All right, my introduction to the next speaker can be very brief. It's me. In the summer of 1848, a young medical doctor and civil servant named Rudolf Fierkau wrote in the editorial column of a journal he had just founded called Medical Reform, some words that were to become famous. Let's see, hang on. The reform of medicine is necessitated not for the sake of the doctors, but for that of the sick. Doctors are the natural attorneys of the poor, the Naturlichen Anvelte der Armen, and the social question falls to a significant degree within their jurisdiction. I'm sure you've heard these words before. They're often cited in writings on public health, a discipline of which Fierkau has a claim to be one of the founders. And they have been identified with a position that is sometimes called physician activism or social advocacy, as distinguished from the attitude that says that physicians treat the patient's body and leave the rest up to professionals in law, economics, political science, theology, and so forth. The position Fierkau expresses here is so uncontroversial, in fact, that I feel it may be useful to reach back into the history of medical ethics and show in what ways it breaks with not only longstanding tradition, but with whole ways of framing the business of ethics. Now, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose that ethics consists of a general theory or set of principles about what justice or good action consists in, and then a set of local applications. There would be ethical theory, ethics per se, and then applied versions with their local characteristics, medical ethics, legal ethics, ethics for park rangers, museum curators, teachers, dog walkers, translators, taxidermists, conference moderators, and so on. Wherever you have people acting on behalf of other people, the classic questions come up. What is the nature of the caretaker's responsibility? How do personal interest and general interest interact? How do we formulate a criterion of justice? What is the order of priorities among the aims to be served? And presumably, it is general ethics that would outline the answers to these questions. And below that level, people cognizant of particular fields would tailor them according to their several necessities. But when you reach back into the history of ethical thought in the West, just to restrict our focus to that set of cultures for today, the story is rather more complicated and doesn't confirm this idea of a steady straight line progression from general rules to particular applications. As we like to do here at the University of Chicago, I will call Plato as my witness. In the Republic, we overhear Socrates and the gang discussing at great length the definition of justice. You have to have an understanding of justice before you can design the ideal state, the Republic of that dialogue's title. One of the speakers in the conversation, Pauli Marcus, holds to an old-fashioned idea of fair dealing, that the meaning of justice is to benefit one's friends and harm one's enemies. This is not good enough, answers Socrates. To benefit one's friends is well and good, but no one is truly just who chooses to harm others, even enemies. That is rather the behavior of the unjust person. For it has been made clear to us, says Socrates, summarizing the earlier discussion, that in no case is it just to harm anyone. Citizens owe each other at least the minimal consideration of not doing harm. That, for Socrates, is a step in the right direction, though it's hardly the end of the search. And suddenly, hold on, let me find the right bit here. Yeah, suddenly Thrasymachus bursts in. And, wait, hold on, I've got the slides all sideways here. Well, let me tell you what Thrasymachus says. Thrasymachus couldn't any longer hold his peace, but gathering himself up like a wild beast, hurled himself upon us as if he would tear us to bits. Says Socrates. Thrasymachus said, what balderdash is this that you have been talking, and why do you simple simons chuckle and give way to one another? Harken in here then. I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger. Socrates then goes to work on Thrasymachus. He makes him first admit that sometimes the strong act against their own better judgment and make mistakes, which result in injustice being done even to themselves. Thus, there must be some kind of art of ruling, an art in which some are more skilled than others, and those skilled in this art might be the just. And is it not also true, says Socrates, that any art exists to discover and provide some advantage? Just as if you should ask me whether it is enough for the body to be the body, or whether it stands in need of something else. I would reply, by all means it stands in need. That is the reason why the art of medicine has now been invented, because the body is defective and such defect is unsatisfactory. To provide for this then is what is advantageous, that is the end for which the art was devised. Thus Socrates injects into the discussion the idea of a beneficent use of power, for which medicine is his example. Thrasymachus a little hastily accepts this idea, presumably because it does give advantage and power to the stronger party as his definition of justice had demanded. And an art like medicine is something strong. It is a technique that gives its practitioners enhanced abilities. But it should exercise those abilities for the sake not of the strong, but of the weak, that is for the sake of those who are benefited by it. There's a difference between the competence of an art and the domain on which it is practiced. For medicine that domain would be the defective human body. For public health it would be the public envisioned as an aggregate of such bodies. So there's a discussion then between Socrates and Thrasymachus about this. Can we deny then, says Socrates, that as a physician, physicians seek the advantage of the patient, right? Socrates could anticipate that there would be MDs with MBAs, but he says that when you're wearing your MBA hat, you're not wearing your physician's hat. Thrasymachus is not going to have any of this. He says, you think the shepherds and the neat herds are considering the good of the sheep and cattle and fatten and tend them with anything else in view than the good of their masters and themselves, right? That's going to be his metaphor for the state. Now in Plato, medicine was one of the analogies that allows Socrates to get a tighter grasp on what justice is. Justice will be the exertion by the stronger of an art that benefits those who submit to it, including the weaker. In the state, justice is the employment of the techniques of politics, lawmaking, and publicity for the benefit of the public which is ruled. Thrasymachus, who doesn't concede that there can be moral constraints on power, now has to backtrack. He has to throw out the idea of any art or technique and come back to the sheer power discrepancy and non-community of interests between sheep and shepherd that define his picture of the justice of the stronger. He knows what it means to act on behalf of the sheep and the cattle. It is to keep them in good enough condition to serve the purposes of the owners until it's time to turn them into good, healthy meat. Here, at least, there's no ethical ambiguity about who is serving who's interest. This discussion contains the kink that I was speaking of. When Socrates wants to understand what justice is, he resorts to a metaphor. As the doctor is to the patient, so the lawgiver is to the city. We can understand justice by thinking through the steps of medical treatment. But once the definition of justice has been established, Socrates and his interlocutors have no trouble using that definition to regulate medicine itself and prescribe to medicine certain tasks for the benefit of the community as they see it. In the later books of the Republic, we hear that medicine must be regulated by philosophers. It is the philosophers, the specialists in the good of the city who decide which citizens are deserving of medical care and which ones should be left to die without it. Once medicine has served Socrates to legitimate the discipline whose concern is justice in the state, it becomes, quite obviously, a mere instrument of state purposes including a form of eugenics. That's in Republic 407 and 408 if you're following along with your pocket play-toe. This metaphorical double dipping is a symptom of the difficulty in scaling up and down in thinking about medical care. I know, of course, that there are practical difficulties in scaling the treatments that we devise in our labs or in double-blind tests so as to make them available to populations that may be divided, populations that are non-homogeneous in all kinds of ways. Here we're dealing with a different dimension of scale, a semantic dimension. In the earlier passage of the Republic, Socrates is not concerned by the fact that the provision of medicine is something that states actually do regulate, distribute, and command in various ways. In a later passage of the Republic, medicine is merely the means for the state to maintain its strength through eugenics. It seems that once medicine has handed over its law-like properties over to the philosopher kings, it becomes yet another thing to be administered by them. Now let's go back to the Fairchild passage and consider it in this light. Fairchild's analogy of doctors with lawyer advocates goes in the other direction. Here, too, there is a relation between medicine and justice, but it begins with the patients. It begins with their need for care and it calls the state to account. It would not be enough to say that medicine is a metaphor in the Republic and a literal thing in Fairchild's 1848 editorial. The difference is rather in the way the term medicine serves as test and trigger of other concepts. So medical ethics is not just a domain of application of ethics per se. Medicine, in some way, founds the category of politics. It is as if we can't think about social organization without also thinking about medicine. And this is reasonable, because human beings are physical people, defective bodies, as Socrates recognized, and we need to be maintained in health, fed, kept in a suitable environment, or none of our speculations about justice will come to anything. A medical metaphor is also one of the argumentative resources of the version of libertarianism framed in Wilhelm von Humboldt's On the Limits of State Action, an essay from the exciting year of 1792. Humboldt had spent those years in Paris and was watching the transfer of responsibilities from the royal government to the revolutionary government in France. Humboldt starts from a broad humanistic claim that the true end of man is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. So anything the state does will be subordinate to that imperative. You must develop man. The only job of the state is to stay out of the way and occasionally to serve as a referee invited to keep us from trampling on one another's rights. It does not itself create or confer any rights. And Humboldt is dismissive of the entire efforts of the state to elevate the welfare of the nation, as you can see in this couple of quotations. Humboldt elaborates on the well-intentioned damage that he thinks public benevolence will always inflict. He says states like those to which we refer, too often resemble the physician who only retards the death of his patient in nourishing his disease. Before there were physicians, only health and death were known. So to follow the steps of Humboldt's analogy, the state is a physician, but physicians are bunglers. Away with them then, let us live in the clear, stark alternative of health and death. As long as we're not dead, we must be healthy, right? This style of thinking relishes absolutes and subscribes to a magical idea that if the troublesome in-between of sickness and therapy is removed, what Socrates referred to as the defective body, then all those who are not dead will automatically be healthy. The doctor, for Humboldt, is the natural attorney not of the poor, but of poverty and sickness themselves. So the difference with Fairchild, I think should be pretty clear. And they're both, of course, living in Prussia, overlapping by a few years in their careers. Though Humboldt was a diplomat in Fairchild, of course, was a medical doctor. With Fairchild, the medicine to justice, relation is not to be put aside once it is served to point us on the road to justice. Medicine serves as the criterion for political legitimacy and that goes all the way up the logical chain. There is no point at which for him, politics takes over as an art distinct from healing. Fairchild's government on the Prussian government of his time, which he came to after observing cholera epidemic in Upper Silesia, was surprisingly harsh. You've seen this. After at the conclusion of his report on this cholera epidemic, Fairchild says, when the state, for any reasons whatsoever, whether these stem from heaven or from everyday life, allows its citizens to lapse into conditions in which they must starve to death, it ceases legally to be a state. Now that last sentence is an extraordinary thing to say in the Prussia of the 1840s. You might remember Hegel, who just a few years before had practically deified the state, saying that the state is the march of God through the world and nobody has a right to question the state and its purposes. Fairchild says that it doesn't matter whether the emergency in question comes from the heavens or from human action. It is an existential problem for a democratic state, which Fairchild defines as one desiring the welfare of all citizens since it acknowledges the equal rights of all. And he calls this the solidarity of obligation. In a way, Fairchild is doubling back on Socrates' use of medicine as the analogy of justice. Actual medicine, not just the concept of medicine, becomes the test of justice.  Thank you.


