I couldn't tell what they were doing Not until I heard the paramedic start shrieking I'd never once heard about cicadas ever hurting a person And here they were tearing the flesh off a person's arms like it was a turkey leg The only thing I could think of is that in those 17 years they decided on a new source of sustenance Us we stood with our guns drawn but helpless What would a few bullets do to a swarming mob of insects? They wouldn't even comprehend that we were a threat It had never occurred to me just how much we relied on the image of a gun To intimidate a person into cooperating There was no reasoning or understanding here Just a hardwired instinct to consume and destroy We fired wide aiming at the edges of the swarm In case it would be enough to scare them off the poor paramedic who was getting shredded I could have sworn that I saw some of my bullets hit some of the swarm and ricochet As if while they were modeling inside of the human tree They developed a much harder exoskeleton There came a beeping sound from the ambulance likely from the other medic colliding with the wheel and his desperation to escape The cicadas swirled away from the medic they'd been feasting on and flew to the ambulance door that was still hanging open He tried to close it but he was too late The whole brood squeezed into the crack of the door and all we could hear were muffled screams and yells The ambulance took off and crashed into the wall We ran over unsure if we could even do anything to help Blood splattered on the windows and we could see his bloody hand banging on the windshield Before long it was mostly bone I sprinted over to the door that was still partially open and threw my weight into it slamming it closed Clarkson took aim at the window Don't I grunted we'll just make holes for them to escape if we shoot The ambulance's horn blared likely because the medic had collapsed onto the wheel I felt guilty but if we tried to rescue him the same thing would have happened to us Clarkson and I turned to the medic that had been attacked first She was still breathing but gravely injured We carefully dragged her to the police car then lifted her into the back seat Her arm was a mess and blood was pouring from tiny wounds all over her body We climbed into the police cruiser and tried to catch our breath Tried to make sense of what had just happened So what they're just eating people now?  She asked clutching her torn up hand I guess some of the cicadas decided to show up a little different this time I said and wiped the sweat from my forehead Chuckling a bit in my delirium This was insane I just watched cicadas rip a person apart And here I'd been worried about a bunch of dead ones piling up on my doorstep Across the way from us I could see little cracks forming in the windows of the ambulance Oh my god, I breathe I think they're trying to break the glass How strong are these things man? Do you know what it would take for an insect to be able to do that?  Kill it With fire The ambulance erupted in a cacophony of Wining metal and shattered glass The windshield blew out And I could see the fire rolling over the swarm inside Whatever resistance they developed Didn't seem to handle heat well Their gossamer wings burned up And they crashed down into the fire I blew out a sigh of relief But then a lone straggler flew out of the flaming car I held my breath, hoping the bug would crash into the ground like the others had It didn't It dipped into the air and took off I knew that cicadas had a short lifespan I could only hope that the fire had done enough damage to it That it wouldn't be able to breed We took the remaining paramedic to the hospital And heard that she would be able to recover from her injuries After that, there were several people that interviewed us back at the PD Many of which never gave us an actual name or form of identification But the way they spoke seemed to indicate That this wasn't an isolated incident We saw them later taking flame throwers to the trees in the park The one that had been by the alleyway They turned the ground over and covered it in cement They took care of the burning ambulance and our mystery guest We never found out who he was either I can't say what it all means But I think one thing is for sure I hate cicadas Mind yourselves out there It's probably going to be a rough couple of weeks I'm not working And neither is Clarkson


emails that we've all been receiving on the topic as well as probably a lot of the arguments we've seen playing out not only on the national stage, but also here in Longmont as well just probably amongst, I mean, my parents' household, for instance, is a bit divided on the issue, for instance. So we see this even at personal levels, kind of the disagreements that go on. And I also think that when we talk about data-driven decisions, I think that we're all right in the fact that the data has continually changed. That is part of this being a novel coronavirus is that we don't have good data. And we can only hope the data continues to get better. I think that's the real hope here. And so we can continue to make better data-driven decisions. One thing that I think we can all agree on is that restrictions are easy at the state level. I think I'm pretty sure the county has said they're not extending stay-at-home order past the eighth. And so we know that restrictions are going to start lifting. I believe as restrictions lift, it's only prudent for precautions to increase. We're not further restricting business by having masks being worn. In fact, it should be the opposite. We should be having businesses open up more freely with social distancing and with masks being worn. It's something I've actually talked to many people about is I don't think we necessarily need to close down businesses at the level that we did if we did maintain good social distancing. And we did take further precautions, specifically with office buildings. I feel that was an easy one where you can maintain social distancing and work in a safe manner. And I think that we see that coming as these restrictions are being lifted at the state and local levels. And so I don't find it too much an infringement on people's