Hi, beautiful. This is long overdue for me. I need a new wig. I need a new wig that makes me feel magical and special and sexy. And there's nothing I love more than a new rainbow wig. Today we're doing this special, gorgeous look.  I can't wait to have this. Yes, gorgeous. That is the look I'm gonna be doing today. Maybe a little bit different color scheme and I'm gonna be doing on a wig so I can wear it and show you guys the results on my own head. And that way I get to feel the full fantasy. And also, if you ever wanna do a look like this at home on your own head, I'll be showing you how to achieve it. Hello, client for today. You look beautiful, but you're gonna be even more beautiful when I'm done with you. I am about to transform this blonde wig into my dream hair. I'm excited to actually do the whole process, but also I'm not excited because it's a lot of work and a lot of patience to color damn wigs. And the moment you touch this lace, you're completely fucked. My assistant will be helping me out. So thank God. What we're gonna be doing, you guys saw the little video. It's a whole peek-a-boo moment. And so the way we're gonna do this is by sectioning out this top bit. And what's important about sectioning out the top part is to make sure that you take enough hair that when you let it down, it's enough to actually fully cover what's underneath. That way you don't see that kind of peek-a-boo section on the top of the head, which is gonna be kind of difficult in this situation because there's not a whole lot of hair on this head to work with. So hopefully the peek-a-boo moment gets actually covered up by the stuff on top. We're obviously using X-Mondo color today. And I'm gonna start off showing you guys my section really quick. It is quite simple, but basically I'm parting in the middle.  And I'm only gonna be coloring this much of the hair underneath. So majority of it is going to be just one solid blue color and the rest is going to be magical. And I can't wait. And there we go. We took it pretty far down in the back. That way you get the coverage we need to cover the peek-a-boo. We still have so much hair underneath to actually color in that rainbow pattern. And I am stoked about it. All right, let's do this. We're gonna be using X-Mondo color, super blue. Wow, look how pretty. I love super blue. One of the first colors we came out with and it is iconic. It's gonna be so like deep and sexy. And that is what I want. I always want sexiness within my hair. Christine, can I have your assistance? Yay, welcome. So I'm just gonna be braiding the underneath of the hair. That way we do not color any of this blue. Today we're using some mesh because this makes things a lot easier. Totally playing with you. I never used this before, I just opened it. But it seems like a good idea. So we're doing it. And what we're gonna be using this for is to lay our first section down on it. I'm gonna put one on the back and one on the sides. That way we can just lay the sections on there and not worry about any of it and transfer them onto the underneath side. One of the most annoying things when it comes to doing wigs is just coloring them in general because the lace, you do not wanna color it or else it is not gonna look realistic. And let's just say, Christine and I, especially me, I have tried every different sort of technique when it comes to coloring. The root area of a wig. Guys, you can dip the hair into color. You can layer hair gel on the roots to make sure the lace doesn't get colored. None of them are foolproof besides this. You have to color the hair with a toothbrush which is painful because it takes forever but it comes out with the best results. It allows you to make sure that you do not color the lace and it looks nice and natural at the root and it doesn't look like your scalp is colored because that doesn't look good. Update, we are making our way around to the top of the head and it is a lot of work. And as you can see, I'm only going down three inches from the roots and then I'm gonna go back with the actual hair coloring brush and do the ends and mids. The toothbrush is just that I do not color the lace and make it look all nasty. Boom, the blue has been applied and look at that. Look at that scalp region. It is not colored, it is looking fierce and we're on to the next part. We're going in, we're starting with coral and it is just a beautiful in between like orange and pink, obviously it's coral. All right, I am beginning with the coral here. As you can see, what's best about this look is if you do like really like colors underneath or just lighter colors than what you're doing on the top, that way when you move the hair apart and get that satisfying moment where you see the underneath, it's like really bright and really pops. So that's exactly what we're gonna do. And guys, her hair already feels pretty good but obviously when she uses X-Mondo color like she is now, great choice honey.  But you're also gonna be getting bond builder in the product along with hyaluronic acid, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and so much more and plus it smells incredible. Also, if you've never heard of bond builders before which I'm sure you guys have, we are one of the only brands that actually have bond builders built into our color. That way you're getting healthier hair while you're coloring it. And that was always the most important thing to me when I created this color line is to have healthier hair post coloring because in order to get your hair light enough to actually use these colors, you need to inflict some damage on it. Unfortunately, bleach is still damaging and it probably will be for a very long time. And I wanted to create a product that when you put this over pre-lightened hair you're going to have the silkiest softest hair, like softer than before you started coloring it.  It's really a combination of like a hair mask and color all in one. So for $28 you get the color and you get a hair mask all in one in one simple, easy step. It's all about simplicity and making your hair feel and look better and actually be better internally. It's a really easy process to use the color too. It's much easier if you're not doing it on a wig like this. You really just apply it all over pre-lightened hair or over your natural hair color. Some of the colors do work over your natural hair color. You have to look at the website to see our swatches and make sure you check out the starting hair color and the results of using that color on your particular starting hair color. This is coming together already.  Okay now I'm going in with some super orange here. You know another inch down with the super orange. The next section we have super yellow. Look at how bright and sexy that yellow is. It's like neon yellow and if you're gonna do yellow in your hair it better be neon. Wow look at how pretty these colors are together.  Another great thing about X-Mondo color is that the formula is thick but not too thick that it doesn't blend. If you put the colors side by side you don't exactly like have to use a mesh or a foil to keep them separated. You can put them like directly next to each other and if you don't actually go in and blend physically with the colors together they will stay separated which is amazing when you're doing things like this but if you do want them to blend just going in with your fingers like that they will blend together quite easily. If you want them to blend they can blend and if you don't they will stay apart which is so nice because it is annoying when you have like super liquidy color that just runs into each other and you like can't help it and you have to like use foils and it just adds more time onto the coloring process. I know for myself I want things to be simple and easy and colors are already really hard so we don't need to make it any harder. And lastly but certainly not least we have one of our new colors lime green and I'm definitely coloring a lot of her ends with the lime green that is because she is going to definitely to trim after this. Her hairs are a little straggly and I'm not really feeling that for myself today. And just like that we have completed the coloring process. The blue with the dirt and the green and the yellow and the this, it's gonna look so cool. So we're gonna let that process for 20 minutes.  The colors are getting more and more vibrant as I sit on her head too. So this feels good, this feels right. Oh my God. Are you ready to see this masterpiece? It looks so good already.  It already looks so cool and it's not even dry yet. So first she's a little trimmy trim. I mean, like, ew, what is that? We want her hair to be all one length and we don't want too much layering in there because we want the blue to glay on top of everything else and cover it up. Which I don't know if that's gonna be possible because her hair is pretty fine, but we'll see.  