Hey everyone. Good morning. Thanks for joining. My name is Neha and I'm an SDM at Amazon Keyspaces team. I'm Vinit. I'm a senior software engineer at Amazon Keyspaces. Today we're going to talk about CDC streaming and how could we improve things and a whole conversation about it. So in today's session, we would be covering general overview of what is CDC, why does it matter, and some of the common use cases for CDC, followed by talking about some common data processing steps that are taken by any application that is using CDC as an architecture. We'll follow that up with some real world examples of how some companies out there have used CDC in Cassandra. As we talk about it, we talk about challenges that are faced by any of these organizations. If we reimagine CDC, what are the desirable traits for CDC and a pitch for how do we support natively? How do we support CDC streaming natively? So let's start with talking about what is CDC. CDC or change data capture is a process of identifying and tracking changes in a system or changes in a database and providing those changes to a downstream system or application. Why does it matter? In today's world, data is the lifeblood stream of any organization. And it's crucial that any decisions that we make are made on data that is delivered both real-time and is conflict-free. As we talk about CDC use cases, we are using CDC as an architectural solution to make sure that the database remains, so the systems remain in sync, which essentially means that our data, with the sheer volume of data that we receive today, because the data could easily go out of sync, we want to keep it, use CDC as a solution to keep the data in sync. So some of the most common use cases for CDC out there are we could use CDC to load data into data warehouse or data lakes. Organizations that like to run analytical applications on top of their data do not want to do that on their operational databases, as that could impact performance for those databases. So CDC as an application could be used to transfer the data to the data warehouse or data lake. The other reason to use CDC would be to sync the data to a cloud application. So in today's world, when we are using a hybrid environment, we would want some solution that could get the data out of the on-premise data clusters, move that to the cloud for durable storage. The next one is information dissemination, and the idea here is that CDC could allow you to continuously capture stream of data. With this stream of data, you could trigger events or do async processing, which also is covered by an event-based notification system. For example, any changes in the databases, if you want to trigger an event based on that data, then you could rely on CDC to get you that data. CDC is also one of the most popular choices that is used by customers for data migration and data application. So in Cassandra, CDC is enabled by setting up property at both node level and at table level. Once the CDC properties are set, the data is available in CDC rod directory, and from where customers could stream the data, and that's the place from where customers could stream the data. So to solve for any CDC needs, any organization would have to do these four steps. They would have to read data from the commit log. So for that, they would install some component on each node to get the data out of the node and convert that into change data events. Cassandra relies on replication factor to ensure that the data is replicated across multiple nodes, which also means the data is duplicated across multiple nodes. Organizations would have to write complex algorithms to de-dupe the data so that they have a single copy of every change that is made. They also need to transform the data so that they have a before and after image. So Cassandra currently doesn't provide the full image of data change, a full row data, right? It only provides further columns that are changing, and any application that is using CDC would need to know the after image of the data, and that is the complete row that they would have to figure out how do we write that. And the last step is published to the data to any publication strategy of choice. It could be a Kafka or it could be any other streaming pipeline, custom solutions as well, that organizations would like to stream to. So we looked at some of the common examples, some of the customers out there who have used CDC in past with Cassandra. So one of the example use cases was with Walmart, who actually had the exact same four steps that they were using. So they used a modified debisium connector to read the data from the commit log. They had an internal tool called as data acquisition tool, also known as DAC, and they created a custom plugin to read the data from Cassandra, sorry, from the commit log. They used Redis bloom filter to cache the data and get a unique value to dedupe the data across. And then they did use some transformation strategy, their public documentation doesn't really state how they transform the data, but they do mention that they do create a before and after image, and then they stream the data to Kafka. Going on to the next example, Yelp has a similar example. They have they've used CDC as a solution to get data from multiple databases and publish that to Yelp data pipeline. They actually write, have written a custom CDC publisher to get the data from the commit log. They use the intermediate Kafka streams and Apache flink to stream the data and dedupe the data. Then they've used rocks DB column family metadata and the merge from the commit log to merge the data and transform it into an after image and then publish that into the Yelp data pipeline. Now considering the things that we have talked about, there are many challenges that are faced by organizations when they use CDC. One of the biggest challenge is the dedupe, the duplicate data that comes from the consistency, consistency for, sorry, the application factor. So in Cassandra, we use replication factor for fault tolerance, which essentially means that if we have three nodes, a replication factor of three, and we are replicating across three regions, we would have nine replicas that would have the data that would amount to a lot of duplicate data and we would want to reduce the volume by compressing the data. Cassandra also does not guarantee ordering of data since the data is available on multiple nodes. If we are streaming the data to a streaming application, the data changes can alive out of order. Cassandra also provides limited set of data changes that only provides the data that is changing, which essentially means that you'd have to do some complex algorithms on the before after images. CDC logs are also run locally. So any log that is stored for CDC is stored locally and the connector has to be run locally to read those logs and get the data out, which essentially means that the CDC raw directory can get full with the log, and that can cause issues with availability drops. Also, the connector failure cases have to be thought about that it can go down or something else can happen and we need to ensure that it's working perfectly. Apart from that, Cassandra CDC does not support all the features today. It doesn't provide for, let's say, truncate or TTL or range deletes. It also does not provide support for LWTs and similar features. Considering all of that, we have reimagined on what should be the desirable traits for CDC and I'd like my colleague to take over. Thank you, Neher. So she talked about the various processes Walmart has used, Yelp and many more. So what properties do we want out of these updates? In an ideal case, right? Maybe we can get them all, but we can get some. So in an ideal world, I want these updates to come to me real time. As soon as my update is made in the database, it shows up in the CDC pipeline. I want exactly once. I don't want to create infrastructure to de-dupe my updates and create more services and if Cassandra can promise exactly one's delivery, that'll be ideal. If Cassandra can also promise in-order delivery for a particular partition or clustering key for each row, if we can guarantee that, that'll be a good guarantee to have. So and other pieces which are desirable are we don't want users of Cassandra to create post-processing infrastructure because that's expensive, you have to maintain it and that takes time. If we can natively support CDC in Cassandra, which guarantees some of these properties, we will be much better off. That's basically our premise for this next slide. Availability of old and new images. So currently there is no mechanism, easy mechanism to get the old image because as everything happens after the mutation has reached the Cassandra cluster, unless you have another database running. And we want minimum impact on transaction performance. So all the mutations that go through, the reasons that go through, they should not be impacted as a result of changes we propose. And maybe some of this we cannot achieve. So this is a common implementation of CDC. In this case, we have six nodes, node one through six. A client application connects to a coordinated node, which is node six in this case. And so once the mutation reaches node six, it knows that, okay, I have to modify a certain row in my table. And from token range, it figures out which nodes that should be sent to. It reaches node two, node three, node four. Those are the ones that hold that image. And a response is written based on the consistency level the user is chosen. And there is the red box, the red circle rather, which is running on each node is essentially pushing your logs, which are written on the node to a downstream process. But now you can see there are three of them for the same data set. Now somebody has to dedupe them. And that's a challenge. And can we try to eliminate