rights as it is an ask for us to return to more of a sense of normalcy and to get back to an economic system that's more sustainable. I think that's a small price to pay to get back to the economic normalcy that so many people right and left are actually yearning for. I understand the anxieties that are coming with it. Everyone's anxious for one reason or another, be it your health, be it the economy and providing, be it your housing. There's so many anxieties right now, this level. And again, like I just wanna reiterate, we don't have the best data. And when we do have good data, it changes. When they decide to report differently, it changes. So again, this is just a plea with people to have patience. Have patience for other people around you. Have patience for us as your council and your policymakers, we don't all agree. And we are trying to do the best job we can with the data that we're given and the data is changing consistently. We're not sitting in a layer dreaming up ways to make your life more difficult. That is not what we're trying to do. And we're not on some weird payroll to make your lives more difficult. That is not the point of the policies that we discuss and that we enact. We are trying to do the most amount of good for the most amount of people as council member Waters previously said. So I hope that we can at least just move to a vote on this and understand that, yes, we're not going to all agree. I don't think I necessarily, while I am voting for this with the majority of the council, it appears, I don't think I even necessarily agree with some of the things that we've all said, but I don't think this is neither, either at the time or the place to go into a debate on those issues rather as a point just to, let's have a vote and move forward because the budget is going to be a lot of fun, I know. And just to be clear, my comments were not about yes masks or no masks. I am wearing a mask in public. I am committed to following the orders of the governor and the local county health department. My office is using them. My family uses them. My comments were not about no masks. My comments were about following the governor and following and leaving it in the hands of the local health departments. That's my opinion. And so a lot of the response was about mask versus no mask. Just to be clear in the paper as you hear this John Friar in the Times call, it's not, I'm not advocating no masks. I'm advocating that anyway, just leave it up to others. But let's go ahead and have a vote. So the motion, do we have a motion? We do, right? Who made that? Yes, mayor, you have a motion. Tim Waters made the motion. Yeah, all right. So the motion on the floor is a bill for an ordinance submitting section 10.08.108, the Wal-Mart-Muse-Pakotin Disaster and Emergency Orders which allows Harold to issue orders in emergencies requiring the public to use PPE. So all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay, nay. All right, the motion passes six to one with myself dissenting. All right, let's go on to general business. 2021 budget planning. Harold, you're gonna make any comments first? Go for it and then I'll jump in. Okay, Mayor Bagley, members of council, I'm Jim Golden, the chief financial officer. And with me tonight is Theresa Malloy, the budget manager. We put a little bit of communication together for you for tonight. Before I jump into covering some of that data, I wanted to point out a couple of things on some related matters. Today we, earlier today, we provided some updated attachments to you, attachments to B and C. Apology for the late submission, but we realized that the program revenues were omitted and they actually were combined in overstating some of the program expenses. So we wanted to get you correct data for the priority-based budgeting data. The secondly, the question was asked about whether, asked by the press of me about whether we would be doing an update to our projections for the shortfall from the COVID virus for 2020's budget. And we're not able to update that quite yet at this point in time, but I can tell you, I did just find out at the end of the day today, we did finalize that our sales tax in March was up 5% over last March. That's something that we're gonna need to spend some time on over the next couple of days, dissecting that to figure out exactly where all of our businesses are falling how well they are, aren't doing. Two weeks of that month's data is part of what I consider to be part of the two months that we projected we would have severe sales and use tax shortfalls. So obviously this is exceeding my projections for those two weeks. There's a lot of big box activity as well as internet sale type activity that are boosting this, but I don't have all of the details yet and we'll probably be working through that the next couple of days and we'll get my monthly email out to you with details. Probably next Tuesday, hopefully we'll be able to come back with some revised shortfall projections for 2020. So go ahead. So to kind of jump into what Jim's saying. So we had been, as the numbers were coming in, I was asking him, well, what are we seeing? What are we seeing? And we have a lot of questions. Obviously the one thing I would say based on this statement and what we've seen is March is we need to be extremely cautious in assuming that that's gonna be what we see in April. If you remember me talking to you all last week we were getting a sense and I said, we really need to see what's happening in April before we can truly at least get a sense of what the immediate impact was for us. What I can tell you is in conversations with my colleagues in terms of looking at the data what I'm anecdotally hearing right now, those communities with big boxes are tending to do better than they projected and those communities without those are tending to do actually worse than they projected. And so we know that's a piece of the equation that we need to look at as we're digging in the numbers and seeing what's happening around us. And then understand was, so the questions that I've thrown to Jim on this was, A, is this part of what we saw in the bin shopping that people were going through in