I don't know, I'm kind of living for the drama. I don't know if I want to bring it any shorter. You know, like I could, but I actually kind of like that you can see all the green on the ends. Like I love this fade from blue to green. I don't know if I want to get rid of it anymore. Okay, so we're ready for the blow drying process. It's gonna be so satisfying to watch. Another thing I want to mention is that I've learned over time that I like to avoid putting product in the hair when it's a wig until I'm finished with the look. I know that a lot of people do put product in but it just makes it look kind of greasy and weighed down and I want movement, I want life, I want sexiness. When you're doing a wig, you want to make sure that the hair is extremely flat and suctioned to the head if you want that really realistic looking wig. I also like to buy wigs that don't have a high density. Everybody thinks it's like better to have higher density. It's not. The lower the density, usually the more realistic it looks. You want your ends to be kind of fine because that is what real hair looks like. Plus, when it's finer at the top and you have less volume, the more it's gonna look like it's growing out of your head. I'm gonna throw in some Viper Smoothing Oil here to really make everything just the glossiest it can be. Viper is amazing because it really dries into the hair and you do not get left with like a really greasy residue but it does an incredible job at hydrating the hair and making everything so shiny. Oh my God, look at how glossy this hair is already. Whoa, that's insane. I'm gonna go in and flat iron this hair now and get everything laid super flat. We're just gonna go in, lift up some sections, get in there, it's already pretty straight but we're just trying to get every little hair laid nice and flat. And I'm making sure to use my iron not on the highest heat setting because wake hair doesn't grow back, okay? So we gotta take care of it. So now I'm just spraying a little bit of hairspray just on the top of her hair and normally at this point I would be using a hot comb but I can't find it for some reason which is really annoying but it's fine, I'll get through it. So we're gonna use a very large curling iron and we're just going to lace it on the top of the hair. This is at a very high temperature, this is at 430 degrees and we're just gonna get that hair really flat to the scalp. This is what you can do if you don't have a hot comb but it's not exactly the same. This is just to make it super flat to the head so that it looks very realistic on the person's head. And also I love to like make the hair go back here. I just feel like when you can see that area at the front it just makes the wig look more real.  See how much just flatter that is compared to this side? All right, this styling is pretty much done and I am going to go and lay this on my head as best as I possibly can with the last ounce of patience I have for today. So hopefully it looks okay but I'm also really stoked to put it on my head. Like it's already just so pretty. And the wig is complete. Oh, this is so cool.  But I also love how like the moment I put a wig on I get like uncomfortable. Like when I'm on camera with a wig on I don't know guys, it's just a lot. It's like definitely growing on me as I look at myself and I'm like, wait, you know what I mean? And no, I definitely didn't lay down the wig very well. It's literally only laid right here. So if you see it coming up on the sides, just ignore it. But I love it. I really do. I love it so much. I want to attempt to do the whole thing where she parted the hair and stuff. I don't think it's going to work as well on wig hair but we can try. So let's get it nice and flat here. And then she kind of went like this to reveal what's underneath. This isn't going to work as well. No. That was so anticlimactic. Okay, but it still looks really cool. Let me just part it. Even though I can't do that whole thing that girl does. Okay, I can't see anything. This is not as cool. Maybe my hair is just not as nice as that girl's in that video, but it's fine. It's fine that all I wanted today was that satisfying moment but we're just not going to get it today. Like this is my favorite part. The way that the hair on top lays and gives you that kind of ombre effect at the ends with the lime green.  I'm feeling sassy. I'm feeling extra. See, I would wear it more like messy though. Let me show you some of the things that wig can do. First of all, look how clean that part is. No color. That's what happens when you use a toothbrush, okay? And also watch this. It looks so cool. I look like my emo fantasy right now. Wait, like imagine if I had it all laid actually on my head and then I like wart half up. 10 out of 10 for this color. This is definitely one of my favorite colors I've ever done, if not like my favorite. Everything is just so cool. It's unlike any other wig I've ever done before and it's just so fun and it came out so good and I feel so pretty in it. This is so cool and so edgy and I highly recommend you doing this to your own hair if you are thinking about it. Sick. I need to stop playing with the wig. Thank you guys for watching this video. I can't stop. If you want to check out any of the color that I use in today's video, it'll all be linked below for you and all the hair products and everything will all be at xmodohair.com. You can shop everything there. Everything is listed over here at brabmodo-myc, at xmodohair, at xmodocolor. So check it out. And that is all for today, you guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to live your extra life and I'll see you next time. Bye.


How can growing food at home help fight carbon emissions, which plants are best for reducing our use of fossil fuels? And how does this help us think about a future of local food? Let's get into it. This is the Low Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute. You're host for podcast number 67 on March 10, 2023, coming to you from the Low Tech Recording booth. Thanks for joining us today. We're talking carbon emissions, what we eat, and how they're linked. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website lowtechinstitute.org. There you can buy both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. While all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. Thanks to Math H for recently signing up. Another way to support us is to donate your used car. Anyone in the US can contact us and your used car will be picked up, sold, and the proceeds come our way. If you're interested in helping us out this way, get in touch with us, set info at lowtechinstitute.org. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org. Okay, today, we're going to be talking about carbon emissions, growing food, and how that works into the future. And the reason that I focus on carbon emissions is because it's kind of a shorthand for the use of fossil fuels in our food system. And as you'll see, there's a shocking amount of fossil fuels used for our everyday food that we buy at the grocery store or basically most of us, the way we get our food is very deeply tied to the use of fossil fuels. And in the future, we're going to have to convert our entire food system to run without fossil fuels. And so by pinpointing those foods that are a middle out of carbon, we're pinpointing foods that are going to have trouble or need to change the most in a less carbon intensive future. And what we advocate for here at the Low Technology Institute, of course, is locally grown food as well as other things, but really centering our lives, at least the subsistence of our lives locally. So let's get into carbon gardening. So before we get into actual gardening, let's talk a little bit about carbon emissions. And I'm basing a lot of this on a pretty entry level book called How Bad Are Bananas, which is a fun kind of look at the carbon footprint of everything, as it claims, by Mike Berners-Lee. I'll link to it in the show notes. And it's kind of an easy introduction to get you thinking about the carbon emissions of all kinds of things in our everyday lives. And again, I mentioned carbon emissions as kind of a shorthand or an equivalent to fossil fuel use. The more carbon emissions, the more fossil fuels are likely going into that. And so we hear the term carbon footprint all the time, but often I feel like people have a pretty ephemeral understanding of what that is. So carbon footprint is just the net impact that something has on global greenhouse gas levels. And this is often expressed as CO2 equivalents. So if I say CO2, here I'm largely just referring to CO2 equivalents, which is a kind of way to flatten, but all the different greenhouse gases into one measurement. So carbon dioxide equivalents are used just as a shorthand. For example, methane, CH4, is 25 times more potent than CO2 alone. So instead of saying it emits this much carbon dioxide and this much methane, and then you'd have to convert the methane to figure out how bad that actually is, we just say CO2 equivalents. Nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas, N2O, emit 300 times more potent than the equivalent of CO2. So we just kind of flatten all of that into CO2 equivalents. And I'm just say CO2 for shorthand because it's shorter for the purposes of this podcast. So when you hear people talking about the carbon dioxide emissions or the greenhouse gas emissions, that's kind of what they're talking about, how much of these different greenhouse gases are emitted for different activities. For example, I was just looking at flights, I know flights to Philadelphia for an upcoming event that I need to get to, and time is short. And so instead of the train, I'm going to have to fly. And right there next to the cost of the flight was the CO2 that was going to be generated or the CO2 equivalents. And one thing when we're talking about CO2 is that we want to be careful of what's called the carbon tow print. And this is when we're looking very superficially at the emissions of a product. For example, if I think, well, how much is the carbon footprint of buying an apple? And I drive to the store, buy an apple and drive home. And then I just calculate the CO2 of me driving to the store. That's only the tow print or one small part of the CO2 required to produce that apple. And so really what we have to do is look at the entire supply chain from start to finish. And that becomes very quickly complicated, as you can imagine. For example, with any type of agriculture that uses a tractor, right, if I'm eating a carrot, and that was harvested by something pulled behind a tractor, how much of the carbon emissions of the production of that tractor should be attributed to that one carrot? How much of the carbon footprint of the factory that builds that tractor should be then, you know, carried over to the carrot? It's kind of like pulling the thread on a sweater. We go, it's all interconnected.  