One value I like a lot this week is Miles Gaskin of the Miami Dolphins. Last week we didn't see Jordan Howard on this Dolphins team. He was a healthy scratch. Gaskin steps in, sees a huge workload, but really over the last three weeks he's seen a nice workload in this offense. He's seen about 70% of Miami's running back rushes per game, about an 18% target share. Those are really, really good numbers and without Jordan Howard this past week, Gaskin handled all of Miami's work within the 10 yard line so there's scoring opportunity for him as well. That type of usage at a $5,700 price tag, it's awesome regardless of opponent, but he gets the Jets defense this week that ranks as the fourth best matchup and adjusted fantasy points allowed to running backs so Gaskin should find your lineups. I also like Justin Jefferson at $5,900. He didn't come through with a good outing and a plus matchup against Seattle last week, but he's very clearly running as the team's number two pass catcher behind Adam Thielen. Thielen ran 41 rounds against Seattle according to pro football focus. Jefferson was at 40. He's averaging a 24% target share per game over the last three weeks and this week against Atlanta in a game with an over under that's currently tied for the highest on this main slate. So he should be a good option for you now that he's under $6,000. And then lastly, there's David Montgomery. Now look, if Dalvin Cook sits out, Alexander Madison becomes the top value play on this entire slate. But look at David Montgomery over the last two weeks without Tariq Cohen. Montgomery's seen a nice spike in target share and that's on top of what he sees on the ground. And now this week, he gets to Carolina Panthers. The Panthers have been the easiest opponent for opposing running backs this year. They ranked dead last and adjusted fantasy points a lot of the position. David Montgomery under that $6,000 price tag should find your lineup.


Good evening. Thank you, Thierry, for your kind introduction and congratulations on convening the 14th edition of the World Policy Conference. The depth of content over three days is frankly extraordinary. And I am delighted to join you all this evening. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor. To welcome you all to Abu Dhabi and to have the opportunity to engage in person, face to face, rather than screen to screen. I'm sure many of you appreciate that as well as I do. As we navigate the long tail of the pandemic together, we genuinely hope that your arrival to the UAE was seamless and that Abu Dhabi's precautionary measures have allowed you to be productive, feel safe and to connect with our wonderful city. In addition to this international gathering, Expo 2020, Dubai Expo, opened yesterday, sparking a six month global conversation around innovation for the future. And of course, congratulations to France on its Expo National Day, which happens to be today. Celebrations are also underway for the UAE's Golden Jubilee, with this country's 50th National Day on the 2nd of December. Tonight, if you all allow me, I will talk about our government's policy. Our policy approach for the next 50 years. Specifically, I'd like to share with you this country's response to the coronavirus. And in doing so, share how the UAE's government's values, priorities and strategies were not only tested and practiced, but supercharged for the future. Let me start with some context. Our nation's approach to governance is grounded in the vision of the UAE's founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nayan. Sheikh Zayed brought the seven Emirates together to form the Federation of the UAE in 1971. We were a new country in a volatile neighborhood with a harsh climate and basic infrastructure during very early days. We grew up listening to stories about our forefathers mitigating and adopting to challenging circumstances. By necessity, they had resilience, grit and a forward-looking perspective, which remains in our collective memory and present-day experiences. Even in the early days of his leadership, Sheikh Zayed had a far-sighted ambition. That was simple but visionary. He imagined a country where people had opportunities to learn, contribute and prosper. He set the course for a stable and sustainable economy and aspired for the UAE to be a responsible global citizen. I was seven years old when I met Sheikh Zayed for the first time. I was with my grandfather, who was the UAE's Chief Justice at the time. And Sheikh Zayed, who was larger than life to any seven-year-old, came to my grandfather's home. Sheikh Zayed visited families, often and informally, throughout his lifetime. It was an expression of how much he valued people. He said, and I quote, Wealth is not money. Wealth lies in man. This is where true power lies. The power we value. This is what has convinced us to direct all our resources to build the individual and use the wealth which God has provided us in the service of the nation. Close quote. Sheikh Zayed's leadership was defined by his commitment to creating an educated, prosperous and generous society. More recently, in 2015, his highness, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nayan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, reaffirmed these values when he said, between quotation, our best bet at this time, our best bet at this period of time, sorry, when we have wealth is to invest all our resources in education. Because there will be a time, 50 years from now, when we load the last barrel of oil, aboard that ship. If our investment today is right, we will celebrate that moment. Close quotation. In spirit and intention, these pioneering tenants remain the bedrock of UAE government strategy. There are so many examples of this. Sheikh Zayed's deep respect for the environment drives our clean energy needs and goals. Last year's signing of the Abraham courts reflects his faith in peaceful coexistence. And the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, formed by Sheikh Zayed 45 years ago, set the benchmark for forward-thinking economic diversification and investment. Now, let's all fast forward to 2020. During the darkest days of COVID-19's global disruption, that legacy propelled us here in the UAE. In late January 2020, when COVID-19 seemed like a distant risk contained within China, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed requested a briefing with all the authorities across Abu Dhabi. In the room, we had people responsible for the economy, the health sector, supply chain, national security, food security. We were all there. January 2020, late. And to be honest, we all walked into the meeting, me included, pretty relaxed. We regularly give briefings on different topics to His Highness. On this day, I myself talked about the economic impact that past pandemics had in the relevant markets. We each discussed worst-case scenarios from our perspective. And as we started to go around the room, we started to grasp what His Highness Sheikh Mohammed already knew. COVID-19 could be disruptive and devastating in so many ways. The meeting turned to early mobilization and a mandate to stay ahead of the virus's probable search. We talked about things that were unimaginable at that time, like lockdowns, quarantine, global shortages of medical equipment and supply chain breakdowns. The most perceptive question that day was, how do we test for COVID? And the answer was a PCR test. His Highness insisted that we have the expertise, the infrastructure and provisions to manage a comprehensive in-country testing regime. We all walked out of the meeting on high alert, recognizing that this is real and the timeline to prepare was bearing down on us. Our responsibility was made very clear to us that day. Save lives, protect all the people of the UAE and safely emerge from this unprecedented global crisis as fast and as strong as possible. Because of that meeting, in late January 2020, the UAE is where it is today. The country has conducted over 83 million COVID-19 tests per capita that is the third highest number of tests globally. Every day, we test more than 3% of our entire population, or approximately 300,000 tests a day. We have the fourth lowest positivity rate globally, at 0.1%. In personal terms, I test probably on anywhere between two or three times a week. The UAE has also administered 20 million vaccine doses, which per capita is the highest number of vaccine doses globally. 83% of our population is fully vaccinated, and a further 11% is partially vaccinated. The highest share of vaccinated population in the world. And our vaccination campaign continues, now providing booster doses to ensure maximum protection to our people and population. It's fair to ask how did we achieve this? Unlike the ambitious targets articulated in our national policy agenda, COVID-19 wasn't a choice, but we are succeeding in mastering both in the same way. Our national disposition is to accelerate towards big challenges, or seemingly impossible, driven by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of our people. It is not in this country's DNA to ever stand still. COVID-19 became the rocket fuel that supercharged every priority in our national agenda. We are therefore now sprinting towards our long-term objectives. Let me share a few examples. One of the UAE's long-term goals is to ensure in-country expertise and infrastructure across critical sectors. In response to COVID-19, the UAE became the first country outside of China to set up a lab capable of processing tens of thousands of PCR tests daily. We also now have a domestic vaccine production capability as the first producer of vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines in the Arab world with a capacity of over 200 million doses annually. That's already in place now. In March 2020, we anticipated a shortage of medical masks. Within four weeks, Strato, our aerospace manufacturing facility in Al Ain, pivoted its facilities to produce a 95 masks in partnership with Honeywell. With a production capacity of 30 million masks annually. The UAE is now a large-scale exporter of masks with 80% of our output distributed to 10 countries, including the US, Japan and Egypt as an example. A seamless secure and personalized virtual ecosystem is at the core of the UAE's transformational agenda. The pandemic imposed a wholesale change in how we conduct business, educate students, interact with people and offer government services. The Al-Hassan app, which many of you would have downloaded probably upon arrival, is an example of our aim to centralize and integrate critical healthcare information virtually and in real time. A newly expanded telemedicine infrastructure is another example. And in the past 18 months, Abu Dhabi's health services, virtual outpatient clinic conducted half a million online appointments, accounting for about 10% of all its outpatient consultations. Following the direction said decades ago by the late Sheikh Zayed, the UAE's foreign assistance program proactively supports countries and communities in need. The UAE is always a first responder in that space. And throughout the past 18 months, we have provided over 2,200 tons of medical aid to over 136 countries, including 4.3 million PCR testing kits and over 2,100 ventilators. 