March and is that part of what we're experiencing in this and is that going to change dramatically? So that's a piece that we have to understand. Another interesting question that, and I don't know if we'll be able to get out it, but this is the first time that as Jim and I've talked about have we really seen, since people are more sedentary are we seeing them stay in the community and shop? And so that's something to look at. And so we have a lot of questions. So I wanna be very focused in saying it is too early for us to tell what this is going to look like. And I know that's what Jim's alluding to. I just wanted to be more overt in saying we've really gotta see April and then we're gonna have to see this every month to see what's happening. Because there will be a recession component in my mind in terms of what this looks like in the future. And I think we have to prepare for that. Jim, did I misstate anything? No, you didn't. And I agree with everything you said. And also as I'm beginning to look back on some of our historical data seeing how much of a recession impact we had 10, 12 years ago, I am gonna probably be revising my recession projections as well higher than what I was using at 5% because we saw 8% in back in 2007 through 2000. And 9 differences. So we'll revise everything. We will look as well at some other funds that we didn't include in our first review to make sure that we're identifying any impacts that we can. So with that, I'm gonna move on into the 2020, 2021, I should say, budget discussion. And last year at this time, we had a study session where we discussed the 2020 budget and we asked council for budget direction at that time. We went into that process knowing that we were going to have some pretty strong revenues available to us as well as fund balances. And then we were able to use those revenues to be able to fund some resources and efforts that the council wanted to see us put some more resources towards. We're looking at a much bleaker picture this time alarm. We were hopefully not going to be focusing too much on trying to add things to this 2021 budget. Everything that we've done so far over the last month or so in the budget actions that we've taken, they've all been trying to focus on how to deal with this revenue shortfall in 2020. Many of those actions that we were taking, they are one time adjustments and they are really just allowing us to be able to maintain the services throughout 2020. 2021 gonna have to be a different story because we need to keep with our financial policies. And one of the biggest, one of those is our balanced budget financial policy, which requires that all of our ongoing expenses need to be funded with ongoing revenues. So we can't use one time revenues to fund ongoing expenses in that annual adopted budget. So that's gonna make it tough for us to build this 2021 budget. So revenue projections are gonna be critical. And so as a result, we're gonna have to hang on as long as we can before we finalize those projections because we're waiting for so much to unfold to give us an idea of what the changes may be. But we are going to probably need to finalize those projections within a couple of months, early July, probably at the latest to allow us to be able to make decisions on what's gonna be included in the ongoing expenses for the 2021 budgets. Reduced ongoing budget revenues will force us to reduce ongoing expenses as well. We will obviously have to project sales tax, property debt tax and any other significant revenue generating services and project what the impact of all of this will be on them for 2021 for us to be able to decide or to know what kind of resources we have available for that 21 budget. So really as a result of that, we will really have very little to no ability to entertain new ongoing resources for existing or new services is that that would require an offsetting reduction in other ongoing expenses. General fund's not the only fund where we need to make reductions. Though likely it is one where we probably may have to make the most reductions or we're gonna need to let the situation play out through June so that we can get a better handle on the impacts on our revenues before we can finalize and know for sure how much we have available for the 21 ongoing expenses. So at this point in time as a staff, what we are doing is we're focusing on our base budgets throughout this month. Staff is building their budget submissions for the 21 budget process. We've asked them to focus on looking at those base budgets and seeing what can be reduced from the amounts that they carry forward in previous years to ask them to take closer looks at that rather than come into us with a request for additional funding for new additions to the 2021 budget, which are very unlikely to be able to be funded. In addition to the base budgets, beyond that, we're gonna use priority based budgeting as a tool to assist us with budget reductions as necessary. I'm gonna ask Theresa to step in here and to briefly give you, take you through that priority based budgeting process to update John that and give you an idea of what we'll be going through and then also just a reference to that data and the attachments that we provided. So Theresa. Good evening, Mayor and City Council, Theresa Malloy, Budget Manager. So the City of Longmont has been doing a priority based budgeting process as part of our normal annual budget process for a number of years now. The notion behind a priority based budgeting process starts with identifying the results that the city is in the business to achieve and goes through a multi-step process that then ends with a prioritized list of city services or city programs that fall within a quartile perspective. In 2016, the City Council adopted Envision Longmont and then in 2018 for our 2019 budget process, we worked to incorporate the Envision Longmont guiding principles into our priority based budgeting process. So this included the involvement of City Council and the community, along with a diverse representation of city staff. So we are now using the guiding principles from Envision Longmont as the desired results in our priority based budgeting process. And