And for the most part, a CO2 equivalence or the CO2 emissions of any particular product I'm going to talk about or any particular plant, you have to take it with a grain of salt. It's an approximation. One thing we can do is look at per capita emissions, how much people in different countries on average emit. And that's by taking the sum of all carbon emissions of that entire country, dividing it by the population of that country for a year. And for example, the average American burns 16.5 tons or emits 16.5 carbon dioxide emissions total per day. The global average is only four. So what does 16.5 tons of carbon emissions look like? That would be about 33 barrels of oil, 55 gallon barrels of oil set on fire every day. Let me repeat that. The average American emits as much as 33 55 gallon drums of oil or of gasoline set on fire and let to burn. Just imagine that 33 barrels of gasoline burning, right? Just sitting out in your backyard every day. That's how much carbon the average American is putting out. And you might say, well, I drive a Tesla, I have all these different things that I do to reduce my carbon footprint. And that very well may be true. And your number might be slightly less than that. And that's wonderful. But remember, this has to, if you think about the entire network that supports your life, you have to count those too, right? So getting your trash picked up, right? That counts towards your CO2 emissions. And so there's different things that we can't really get away from. They're baked into how our lives are set up. The average global citizen is closer to four tons. That's eight 55 gallon drums of gasoline set on fire every day. And this is all from the World Bank data, about a fifth of those carbon emissions are attributed to food, about 3.3 tons of CO2 emissions for meat lovers per day. If you're vegetarian, it's somewhere about half that 1.7 to 1.5. That's why a lot of environmentalists are so keen on people becoming vegetarians. It's although many people also have a problem with the cruelty to animals and the way that industrial agriculture treats animals, which right, that's a that's a moral argument for sure. But just on the carbon emissions alone, it's half as carbon intensive to be a vegetarian. And the reason for that is it takes about seven calories of plant food to make one calorie of meat. So for every calorie of meat you eat, you're emitting enough for seven calories of plants. And so it's quite quite a lot of energy stored into that meat. And so by changing to a vegetarian lifestyle or switching over to eat less meat in general, that can really reduce carbon footprint. And for us, for example, you know, we hunt venison and butcher our own chickens. And so our meat intake is significantly less. But for example, we do about once a week, we eat meat. And so our carbon footprint is significantly reduced by by doing that. Alright, so let's move on and talk about a few examples of carbon emissions for food. And we're going to go through ranges here because it's not cut and dried. I can't just say, well, an apple has x grams of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, because not all apples are the same. Let's start with an apple. An apple, if you pick it in your backyard from your own tree, and you're going to see this as a trend, if you grow it and pick it yourself, you are pretty much dealing with no emissions, maybe even negative emissions.  And now people like to say, well, trees are great for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. And that's true while they're alive. But once they die, and they start to compost and decompose, they release that CO2 back in the atmosphere, unless those trees get cut down and buried, and that carbon is truly sequestered, that is part of the carbon cycle, it isn't truly fully sequestering the carbon. Now if we have more trees growing at any one point in time, that will sequester carbon. But planting one tree and then letting it fall down and rot is not saving carbon. I hear that all the time. So I hear about how important trees are, and they are obviously important. And the total number of trees growing does reduce carbon emissions. But one specific tree isn't, so you can already see how complicated it gets to track down the CO2 of a particular item that you're eating. If you pick up local apples, let's say you drive out to a local orchard and get apples, you can count on about 10 grams of CO2 equivalents per apple. If you buy them at the grocery store, each apple is about 80 grams of CO2 equivalents. And if you get those apples shipped, their specialty, they're kept cool and refrigerated and all this, you could be using up to 150 grams of CO2 equivalents per apple. What does that mean? What's 150 grams of CO2? That would be something like ironing for an hour or watching TV for an hour that be closer to 80. Using your cell phone is actually really pretty low compared to like a computer. That would be something more like a 10 grams per hour. So apples are kind of in the range of TV watching ironing down to cell phone use in terms of carbon emissions, just to kind of give you an equivalent idea. The key to keeping the carbon emissions low for an apple, and again, these are just examples, we'll talk specifically about what you should grow or what you could consider growing to reduce your own carbon emissions in a bit. Keys are, and we'll see these over and over, apples often don't have packaging. They are able to be shipped slowly and they're grown out in the open rather than say a hot house. What about a banana? These must have a lot of carbon emissions, right? They're a tropical fruit. Well, if you grow your own banana, again, zero grams of carbon, if you buy one at the store, they're actually only about 80 grams of carbon per banana. And the reason is because they're cut green, and then they're shipped in boats, which is slow. They also don't have much for packaging.  Again, you pick it yourself from your own property. That's about zero grams. But if you buy it at the grocery store, and it's been say shipped 2,000 miles by boat and then another 500 miles by truck, you're looking at about 90 grams of CO2 equivalents per orange. If though, that's an air freighted orange, and it like when I lived up in Northern Alberta, I imagine those oranges were flown in and they were very expensive. And that's a whole kilo or a thousand grams of CO2 equivalents when it's in the off season and freighted in. The key to having low carbon emissions for an orange is the long shelf life, allowing slow shipping and growing them outside. What about something a little more intensive, a basket of strawberries? Again, ours in our backyard, probably zero grams of carbon dioxide equivalents. If they're regionally grown, so I go to the farmers market, I pick some up, that's about 150 grams for a basket. If right now it's March, they're being flown in probably from Mexico or other places, that's 1.8 kilograms, 1.8 kilograms 10 times as much as when you get them at the farmers market of CO2. The reason for that is they have a relatively short self-life and they are best enjoyed seasonally or preserved. That fast shipping is a real CO2 emitter. What about a kilo of carrots? So 2.2 pounds is a kilo. What about a kilo of carrots in your own garden? Again, zero grams. If you buy them locally in seasons at the farmers market, you're looking at about 250 grams of CO2 equivalents. If you get them at the grocery store, that's really only 300 grams, so not so bad. But if you buy baby carrots, they are four times more emittive. So one kilo of carbon emissions for one kilo of carrots. And the reason for that is babies are much less efficient. They must be kept cooler. They have more production cost or work and they have to be shipped very quickly. Whereas normally, and this is true for a lot of root vegetables, they're great. They store well, they can be shipped slow, they don't need a lot of packaging. So relatively speaking, root vegetables are actually pretty good for carbon emission other than baby carrots, as I mentioned. Case in point, a kilo of potatoes. Grown in your garden, again, zero grams. Get them from the grocer. You're looking at about 370 grams carbon per kilo. Again, the key for potatoes is they store well. They're a root vegetable. You can ship them slowly. They don't need refrigeration. All of these are points in their favor. On the opposite end of the spectrum, let's look at just a half a pound of asparagus, a half a pound. Grown in your garden, zero grams. Get them locally from the farmer's market, about 125 grams of CO2 equivalents. But if you buy them right now, March, out of season, flown in from say South America, you're looking at a whopping 1.9 kilograms of carbon emissions for that half pound of asparagus. The takeaway for asparagus is fine as a seasonal treat, but it's really pretty bad outside of the season. What about some staples? Let's look at a kilo of wheat. A kilo of wheat emits about 1.8 kilograms of CO2 emissions, equivalents per kilo. The nice thing about wheat is it stores well. It doesn't need refrigeration, but the downside is it needs a lot of industrial production to get that kilo of wheat. Compare that again back to another staple like potatoes, which need a lot less processing. They're much lower per pound in CO2 emissions. What about rice? Rice is a really interesting one. So a kilo of rice actually emits 2.5 kilogram equivalents of carbon dioxide, if efficiently grown. On average though, it's about 4 kilos of CO2 emissions per kilo of rice. And if it's inefficiently grown, it's 6.1 kilograms of CO2 per kilo. So that's way worse than wheat. It's almost three or four times more carbon intensive. And the reason for that is rice is grown in patties. Patties are kind of stagnant water, and that produces a lot of methane. It also uses a lot of fertilizer. So rice on the production side produces quite a lot of CO2, but otherwise it's pretty good because like wheat, it dries and stores without refrigeration and ships really slowly. So that really cuts down on the carbon from that end of things. Finally, last example, a kilo of tomatoes. Again, growing tomatoes in your garden, zero grams. 