117 countries received aid from the Logistics Hub in Dubai's international humanitarian city. And we set up seven mobile hospitals and clinics in developing countries. Millions of vaccine doses are being donated throughout international initiatives like COVAX, alongside $10 million of in-kind donations to the WHO. As a gateway between East and West, the UAE is deeply invested in strong diplomatic ties around the world. Undoubtedly strengthened during the pandemic. Our bilateral relationships allowed us to share information, learn from others' experiences, and kick-start mutually beneficial collaborations. In the early months of 2020, we were in constant touch, as an example, with our Korean counterparts to mine their knowledge and pandemic management. We have also been cooperating with our Chinese counterparts on three clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines, involving over 31,000 volunteers here in the UAE. And we are working with partners in Israel on breakthrough therapies and technologies for severe diseases, which include, of course, COVID-19. The 2021 Edelman Trust parameter highlights that 80 percent of the UAE's that 80 percent of UAE respondents say that government is the country's most trusted institution. Very compelling point. I was surprised when I saw that, but it shows you the level of the population's trust and confidence in this government. Throughout the pandemic, we made sure to honor that social contract by communicating often and honestly with our citizens and residents and by being decisive, immediate and transparent about precautionary measures that are based on science, data, and global best practice. Like our forefathers decades ago, by necessity, we were agile, imaginative and innovative when this crisis hit with speed and intensity. We are now emerging from this period with minimal negative impact on our community and optimal prospects for our economy. This month, the UAE plays sixth globally in the Bloomberg COVID Resilience Ranking, which analyzes where the virus is being handled the most effectively with the least social and economic disruption. And COVID-19 hasn't been our only focus this past 18 months. We advanced our goals in space exploration with the July 20th, sorry, the July 2020 launch of the Hope probe into the Mars orbit. Only the fifth country in history to do so. We are now gathering the first complete picture of the Martian picture, sorry, of the Martian atmosphere to support global research efforts and scientific understanding. We furthered our leadership in the clean energy sector as the first Arab country to produce nuclear energy when the Baraka-1 nuclear plant started commercial operations in April 2021. In the midst of COVID, we were able to start our first nuclear power plant safely and efficiently. We also continue to produce the cheapest kilowatt of solar energy in the world at 1.35 cents per kilowatt. We strengthened diplomatic relations first with the Abraham Accords in August 2020, a historic peace agreement between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel which is opening the door for partnership and exchange. And also with our two-year term on the UN Security Council working towards further global cooperation and problem solving. We doubled down on attracting and retaining human capital by expanding our global visa residency program and creating a long-term pathway to UAE citizenship. We focused on our competitiveness by fast-tracking significant pieces of social and commercial legislation that make living, working and investing in the UAE more rewarding, more enjoyable and easier including 100% foreign ownership of companies. We kept investing in growth areas of the future. At Mubadela, which I run, for example, COVID-19 supercharged our deployment of capital and areas that are driving global progress like healthcare, life sciences and of course technology. So what do I think the next 50 years would look like for us here in the UAE? Just like that January 2020 meeting with His Highness, there will be both challenges and innovations that I cannot imagine but I can tell you as a nation we have the experience and expertise to take educated risks to advocate humanity and to advance it. As a government we have a renewed confidence to excel in the face of challenges and overcome the unexpected. And most importantly as individuals we are empowered to contribute to our collective future. I will leave you this evening with a quote from our founding father Sheikh Zayed who said open quotation future generations will be living in a world that is very different from that to which we are accustomed. It is essential that we prepare ourselves and our children for that new world close quotation. Thank you so much for your time I apologize if I had gone too long but as you can see I am very passionate of what we have accomplished as a nation over the last 50 years what we have accomplished over the last two years in the face of these incredible global challenges and obviously how excited I am for the next 50 years of what we intend to do as a nation. Thank you for being with us here today thank you for making the time to fly and come from many different places I hope you have an enjoyable stay here in the UAE and above all thank you Terry for your kind invitation it is really my pleasure to be with you today I apologize I have to run I am flying to New York for an important meeting tomorrow but hopefully we will have more and more of these gatherings and I wish you a wonderful evening good night


We began our service this morning with the words of Reverend Teresa Soto, Bring your broken hallelujah here. Bring the large one that is beyond repair and bring the small one that is too soft to share. Bring your broken hallelujah here. We were reminded that we all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes, but here together we reach within. As a community we begin again and from the pieces we build something new. I love these words and the recognition within them of all that we bring together, that each time we are with one another, we are carrying with us dreams and hopes, holding all that we love and all that we've lost. I love the recognition that when we gather here, week after week, that it is a form of beginning again, a chance to build something new, something beautiful, something strong, something that can be repaired with gold, even if it feels like the only prayer on our lips is a broken hallelujah. We are coming up on one year of living in this pandemic time. One year of loss, of loneliness, of services here in an empty room, of seeing one another's faces only on screens, of so many tears, of feeling like maybe we are living in unending brokenness. Yet over this past year, as we have been building community in new ways, we have also seen healing. We have seen repair. We have seen creativity and innovation. We have witnessed deep connection. We have learned to love each other well through challenge and loss. As I think about the fullness of life that we have shared together, I am reminded of the poem The Facts of Life by Padrego Tuma, that you were born and you will die, that you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not, that you will lie, if only to yourself, that you will get tired, that you will learn most from the situations that you did not choose, that there will be some things that move you more than you can say, that you will live, that you must be loved, that you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention, that life isn't fair, that life is sometimes good and sometimes better than good, that life is often not so good, that life is real and if you can survive it well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning is scarce, that you will learn to live with regret, that you will learn to live with respect, that the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constricting, that you will probably be okay, that you must accept change before you die and you will die anyway, so you might as well live and you might as well love, you might as well love. My friends, over this past year we have learned that life is sometimes good, sometimes so much better than good and we have learned that sometimes life is often not so good. Through it all, we have remembered that in this life as long as we might live, we might as well love. That message has been carried through this month of examining beloved community. At the beginning of the month, Alex Capitan joined us to share a message of radical transformational love. Alex shared the harsh truth that there are many who do not feel welcome in bringing their whole selves into our life here. Alex's message ended with a call for us to create a community of unconditional love, welcome and belonging. Alex called us into the difficult work of becoming, becoming a place where we are broken, open and held, healed and sent back out into the world to keep fighting. Alex recognized that this is messy, this is uncomfortable, this is possible only if we are open again and again to being made new. The next week, Roger shared a message of exploring the power of love by looking at the wide assortment of love that fills our days. He told us that love is so much more than our narrow understandings and asked us to celebrate love in all its forms. The love of family, the deep love of friends, love for ourselves, romantic love, love for all life and this planet we share. Roger called us to open ourselves to the many types of love that we find and asked us to remain open to all the love waiting behind that next door. And last week, Roger brought forth the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King who saw beloved community as something that happens when we enter into an interdependent relationship of love, mutual respect and care. A simple working definition is a community ordered by love. Roger acknowledged that Dr. King was an idealist and he was a realist. He understood that all people including himself make mistakes. Communities are made up of people. Therefore no community completely and perfectly embodies the idea of beloved community. So here we are on this last day of the month at the end of our month of exploration and I am wondering where does all this leave us? First, I believe we have learned that we are the beloved community and we are not. Beloved community begins with us. Here in this congregation with you and me. It begins with the ways we treat one another, our staff and our larger community. It is in all the ways we show up here. In all the ways we are open to trying again and again to bring the values we espouse into practice. As the Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams would say, we go to church to practice being human. All of this, all we do together is practice. And in our practice we help each other be better humans. We help each other live into being the beloved community. Small groups and regular worship shared service both within and beyond the congregation. Our upcoming relational covenant work that you'll be hearing more about. All of these are our practice. And this is a big and. Part of our work together is seeing this world and one another with new eyes. We need one another and our