that? That's our goal. Let's see. So what are the advantages of the current commonly used scheme? Is it real time? No, it's not real time. Because the async pusher is running in the background. So you're not going to get real time updates. There'll be a delay. The faster frequency you have, the closer you get. But it's not real time. You guarantee in order, you don't guarantee in order. Because they're coming from three sources, you have to do some kind of merger to get them in order. Exactly once, absolutely not. Resilient. It is resilient. You've got three copies of the data. So you're not going to lose data. Does it affect your latency for normal transactions? Actually, it doesn't. That's a good part of the implementation that it has no impact on your cluster performance because everything is on asynchronously. So, okay, you put our thinking hands on. So you say, okay, can we kind of elect some leader in this process and have a unique person or unique node which holds that data together and is the source of truth? Okay, could the coordinated node do that? Okay, let's see. So coordinated node received the data. They see the mutation from the application and it sends that off again to the three nodes. And the nodes now, other than just responding with the knack, they could say, okay, I'm going to send my image to along with it. It obviously consumes more bandwidth. But an image, if the image is received on the coordinated node and it respects the consistency the user has chosen, which could be local one, local core, and whatever it is, it responds to the client application and it has one copy now. It can have one copy because it's anyway going to wait for the transaction to complete. So you've got rid of the duplication here. So now let's look at the properties again. If we did put that red box in the coordinated node, I guess keep on saying box, red circle in that coordinated node, if you make it async, it's not real time anymore, so because you are going to send data at some frequency, collect the data and send it off. Is it in order? That's actually a complex one a little bit. It is not in order. It's not in order because the previous solution had this nice property that a partition lived on a very well-defined node. However, a coordinator is not well-defined anymore. Anything could be a coordinator for any partition. So you can get, note, five would have been a coordinator for the same partition. So now you cannot guarantee in order updates. Is it resilient? Questionable. We could do some things to make it resilient, but let's see if we can do better. And is it low latency? It is not. It does impact your transaction performance, so it's not low latency. It has an impact. We could make, if you wanted, we could make the async lock push it async. So it'll be part of your sync path. Every time you get an update, you push it out. You have some kind of a TCP stream running between each node and this red box. And you can get a sync lock pusher. And the other thing you could do is before sending a mutation, you could read the image before too. Again, still maintain the same level of consistency your mutation is for. And you can obtain the code data node can obtain the read image read before the mutation. So you have after you have, you can guarantee, you can provide both before and after. But there are some side effects of this. Code data node is a single point of failure. We could push data out to some other peer if you want to come up with that concept. But even there there will be some delay in getting it. You can absolutely guarantee it. And there is an increased bandwidth consumption. So on the wire that connects your coordinator node to other nodes, you are going to consume more bandwidth. If your cluster is network bandwidth bound, you will see an impact in latency. There are more operations you're performing in the right path. And that kind of is one of the bread and butter of Cassandra. So you're kind of deviating a little bit from that. And out of order mutations. So you're not you're not still guaranteeing in order mutation capture. Okay, next slide is going to be a little controversial. How about we have a leader in Cassandra? We never had leaders in Cassandra. Cassandra is based on the premise that every node is a worker and everybody's equal. What if we have a leader? Could be simplified. By the way, there are many, many products that have come out of databases could come out of the original paper. And Amazon, he spaces, he's based on that principle. So if you have a leader, then how does this how does this change things? The mutation still comes on to coordinator node, node six. But instead of sending it to three nodes now, it sends it to leader node three in this case. And now that's a single source of truth. And the node three will will send the mutations out to node two and node four. And depending on the consistency level requirements, it'll accept an act from node four and node two. And Mary goes the response back to your client application. And again, now you have this red circle, which is the agent CDC lock pusher agent running on each node that pushes your CDC logs to a downstream application. But there are no more duplicates. I would say we are mostly exactly ones. And the reason why I say that is if your leader node goes down, there's a potential that you may have to pull data from node two and node four in this case. And which is so we will have we would guarantee that data is available in normal functioning, you will only get one source of data. So by design, this approach in normal functioning modes guarantees exactly what's delivery guarantees in order delivery to because only only one node is serving traffic for mutations, definitely serving traffic for mutations. I mean, there are obviously some shortfalls with in choosing a leader replica. And it's not it's questionable whether it is the right answer for other reasons. But CDC could definitely be solved by by by using a replica based approach. So replica leader advantages. It definitely provides better CDC properties. And depending on your needs, you can guarantee certain properties, which would be helpful for CDC. You can get consistent levels to match what there's no loss in that. I mean, outside of CDC, you can actually make your lightweight transactions or compare and set faster. You can you can actually make a code item important at this point without seeing any loss in in speed. One of the things we do also is we you can switch. I mean, you don't want to keep a leader for for eternity, right? So you can keep on swapping your leader after a certain amount of time. So you can use some kind of a leader election mechanism every an hour or so to lead to changes. So you you're not you don't need special load. You don't you don't force all the load on us on a node all the time. There are some disadvantages to leader election is a complex process. And and needs needs special code. I mean, there was a talk from Alex yesterday, Alex Petro. And he mentioned he mentioned we are we are Cassandra community is moving towards more adaptable, being more elastic. That's the word he used. And to me, if we swap out the protocol, the interaction protocol between the coordinator node and other nodes, this could be a pluggable to it could be pluggable. And there was another talk by brandy meal, which was about pluggable memtables, where he introduced a try instead of using a assorted set of keys and cash. So if I mean, I actually some evidence that Cassandra community is moving towards making Cassandra more variable, more adaptive to the needs of the customer. And I think we should put some effort in choosing some scheme, which is which is an optional and does improve things for certain use cases. That's it. Thank you for questions. So leader election for us doesn't use gossip protocol. It's based on there's an external service which runs outside. And that's really coordinates all the leader election. And and it can take it can take time. It's not going to be instantaneous. And that external source of that service is the is the arbitrator of all this information that there's a new leader, this leader has failed and new latest leader has been elected. And this has to be disseminated to every single quest, every single node in the cluster. That that also so presumably the leader will be one of the three replicas. And and that will be able to pull. I mean, it's actually receiving the data asynchronously. And there is a process asynchronous process, which makes sure like an anti entropy, which which keeps up with the data updates all along. Absolutely. It's going to add some latency. And but the closer you do it to the node itself, the better you are, because you have to read from the disk and do with operation right there. So CDC is not supported. So CDC is not supported currently. We don't have that, but we do have a leader today. So we use a leader based mechanism to as part of our right operations, the for all of the replicas that we have, we do have a leader. We don't really support CDC today. It's not on our roadmap. But your question was just to repeat the question a little bit. Your question was more around the latency impact of choosing a leader and not really about CDC, right? Okay. Yeah, I can talk about the latency in terms of leader based mechanism and all key spaces operations currently are delivered within less than a sub millisecond latency. So if you if anyone has any more questions, these are the places that you can find the key spaces team. Some of these sessions are in the past, but the ones that are today we have a workshop that's happening at at 1150. So we can catch up with you over there. Apart from that, we have a booth so we can meet you there as well to provide more information if you have if you have any need for that. Thanks, everyone.


Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this week's Exploration of the Solar System, we are going to look at the first few Vanira spacecraft, those numbered 1 through 4. Now the Vanira spacecraft were our early explanation of the planet Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor in space. So we've looked previously at exploration of our Moon, which is even closer, but now we're looking at a planet for the first time. And in fact we'll see the first few Vanira spacecraft, Vanira 1, 2, and 3, were actually unsuccessful. Well the first one, Vanira 1, launched in 1961, communications were lost after about a week, it did fly by Venus, but of course no information was able to be returned. There was a successful fly by in February of 1966 by the Vanira 2 spacecraft, which was launched at the end of the previous year, and however communications were turned off for the fly by so that images could be recorded and no contact was then re-established. So we can see a sample of one of those craft here that was used. Now Vanira 3 was launched about the same time as Vanira 2, just a couple of days later, and it was scheduled to be a crash landing on the surface of Venus. Now we'd previously crashed on the surface of the Moon in our early explorations of the Moon, so here was a chance to actually crash on the surface of a planet. That did happen on March the 1st of 1966, but contact had been lost several weeks before. So really the first successful mission that actually did what it was trying to do was the Vanira 4 spacecraft, and that was launched in June of 1967, and it was designed to study the atmosphere and again to crash on the surface, and here we see a mock-up of that impactor that was going to crash into the surface. Now this was successful as it was able to return information about the atmosphere. So it was not a successful landing on the surface, although it would have crashed into the surface eventually, but we started to learn something about the atmosphere of Venus, and this was our first real look into how this might be. And we started to find that Venus was much different than we expected, and in fact there were many thoughts prior to this that Venus might be a watery world beneath all of those clouds, but here we've begun to learn about the high pressures and the intense amount of high amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So we're learning now beginning to learn that Venus is going to be a very inhospitable place and not a very easy place to land. We were getting very high pressures when the craft ceased signalling, and again had gotten our first measurements of the atmosphere direct study as a craft traveled through the atmosphere of another planet for the first time. So let's go ahead and summarize a little bit about what was done here. The first four Venera spacecraft were some of the earliest craft to explore the planet Venus. The first three were at least partially or completely unsuccessful, but Venera IV did give us the first direct study of the atmosphere of another planet beyond our Earth. So that concludes this discussion of the first four Venera spacecraft. We'll be back again next week for another topic on exploration of astronomy. So until then, have a great day everyone, and I will see you in class.


Everyone Chris here from IELTS Advantage and recently I went and did the computer delivered IELTS test I recently got my certificate. Here's what a band 9 Certificate looks like but it wasn't really so that I can show off that I can get a band 9 The reason why I did this was for two reasons number one to give you guys Insight information on the experience of doing the computer delivered test and they give you some advice on How to get the best possible score and have the best experience on test day and just to walk you through Exactly what test day looks like for the computer delivered test and then also answer the question that we get a lot Which is is the computer delivered test easier? Or is the paper based test easier? So I'm going to answer that question And then at the end of the video, I'm going to give you the most important advice about Computer delivered versus paper based and I'll also give you a free course if you watch all the way to the end So one of the things that I discovered is that your score will be determined by Not just your English level or your IELTS knowledge or your IELTS skills But your overall capacity on the day What do I mean by that? Well, if you do the wrong things and you're feeling bad You're not able to perform to the level that you are capable of performing that You're probably going to get a lower score because think of what you have to do on test day You have to spend a very long time Focusing and if your brain and your body is not ready for that Then you're not going to perform at the level that you need to perform at so let me give you some advice on things that I think you should do in order to perform at the best possible level and It really starts the night before so the night before I did all the wrong things And so I worked all day the day before and then I had the drive down to Dublin where the test center was that was a two and a half hour drive so when I got there I was pretty much exhausted and then when I got into the hotel and The I discovered that the bed in the hotel was very hard very uncomfortable And then to make matters worse what I did Dublin has like the best pubs and the best Guinness in the world So I went out and I didn't get drunk, but I had like five or six pints of Guinness which meant that I was not optimally performing and to my best them the next day, so What I would advise you to do is make sure that you're you know not Taxing yourself not stressing yourself out not tiring yourself out too much the day before Get a good night's sleep and don't go to the bar and drink the night before instead just have a nice relaxing Evening and make sure that you get enough Sleep the other thing that I didn't do what you should do is prepare what you're going to do From when you wake up until you get to the test center So my test center said that I had to be there at 8 10 a.m. So 10 past 8 in the morning so when I woke up I was staying in a hotel because it's very far away from my house and The hotel didn't have any breakfast so I had to go and walk in the rain to try and find breakfast which I couldn't find any and Then it made me really late, and then I was late to the test center. It was raining It was just a disaster. So what I strongly recommend you do is like the the day before Go and find out exactly whoops go and find out exactly where the test center is How long is it going to take you to get there? How are you going to get there? Get all of your breakfast and these things sound really silly But they do have an impact on your score and I'll talk about Why that's so important when we're talking about the listening test and the reading test and the the writing test The second big mistake that I made That you shouldn't make is kind of arrogance.  I often criticise students because they will Email me and say I don't really need to prepare for the test. It's an English test I'll just go and do it. That was my attitude. I was like, I'm a native English speaker I'm an IELTS teacher. I don't really have to prepare.  I didn't realise how quickly the questions come up and The first question was the registration plate of a car And they only said it once and they only said it very quickly and I was oh, I didn't realise how quickly that was and if I Had have done some practice tests if I had a prepared that wouldn't have been such a shock now It wasn't a problem for me because again I'm a native English speaker wasn't going to be a huge problem But if I was a non native English speaker and I was struggling to get a band 7 that one mistake could have been a disaster for the rest of the test because Even as a native English speaker when I thought that I got the first question wrong I just started thinking like what's the point? What am I doing here? I messed it all up. This is going to be a disaster Even though I coach people not to have those negative thoughts as a human being if you're unprepared And you think that you've messed something up. You're going to be making mistakes and it's going to be really stressful So make sure that you're fully prepared before you go and do the test The third thing that was quite surprising that I haven't thought about before was they they put you in a waiting room With other students and you're there for about 30 minutes and it was interesting I looked at what the other candidates were doing Some of them were just like very relaxed looking at the window, you know, not not that bothered But other students were on their phone and you could tell that they were looking at IELTS websites and one was watching YouTube clips about IELTS and everything You should not be looking at IELTS tips and tricks and things like that 30 minutes before your test for two reasons number one They're going to confuse you and they're not going to help you improve in any way So it's a waste of time, but number two The IELTS test is very tiring. It requires a lot of focus So you