400 grams though of carbon dioxide equivalents. If you're buying organic in season local, say again from the farmer's market, so that's about 400 grams per kilo. If though you're buying from the grocery store, just an average tomato from the grocery store, you're looking at 9.1 kilos of CO2 equivalents per kilo of tomatoes. Let me say that again, 9 times the amount of CO2 than the weight of the product. So for each kilo of tomatoes, you're looking at over 9 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalents. If even worse, let's say it's March and you're in Northern Alberta like I used to live and you're buying on-the-vine cherry tomatoes, you're looking at a whopping 50 kilograms of CO2 equivalents for your kilo of tomatoes because they have to be grown. That's the worst case scenario because specialty varieties are lower yielding than non-specialty varieties. It's being grown in the off season means it has to be grown in a hot house and it has to be transported quickly and they don't transport well because they're a soft fruit. So if you avoid those things, if you buy tomatoes in season at the farmer's market or grow them in your garden, they're great. But if you're buying them at the grocery store, especially out of season, they are really, really carbon intensive and we do see that somewhat in the cost of food, right? We do price this in and you can tell that like asparagus and tomatoes and other things in the winter are much more expensive. So the takeaways, these are the four main takeaways to avoid carbon emissions in your food. Avoid things that are fresh, fragile, far away or off season.   Off season, I guess off has two Fs. But those four things help us kind of encompass everything we've talked about so far with the examples of carbon intensive foods. So when we're talking about fresh things, we're talking like lettuce and other things that have to be transported really quickly, fragile, things like eggs, tomatoes, other fruits and vegetables that bruise easily, things that are far away.  And again, the carbon emissions remember is just a shorthand for the use of fossil fuels at least right now. And so by focusing on reducing the carbon emissions, we're also reducing our dependence and use of fossil fuels in our food system, which is really important. There's a really interesting study in Switzerland. So it's slightly different for us because we have access to California, Switzerland, largely gets a lot of its off season produce from Spain. So it's kind of equivalent there. And they looked at what were the biggest carbon emitters. And so for concrete examples of things, especially off season to avoid are things like asparagus, lettuce, bananas, tomatoes, pears, and then going down the list, more citrus, cucumber, apple, vine, tomatoes, grapes, things like that. And then you start to get into things that are a little better. If you're buying them at the store, things like bell peppers, potatoes, avocado, melon, kiwi, strawberry, again, when they're on season, leeks, onions, carrots, cauliflower, pineapple, broccoli, eggplant, and other things like that, which ship a little better and a little slower. It depends what you can grow where you are. We're in Wisconsin. So I'm going to be couching a lot of what I talk about for growing in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin's temperatures. But generally speaking, if you want to reduce your dependence on fossil fuels, and we're talking about it in the guise of carbon emissions today, you can do that by growing the things that have higher carbon footprints when you buy them at the store. So if you really like asparagus, lettuce, cucumbers, things like that, you'd be better off growing them yourself, preferably, or buying them at least at the farmer's market. And so when I run down that list starting with asparagus, lettuce, banana, tomato, pear, et cetera, the more you can buy locally, that's really going to make a big difference. And you're going to have to buy more seasonally, because where you are is going to dictate what things are available when. And that's why things like jams and preserves and canning is so, used to be so popular. Things come cyclically in the year. You plant them, grow them, harvest them, preserve them. And that way you can enjoy them throughout more of the year without increasing your carbon footprint. We don't have to have fresh tomatoes to have chili. Crushed tomatoes in a can are perfectly good. So some other things to do when you're planning your garden, if this is something you want to think about, you really want to pick the things you like to eat, because we'll talk a little bit about food waste and other things, but really think about what types of food you like to eat, which ones have the most carbon intensive production, and then focus on those if this is if this is your goal. So let's talk about other ways to reduce our food impact or our carbon emissions. Number one, don't be so picky. If you're growing your own food, you'll be surprised at the variety of fruits and vegetables that come out and how they look because at the grocery store, they have sorted and you're only buying the best looking produce. The non-great looking produce goes into things like V8, right? You can get a tomato or a carrot or other vegetable that doesn't look great, but is perfectly healthy and sound. They'll grind it up and put it into juices or they'll can it into tomato soup or they'll do some other thing with it rather than try and sell you something that doesn't look great. And I have seen recently on social media ads for things called, I don't know exactly what they're called, but basically it's a box of seconds of fruits and vegetables that don't look ugly produce or something like that. It's called and it's kind of a shame to see these on social media because basically what's happened is there used to be this secondary stream of unsalable fruits and vegetables that are perfectly healthy and perfectly safe to eat, but they just don't look as nice as the producers want and they used to donate these to food banks, but now they realized, hey, we can sell these as quote unquote ugly foods and actually make money on them instead of donating them, which is kind of a bummer. So when you are growing your own food or growing your own stuff in the garden, give yourself some slack. Not everything's going to look great. A lot of it's going to taste great because it's grown locally. You can allow it to ripen fully rather than being artificially ripened like most tomatoes are, for example, but give yourself some slack. Things are going to look different. If it doesn't look great visually and that bothers you, can it or make something else and make a stew or a soup, right? A 10th of fresh produce is tossed out because it's unsalable but still edible. If you don't have space to garden, one thing you could do is go to the grocery store and see about what's on sale, what's about to go off, what are they getting rid of? And if you make a good relationship with your grocer, sometimes they'll set things aside for you. And then you can can those things. I used to go to the farmer's market at the end of the day to see what I could get deals on.  The farmer didn't want to take them home so they made me a deal. That's another way you can do it. Another thing you can do right now in your own home is not waste food. A third of produce and food is wasted at home because it goes bad. And so there's a couple of different ways that you can do that. And this is a point of contention in our own household but get a smaller fridge because it's harder to hide bad food if you have a smaller fridge. Shop smart so when you go to the grocery store make sure you're not over buying or under buying especially produce and things that need to be eaten within a short time frame.  Look for the stuff that's about to go off. Potentially can that or preserve it somehow. Save your leftovers or feed them to your chickens or something like that. Right and make sure you eat them instead of letting them go bad.  Donate excess food so at least there's somebody out there that is hungry that will take that food. Food banks and other things. My neighbor is a retired market gardener and he largely grows four food banks now and organize your fridge. So what we do and I'm not saying everyone has to do this but what we do the top shelf is things that are long term like jellies, jams and things that won't go bad being left in the fridge for a little longer. That's on the top shelf and then we have a cheese drawer and then we have a shelf of short term stuff stuff that needs to be eaten soon and that's the most visible shelf and that way we try and avoid having our stuff go bad. And then finally compost and the reason compost is important well there's a number of reasons. First we want to preserve that nitrogen. We spend a lot of fossil fuels to make nitrogen to turn into foods and when we throw that away we are basically wasting that nitrogen that could be used to grow more food. So composting preserves that nitrogen number one. Number two when you compost properly you're not emitting as much carbon dioxide equivalents or namely methane then when you throw food away. When you throw food away it goes to a landfill where it gets crushed under a whole bunch of other garbage and then it produces a lot of methane through anaerobic digestion meaning there's a lack of oxygen and the bacteria that thrive at that point to eat organic material produce methane which is a lot more carbon a lot more potent than carbon dioxide and therefore if you compost properly in your backyard and you turn it often and it's hot and well-functioning compost pile you're only emitting carbon dioxide instead of methane so that's a benefit also. So in summation try and get your food fresh and local as much as you can in season and avoid the fresh fragile far away off season foods and that's going to do a lot to reduce your carbon footprint for your vegetables and fruits. Obviously growing those more carbon intensive fruits that you would otherwise get at the grocery store is going to be your best bet for saving or reducing your carbon footprint and then on the backside or on the use side use those ugly fruit produce use composting to help sequester and maintain that nitrogen and don't let food go to waste.  