community to be a place that can remind us of the harsh realities of the unacceptable truths. Remind us that this is not the world we were meant for. We need to be a place where we can confess our heartbreak and confusion and our vulnerability. We need to be able to let down our walls and our coping mechanisms and begin to call forth the life we wish to create. Because we are not in community to be with people who want to sing the same music or rally for the same cause or attend the same retreats. We are here as we heard Alex and Roger say to learn to love better. And this can only happen when we love past our disappointments and return to a place of acceptance and affirmation. This leads me to our next learning. This work is a deep spiritual practice that requires us to have a lived theology. As the Reverend Gretchen Haley wrote, Sustained open-heartedness requires feeling connected to something greater than ourselves. Call it what you will. A greater love, the interdependent web, the universe, the spirit of life, God. And sustained waking up requires meaning making around this something greater. We need constructive positive theology, not just the stuff we know we don't believe. We need to know the words we want said at our bedside or at the bedside of the one we love. And we need to have a sense of how and why we keep going in the face of loss and disappointment. And then we need to tell each other about these things, share with one another what it is that brings our lives meaning in a world of beauty and pain because we're gonna need to be reminded a lot. And this brings us to our last learning. Beloved community is all about relationship. From a position of companioning, we are invited to walk alongside one another, unlearning the dehumanizing patterns of racism, classism, ableism, sexism, dehumanizing patterns for us all and establishing new habits and patterns of collaboration and partnership, hearing each other's stories, discovering who we are and what we love rather than what we think we know about one another. Widening and widening our circle time and again until it truly includes everyone. And then we will find that radical, transforming love Alex called us to create. Remembering what Audrey Hepburn said, people, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed. Never throw out anyone. This relational foundation means Beloved Community does not compete for resources but collaborates towards more for everyone. Simply put, the Beloved Community paradigm causes us to strengthen our ties, help each other out, offer the unique gifts we have, never throw anyone out and rejoice in the working together. This is complicated and messy work. Years ago in our new UU class, a tradition started. First when Jean Sears was our coordinator of member programs and this tradition continues now with Janet Swanson. Toward the end of each session, they will look at me and they will say, go ahead, give them the disclaimer. I felt like this was a good moment to give everyone the disclaimer. And the disclaimer starts with a story. Once upon a time, there was a man stranded on a desert island for many, many years. One day while strolling along the beach, he spotted a ship in the distance. This had never happened and all the time he was on the island, so he was so excited about the chance of being rescued. Immediately he built a fire on the beach and he generated as much smoke as possible and it worked. Soon the ship was heading his way and when the ship was close enough to the island, here came rescuers. And after some preliminary conversation, one of the rescuers asked the man on the island, how did you survive for all of these years? And the man replied by telling them about how he found food, how he was able to make a house to live in and he said, in fact, look up there on the ridge, there's my house. And they looked in the direction of his house and they saw three buildings and they inquired about the building next to the man's house and he said, that's my church. I built that so that I can go there and worship on Sundays. And when they asked him about the third building, the man replied, well, that's where I used to go to church. We tell this tale time and again to point to a very real truth in this work of building beloved community. We will disappoint one another. We will fail each other and ourselves and we will need to choose to come back time and again. We will have our hearts broken. You, me, all of us. And when those moments happen, we will have a choice to lean into the discomfort and stay doing the hard work of repair or to leave. And what I want to invite you to do here in community is to consider the possibility of opening your heart and coming in closer. There is really only one choice between imperfect community and no community. Again and again, we are all called to choose to commit ourselves to building something beautiful, something with the power to transform ourselves and our world, something that is the ever messy and imperfect beloved community. We all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes. But here together, we reach within. As a community, we begin again and from the pieces, we build something new. May we be brave enough to make it so.


What's up everybody and welcome back to the Johnny Q channel in today's video. I will be unboxing a brand new Glock 19 MOS so I did get this at my local gun dealer my local gun shop and this gun did cost me $630 I got it at a slight discount. I believe it was 670 but got a little bit off because of a 15% discount so turned out to be 630 and What's funny about this is this is the California compliant Which is why there's three ten round magazines in this box? Oh There's a price it's about 680 brand new but I did get it for 630 as we can see here It's Glock 19 gen 5 9 mil California compliant it's got three magazines ten rounds each But I did go and pick up another Magazine of 15 rounds which I already put in here, so I'll show you guys that as well So of course we have the Glock case the Glock box as we all know and love Let's open it and so right off the bat we can see we are met with the notorious Glock essentials and it's kind of nice because It's all there. It's not some bag like we see in other You know gun brands, but it's not very organized either, but hey, it's there. It is or it is So we have in this plastic baggie the back straps to adjust how we want the beaver tail and Grip angle of the pistol with our hand, etc. So it goes off to the side And then of course like I had mentioned we have ten round magazines Here we have this thing We got one two hand Three now the Glock 19s if it's non-California compliant will come with a standard 15 round mag I believe it's two 15 round mags But let me know in the comments if I'm wrong, but I will not need these because I do not live in California No, thank you ten rounds.  We'll put this over here for now And of course if you've ever owned a Glock or bought a Glock before you get all the basics Here's the adapter plates, which is really nice that Glock actually gives you this for your MOS, which is awesome Put that up to the side. We might use that later and of course We have some safeguards from Glock all the manuals, etc. etc. So we'll put this back And if you want to clean your Glock Glock does provide you with this set of cleaning tools to clean your Glock But I will put those away because I don't need those We'll close it up put this away and here it is you guys. This is the Glock 19 gen 5 MOS and I gotta say This is such a good handling Glock Now when I was on duty We did go from Glock 17s to Glock 45s with an optic and the Glock 45 is essentially a 17 handle with a 19 slide and I just I love this feeling of gun It does feel really good in the hands even though it's a shorter Pistol grip, but that's okay. And like I mentioned earlier. I did go ahead and purchase my own Glock 15 round magazine. Let's make sure it's cleared An empty and it is and Just like that. There's a Glock 19 gen 5 I know a lot of people hold pistols differently, but this is how I hold it and I gotta say it does feel Really good in the hands, which is no wonder why the FBI uses a Glock 19s for their duty carry pistol And of course this up here on top of the slide is where the MOI system is you can mount your optic of choice I believe we'll probably do that here in a little bit. All right now. Let's test that trigger action Let's release this put the magazine over here and let's test that trigger Okay, we have this amount of take up We have a little bit of mush but not too much now. Let's press press There's the wall and break Okay, now we'll release release There's that tick and that click there's the mush the wall take up and Break one more time. Let's see releasing is smooth Tactile click and coming back up again a Crisp break which feels really nice feels really good in the hands and on the finger now if you wanted to you could attach a Surefire light I have a surefire x300 ultra as you saw there just clipped it on very easy to do not hard at all and You could use this as an everyday carry holster it up conceal it and It would look pretty good. So Not too bad, but we'll take this off for now and let's attach this Optic on here or let's start unscrewing this portion of the MOS Optic cover we'll gently remove that Put that off to the side and it should look like this You'll take the MOS adapter plate that Glock gave you place it on there just like that So once you have your mounting plate on the slide Take the screws that Glock provides and these screws are what's going to hold your plate on The slide itself, so we're going to insert those and make sure those are screwed on Very well, so we'll find our thread and start screwing in and just so you guys know there is already locked tight on the screws So that is very helpful. It is pretty tight on there. I don't want to strip the screws So that's not moving anywhere and the plate should be aligned with those recirculations As you see there so that is pretty good The optic that I'm using today is the RMR Trigicon type 2 Very typical very reliable optic and it's going to go on my Glock 19 And I'll probably live there for a little bit and maybe I'll change it out for some other optics, but that's what I'm using today So now that we have our optic and our plate mounted. Let's just put the optic Just rest it right on top and I'm using the screws that Trigicon did provide and I'll just find the thread And slowly thread in both of those just like that make sure it's nice and tight don't over tighten it There it is. The Trigicon type 2 is now mounted on my Glock 19 MOS Let's turn it on here now as you can see here What I don't have is my rear and front sights are not co-witnessing I mean they kind of are but they're just buried behind the optic So that's something I may have to just work on later, but for the most part I trust this optic I've shot it quite a bit, and it's very very reliable. So I'm I'm okay with with the optic and the iron sights not co-witnessing so And if we add our Sharefire X300 That's what it looks like and if you want to add Just for fun and extended Magazine that is what we have So yeah, I think this is going to be a pretty good every day carry. I think this will be for sure one of my new Everyday carries or at least in the rotation. It does feel really awesome in the hands I feel really confident especially with that RMR Trigicon. I feel confident in it I probably will run it with something smaller of a light not the X300 But of course, what do you guys think? Let me know down in the comments below if you carry a clock 19 Gen 4, Gen 5, MOS Maybe no optic. What do you guys think? And if you've been wanting to buy a clock 19 Gen 5 Would this steer you in that direction? Yes or no comment down below. We'd love to know what your thoughts and as always guys Thanks so much for watching appreciate all the support you guys make all of these videos possible and Until then I'll see you in the next Johnny Q video Peace