shouldn't be doing anything in that 30 minutes other than trying to relax So that could be just listening to some music that could be just Meditating that could be looking at the window that could be you know breathing I would strongly recommend finding something that relaxes you and do that during those 30 minutes Two things that you should not do is number one Start looking up, you know, IELTS websites and stuff like that 20 minutes for your test and the other thing is stress Getting very anxious and very stressed out. I know it's a stressful situation But if you are spending 30 minutes worrying, you're going to start the test At a disadvantage, you're going to be a little bit exhausted You're going to be a little bit tired when the test begins And it's really important that you are like an athlete at the Olympics You know, an athlete trains for four years in order so that they will reach their peak During the race at the Olympics, you want to be starting the IELTS test At your very peak, not like me Hung over from drinking too much beer, no breakfast, no sleep You know, just not in a good way at all So make sure that you are giving yourself the best opportunity to get the score that you need The other thing I would like to say is the staff were amazing I have done the IELTS test in different centres I speak to students who tell me that their experience was not good This experience was excellent and they did everything they could to be professional But really relax people and make sure that they give them the best opportunity I know that it's different in different cities and different cultures and different countries But it did actually help And I was thinking if I was a student, this would actually really help me And I think it's important for you to realise that there is a market out there of different centres So I live in an extremely small country Just in my country, within a two hour drive I think there are three or four different centres So if you have a bad experience at one centre Don't be afraid to go to a different centre with different staff, different examiners They're not going to make it easier for you The test is not going to be easier, the test is not going to be different But I just think that if you have a better experience and you're more relaxed Again, you're able to just perform at your optimal level One last thing before we get into the experience of actually doing the computer deliver test was they said something really interesting before the test began which I haven't thought about before They said if you have a complaint, if something goes wrong you need to make that complaint on the day before you leave the test centre After you leave the test centre, IELTS will not listen to your complaints You would not believe the number of emails that we get from students complaining about examiners, complaining about test centres complaining about all sorts of bad things that have happened on test day and they send me an email a week after they do the test with the British Council I don't work for the British Council, I am not delivering the test I'm not a test centre Why would you email me, a teacher, instead of complaining on test day? So for example, a common complaint that we get is that people can't hear the listening, the audio equipment is not good If you complain on test day, they will listen to your complaint and you will have a justification for you should give me another chance of doing the test But if you wait and you email me I'm not going to be able to help you and IELTS won't listen to you So if you have a complaint, complain on test day But if you go to a good centre, you shouldn't have any complaints OK, so then they bring you in and you do the listening test then you do the reading test and then you do the writing test It's really important that you understand that those are back to back There isn't much of a break in between the listening test the reading test and the writing test You can go to the bathroom whilst you're doing the test But you cannot go to the bathroom in the last five minutes and in between the test So one quick tip is don't drink a lot of water If you're really needing to go to the bathroom, you're going to waste a lot of time I don't agree with the fact that they're back to back and there's not much of a break in between I think it's because of cheating They're worried that people are going to go to the bathroom and, you know, find phones or something like that You wouldn't believe the lengths people go to to cheat The example I always use is like when you go to the airport 99.999% of people who go to an airport are not going to do anything to the airplane when they get on it But, you know, one guy tried to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb 15 years ago and now we all have to take off our shoes So a lot of people criticise IELTS for these rules These are because of bad people who are trying to cheat the test and they're trying to make the test as secure and as safe as possible So I do have sympathy for them because running an IELTS school we have to create all sorts of rules as well because a tiny minority of students are just idiots So make sure that you have a good breakfast but don't drink too much water because you'll be going to the bathroom and when you're nervous, you have to go to the bathroom a lot as well So, you know, don't dehydrate yourself or anything like that but don't fill up on water either So the listening test starts Is the computer-based listening test easier than the paper-based test? Yes and no A few things are advantageous when it comes to the computer-based listening test The first thing is, is you get proper headphones So you're not in a big room with lots of people and, you know, bad audio equipment You have headphones which blocks out all the other sound and just makes it easy for you to focus So I think that is a big advantage especially if other test centres in your local area don't have headphones That can really help people And, you know, listening to a foreign language is difficult Headphones should help The other thing that is just much easier is you will see the questions and they have some of the questions are typing but some of the questions are drag and drop and I think it's just easier to look at the screen listen to your headphones and then drag and drop different options I think that's easier than looking at the paper I don't think that's a huge advantage and it wasn't an advantage for me because I spend all day looking at a screen and I think it was a tiny advantage but I liked it but it wasn't a huge advantage I don't think it will help someone go from a band 6.5 to a 7, for example The other thing about the computer-delivered test is you're in a small room with a smaller number of people I don't like being in big rooms with lots of people It makes me nervous I just don't like it I know that's probably weird but, and probably most of you don't worry about that type of thing I do not like to be in big rooms with, you know, hundreds of people That's not... I don't even like to be in rooms with more than 10 people That's kind of a fear that I have But it helped that I think there were only five people doing the test that day It was a small room and there were only five people That really cuts down on the background noise as well I get easily distracted by background noise And during the listening test, if you're distracted and you think of something else then you might miss the part of the recording that you need to get the correct answer So I think that has its advantages as well Moving on to the reading test Again, because it was on a screen I found it faster to read Just sitting up, looking at a screen And again, you had those drag and drop options And then you had the tick options I think that just makes it easier Not easier to find the correct answer But just get through everything And it's not as stressful in some way Because it's on a screen That's what I find personally I got it done in 20 minutes When I do the paper-based test It takes me at least 40, 45 minutes to really get everything done I'm not saying that's going to guarantee that you will get everything done You know, in half the time But I did speak to Some people who have worked in test centres And they said that what they noticed with the computer-based tests These are people who've watched thousands of people do the tests They said that people generally finish the reading test faster So if time management is an issue for you It's not a magic bullet It's not going to magically make you go from a six to a seven or anything like that But if you're really struggling with time And you feel that would help you Then I think the reading test and the computer-delivered one is a little bit better Also, there's a bonus hack This is a great opportunity to go to the bathroom So, listening, you cannot go to the bathroom because you will miss something Reading, because what I did was I focused for 20 minutes I got everything done in 20 minutes I went to the bathroom And what I actually did in the bathroom was Well, I'm not telling you exactly what I did in the bathroom But the additional thing that I did in the bathroom was I