I want to take a quick second as we wrap up here to talk about some classes we have coming up at the Institute. In the next few weeks we have a number of timber frame related classes that I hope some of you might be interested in taking. On March 25th we're going to be building a toolbox for timber framing tools at Grand Inspired in Stoton. On March 26th that's the next day we're going to be felling trees with an eye to cutting them up for timber. On April 1st we'll be refurbishing antique timber frame tools and other tools if you're interested in that and on April 8th we're going to be building mallets and potentially saw horses for use in timber framing. So those are some classes that we have on our website lowtechinstitute.org slash events. So check those out you can sign up for some of them already and you can look for the rest of the summer we're going to have a lot of cool classes we're going to be milling timbers we'll teach people how to cut down tree into a usable timber for framing or boards for lumber we're going to be building a stone foundation we'll be cutting timber framing joints assembling the floor and the main structure we'll be adding a roof putting on siding floorboards and we'll be filling the walls with light straw clay infill building windows doing lime plaster floor our interiors all kinds of great stuff electrical plumbing heating throughout the entire summer so if you are interested in learning about more locally built structures this might be a fun series of workshops for you also keep an eye out our website and our blog for upcoming announcements for other classes like we'll probably do our annual apple grafting and pruning class this spring in April so keep an eye out for that if you want to be the first to know about these classes become a member members get emails letting you know when classes are available for signing up as well as a discount and you can also sign up for free to our listserv just go to our website scroll down to the bottom and there you can find out how to sign up for our listserv to make sure that you are kept up to date on all the classes we have coming out in the near future that's it for this week the low-tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me scott johnson and co-produced and edited by hina sezuki this episode was recorded in the low-tech recording room subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast and if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thanks to our forester and land steward level members sam brawn maryland scarpon and the havestes for their support the low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at lowtech institute.org find us on social media and reach me directly scott at lowtech institute.org our entry music was Saturn off the album interstellar pop songs by halizna that song is under the creative commons universal license and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks and take care


When I started thinking about a lab that would help us think about our nutrition choices, I was thinking about something that would really focus on taking care of our health. We get so many bombarded with messages about calories and losing weight and how important that seems to be on the sort of glamour side of things, but really what does my body need? And I thought about proteins. There's a lot of talk about getting the proper amount of proteins in a day because that's a nutritious choice, a way of providing my body with the nutrition it needs as opposed to checking every label to make sure I can keep up the body image that I'm hoping for. So I wanted to write a lab, and I wrote this with some colleagues, about really looking at what does my body need. Before I did this, I don't even know how many proteins my body should have. I can tell you how many calories are in the things that I eat in a day, but not really what is necessary to nourish my body. So we started looking at proteins. When you're working in this lab, the very first part is to document all of your nutrition intake for three days. That will be in three columns. List what you eat. List all of your nutrition choices, including beverages. If you feel like this is too personal, it's okay if you think about what you might eat or what your neighbor eats or a cartoon character would eat, but to be meaningful for you, it's best if you write down your own personal nutrition choices. In each of these columns, you will look up, or you might already know, how many proteins are in each. Sometimes it's on a package container. Sometimes you look it up on the website, but write down how many proteins in each of the choices, your nutrition choices, and then how much did it cost you? We're going to look at three parts of this lab. How much did it cost you out of your pocketbook? What did it cost you? What was the impact on your body? How many saturated fats in exchange for giving your body the nutrients it needs? And then in part two of this lab, we're going to look at how does it impact the environment? So three kind of ideas. What's the impact on the cost to you personally?  So after you've done a three-day log, there are pretty clear questions about finding how many proteins your body needs. We're measuring in grams and kilograms, and the unit called grams per kilogram per day. These are things that you will need to describe in your lab rather than sentence explaining what these units of measure mean. Not units of measure we probably run into. We operate in pounds and tablespoons and units that these might not be as familiar to you. So be sure you familiarize yourself with the units. Another question is to find out, even if I knew how many grams of protein I take in, what's the context of that? Is that too many? Is it not enough? But if I'm five grams over, well, is five grams a lot? I don't know because I don't know the context of it. So when we get to this question, number five, the question is that a big number is a question about percent. Be sure that when you find the percent difference that you are using the recommended daily intake for your body as the base or the denominator. We then have some questions about how much, how many saturated fats are in your protein choices. And this again is just to have an awareness of your nutrition choices. In exchange for what you're eating, how much did you have to pay and also how many saturated fats did you take in? And finally, what was the impact on the environment? And there's a website that you can link to which has an infographic. And that infographic tells us how many miles driven per four ounces of protein. And I want you to stop and think about as you're looking at that infographic. What does this unit of measure mean? Miles driven per four ounces of protein. If say almonds is the protein choice or maybe salmon or maybe yogurt, it doesn't mean I'm going to put almonds or yogurt into my gas tank. It doesn't mean how many miles were driven to get the almonds to my house. It's about the carbon imprint or the carbon footprint for the processing of that particular protein, the energy used. So try to use a sentence in your own words that will describe that infographic. And then finally, really think about after you finish this lab how satisfied are you with your protein choices? The nice thing about this lab is there's not a right answer here. I have a lot of students who work through this lab and say, hey, I know these are poor choices from my body or my planet. I'm good with that. That's fine. This is a lab about awareness. How satisfied are you now that you've really taken a look at the choices, the food choices that go into your body? I hope you get something out of this lab.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we are going to discuss the following question and the question says that find centered and radius of circle given by the equation x square plus 5x plus y square minus 6y plus 25 by 2 is equal to 0 by method of completing square. We know that standard form of equation of circle with center hk and radius r is given by x minus h whole square plus y minus k whole square is equal to r square. With this key idea we shall proceed to the solution given equation of the circle is x square plus 5x plus y square minus 6y plus 25 by 2 is equal to 0 and we have to find its center and radius. So we will first convert it in standard form for that we need to make perfect squares. For this first we keep terms with variable x and variable y on one side of the equation and bring the constant term on the other side. So the equation becomes x square plus 5x plus y square minus 6y is equal to minus of 25 by 2. Now we put the x variable and y variable terms in separate brackets so we get x square plus 5x the whole plus y square minus 6y the whole is equal to minus of 25 by 2 and now we will make perfect squares in the brackets. Now for x variable terms we divide the coefficient of x by 2 and then square the result we obtain and then we add this obtained number inside the bracket and also add this number to the right hand side of the equation so that we don't change the original equation. Here we have x square plus 5x so we will add square of 1 by 2 of coefficient of x that is we multiply the coefficient of x by 1 by 2 and then we square it and this is equal to 25 by 4 and we will follow the same method for terms in y variable here we have y square minus 6y so we will add square of 1 by 2 of coefficient of y that is we