Hey, everyone. My name is Jason Imerman. I work for Zipcar. This is Derek Van Ash, works for HS2 Solutions, and we're going to talk about how Zipcar has recently been using concourse in order to manage our increased product and process complexity, or more specifically, how we use concourse for all of the things at all the times.  Cool. So as I said, my name is Jason Imerman. I work for Zipcar, and Zipcar provides on-demand cars. It deals when you want them. And as a result, we do a lot of things with scaling, fleet management, and Internet of Things as we pull data from our cars. And I'm Derek Van Ash. I work for a company called HS2 Solutions. HS2 is a digital brand experience agency. We offer the full range of services, including development, management consulting, QA, analytics, pretty much everything in between as well. HS2 and Zipcar have been partnering on different projects for over seven years, and currently I'm working with Jason and his team to build out their pipelines in concourse, trying to optimize their development workflow. Cool. So before we jump into concourse, I'm going to give a little bit of context as to where Zipcar is with our tech stack. And hopefully some of you saw this in the keynote with Andy and Holly. But right now, Zipcar is replatforming. So we're a major replatforming going from a monolith to a set of microservices. And we're using Cloud Foundry tools for our deployment, our orchestration, and a lot of our monitoring, things like Bosch, Diego, and LoggerGator. And we built a subtraction layer that we call Savannah that really makes it easier for us to host and do all these things with a set of microservices. And it's super cool. That's not what this talk is about. So I'm not going to talk about it too much, other than to say two pertinent details. One of which is throughout this talk, I'm going to reference an app or a microservice or a service. I'm talking about the same thing, but at Zipcar we have a very opinionated idea of what a service is or a microservice. But Savannah can host them all. The other piece there is we're going to reference deployment manifests. So deployment manifest is a file that contains the state of an environment. It's effectively an array that's a set of services, their names, their versions, the number of instances, et cetera. So that will come up a few times. So this replatforming has been super cool, but it's also increased the complexity of our system a lot. So a few numbers there. We have now over 80 services, and that number is only going to keep growing. We have over 25 production environments. Because in addition to the Zipcar solution, we also have a white-labeled solution called Local Motion by Zipcar. And we're using the same technology to work with our parent company, Avis Budget Group, on some connected car stuff. So we also have teams that can choose their own languages, their own frameworks, their own runtimes. And as a result, we have a lot of varied host configurations of what we need in the DACR images and the parent DACR images that they use. And then finally, our teams are widely distributed. So geographically and as a result, they're distributed in time zones. So in pictures, we're going from something that looks like this to something that looks more like this. You don't need to read that diagram. It's really just so there's more stuff. And so the problem statement really becomes, how do we minimize the human error while still being able to fully understand our environments and safely delegate ownership to the individual teams? That last part is really important to us. We want the teams to be able to own the code from development to production, to support, to interact with users, and getting technical feedback. And we want to take away a lot of the stuff that they need to deal with in order to do those things. Cool. So in looking for a solution, we came up with a few main tenants. One is communication. We want the communication to be transparent, centralized, and consistent. As a individual engineer, I want to know what's going on with my builds, what's going on with my apps, where they are in any particular environment. As a stakeholder, I want to know the same things, but in a little bit of a different perspective. Change management needs to be lightweight and auditable. Specifically that lightweight piece, we want to make sure that people can apply these solutions to really a general set of technology. And so that a lot of our artifacts, our publications, things like that, are built in a fairly consistent way. Cascading changes, if I make a change over here to a package, that package gets to where it needs to be over here. And ultimately, that thing that is using that package is deployed to all the right environments, and then I can actually check that that happened. And then finally, managed configuration. We don't want snowflakes, we want to be able to redeploy and rebuild and have it be the same thing, and isolation. Let's say if I build a bad version in app, I want to be able to build that same artifact without thinking that the bad version is going to have somehow impacted the good version. So we chose to concourse all the things. And so in the next slide, I'm going to show a general solution, and then I'm going to pass it off to Derek to break down how we're going to go through this talk. The general solution I'm going to show does not contain all the ways in which we use concourse. Because we use it across our entire system, our infrastructure, everything. It's going to show a high-level idea, and then just kind of to give a flavor. And then what we're going to do is try to give you some scenarios about how we actually use concourse to show how you might be able to use it in your organization. So that solution looks a little bit like this. We have pipelines for things like building our Docker images, our parent Docker images, for building all of these individual microservices, for deployments to all of our staging and production environments.  But the main important piece of this slide is the center. So in the center, all of our artifacts are built by concourse. All of them are built in a consistent way. They're rebuildable, and no one is really manually going in and building and pushing to our artifact stores. With Slack, all of the communication from concourse about our pipelines and everything else is going to the same set of channels. And those channels follow patterns so that as a stakeholder and individual engineer, I know where to look. And I know that I can look there and feel comfortable that I'm getting the right information all the time. Cool, so now we'll hand it off to Derek. All right, so for get started, one thing I want to reiterate that Jason mentioned earlier, Zipcar uses concourse in many different places and a lot of different ways, so many different ways that we don't really have time to really dive into any meaningful detail in the time we have allowed. So what we decided to do was just identify a few different scenarios that might be relatable to a lot of different types of organization. And just kind of break down, like discuss a little bit about the work flows involved and how concourse enters the picture. So as you can see here, this is what the scenarios are. And without further ado, let's go into the first one. So let's say a developer wants to make a change to an existing application. So what I'm showing here is just a basic outline of a process that a lot of different organizations might follow, might vary slightly a little bit, but especially if they use get as source control. So first off, a developer would create a branch. And then make some code changes on them. And like they would iterate on these changes as they further test. Once they're ready, they would create a pull request, maybe iterate some more on their code changes. And once everyone is happy with that result, they would merge it to a master branch, then deploy to staging where some manual testing, some automated testing would occur. And once all stakeholders are happy with the result, then we would deploy to production. So what we're going to do today is just focus on the items in the dotted rectangle here. So the items in green, actually the ones in the dotted before I go further, these have concourse pipelines associated to them. So the ones in green are basically automated triggers and anything in yellow, which in this case the deployment to production is manually triggered. So first off, when it's time to create a pull request, a pipeline that looks like this gets executed. So for those that are not familiar, this is just an example of a pipeline screen within concourse. And again, for those not familiar with concourse, within concourse, you have pipelines. And with pipelines, you have resources and jobs. So a resource could be any object that you might want to trigger action off of or any object you might want to update. Some examples might include like a Docker repository or a Git repository, a database, things in that nature.  