those guiding principles and their relative priority weightings were provided to you in our Council communication. But just to recap, they are livable city council centers, corridors and neighborhoods, a complete balanced and connected transportation system, housing services, amenities and opportunities for all, a safe, healthy and adaptable community, responsible stewardship of our resources and finally job growth and economic vitality through innovation and collaboration. So those are what we mean by the desired results. And so through our priority based budgeting process, staff has identified the programs that we provide as services to this community, as well as the programs that our internal service providers provide to support departments who are providing those direct services to the community. Those programs then are scored based on a variety of several factors. So the first factor is they're scored against how they influence those desired results that I just mentioned to you. Then they are scored against some basic program attributes. So the first is the mandate to provide the service. At what level are we mandated to provide that service? They're scored based on the reliance on the city to provide the program. They are also scored based on a cost recovery component. And then they're scored finally on the portion of the community that is actually served by the program. So it's a pretty elaborate scoring model that basically results in an overall score that is made up of those different components. And that score really determines where those programs will fall within the quartile ranking. So higher scoring programs will fall in a quartile one and our lower scoring programs will fall in quartile four. And then in between. So the step, each of these steps is not something that we update every budget process. The step that we really do every budget process is to reallocate our costs and program revenue against our programs. So that is a step that our departments are going through right now is to take their existing 2020 budget and allocate it then to their programs. And so the attachments that were included with your communication attachment A shows the quartiles, both quartiles for our 2019 budget compared to our 2020 proposed budget. So this was information that we provided to you back in September as part of our budget process. And as I said, we're in the process of updating that the costing and revenue allocation right now. So those quartile views will change because we did, as Jim mentioned, added some new resources and then departments will shift resources to various programs depending on how they're covering those programs. So that's attachment A, attachment B was the list from again, our 2020 budget process. This is the prioritized list of our community programs and attachment C was the list of our prioritized governance programs. And so the governance programs, again, those are the internal type service programs where we don't provide direct programming to the community, but we are supporting the departments who do provide direct programs. Direct program to the community. So it's things like human resources and finance and the city manager's office and those types of programs. So that's kind of the overview of our party-based budgeting process. As we continue to update the costing, we will use that then to review as part of our 2021 budget, what we will then eventually be submitting to you as our proposed 2021 budget. So council, that's our presentation. I would be glad to try to answer any questions or take any comments or direction. Are there any questions from council waters? Before. Thanks, Mayor Bagley. Two questions, one just, it's kind of technical, I guess I should have asked last year on the weighting of the categories that are tied back to a vision long bond and the principles of livable centers and balance and connected transportation system, et cetera. How do those weights get applied in the scoring process? Then I understand weighted scoring. I'm just curious how these percentages get applied. Teresa, you wanna take that? You bet. So councilman waters, that's a great question. So I mentioned earlier that the scoring component is based on a few different criteria. And one of those criteria is how the program influences those desired results. So each of the programs then are scored against how each of these desired results, how the program itself influences each one of these separate desired results. And then that relative priority weighting then weights that component of the scoring. I appreciate that. I probably, you know, tutorial, we don't need to spend any more time on this. I'll get, said, Teresa, I'll sit down with you and you know, I just need a better working knowledge of how you're doing it. The other, it's probably not a question. It's an editorial comment and you've done a terrific job. So what I'm about to say, I don't want to be interpreted as anything other than I appreciate what you've done here. And Jim, I got everything you said. It's gonna be a tough second half of this year and we don't have extra money. And you know, we're gonna have to be really clear on our priorities in terms of keeping the lights on and things moving forward. But I will wonder, nobody has to answer this tonight but maybe it's a question I'll follow up with Harold on. As much as I appreciate a vision long run and all the work that went into it, it still would, it would be somewhat affirming at some point to see where the vision and the goal statements that this council has adopted show up along with the other criteria like the principles in a vision long line because it just doesn't get acknowledged in this document. Maybe it gets acknowledged someplace else and understand that's not gonna drive budget decisions for 2020, given where we are financially. But I guess just saying at some point, I guess it would be helpful to know what does it take to get some of that shoehorned in here? So I think part of it, when we talked about this last year, I know we took your council goals and visions and we also then tied them into these categories in envision long run based on where they fit. So that's the short answer and we'll have to give you the details on that. And if you remember when we talked, we were talking about alignment within those categories. So we'll get that information to you. All right, Council Member Ridaglifer. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so when we start reevaluating or when you start reevaluating just what, where you might have to do cuts, are you going to be I guess looking at the reevaluation of the where certain programs fall in which quartile. So if you end up reevaluating and deciding something that is in quartile too, might need to drop down or they all, is it pretty much set where these programs fall? Like are we looking to see anything change on how they're evaluated? Does that make sense? Do you want me to take this one? Yes. And then I'll jump in. Sure, so the order that programs fall within the priority ranking, I guess I will say is set by the scoring. So that won't change. We don't re-score programs every year. We don't have a need to re-score programs every year. The only time we would need to re-score programs would be if our desired results were to change. We do though from time to time have new programs that need to be scored. And so they may fall anywhere within any of those quartiles and may ultimately change the complete list of ranking of programs as new programs come on. The piece that we do every year though is what I was talking about earlier and that's just the costing piece. So taking our ongoing current year-based budget and recosting it or reallocating it to the program so that piece will change the dollar amounts that are shown in the quartiles but the number of programs within a quartile is set. So part of the answer to that question and this was something that I was gonna touch on is so I think one of the challenges we have coming into this budget is it's going to be a different one in that we have a sense of what's gonna happen with revenue. The thing that I think we're gonna have to pay particular attention to is what's just happening in the world around us generally. And what needs are we going to see that may become more significant as a result of everything that we've been through. And so what we, to give you a point of that we talked about in term that we're talking about in terms of the 2020 budget is we know that we counsel directed and we allocated money for early childhood education. And it was really to look at a component of how do we help people get licensed and some of these other components in terms of what they need. What we know today is the need in early childhood education is much different than it was when we had the conversations. And then that has a connection into businesses and workforce and these other issues. And so there's going to be an added component that we're gonna have to be very mindful of generally in terms of what we're dealing with. And there's other things I wanna touch on and see more questions, but I'll hit that as well. Yeah, and I guess some of these you don't have to cause I do have other questions, but I think that I can just direct an email and maybe have, if you have an opportunity to do a little tutorial for a couple of us, I just throw me in there. Mayor. Councilor Martin. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. Actually the example of early childhood education was one that I was going to use. So it's a good segue, I guess. I'm not quite sure that I, whether this is an example of re-scoring or not, but the example that Harold gave about the needs of early childhood education being different seems appropriate to use in terms of what re-scoring means. Because we were looking at upgrading it and making more available in terms of putting together training programs and expansion programs of various sorts. And now what we're finding is because of the need to maintain social distancing in terms of the need to never ever ever let a caregiver work sick, it's having stable classes for childcare so that we can't mix the kids up when the number in the class goes up and down. All of those things are making early childhood education be much more expensive than it was. So the way in which we subsidize that and the amount to which, the extent to which we subsidize it, they need to change just to keep stability among the childcare for low income people that we already have and have had available to us in this city now. So is that kind of consideration going to be part of the priority-based budgeting? Because I think it has to be, but I'm not sure how it works in the process. I think Theresa, Theresa, if I'm gonna speak, you correct me immediately, but one of the questions they look at is is this service provided by others? That's one of the criteria pieces. Well, if that changes dramatically, that's gonna change that component in terms of how you rank it. If, let's say, theoretically lost, and this is, I'm just throwing a number out, I don't know anything about this, but if you lost 40% of the childcare providers, that's gonna impact that component of the scoring, correct, Theresa? Correct. Because it changes the landscape dramatically and so it'll be embedded within those components in terms of how we evaluate. Did that answer your question? Kind of. If you needed 50% more caregivers, it would be the same thing, which is more likely to what's gonna happen. Correct. I mean, and that's what, that's where I said, I think the science or the arts gonna meet the mathematics that go into this is really evaluating those areas. Some other examples, if you have grants for certain projects, that's gonna impact the cost recovery component of this, but the one thing we know is we're not the only one having financial issues. States having financial issues, RTDs having financial issues, and so does that landscape change on us as well in terms of potential grant dollars we were anticipating coming in, and does that look different? So all of those, all of the world that's moving around outside of us right now, we're gonna have to be mindful of to ensure that those scores really reflect what we're looking at today, because as I've said before, normals new and how we look at many of the programs and services we've been