have 1 by 2 into minus 6 the whole square which is equal to minus 3 whole square that is equal to 9 so we add 25 by 4 and 9 in x and y terms brackets respectively also we will add 25 by 4 and 9 to right hand side of the equation so we have x square plus 5x plus 25 by 4 the whole plus y square minus 6y plus 9 the whole is equal to minus of 25 by 2 plus 25 by 4 plus 9 which implies that x square plus 5x plus 25 by 4 the whole plus y square minus 6y plus 9 the whole is equal to now taking the LCM here we have 4 in the denominator and in the numerator we have minus 50 plus 25 plus 36 which further implies that x square plus 5x plus 25 by 4 the whole plus y square minus 6y plus 9 the whole is equal to now minus 50 plus 25 is minus 25 plus 36 will be equal to 11 upon 4 now this can be written as x square plus 5x plus 5 by 2 whole square the whole plus y square minus 6y plus 3 square the whole is equal to 11 by 4 and we know that a minus b whole square is equal to a square minus 2ab plus b square and a plus b whole square is equal to a square plus 2ab plus b square so using these formulae we have x plus 5 by 2 whole square plus y minus 3 whole square is equal to 11 by 4 which is the standard form of the equation of the circle that is x minus h whole square plus y minus k whole square is equal to r square now on comparing these two equations we have h is equal to minus of 5 by 2 k is equal to 3 and r square is equal to 11 by 4 so we say that its center is given by the ordered pair minus of 5 by 2 3 and we have r square is equal to 11 by 4 which implies that r is equal to square root of 11 by 4 that is by taking positive square root and it implies that r is equal to square root of 11 by 2 so the given circle has center which coordinates minus 5 by 2 3 and radius is equal to square root of 11 by 2 this is the required answer this completes our session hope you enjoyed this session


What's up everybody Jason for Jasper's case base outcome 2023 top stadium club baseball hobby eight box half case break PYT number three sold out guys all-card ship here One two three for the left four five six for the right to one two three no problem Steve Thank you, buddy. Appreciate you man. Yeah, I'll let you know might even say some pics I'll let you know how it goes and stuff and thank you. I appreciate it man. Thanks for buying me today, man I'll talk to you soon. Thanks to Levi for signing this out, man. I know kind of straggled there from Wednesday or from yesterday to today and You put in some work to get this going. So I appreciate it man Close they have Ramirez. They hate that this box is all cards are almost like half backwards. I Hate when they do this. Yeah, these are just gonna be three backwards cards Almost in every stack night's muscle talking a sheet of refractor. Nice going yard Can't give you junior did I cut? Kenbaum with the Mariners and Tommy Henry For the diamond that's gonna leave I price Howard or price Howard price Harper and then eat them small for the Brewers going to Omar beam team I Didn't see a color The reds are just base All right, Xbox And we've got a dad David Hensley for the Astros Ashes is Kev and then Franklin germane Why talks Glenn and Michael and they can't go to be junior beam team use now Diaz for the Dodgers Patrick Hawks And Marcus Wilson for Boston yay with that one All right So far there's our six autographs got four more and then we'll rip the next four guys Have your side for the Cubs, but a Matthew Trout. Oh, sorry. That's wrong. Show it and Oscar Gonzalez for Stadium Club here for the Guardians going to lead by I Have not seen one number to Cartier the first four boxes I mean, they've been actually averaging like one every other at least but Haven't seen one. Just yeah, I've been seen a lot of the reds over the reds are not number That's a blog. That's not numbered either She's the orange and blue Going yard Lattie Patrick with that one Okay, next four Julio, I'll be with junior nice Adley Rutschman over last four here So we can find something better in this house. I show you a Tony refractor Angel gonna Kenneth and Jonathan Aranda for the raise leave out with that one go in your Julio show time Whoa. Wow. Oh, I was not expecting this. Sorry guys. We found something nice base card autograph red foil parallel of Ronald Acunha junior for sport port in the Braves Now, I don't know what red foil is that just the normal red or does that mean like it's gonna be out of five No red foil is out of 50 actually There you go. I'm still a nice Acunha though. That's what we're looking for something big like that and a Dale Murphy. Yeah, it looks sick Another one for the Braves Number to ten. That's the rainbow foil. Very nice braves box right here There's our first like little non-red and out of 199 Kodaisanga finally do some number four Hopefully these next four have our little number cards So definitely didn't find in the first four Riley green chrome Cody Clemens for the Phillies Gonna leave I And Matt Walner Minnesota Twins II Eric our way Minnesota turns Eric Leo Okay All right two more boxes guys Another Dale Murphy Braves killing this break now and a Raphael Devers to 99 and lower for grow for the Pirates Pirates, that's going to Levi All right last box here guys. Good luck. Caleb Killian Cubs gonna Matthew and Nolan Gorman and Jared Young for the cubbies again going yard Freddie Freeman Alrighty guys, well there you go You top load these autographs here really quick and then we'll go through a quick little recap All right guys. So again, you guys obviously know what you guys say in the first half So nice stuff with nothing crazy, but it wasn't until I got this deal Murphy at a 10, which was nice rainbow foil around the Clemens Walner Dale Murphy again over Pugler Killian Gorman refractor young and then we hit a red out of 50 Ronald Acuna, Jr. autograph So that was pretty nice. So appreciate it guys. Thank you. Get some more bricks going at jaspyscasebreak.com


talking tax with Tom Yamachika here on a given Thursday at 10 o'clock. I'm I'm Jay Fidele. This is Think Tech and we always learn new, exciting, and sometimes disturbing things in talking with Tom.  What can I say? Welcome to the show. With that kind of welcome, I don't know what to say, Jay. So, you know, we're talking today about the great tax credit once, and it's really all about the earned income tax credit, EITC, and we'll get into the weeds on that in a minute. But first, I want to ask you, if we want to give relief to people at the low end of the income scale, and maybe not so much relief to people at the high end of the income scale, why don't we just reorganize and rationalize the schedule of tax rates? Wouldn't that be so much simpler? No, I entirely agree with that. Matter of fact, there's a similar debate brewing on the federal side because the Congress has enacted so many new things that use basically the IRS as a welfare distribution system. They're having IRS send out monthly credit checks every month, you know, which was never done before, and they're really not equipped to do that. That's not what they do. They're there to take in money, not get out. Okay. Yeah. And they have been behind the eight ball on budget funding for years. The Congress hasn't given them enough money for them to do what they want to do anyway. Absolutely. And now they're kind of saddling them with other stuff that human services or social security is much better equipped to do. You know, it's like everybody is terrified over tax reform because you don't know who it's going to bite. And you don't know how the sausage will be made, so to speak, once it gets into a legislative forum. And of course, that's still the case. It'll probably always be the case. But ideally, and maybe this is what constitutional conventions are all about. Ideally, you sweep the whole thing out the door and start again. And countries, for example, in Europe, that, you know, have the ability to do that and do serious tax reform, come up with better systems. They're brand new and they don't have this baggage that we seem to have. What are your thoughts on that? Oh, yeah, no, I totally agree. For a long time, we at the Foundation have been saying that the thing that the legislature should be doing is basically getting rid of the old, you know, getting rid of the tax brackets, some of which date back to the 1960s or before. And just revamping the schedules so we don't tax people who are already in poverty deeper into poverty.  Now it's not. Right. I mean, a few years ago, I took a look at, you know, where the poverty line was with relation to our tax brackets, and somebody earning at the federal poverty line is in our fourth tax bracket, fourth from the bottom. So not the lowest, not the second lowest, not the third lowest, but the fourth. Okay. I mean, that's, to me, that's insane. I mean, they ought to be taxed at zero or close to it, in my opinion. Yes. The other thing is the other thing is legislations are not really equipped to make, you know, adjustments in rates or in, you know, in these various provisions, because they don't get the information fast enough. They don't understand that there's four levels of poverty there. They don't, they don't know that, and nobody is telling them real time what's happening. And I've always felt that if we wanted to do this kind of rate modification, it should be an algorithm. You know, this is, this is the economy of the state. These are the people who are disadvantaged. These are the people who are not. And the algorithm figures it out based on the statistics of income of the state and bingo, you have a new rate schedule and it can change, you know, year to year, whatever. I know that's not the subject of our show. I'm just throwing that out there because I'm, I'm into technology and I'm into algorithms. Oh, bad, bad word. Anyway, Tom, let's talk about, let's talk about the earned income tax credit. What is the purpose of such a thing? And what is this current status? We have