So to start out, we have a dependencies test. And it's a check that essentially looks out any kind of internal service dependencies that a particular application has. Just make sure that version exists. There's no circular dependencies, things of that nature. And moving on, we also run some integration tests. So automated tests to ensure that the code will work on upper environments. And also we run an internationalization job. So essentially, we take a look and see what languages are configured for a particular application and generate the proper translations there. And then finally, we create a Docker image and publish it to all the Docker repositories we need to. And one thing to note with these Docker versions that we tag, we can overwrite them. So it's not limited to just one. So it's essentially a snapshot version of that particular application. So once it's time to merge the code to master. So we have a very similar looking pipeline here. There's a couple of differences, though. So one is a master dependency analysis job. And what that does is just conducts a security vulnerability check against the code. And also make sure that all API dependencies, external dependencies are up to date. There's no newer versions of those out there. Again, moving along, we have a Docker build step that, again, creates a Docker image, publishes it up to the Docker repositories. And but this time when we tag it, it's a lasting version. So you can have exactly one version of that. If you want to something change, then you have to actually bump up the version again. And finishing off here, we have a deployment manifest update. And this is a very key part of the process that Jason alluded to earlier. So essentially what that is, it's a per environment configuration. One of the things in there is that it has all the current version of an application per environment. So at this point, we update that version once it's version master, we have the hot off the presses version in our manifest for a staging environment by default. And that brings us to deployment time. So once that happens, we kick off a pipeline, a pretty simple one that looks a lot like this. Again, we update that deployment manifest. And by default, it will actually kick off this pipeline, checks to see what if the deployment manifest was updated, and then actually deploys it to our staging environment automatically, which is nice. And then once it's time to deploy to production, we have a very similar looking pipeline. But this time, it's manually triggered. But essentially, it's the same mechanism in order to deploy. We update a deployment manifest for the version of that application, as well as any other application we want to push out to prod. So with that, we'll move along to another scenario to create a new microservice, let's say. So again, the workflow looks very similar to the one if you want to change an existing microservice. But before we can get to that point, we need a little bit of setup. So again, the developer might create a repository first and then create a concourse pipeline. So for our sake, again, we're going to focus on the item in the data rectangle that's creating our concourse pipeline. And we actually chosen to automate this process for a few different reasons. So as Jason mentioned earlier, Zipcar has over 80 microservices that's counting every day. Not all developers at Zipcar are necessarily well versed with concours, know how to create pipelines, and things of that nature. But they don't really have to be. We've created a nice little process to seamlessly integrate with an agile development workflow. So having a nice powerful tool like a concourse pipeline is just a matter of seconds away. Definitely not a barrier to have something spun up to help with continuous integration. Great thing to have. Another reason why we chose to automate it is just issue support. So Jason's team is charged with supporting these pipelines. So A, having so many pipelines running, it makes it very easy to identify issues but more importantly, fix issues. So when you're fixing one issue for one pipeline, a lot of times it'll apply to many pipelines and sometimes all pipelines, which is very powerful and efficient, which we all like. Another benefit is to aim towards stateless infrastructure. So if we wanted to migrate to different concourse hooks for some reason, we can easily spin up all the pipelines that belong to that concourse instance and have it in a matter of minutes. Very nice there too. So going into the solution a little bit more detail. So we've created a command line application. It essentially allows the developer to configure a few different aspects they would like to see in their pipeline so they can customize different types of testing that they want on it, which concourse instance they would like to push their pipeline to, what tech stack that their service belongs to, that kind of customizes actually how the pipeline runs in a lot of cases and as well as if they wanna update other deployment manifests for auto deployment. So as I mentioned earlier by default, we will deploy to our staging environment, but if you wanted to deploy to other environments automatically as part of this pipeline, you can easily do that here. So to draw your attention to the diagram at the right a little bit, so again, we have an application. It basically takes a smaller configuration and generates a larger configuration file that concourse can recognize. We push it out there. One notable thing, we use vault for sensitive data that is within our pipelines. So we'll push it out there. Another thing to note is that we also interact with our Git repository in this pipeline process and this is kind of interesting. So by default, the concourse Git resource that we used will pull our Git server and we found that it produced a lot of load on that server. So in order to, especially with all these microservices, we have a lot of different repositories. So what we chose to do instead is to trigger our pipelines based on a commit against a pull request that we showed earlier and a commit against a master branch. And just by looking at this, you may wonder, well, how does this magic occur? So we have created this application called concourse API and what that essentially is, it acts as a traffic hop. So anytime, like I said, a commit is pushed against a pull request branch or a master branch. It'll flow through this concourse API application and in turn, the concourse API application is smart enough to know which pipeline did kick off, which resource did kick off to get the whole pipeline going. It's a very powerful thing. So moving on to our next scenario, I wonder how Zipcar does code vulnerability analysis. So we have the, going back to our first scenario, one of the steps in our workflow was merging some code to master. We have a, within that workflow step, we have a job that will actually conduct this vulnerability analysis that I sort of alluded to earlier. So again, that's, it checks for old versions of API, but more importantly, any security vulnerabilities that might be within that application. So what we actually do there, going into a little more detail, there's a national vulnerabilities database, which is a US government hosted database of known vulnerabilities of APIs. And so we make that flow through this job. And if there's any vulnerability or old API dependency, we will post a notification to Slack. So the correct Slack channel, so any stakeholder or development team will be notified that, hey, there's a security vulnerability in your application. And we'll also post it to this DevMetrics database there. I'll talk about that in more detail in a minute here, but before I do, one thing to note is that any failure here, so if there is a cold vulnerability, for example, although the job will fail, the pipeline will continue to flow, so we'll allow Docker images to continue to be posted for that particular, and tagged for that particular version. Just allowing the different development teams to kind of prioritize like how vital they see these vulnerabilities, or how vital they should get up to the latest version of an API dependency. So again, we put the control right into the developer's hands and the development team's hands so they can make an educated decision there and not have to block any kind of agile workflow. So going into a little more detail on DevMetrics. So as you can see, we have wrapped this DevMetrics database around a service. And again, we have it not only embedded in our pipelines, but we also have a scheduled DevMetrics run. So for those cases where an application is actively developed, let's say it's pretty stable and there's no code changes against it, we'll at least run this DevMetrics run that we call once a week and it'll essentially do the same thing. It'll look for security vulnerabilities, updated API dependencies, post to the same Slack channels and have the development teams kind of prioritize accordingly. Another interesting thing to note here is we have a Hubot application and what that is, it just takes some Slack commands that'll interpret them and go against our DevMetrics service and basically post the same results. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Jason who will bring us home with a couple more scenarios. Cool, thanks, Jack. So a lot of what Derek has shown so far is our pipelines within the context of a single microservice, a single application, but that's not the only way that we use concourse. It's certainly the primary way, it's the way that most developers or engineers interact with concourse, but there are a bunch of things that we do outside of that. So I'm gonna demonstrate a few of those more cross-cutting applications. So the first one, if we need to upgrade a package that's shared across a lot of our services, in this case, let's say we're upgrading Java, more specifically the version of JDK. So what we've done is we've wrapped the remote Oracle JDK repo in a concourse resource, which means the concourse can natively interact with it when new versions are posted, concourse will know about them. And so for minor versions, we can automatically trigger the pipeline and what's going to happen is if Oracle posts a new minor version of some JDK that we're using for the major version. We are going to kick off this pipeline and automatically rebuild all the images. So the base job image, the image that has Java as well as all the magic sauce needed to interact with Savannah and the same images that are used to test within concourse. And then what Derek showed earlier, we have a developer coming along, making some code changes unbeknownst to them, JDK has been bumped, they push something up to get and the pipeline kicks off. Now the magic here is that the pipeline that runs, both the tests and the artifact that's built and published are using the new version of JDK. Of course, the test can fail and in concourse logs, you can easily see what happened, why it failed and moved from there. But ideally it's published, it works, it automatically goes to staging and the workflow Derek showed. The developer chooses when to push it out to production and we've upgraded JDK. There's a pretty big gap here though, which is because we have over 80 microservices that numbers gonna grow, they don't all get developed very often. So some of them are constantly being developed, some won't get a commit for a little while, but we still need to get the new versions of in this case JDK up to those apps. So we have this thing that we're developing in process called maintenance mode. And effectively we choose some time, let's say in this case a month and we're gonna trigger these pipelines in a schedule, check what pipelines haven't been run in a certain amount of time. And if they haven't been run, we're gonna bump the patch version and then run the pipeline. Ideally the test pass, we publish new artifact, we push that to staging and then we have the new version on staging with the new JDK, even though the developer didn't commit a code changes. Well, the developer didn't commit any code changes so they're not expecting this new version so they're not gonna know to deploy that at production. So we use concourse again for a bunch of reports, one of which is this environment diff report. And for any of our staging and production environments, we can diff production and we can diff staging and we can see what versions are in both, how old those are. And so we publish that to a very public channel once a week and ideally the engineer notices and say, oh, there's a new version of my app, I need to go deal with that. Test it, push it out to production. However, they might not notice and this is where peer pressure comes