just meditated a little bit and did some breathing Because that was like an hour into the total test And my brain was starting to melt Because of the reasons I explained before But I was just starting to really lose focus and really lose concentration So that was a good opportunity to do that Now, don't do that if you are struggling to finish all the questions It's better to focus on the questions and get them done But if you can get everything done in kind of 40-45 minutes And then take a short break, take a quick toilet break That's going to refresh you a little bit for the writing test Because the writing test requires a lot of focus and concentration So I found that quite good Then I was able to come back I still had 30 minutes to check my correct answers and everything And I think that really helped me get a bad 9 Because in the general training, if you get one question wrong, you don't get a bad 9 So I think that really helped The writing is where the computer-based test, I think, is much, much, much better Especially if you are someone like me who writes on a screen all day long So all day I'm just typing essays, replying to emails, sending messages to coworkers That's just what I do all day So it's very natural for me to look at a screen, write something, think whilst I'm writing something on a screen But most importantly, I find the editing much easier on the screen So when you're writing on a piece of paper and you want to edit something you want to delete It can look very messy and on a screen, you can tidy everything up And I just felt more confident about writing the essay and then checking it at the end And then just tidying things up a little bit I think that is much, much better And if you're struggling with writing and editing is a problem for you And you're used to working on a screen and writing on a screen I think the computer-based test would probably be worth a go But wait until the end and I'll give you some really important advice Don't think that it's automatically going to improve your score Speaking is exactly the same for both computer-based tests and paper-based tests So I won't go into too much detail about that If you want to know about my scores and what scores I did And quite a crazy experiment I did on test day I'll leave a link below to my discussion on my scores And how I got those scores and everything OK, so you're probably thinking now that computer-based is better And you're going to do the computer-based test Wait one minute, here's the most important advice So you're going to be using this with the computer-based test And you're going to be using this on the paper-based test But are you really? No, what you're really using is this You're using your brain If you're writing, listening, reading, speaking level Is not up to the required level before you do the computer-based test You're not going to get that score A huge mistake that a lot of students make Especially those that are stuck at a 6.5, for example So they got 6.5 a few times on the paper-based test They think if they go and do the computer-based test They're magically going to get the score that they need This is not going to improve your vocabulary This is not going to improve your grammar This is not going to improve your reading skills Your listening skills, your writing skills It just is not It's going to give you probably the best opportunity To perform at the level that you are at But most of you are not at that level right now I know that sounds harsh, but it is true And it's our experience of teaching thousands of students every year So what I would strongly recommend Is that you get to the level you need to get to Consistently in practice So listening, reading, writing, speaking You should be getting your score that you need Consistently before you do the test Then once you are happy with that Go and book the test Don't do what 98% of students do Which is book the test And then panic the day before And be sitting on their phone You know, 30 minutes before the test Going, oh, what are some tips and tricks Like that is not going to work And this is not going to help you If you want to prepare What I've done is I've put together a free course Called IELTS Fundamentals Click below, it's totally free It's going to take you through The most important information you need to know And what it does is just make everything really, really simple And easy to understand Click below and you can get free access To our fundamentals course Also check out IELTSAdvantage.com That's our website where you'll find help With basically everything you need All things IELTS And if you have any questions Pop them below in the comments Or feel free to send us an email We answer 100% of the emails that we received Hopefully you found that video interesting If you want more detail about the experience Of doing the test and my scores And how I got those scores, click below And you'll find another video Or it should be coming up somewhere here Justin, put it somewhere All right, thank you very much, guys And hope you find that video interesting


So let's just imagine that you and some friends want to have a race or maybe how about you and your best friend? So you've got two people here Basically perfectly matched say every time you guys go running You always finish at the same time. You always run the same speed and you always tie Now let's imagine for the sake of this lesson that we then tie a big rock So here's our rock We tie that rock to your leg So there it is tied to your leg Now who do you think is going to win? Well in this case your friend is going to have a huge advantage getting to the starting line or to the finishing line Because you're going to be dragging this rock this big heavy rock. This rock is a burden Because it's holding you back. It's a nuisance and This rock kind of in a way for the sake of this lesson is going to represent disease Because in this lesson, we're going to be talking about the burden of disease We're talking about the global burden and the personal burden and the community burden and how disease holds people back This rock right here This is this is all a metaphor for something that could maybe be Malaria for example in lots of different places There's malaria as a disease that holds a lot of people back or maybe another one is tuberculosis, which I always call just TB You get that right here TB It could also be HIV which is also another common one that's holding a lot of people back around the world So how about we go take a look at what this really means? We're going to first start by taking a look at some definitions because definitions are kind of important because you know Need to know these things and we're going to start by just writing the global burden of disease and I think that this last word here really needs to be sort of taken apart actually didn't know this before I was The actual definition. I mean, I think everybody in their head kind of I has an idea of what disease mean means But I didn't really ever look up the definition because I kind of always thought well I guess I I know that but basically it means an abnormal condition affecting the body and In humans this leads this causes so it leads to I'm just going to make that with an arrow it leads to pain Dysfunction so things not working very well dysfunction stress So emotional stress physical stress social problems So maybe a disease causes you not to be able to get along with your friends And then in really bad cases when things are not going right at all It can result in death and that's and that's a bit very very bad thing obviously now these are caused by Diseases are caused by Often bacteria and so we'll talk a lot about bacteria in this course also caused by viruses Or they're caused by fun guy Then there's lots of other things that cause you to be sick in some way But a disease is generally caused by these three things now a disease is a little different than an illness an illness is actually Something they can't necessarily be proven so when someone is sick you can go in their body And you can look for signs of one of these things you look for bacteria or virus or fun guy and you can say oh Hey, this guy has an actually sorry fun guy is not spelled with an a I'm gonna be making this mistake all the time So fun. He's only spelled with any with an eye here. No way But when you go into someone's body when they are sick with a disease you can find evidence of one of these things Or maybe something else if they just have an illness It's actually something that someone feels but doesn't necessarily it's not necessarily always Provable or perceived. It's it's something that you can't necessarily look up It's something that someone feels Now obviously we've already talked about burden. It is some kind of hardship or maybe a nuisance of some kind So when we're talking about all these things we're talking about the ways that disease holds you back when we talk about the global disease burden, it's how disease Holds us back And I use us because we're all humans and no matter where you go in the world. There are sick people In some places there are more sick people than others But in general the global disease