an earned income tax credit, you know, not only does the IRS have it, and it's been touted as the, you know, the greatest program since sliced bread to get people out of poverty. But it is exceedingly complex. And it's very tough to administer on the federal level, but, you know, our legislature and our representatives and senators in their wisdom said that we should do that for Hawaii also, so we did. Okay. And now I think is a good time to be talking about it because many of our working families are struggling through the income tax forms as we speak. So it turns out that because of the way the forms are put together, they're going to need some spoilers to help them actually find things that they should be finding. For example, yes, we have a state earned income tax credit, but where the heck is it? And we're going to go through some of the forms so that I can show you what the problem is. Please do. Please do. All right. So let's start with the first slide. This slide here is a part of our, after that one, there we go. That one is a part of the form and 11, which is the income tax return that most Hawaii residents fill out. This what I'm showing here is that part of the return that where you claim credits. Right. I mean, so there are certain lines on the return for different kinds of credits. You see that? Not well, not well, but I do see it. But let me let me let me just interject one point. If the federal government has this and if the state wants to do it and if the state so often just copies out what the federal government is doing, you know, like bingo, they're doing the same thing. We adopt, ratify the federal system. Why is that not happening here? And why not? No, that's this is another copycat credit. It's an additional sweetener on top of the federal tax credit. You need to claim the federal tax credit to be eligible for ours. So it's the same thing. The calculation, the form is all the same thing. The rates are different. I mean, we have a smaller tax, so our credit amount is different. And the federal income tax credit is refundable, which means that if you don't owe tax and you have some credit, the federal governor will wait you a check. Okay, ours is non refundable, which means that if you don't owe tax and you have this credit, our government will not wait you a check, we will carry you over the credit to other years so that you have to pay tax in the future. Okay. Okay. But who knows this? I mean, not many people who, you know, are normal working families, not many people would know this. So let's kind of go back to your slide number two, which shows the tax form and say, well, okay, where is, where do you claim the, there are income tax funds? And take a look at that part of the return. There isn't anything that says income tax here. Okay.  So let's go to the next slide. See that little yellow oval? That's where you claim the credit. It's on a line that says total non refundable credits attached to get in CO. Okay. So that means we've got to pull another form. Okay. So let's go to the next slide. And the form is called schedule CR schedule of tax credits. Okay. I need to give you another spoiler over here. If you look on the department's website to pull the form down. Okay. You're probably looking at the end, the end forms, right, because N11 is the income tax form and it starts with an N. So you look all through the end list and it's not there. Why? Because in their infinite wisdom, our tax department said schedule CR starts with an S. So you go to the S's and there it is. So you pull down schedule CR and so this is how it starts. So it names a few tax credits. Let's go to the next slide. And here it names a few more tax credits. And let's go to the next slide. And this is the last page of the form. No. Where do you suppose the army income tax credits? It doesn't say. It doesn't say. It just gives you lists of form numbers. So you have to figure out that there is indeed another form you have to pull. They don't tell you what it is. By the way, even if you look in the instructions to the N11 and you look for earned income tax credit, it's not there. So yeah, I mean our tax office is making the stuff really easy to find. Well, it sounds like this is something that a tax return preparer would like to have because the average Joe, including the average Joe in poverty, won't have a clue on how to do it. And he will have to go to a tax return preparer to get it done. Yeah. So the average Joe's who can afford the H&R blocks or the account to the CPAs, yeah, they can certainly do that. But if they don't, and they try to vote themselves, you know, I did that for a few years myself. And now I have tax software. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, what's interesting about this is it all seems to be miles away from effectuating the original purpose. And the original purpose is to alleviate my right poverty in this state, to give the people who are economically disadvantaged a break. Of course, the first way is with housing and the cost of the cost of occupancy, which we are not doing very much in that department. And then of course, this is very much in that department. But let me just kind of go in and get through a couple more slides. So we were showing you that part of the schedule CR. And let's go ahead and bring that back. Here's the spoiler. Okay, the spoiler is the next slide with the green text. And it says, here's where, you know, here's what each of these little form numbers stand for. So you have six or seven different things. And yeah, I mean, you know, the credit names are kind of long.  But as it turns out, they kind of take it from the perspective of, well, really, really, you need only the tax payers really, you need to know about this. So everything's kind of like put in code. N356, oh yeah, you need an N356. And then you need a schedule CR. And you need to carry that over to the form N11 and the non-refundable credit code. How many ordinary people know that? So we got stats on how many people who theoretically qualify for the credit are actually taking the credit? I don't know if we do. Because it strikes me that, you know, it's hard for anybody at any end of the scale to fill out tax returns that are written this way. And for somebody who may not have great education or any money, or friends, you know, to call and compare notes with, that person going to have a lesser chance of finding it and taking advantage of it. So the probability is just the probability, but the probability is that a lot of the people who are theoretically entitled to this credit are not taking this credit. Period. Yeah. Easy as they don't know about it. They look at the form and they can't find it and they say, oh, I guess we don't have it. So why would they care about it, Tom? I mean, is it a lot of money? Is it going to save their bank in this credit? Well, I mean, I don't think that's the point here. The point here is that our legislature and its collective wisdom said, we want to give this to our people, right? And so it's then becomes the duty of the tax office to make it available to the people. And they say, oh, we're making this available, I mean, it's on the form. Well, yeah, if you have, you know, the right kind of coded magnifying glass. But can normal people find this stuff? And I firmly believe that that tax form, they're supposed to be approachable by normal people. Well, I guess the good news is this is the only provision, the only credit, the only tax form that has this problem that all the other tax forms that we use and see and need to know about all those other tax forms are clear as a bell, and they identify exactly what you're supposed to do. Is that the good news? Of course not. I mean, even on that one page that I showed you, there were, you know, eight or nine credits who weren't even identified on the form. And, you know, if you didn't see our spoiler, you might never know. Yes, you can get the schedule, see our instructions, and it's all there. That's another spoiler.  But if, but then the question becomes, well, is this form approachable by normal everyday people at whom the credit is directed? It's been a lot of criticism level that Hawaii government, which is huge and some people say very bloated. But I think one thing has been demonstrated over the years to me is that it's not a sense of service. You know, like for example, we did a show involving Helsinki. I know that's a long way from where you wanted to go on this show. But Helsinki and they call Helsinki the city as a service. In other words, everything that happens in that city is dedicated to public service. They see every inhabitant as a customer, as a client, as somebody they need to service and make them feel good. But this sort of suggests something that I have felt for a long time is that Hawaii government doesn't think that way. It's more adversarial. It's more, I don't care how you feel. I don't care if you feel that government is serving you or not. I'm doing it the way I like it, not the way you like it. Is there is there a some element to that here and in what you've been describing? Well, I know that there are people in the Department of Tax like there are in the other agency that have the spirit of public service. But that's it's not everybody. Some other people are concerned about wealth G's. There's no realistic left on this form. If I got to put in three columns, as well as the description of the credit. So I don't have enough real estate. I'm going to leave the title of the credit out. So why is this? And help me understand why we are having this conversation. Why is this so difficult? Is there no one in a position of creative authority in the tax office who would understand what you're saying? No one who would come at this problem and try to solve the problem on behalf of the taxpayer? Is there no one who is able to or trained to write a tax form that you can understand? Well, I'm sure there are. But for whatever reason, the form that we have now is not approachable by the people who are designed to service. And, you know, it really kind of got me. This this topic for me got started from a letter to the editor that somebody wrote to the star advertiser. And they said, you know, we've been trying to claim the income tax credit, but we can't find it. And I go, really? And I traced through it. And I go, well, yeah, I guess I can see why you can't find it. And that that's why I decided to come up with this topic.  