in. We have this nudging mechanism where everyone's accountable, people are talking to each other, stakeholders may notice, peers may notice. And inform the engineer, get it out to production. And a quick shout out, we also have that as a HuBot command, a lot of these things for Slack integration. So there's one more gap here. I said that ideally the test pass, the thing pushes out to staging and then this environment diff report picks it up. What if the test started failing for whatever reason, time passed or the new JDK version caused the test to fail? Well, that's where another report comes in the persistent pipeline failure report which is effectively on some interval we check to see, has or by admitted consistent failure state for X days, weeks, months, whatever. And if so, we do the same thing, we publish how to report to Slack and through that same mechanism, we hope that the engineer will get it, that information, make some code changes and measure that thing out to production. So one last scenario here is continuous integrations or continuous integration testing. So Holly references this on the keynote stage but we do this thing called journey testing or user journey testing and these are really the revenue critical paths that are required for our system to work and our users to interact with the system both internal and external users. And so we have a set of very stable tests that run constantly against all of our staging production environments to make sure that these revenue critical paths are passing because we have all of these versions of all of these apps constantly flowing into these environments and we need to make sure that they don't break things. If something fails, post to Slack and all hands on deck to get that thing fixed. But one side effect here is that because we're running these from concourse we're constantly ETLing the data from these tests into New Relic which is an application performance monitoring tool. It's really cool if you haven't used it. But one really nice side effect here is that we have constant uptime metrics on both our staging and production environments. So we can see how quality is affected not only in production but staging because CICD comes with the fact that we can't just constantly be bringing down our staging environment. We need it to be usable for people to actually test and things like that. And so as a little bit of a side we take this data and then we have a New Relic dashboard that we can make for any environment that gives us uptime metrics. It gives us things like historical duration of the test. We can see if we have load problems. Yeah, things like that. So with that I will hand it back to Derek to wrap up. All right, so thanks Jason. And as we talked about Zipcar uses concourse in a lot of different ways. We covered some really fundamental basic building blocks just to kind of get your appetite wetted a little bit. Like we said earlier, it's used in a lot of different ways, a lot of different things. It's used for other development workflows. There's nuances to the workflows we've discussed. There's a lot of infrastructure related workflows that it's used as well. So really neat powerful tool. So really I just wanted to extend an invitation. If you see either Jason or I walk it around feel free to stop us. We'd love to talk more about concourse and how Zipcar uses concourse. Or if you're a user of concourse, we'd love to chat as well. There's a lot of different ways to solve different problems. And it's interesting to kind of relate some different organizational challenges and try to come up with good common solutions. And also before I close too, I wanted to give a big shout out to Stark and Wayne. They got Zipcar started with concourse, got them initially implemented. So thanks for that. And with that, I'll just close it out. And I think we have time for a few questions if anyone has any questions. Guess I don't fully understand your question. When you say applications on the core versus the periphery. Sorry about that everybody. So your question is around pulling apart a tightly integrated system is really hard. And so what I think you're saying is that the things in the core that are really tightly integrated you can't get to those right away. You have to have a real strategic approach to those. And so to start out, you pick things that aren't quite as tightly integrated and start migrating them into the environment. Is that what you're saying? So you wanna ask the rest of your question? So did we do it that way? What we ended up doing is starting off with completely new functionality. And we are in the process of migrating some of that deeper integrated stuff. And we do have a strategy in place for that. But I'm not sure I can really talk about how we're going about that without divulging internal stuff. So does that help? Okay. Cool, anything else? Sure. Yeah, so yeah, exactly. So instead of concourse polling get it'll basically anytime you commit to get. So like I said, the master branch or a poll request branch only it'll flow through that concourse API and then trigger the pipeline instead of a polling mechanism. Yeah, webhooks. Yeah, we use webhooks and there's also a PRNFB servlet that also handles the poll request. So that's kind of just something like a plug-in that you put right into in our case stash. I mean, I think it's pretty solid. Like so far we're not, we find some issues sometimes with having to configure workers and container counts getting maxed out but then it's pretty tweakable. Like you can easily just kind of scale that in a lot of different ways. I think we're still kind of exploring the different ways that you can do that but so far it's not like a huge problem. It's usually pretty attainable to all that. We've done a few things to also mitigate that. I didn't know if you noticed in earlier slide we have multiple instances of concourse. So we're having problems with one and that was more of an issue in a much older version of concourse. We were able to dynamically go between them and because we automatically can generate the pipelines that was not too painful. We also have a lot of monitoring setup on concourse itself. So there's a lot of documentation about how you can do this but concourse is always emitting data that you can report upon and similar to that we built a lot of our own reporting mechanisms to hey if jobs are failing with a stalled worker exception we get notified and then we can go take care of it. Anything else? All right well again approach Jason or I and thanks for your attention.


Live from Miami, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM's data in AI Forum, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering the IBM data and AI Forum. Mike Gilfix is here. He's the Vice President of Digital Business Automation at IBM. Mike, good to see you again. Good to see you. So your question, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Digital business is one that gets digital software scale. So as opposed to traditional business, you know, very manual, very rote. If you want to get software like scale, you need to digitize. Okay, that's important. So now follow-up question. You hear, I don't know, I think Benioff said every company's a software company or a SaaS company. Does every company have to be a digital business? Else, they're toast? I think it's a competitive pressure. I think every business today is looking to get more and more leverage to stay ahead of their competition. And they're looking to technology to do that. That's actually where we come in, because we bring to them automation technology. Automation technology, they can apply to their business operations that will help them to get that scale. Mike, you guys got some hard news. Let's get right into it. What are you announcing today? Sure, so we're announcing a new critical capability. It's part of our cloud pack for automation. It's IBM Automation Digital Workers. The idea is that you can leverage a digital workforce. You can manage them like people. They can work alongside your people. And they can help to free up your people to be that much more productive. They can spend their time on creative things. They can get assistance where they need it. All integrated as part of this digital workforce. All right, a lot of questions. So what's a digital worker? Well, it kind of works just like a person does. It can do critical tasks that they need to do, like sift through documents to find out what to take action on, help with decision-making processes, figure out when to act, how to prioritize work, and it can integrate into those people's workflow. So they can offload, say, mundane tasks to even more complex tasks where it works alongside them, helps them be more productive.  Is it? I mean, is it? It is a form of software robot. You know, the way that we've approached the problem though is we've really approached it from the human aspect. We've looked at the set of things where people spend their time, where they're doing things that they're really not good at. For example, many organizations, actually probably think about even your own job, we spend tons of time sifting through emails, business documents to figure out how to turn something into action. It's boring, it's tedious, we're frankly overwhelmed with it. We can use a digital worker to go through those documents, figure out then what to do, and then take action on it. Simple example, let's say someone's doing contract analysis. Think about all the time spent going through a contract to figure out what's in it, the decision-making process to figure out is it a valid contract, and then determining who should I get involved when there's a situation, so you can bring the right expert to the right job. So is this a pre-integrated package, or do I have to sort of roll my own? How do I consume it? Well, that comes as part of our cloud pack, but it comes with a set of tools that you can adapt to your given job roles. So you can describe, for example, what's my compliance officer do? What are the set of tasks they do in their day? For example, checking those contracts, and then you can use that to do automation and augmentation, where it integrates into the person's workflow, and you can manage them just like people. It'll tell you what work they did, and very importantly, we have an element of business controls so that you can trust the work that gets turned over, and it'll determine when you have to stage intervention and get a human involved to complete some form of task. So it still sounds a little bit like RPA, but maybe more focused or more specific to certain use cases or tasks? Well, if you really look at where RPA is making its strides today, it's making its strides in data entry and automation of input and data. A lot of back off of stuff. But what it doesn't do really well is, for example, complex decision-making. So consider that compliance officer. Checking whether something is compliant requires more than simple decision-making. It's not excelling today in the area of dealing with unstructured data or figuring out how to integrate into workflows directly. And we've approached this problem from the perspective of the job role. Tell me about the person, not the point thing