burden is one that we can talk about really for all humans everywhere. So So at some point the question comes up. How do you measure the burden and This is actually really a huge question if you think about it how it's it's so complicated How do you measure whether people are healthy or not and in a lot of ways? It's not really actually possible to do that You know you you're taking a look at people's lives and it's almost impossible to actually really quantify or qualify How someone is doing but people try to do that so in a lot of numbers You're going to see them counting The number of years of life So that's the ones that are quantity based and then you have the quality base Which are the ones that are trying to calculate out how healthy or how how well someone is doing Through some very complicated math that will very quickly breeze through and not really talk about in too much detail So let's take a look at the quality numbers. You're going to see these quite a lot The number one sort of number that you kind of come across a lot is called life expectancy Life expectancy is just sort of a measure of how long someone will live And it's often calculated from the day that you're born So if you're born in 1960 you have a different life expectancy then it's someone who's born in 1970 or in 1980 now there's another way of measuring someone's life a lot of time when it's already kind of over and that is the years of potential Life Lost and years of potential life lost basically is just asking how long were you supposed to live and how long did you actually live? So if you're supposed to live 80 years But you actually only lived 60 years then that means you lost these 20 years here that you were supposed to have and You'll see this abbreviated as Y PLL You'll also see life expectancy abbreviated as L E or L L E something sometimes there will be different things around it, but generally you'll see L E as sort of the abbreviation Now years of potential life loss and life expectancy are all just numbers of how long you're living But sort of right between this quantity and quality group. There's one called Hale which is Health adjusted There is a little dash there health adjusted life Expectancy and I'm not going to write out expectancy because you know that already Health adjusted life expectancy and this is just basically a number that is measuring how many healthy years Are you going to have in those in in your life? So say you're supposed to live 80 years, but only 50 of them are healthy Then you actually really have only kind of lived 50 years And that is an adjustment of that life expectancy So it's kind of this very similar. It's tied to this number But in a lot of ways it's also kind of tied to the next two concepts that we're going to see and I'm gonna write Them in green because they're a little bit different and you've got I always do this for some reason Kali And Dolly Now the difference between Kali and Dolly is there actually isn't too much of a difference in a lot of ways They're they're calculated in very similar ways, so they just kind of vary a little bit in their technique Kali is asking you as is basically the quality adjusted life years. So I'm just gonna write quality and Not really worry about the rest because you already know adjusted life years is pretty simple because you've already used it over here This one is called the D.  Are you not are you not going to have because you have been disabled? So In a sense, if you're really simple it down, how much life are you missing So you could with disability adjusted life years you could live to 80 But you're you could lose maybe 20 years to sickness in in principle So it's similar to your it's very similar to your health adjusted life expectancy But it's calculated in a different way and it's also a number that is sort of associated with It's used a lot for the economics of understanding health care. It's it's kind of a slightly more complicated Calculation the health adjusted life expectancy is a pretty simple number in sort of how it's built but dally and Kali come both with a very long set of Calculations they're actually calculated in a very interesting way. So They're actually calculated opposite of each other in Kali. For example health is a score of one for a year and death is a score of zero for a year and then any sort of sickness or illness or something in between Counts as sort of a number with a point So maybe if you have a year where you're about where you have a sickness for about a year that Puts puts you like 50% or so like kind of knocks you out about puts you at about 50% capacity it'll be a point five so half and Basically the same thing works for dolly except that it runs in the opposite direction because Kali is a positive Sort of count. It's asking. How many good years do you have? And this dolly is asking. How many years have you lost so when you talk about something? When you talk about a disease maybe taking away people's Living kind of like good living standard. It'll be usually framed in terms of dolly. It'll be usually said This many years were lost due to illness and usually not said the other way and so it's often kind of sort of more of a negative number Which is also a good thing. It's important to remain critical. I guess Here you can see I've prepared a little bit of a chart to kind of talk about some of the effects of being having a disease or the burdens of the effects of Disease so let's take a look at Kind of what I've done here So I've taken taken this and divided into the personal realm and the societal and I've created this really nifty Venn diagram here and you can see here that the societal level and the personal level sort of Mix here in the middle. There's a sort of Blending in the very middle of the diagram where they kind of overlap a little bit And they probably overlap more than I really have even shown here, but I've kind of simplified this whole thing So the effects of disease are first felt on the person and they've got their body feels bad Maybe your emotions don't feel so great. Maybe your mind is somehow affected by The disease that you have or just you feel bad because you have it This could all play out in your relationship. So you can with friends or people that you care about your family It could mean that you can't work Could really cut back on your ability to do things and lots of other stuff So I put etc. And that could be things like creativity for example or something like that So there's a billion effects that disease or has on on your body and the burdens of a disease Now over here on the societal level you being sick Maybe means that you can't be a part of your community or it hinders development because maybe you're a part of some sort of Progress that the state is undergoing or the community is undergoing And then you have the costs that your sickness costs to social services into the healthcare system So any kind of strain that are put on those things and then in the middle You have things that kind of are shared on both sides because when you're sick you can't necessarily go to school So it affects your education which affects the entire society's education if you're sick, you can't necessarily work So it affects productivity also on the societal level and when you're sick You can't always earn money because of that productivity and the work and all these things in your personal life Which then sort of falls into the societal level again So a country that has sick people is not as able to pull its economy out of the dumps Or maybe create some sort of productivity goals that they want or get everybody in school And the same thing is happening basically on the personal level because you know group health is just sort of the sum of The health of the people living in that society though. It's a little more complicated than that. So these are sort of the effects of Disease or the burden of disease sort of on the personal and societal level So that was our lesson about the burden of disease you can check out more videos like this one at alversity.org