providing. All right, anyone else? All right, Harold, do you have anything else? I do have a couple of things. I forgot to mention earlier my update. One of the things that we're trying to do is also work collectively with our partner groups to be creative on certain issues. So one of the things that you're gonna see, at least for the next few days, and then we're gonna evaluate it on a regular basis is the whole concept of curbside pickup. So I know Public Works has worked with the DDA because their situation's different than retail establishments in larger developments. And so they're gonna designate a lot of spaces if not almost all the spaces along Main Street for curbside pickup for the retail to help facilitate that. And then as the opening starts transitioning there will be managing that more globally because now they don't necessarily need parking spaces in front because they're not open. So just to let you know, we're gonna be working on issues like that. One that just hit me this week is, is there a way for us to facilitate a concept and it's way too early to say whether or not we're gonna be able to do it, but an economy is scale aspect to PPE programs and purchases for businesses that have to have it who haven't been able to do it. And there's a way for us if we can really work with Jessica and Kimberly and Scott and all the businesses and find a way to bring that information together, can we help facilitate the acquisition of PPE for them utilizing an economy of scale while it's not a direct allocation of dollars it still is an ultimate cost savings for businesses. And so those are the kind of things that we're starting to see because I think the one thing that we all know is creativity is going to be incredibly important as we continue to move through this and we see issues that are developing across our community both from a business perspective and an individual perspective. All right, that it for the budget? Two. All right, Mayor and Council comments. Anybody? Let's start with Council Member Hidalgo-Ferring. Okay, thank you, Mayor. So I have a couple of comments. One, it is in regard to, and again, this was kind of going on prior to me sitting on Council. So I've never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Helmig. I've heard him speak and I followed the work but I've never really had a chance to know him or get an insight of what happened at CU Boulder nor do I, that's not my concern. The information that he's provided is, to me, it's very profound and it's really opened my eyes to what is happening to our environment and how it's impacting our health and wellbeing. And so I was disappointed to hear that. The piece that disturbed me the most was the firing of the TC reporter, John Spina. That was something, and I just felt like I need to make something public. I'm very concerned with that piece that someone who is reporting this information and then all of a sudden gets fired and is discrediting. The institution seems like it's discrediting not just Dr. Helmig and this reporter but just the whole research in and of itself. And so that is something that I am really concerned about and I would like to kind of know more about why this is all happening and I really wanna make sure that, and I support Dr. Helmig and his work and I would like to see something in the long run where we can collectively say, we do support this work, we value this work and we need to have his work continue. The other one is in regard to having a presentation and whether or not this is, City Council is the forum to really have a presentation on cultural brokers and the work that the resiliency for all and what that work is doing. I do feel this is the place and I want John Friar, if you're listening, bring attention to this work because it's impacting a lot of our community and we need to bring attention to the strong work that is being done to build equity and break down these institutional racism and an oppression that is happening among our community of color. So thank you, that was it. Council Member Christensen. Oh, not the wrong thing. Okay, so today is Cinco de Mayo and so even though there is no fiesta, there's a fiesta in our hearts, we cherish the traditions of Cinco de Mayo. It's always been very important to this town. Secondly, it's National Teachers Day. So thank you, Suzy. Thank you, Dr. Waters who spent most of his life in education and all the other people who are working tirelessly, trying to educate people in a very different new way. From what I hear has many, many glitches, but that's okay. They're kids, they're tough, they're resilient and the teachers are even tougher. So thanks to all the teachers and everybody stay healthy and wash your hands and don't forget to fill out your census form. Dr. Waters. Thanks, Mayor Begley. It might not nearly as philosophical or as enlightened as Council Member Christensen's, but earlier this evening, from one of our residents who called in made a reference to budget priorities and the golf fund and grazing green fees because taxpayers are supporting the golf fund. And I just want to just clarify, that's not true or it's not accurate. If there are capital construction needs like what got done with our bond with the as a result of the last bond election, recreation services and golf courses benefited from that. But on an operating basis, the golf courses pay for themselves. It's cash and carry. There are no tax dollars subsidizing our golf courses. So as we build budgets, that's not a place that you're gonna cut to free up tax dollars. I guess for the record. Anybody else? All right, I guess the only comment I want to make is my belief is that once we take a vote, I forget about it. So that's it. All right, anything from you, Harold? No comments, Mayor Council. All right, Eugene? No comments, Mayor. All right, appreciate everybody's service and doing this tonight. Later, we're adjourned. Actually, do we need somebody who want to make a motion to adjourn? Council Member Christensen. Okay, good. I moved that we adjourn. All second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say nay. We are adjourned unanimously. All right, see you guys in that later. Bye.