that I want to get involved. So it's something that can integrate with RPA, it'll extend RPA, but it'll really allow you to create a digital worker as in a hybrid workforce management experience. Okay, that's starting to make sense now because you're right, RPA is basically take this mundane work process that's very well understood and automated. Sometimes I call it paving the cow path. But to me, the future of RPA is being able to cross that chasm and going into these fuzzy areas that you're describing, embedding into workflows, maybe allowing humans to come into the equation, maybe calling other automations to act on my behalf. That's where I think we partner with RPA vendors. We can supply that brain, if you will, that manages the digital worker brain and we can seamlessly integrate it into business processes, many of which actually run on our technology. And so the marriage of those things is effectively really what we've heard clients want, but today struggle to achieve. Well, it's interesting because it makes, so you're not trying to replicate RPA, there's enough vendors out there doing that. You're trying to add value to that and other, I'm sure there are other areas that you can add value to. And are you partnering specifically with RPA vendors? We do, we have close partnerships with RPA vendors. One that we've worked very closely with is automation anywhere, but we interoperate and we work with all the top RPA vendors. So when you think about digital workers, what's the critical issue for customers in terms of enabling them? Well, first a few things. There's a set of trust. If I'm going to turn over work to this digital worker, how do I know that, for example, I don't care what it comes up with, it's not going to sell inappropriate goods to miners as an example, because it doesn't know, it hasn't been taught those things. So we put some business controls in place that you can specify in natural language so you understand exactly what your digital worker does. And it knows then when to get a human involved. Kind of second component is I think today, people want those to be integrated into their workflow. They want to know that it gets you involved with the right person at the right time to take action and we can integrate that seamlessly into workflow. So that way it's not an isolated thing that just runs as automation. It's truly a synergistic collaboration between both humans and the digital worker. So what is the cloud pack for automation? We've been talking about the cloud pack for data. What is the cloud pack for automation? So it's a set of technologies that digitize what you do in a line of business. So all the technologies in it have a direct analogy to what people do in their workplace. It digitizes your workflow, meaning it coordinates the activities. It digitizes the business data and documents around it and all of the who can see it, what's the life cycle, enables collaboration around those documents. It digitizes decision making, processing of unstructured data. So really if you think about going to someone who works in a line of business, say they work in supplier onboarding and you ask them what they do, they'll probably describe their day and those kinds of elements and we can digitize that, run it, manage it and then give you visibility into its operations. How do you go from what's in the domain expert's head to codifying it? Is that a methodology process? Is that services? Do you have tooling to do that? Well, yeah, so one of the key ideas behind the technology is it's low code or model driven. So what the thing does is what you see. And that's really important because you can explain to a non-technical user essentially what the system is doing so they can check it with you along the way. And we have this methodology that we call playbacks and the idea is is you kind of elicit requirements from your business user, you put it in the technology, at any given point you can click play, step through your solution, your business user can kind of watch it even if it's incomplete and say oh yeah, that's what I had in mind that isn't what I had in mind. So that's a very powerful technology for doing sort of interactive development between business and IT. So it's an iterative process. Yes. Where you kind of record the user activity and then show it back, play it back to the user and say oh, close but make this alteration. And once you've digitized your operations on it, the automation play is you can integrate things like digital workers or we actually allow it to use the data from your operations to find ways to scale your workforce. So IBM is obviously in addition to a technology company or a world class services organization, one of the largest and most capable SIs in the world, global scale. With a lot of domain expertise by it, pick an industry, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, name it, IBM's got domain expertise there. Are you able to tap that domain expertise to drive your business? Sure, so first I'm in the software part of IBM so I support a broad ecosystem which is inclusive of partners. Specific to IBM global services, we actually have an IBM automation practice that has expertise specifically in the area of how to apply automation technology to business operations. Okay, so I love that answer because basically I'll translate, you said I'm an arms dealer. I'll sell software to my colleagues within IBM but I love all my partners just as well. A little more benign than an arms dealer but yes, yes, nonetheless. But the point is your goal is to scale your software across as many as clients as possible if they want to use a competitor of IBM global services and that's fine with you, obviously. They can, yeah. And so what's that ecosystem look like? I mean you've got it as a software company, you've got to develop that ecosystem. Yeah, we have a massive business partner ecosystem. Everything from large SIs of course as you mentioned but we have lots of regional SIs. We have a lot of people that have created vertical solutions around our technology. In fact that's one of the key ways in which we go to market where they've developed something that's specific say to accounts payable or loan processing or healthcare claims and so on. And so that allows us to extend our reach to niches and it gives them an opportunity to add value at. Okay, I'm going to ask you some thoughts on automation in general. We've seen a lot of tech spending but we haven't seen a productivity boost as a result in the last several years. Except for this, I guess first quarter of 2019 which is the latest data we saw, a big uptick. And so a lot of people think we're on the cusp of a productivity boom. That obviously is your business. What are your thoughts? What's your point of view on all that? Well, so we think of ourselves as our mission in life is to bring digital scale to knowledge workers and let me explain why that's so important. This industry's been talking about digital transformation for a really long time. And we've actually been quite successful in digitizing, we're not done, but we've been quite successful in digitizing a huge portion of our business. But the side effect of digitization is that we've generated all of this work. You expect that digital business to serve twice as many customers or be that much more responsive.  And what it's done is it's fueled this growth of knowledge work. Where today we're not doing manual things the way that they were before they were digitized, but instead we're doing them in software. So how do we help people to keep pace? And that's the goal of automation technology. And there's this explosion of knowledge work. To some extent organizations far and wider figure out, okay, how do I get productivity in this new era? That's where we come in. We can help them get that productivity and we really are in the cusp of people using those techniques now to get that next level of productivity gain. So I've been saying for a while that I feel like there's this huge wave coming in productivity as a result of things like automation. People don't like to talk about it in the technology community, because the sellers especially, but I think it clearly has to have an impact on jobs. Maybe people don't get fired, but you might hire less people, but that's not really the point I want to make and ask you about it. The types of jobs that are going to become valuable will shift to these higher value activities. If you're filling out a form, that's going to be less valuable than some of these other more creative, more strategic types of things. What's your point of view on that? So first off, I don't think there's any human that can keep pace with the growth of knowledge work that's getting generated now. So they're going to need help. There's no lack of things to do. So that's kind of my first thought. I would say my second thought in that is, what if you could use your time differently? I would ask that question to anybody. If you could use your time differently, think about all the value you could go and create, but if you're spending time doing administration, is that really the best use of your time? It's clearly not. And so that's where the technology comes into play. The productivity gain is because you're going to be able to do things that matter the most, or unleash the creativity of your people. And my experience in working with organizations is exactly that. They leverage automation technology. Now they can do the missions they always wanted to do, but never got to in their backlog. Yeah, so I guess my take on that, I love your thoughts is, I mean, take existing jobs and put a brick wall around them. Those existing jobs are going to change. And I think he's going to have a negative, you're going to have a job loss. There's no question. But then other jobs are going to be created. My rap on this, people who want to protect the past from the future is, we basically have 0% unemployment right now. Even in an economic, a dramatic economic downturn, we have what, 10% unemployment.  Now, nobody likes the economic downturn, but the point is to be competitive as a nation, as a society, you've got to innovate, and automation is part of that innovation. Look, I think, if you think about the jobs that people want to do, they're probably not the jobs that are going to be affected by this. And that's what I mean by the evolution. So people can now spend their time on those higher value things. People don't want to do those sets of tasks. Or if you really ask them, think about what they put on the resume. No one puts on their resume today, I'm a great data entry expert. They want to talk about their time with clients, relationship management, making a difference for the business. That's the potential of this technology. Yeah, but there was a time people would put that on their resume. Punch card, you know, operator, right? So, and we're still thriving. We're still around. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was a great conversation. Thank you, thanks for hosting me. Pleasure. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back to wrap the IBM data and AI form from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. 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