What's going on everyone? Sam here with uh late sports cards ripping 22 tops gold label baseball hobby 16 bucks full case break number three random team style here's a look again at your random results as always you can find these on the website under the results tab as well as the link in chat change the ticker really quick good luck here everybody let's do it just chilling there on fire yeah i know it's a little little suspicious Vaughn is bringing this up now sounds like somebody who who committed arson would say interesting very interesting suspicious very suspicious jeter gore lubeb sasa zuki rookie chain got you got the cubs too right chain yeah it's not bad yeah there it's okay matt manning that is 22 of 99 and guys just three to go in moments best i believe let me go double check that again really quick or donny'll check that really quick thank you donny donny'll drop you guys a link to that really quick if it's not sold out yet uh bobby witt rookie oh man that's funny the comically large match behind my back really bass oh that's funny just two to go guys two to go bass and bass got one yep as for the cardinals on your framed auto congrats on that uh saint i don't think it's necessarily the it's good i think it's a really good set smack i wouldn't say it's the best but it's good common wood valid that's just this labeled tnt poniel proofs what do we got for sports tonight everybody yeah me and santo don't know what to watch yeah bobby witt vander franco was a seary seager uh here i'll show you right after that it was actually pretty cool when i got this off lids for christmas heather got me a lids gift card is it a cap is it like a uh city thing uh wash no it's not washington nationals custom so it's nationals custom like the old logo one of their inaugurals and then it's uh 2008 inaugural season side patch warrior's map 730 and lakers uh suns at uh 10 so i picked the ball as well as this cornhole on the svn ocho oh pick a ball like schmidt so we have good basketball so basketball tonight on usbm yeah i like the gnats logo too i agree i agree wahoo's i wanted to get like i have one other gnats hat i have the city connect one but i wanted to get one with like this logo on it because i don't love their on field it's kind of just whatever it's the walgreens so essentially so i'll still get one eventually but javibias cabrion hays nice one here is going to be a shane boss ooh let's do hockey instead there's pens abs at eight and then coyotes oilers at 10 30 so the season big david all right let's do that yeah pnc we'll do that esports going on i'm in on esports i'll wash them fortnight i'll make donnie for force to wash them oh no sounds like when i make force to wash the golf just bobby witt watch some rainbow six each i actually don't mind watching that professionally Royce Lewis it's really crazy it is yeah it's really impressive honestly any esport at the professional level is very impressive bobby witt yeah i'll be crankin uh so that's just golf donnie's college golf on thursday oh that's funny gotta get the prospects man guys no donnie's just got you ready for this donnie's prospecting for when they finally release the next golf product there's uh wander franca in 20 years uh vladimir gorero jr 26 of 35 donnie i mean this isn't really saying much because everybody else at the shop other than maybe kaleb kind of stinks but donnie is like far and away the best golfer at the shop like donnie is like this and this yeah i'm way better than he is there's joe ryan rookie auto how dare you for the twins i think maybe you like think you're better than donnie is have you seen me play yes yes i have as a matter of fact yes i have maybe to the course donnie is as good as golf at vaughn is at arson i'm a master that is purple chris brine uh i don't think so jeff unless it was over on match channel i don't think so chris brine to 99 color match charlie woods first max shares are the 150 on the blue the first car that charlie woods has is would definitely be a chase car oh yeah for sure new bar trade turner this guy is really starting to bug me being in here glad he's leaving uh it's a torque rookie got a blue uh pose a break to 99 friday night spencer torkelson clayton kerchak yeah i was gonna say this is only number three right here we don't have any more gold label tonight jeff so yeah it won't go until friday night beaver vladimir traveling is not cheap vaughn i have to i have to keep some consistency or true it's a problem soto markiplier bye corsese that's nasty bobby wit curvy pocket who's got this team this is cool dude they're really freaking cool uh going to michael s how about a dual auto of barry larkin and joey vato two of ten that's awesome there's a couple of reds legends right there that's sick dude congrats on that michael you can pack this one that's that's sweet dude that's really sweet sasa zuki yes as of one minute ago loge bomb wonder franco to 150 check your obviously wonder franco rookie hunter green is petal anzo oh i think we're sold out on uh bowman's best haven't been checking but yes we are nice thank you guys also did you guys see league altering news dj augustine signing with the houston rockets dj augustine charlotte bobcats legend dj augustine do you see that too vaughn i figured i'd let everybody know so they can stop uh their hope for their team winning the championship now alex thomas wander dala cruise and brandon march so i'm here connor siebold framed rookie auto for the hey thanks disco appreciate you buddy uh for the red sox yeah i meant to say uh that that's actual news i was i was going to say your name but i deleted the email too quickly so thank you for closing us out i appreciate you buddy gotta play something nice now why would they not sign dj augustine you gotta ask yourself that illegal backward toze siri mani machado so yeah we are sold out up until tiered random team for choice now for don ten boxer of don rush choice later on tonight and we got some football p y t's and some football random teams upside down uh mike trout we don't really know that who are ujri because i actually think i saw that i saw like a um i think you got like a bleacher for that or twitter or something shane boss was he he was an orlando magic member at one point right next break is your first break you need first break mojo joshua purple pita lanza 20 and 99 that is jersey number i believe yes 20 of 99 orlando magic legend dj augustine base space nice one here that's going to uh the cubs alfonso revost there you go shane grads buddy first break dot dot dot of the day magic and bob k i remember he was a bob k i think he had to have been there when they were like really trash i mean they were always kind of really trash but yeah a lot of autographs the next break what is two per there's four per master box so what is that 48 i want to say there's paedro that's cool uh 15 of 50 on the jersey card nice one there red sox it's a game to use paedra i feel like he was on a box at one point too i don't know if that's true or not there's wander franco purple hosea brave four 75 oh my god corkelson magic bobcats pacers thunder bulls pistons rockets bucks nuggets lakers rafters good god for what for dj augustine the team he's played on uh josh low to 150 blue i'm just lifting listing up uh draft lottery teams the dj augustine jersey rainbow i'd do that that's really impossible to find base base uh going to the blue jay is kevin smith rookie auto kevin smith there is no way that there is a denver nuggets dj augustine readily available for sale anywhere that's what makes it challenging uh jeff shoot us an email really quick come on drop in the email really quick oh yeah uh donny's gonna drop you the email just shoot us over an email and i could forward it over to whoever would be best to answer that question uh hosea america's one of 35 on the purple for the guardians ish smith pistons wizards sixer suns magic hornets nuggets thunder rockets pelicans bucks gristlies and warriors oh my god so he's played on everything pretty much yeah yeah jeff uh shoot us an email right there and i could forward it over for you buster posie to 99 for the giants probably won't be until tomorrow that someone will get in contact with you but um it's up matthew but i will forward it over make sure that it gets to the right person for you unless i could answer it potentially now then i can help you with that now but potentially it's up earth purple jossiah gray to 99 rois louis nois rois i hope you pull your donny delos on so and bonus that's up to you he is in there like swimwear newt bar chas mccormick like that one chas mccormick rookie auto for the asteris the chainsaw devil chas that one that was that one was funny that one really got a laugh out of you that night too you were dying because i was like i i think i was just loopy at that probably yeah that was that was like uh a post one a.m break right here too so all bets are off at that point all bets of sanity are way off the table i mean that's the same beer actor like eight o'clock yeah oh my god yeah bolgerado i'm trying i'm trying illegal i love to bolger be awesome wander rookie daylockers david orchid's w ris cody bellinger uh one of 50 on the red the dodgers yellich jash chiseled bobby wit rookie o'neill cruise rookie and frame ski let's see what we got here frank thomas mariano got another joe ryan framed rookie auto going to the twins nice one there at minnesota ball picking up a obsidian mixer jason bead matt jeremy picking up an i mat some prism gone so we've got uh some spots coming in for sure everybody thank you very much to appreciate that that's wild that's actually wild safari planet that is spencer torkelson cj abram's rookie j rod to 99 there you go shane nice one there buddy that is jersey numbered 44 of 99 that's awesome let's go shane congrats man 44 of 99 j right just because it's jersey numbered so don't eat you right that's cool dude that's really cool jersey numbered j rod migel compare so second jersey number of this break eat by 101 this is cool going to the angels jim abbott that's four of 75 nice one there for the angels yeah true vaughn kade i would put kade in there too jim abbott for the angels if you reduce fractions yeah true no like really bad and really really bad injuries plus whatever's going on with zion whatever it is this week