So this is something that they really ought to be mindful of. And this might even help them. Well, suppose you are right about this. And suppose the government agreed with you. And the government said, gee, if we're going to try to help people, we ought to actually make it make it easy for them to apply for and get these benefits that we have adopted in the legislature, who would do that? Would it be the governor? Would it be the legislature? Would it be the tax office? Who who would step forward and say, wait a minute, you know, Tom is right. We have to correct this and we have to make it, you know, we have to democratize it, so to speak, we have to make it easy to understand, easy to fill out these forms, not only for this particular credit for all the credits, and not only for the credits, but filling out the tax return in general. A lot of people just have a lot of trouble with these tax returns. Why not make it easier? And who is the person who would step forward and say and say that adopt that? For example, if I'm running for office, this is an interesting question for you, Tom. I'm running for office. And I'm looking for platform points. Why not take this as a platform point? Would this work politically? Well, I think that, you know, a lot of the what we're talking about today is, you know, really kind of deepen the weeds for platform points. These are like, you know, litty gritty details that are supposed to be worked out at the at the executive agency level. So really, the people who are most equipped and best positioned to deal with this are those of the Department of Taxation. So they create the forms, they rewrite them, they can make the changes that are necessary. If the problem is we don't have enough real estate to put the descriptions of the credits, I say, you know, get rid of some of those damn columns that you don't need and put at least the credit titles in there so people know what the hell they're talking about.  I have a very important question for you about this. So most of our lives when we are interacting with you know, other people and organizations applying for things, for example, we go online. Okay, and you and I know that some online systems, you know, forms and the like, wizards, if you will, are easy to fill out and some are not. But why don't we have tax returns that are completely online, like wizards? So it takes you logically through the system, through the maze of possibilities, and it helps you make those choices. It's like any good programmer would do. Why don't we have that? Wouldn't that be a tremendous public benefit if people are going to engage with the government? I know that, you know, in the case of people who don't have any money, they don't have any computers, but you could do it on your phone too. And everybody has a phone. Why don't we spend some time and thinking about how to make this really easy on a systematic, logical basis on some online platform? Well, to answer your first question, you know, that's already been licked. Okay. Okay. There are software companies that put out online filing, you log into the site, you answer the questions that the program interviews you with and, you know, opops, tax return. Okay, several companies do that. And they're competing with each other in the marketplace. IRS has put out something called free file, which can be used by lower income taxpayers. Those are more simple returns. But, you know, software like that already is available. Do we have that in a way? I don't think so. And that's, you know, perhaps something we ought to invest in. Now, investing in a project like that takes, you know, a couple of things. Number one, takes initiative. Number two, it takes resources. Okay. Which means that the government, you know, has to say, okay, this amount of tax money is going to be given to the department of taxation to enhance this system or that system. Now, politically speaking, it's way easier for politicians to, you know, defund the tax collector. They've been doing it for years. Some of them, you know, find it fun to do that, I think. And that I think is one reason why both the IRS and in my view, the Hawaii Department of Taxation has got a lot of, you know, a lot of the short sticks on the, you know, short straws in the budget bundle. And that's not going to change soon. I remember Neil Abercrombie's big tear was that he wanted to upgrade the state computer system. And he promised us that he would do that and in short order. And he brought in this guy from the federal government, by the Sony by Wally, and the, that part of the federal government that deals with logistics. And the guy came out here and formed a team of public-private partnership to fund at least part of his cost. And he spent two or three years examining the state computer system. And in the end, he wrote this huge, big report that said the state computer system is way behind the curve. So that was, you know, something we already knew. And then he left. And what troubled me about that is that that's the state computer system. That's among the agencies of the state. You know, I'm not sure exactly what he was doing or writing his report about, but I don't think that he was just one state computer system. That's part of the problem. You know, that's right. That's what he was doing. He was trying to bring them all together. No, they don't. And they're all archaic.   But my point, though, is that he was addressing, and Abercrombie was addressing, the state computer system, how the state engages and operates. I don't think it was covering this kind of thing, how the state engages and operates with the citizens, with the taxpayers. Yes. And that's, that's very, very important as well. Yeah. Well, we only have a minute more. And I would like to return to something that I was asking you about at the very beginning. And that's this. We have a lot of poor people that we really need to take care of. And there are many, many things that make them poor and keep them poor. And some parts of the state government are dedicated to that. And I guess, clearly, are we addressing this properly to say, well, let's give them a tax credit. But there are so many other things we could and should do to alleviate the poverty. And I mentioned earlier, housing, for example, is critical. We're way behind in housing, even for the middle middle class. But we're even further behind in housing for the disadvantaged. And rents are too high. They're out on the street. They're homeless. This is travesty. It's a shame. It's a public shame.  And I'm thinking, you know, if you look at the social problem underlying that phenomenon, it's not necessarily a tax problem or a tax solution. It's a community problem. It's an economic problem. It's a societal problem. Thank you. And the government can be many things to many people, but it can't solve everything. It can help. If agencies are properly focused on doing the right things, one of the organizational problems that I think we need to be wary of is giving an agency too broad of a mandate or stretching it beyond its competency level, which when you start getting those credits proliferating, you are stretching, you know, de-attacks its competency. I agree. And I agree with you that, you know, we cannot have the Department of Taxation take, you know, organize a comprehensive solution here. It's not in their wheelhouse. That has to come from somewhere else. We need overarching, may I use the term critical thinking, and to develop public policy and coordinated efforts by all branches of state government. So if I say to all the branches of state government, look, we've got a poverty problem here. Think of something. And then you let me know. And then we'll do it in order to achieve a comprehensive plan. I don't think we've done that, but it strikes me that you can't do it at the agency level and expect it to be comprehensive. It has to be at the gubernatorial level. Don't you agree? I agree. And that's why they had a governor's housing coordinator. That gentleman who used to be with Focused is leading that now. He's kind of been shaking the trees for the three, four years now. But hopefully, you know, they've accomplished something and that would be sure of what. But hopefully they're getting more coordinated. Well, this tax credit should be easier to find and obtain. We've examined how it might be improved. And we have agreed that there's a lot of poor people in the state that need to be helped in ways that are meaningful and sustainable. We've agreed that that takes leadership. We've also agreed that, well, we haven't discussed this, but I think you will agree with me is that if we don't take care of them, the quality of life of everyone in the state is affected. Nobody wants those blue tents out there. Nobody wants the homeless. Working homeless is the worst of all where they work and scrimp and save, and they still can't afford the cost of occupancy. So we have these, you know, serious societal problems. And I hope that comes up as a platform point somewhere along the line. Well, thank you, Tom. Always fun to talk. You're always stimulating, actually. You know, it's either stimulating or disturbing or both. Usually both. Thank you for calling me a disturbing person at the start of the show. It's a compliment, Tom. Don't you know? I'm Yama Chika, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. We always enjoy our discussions and we learn so much. Thank you, Tom. Thank you for having me on this show.