my big toe coat migel cabrera 48 of 75 yeah pg2 kade cat kady pg people on the throw some incandescent real quick for me and we get we could sign it for you shane put donnie put his own signature on that card on the j rod uh excel increase the value of donnie write it in crann is that a rule redemption cool oh that's good i was told the reductions are really good yeah uh first off going to the cubs patch wisdom very wise man yeah let's go that's the weakest um can you grant me a um no no you don't just kidding i'm playing filler for you redemption who to receive a framed autograph card of wander franco going to the rays let's go tampa nice champa bay that is gonna be jim l there we go jim congrats buddy yeah when they won a bunch of championships because they won the the lightning and the box won the same year and i think it raised me the world series nice one there they raise balls tampa bay raise ball boy that's pretty funny don't remind me about the lightning oh that's right they beat the haves i forgot about that i remember that was during covet and my dad does not like a hockey fan at all and we watch every game of the uh stanley cup j rod not really like he wouldn't watch it on his own but it was fun because we just made it like a thing you know because there's nothing to do so we just watch like that's anthony riso 18 of 35 w ris true cold call field did put on a show though cold call right player shone jaren diranda 150 andre jackson 43 of 99 that guy's a steamer no true words have been spoken yep wander rookie something along that is true earth face there's wander franco rookie and a jake mccarthy rookie auto for the diamond backs nice one there or Arizona don't you have like a job to do or something or you're just standing there get out of here get lost this guy like what what that's cool nice one pay a safari planet the otani is better than baby true i know it's a question that i worded poorly yes the answer still yes that's what the popular vote oh my god dude that's insanity that's legitimate insanity that is legitimate insanity that that is a actual call the fact that 58 percent of people said yes spend stroke syndrome does he have the potential to be yeah sure shers are in chiseled uh another chainsaw devil chas mccormick going to the astros yeah photogenic was cool last year photogenic in what it was his own standalone set oh yeah for what's for the fast book okay that's like that was it was a standalone set right it wasn't in recon i feel like it was in recon for some reason i thought it was an insert at first yeah i'm pretty sure it's his own thing cj abrams edward cabrera i don't want 50 yes standalone i don't know why i thought it was in recon that's probably coming out relatively soon i think right which one you know that has um it's like thicker stock um that's uh okay it's like uh it's kind of like revolution but not like a thicker non yeah kind of i don't think i remember yeah that's right it was an online release me i think we broke any of it base base auto rookie for the blue jays kevin smith on your rookie framed out again a little bit of damage on the top there we'll send an empty box and wrap her with the new jays sorry about that's wrong i feel like we did break it i feel like we sorted photogenic no not photogenic oh i thought we did yeah recon we did yeah photogenic yeah chase autos are kind of wild like someone just said curry and durant dual oil and there is like yeah i don't know the last time durant signed there's nick ledolo rookie 10 of 75 nice one there for the reds color match is this a hobby only product what yeah yeah it's my knowledge at least i mean there's like every year they come out with something new has a retail variation too i'm pretty sure this is hobby only this might be the lasher that naked i think i think is one of the products that got discontinued for 23 all right frame time there's a j rod nice one here for shane i got a cow rolly big dumper on card rookie odd nice one this nice one there shane what are the other big ones gypsy queen clearly authentic um what else fun bow and curl in the x i know um one of the archives i think which i love archives archives one of my favorite i'm gonna put up in my like gaming area and my new house i'm gonna put up a bunch of shelves and just put all my favorite cards like i'm like stands yeah leaned up against the law like a bunch of my raven stuff and just like pc stuff make sense yeah uh john carlo stanton nine of 35 base and base we can see him having a man game oh yeah how we're looking on spots mat spots some choice spots coming in thank you there uh kyle m one second again here another cheered spot came in thank you there jeff all right give me a moment i know what i want to do dude heather like i said heather is gone on friday and i only break in friday morning 60 of 99 there's no chance i go out and do anything no chance so i don't know what i'm gonna get for dinner that's my big question just get pizza i think i'm gonna get pizza i really do just i agree after our talk of pizza 150 buster posi very hard our craft snapshot chrome x clearly fire top gallery gold label opening day first oh opening day kind of socks opening day first edition going kind of socks like i could live without chrome x could live without fire could live without gallery gold label is cool but now that gilded's in um i'm not as uh what are you doing briceton's messing with us now probably wish there was new haven pizza places in napapka and haun's kraus pops gold label rookie auto i'll probably just get dominoes i like dominoes this one there's two quick recap here everybody nice little break for ourselves here we had a page row jersey card cal raleigh kevin smith chasmacormick jake mccarthy a haun's kraus patch of wisdom jim abbott joe ryan chasmacormick kevin smith alfonso reboss conor siebold joe ryan shane boss won yepas mag cards we had a jersey numbered uh j rod 44 of 99 we had a wander framed autograph card redemption for the rays and a really cool duel of barry larkin and joey vato for the reds that'll do it for the break guys thanks again for the film next up we've got bowman's best


Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by Daniel Highland, Edmund Burke, Intellectuals, and The French Revolution, Part 3. After posting the first two parts of this series, I received an email from an old friend who expressed his desire to read Edmund Burke more carefully than he had previously. I replied in part, I've had a love-hate relationship with Burke for decades. I often find him annoying, while at the same time appreciating that he made some good points. Many other Libertarians will, I think, have a similar push-pull reaction after reading Reflections on the Revolution in France. If so, their reactions have been shared by many readers of different political persuasions. I stated one reason for this common reaction in Part 1, when quoting from my book The System of Liberty, I described Reflections as a rambling mixture of model and sophistry and stunning brilliance unique in the history of political thought. If you are looking for a systematic presentation of Burke's political philosophy, you will not find it in any of Burke's writings, least of all in Reflections, but there is a coherent philosophy lurking in that book. One that may easily be overlooked by casual readers. Therefore my main purpose in this installment is to explain the basic reasoning behind Burke's condemnation of radical revolutions that are justified on the grounds of abstract principles, most notably the rights of man. Let's begin with a famous bit of Burkeian sophistry. In October 1789, thousands of Parisians, believing that Louis XVI was gathering a military force to crush the revolution, marched to Versailles to demand that the king move his court to Paris. A small faction with a grudge against Marie Antoinette, one woman had threatened to bring back the queen's head on the point of a sword, broke into her chambers, after which the queen barely escaped by fleeing, nearly naked, to the king's bedroom. This event outraged and offended Burke, causing him to write what became the most famous passage in Reflections. It is now 16 or 17 years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphinès at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy.  And what on heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall? Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophistas, economists, and calculators has succeeded. And the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive even in servitude itself the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. Although the safety of the king and queen was secured by twenty thousand national guardsmen, led by Lafayette, who arrived in Versailles after a forced march in pouring rain, the fact that the attempted assault on the vain and spendthrift queen could happen without a public outcry of indignation is what so infuriated Burke. One of the leaders of the assault, the woman mentioned above, was later sentenced to a year in prison. If Burke's reaction became the most quoted passage from Reflections, it also inspired Thomas Paine to write the most quoted passage from Writes of Man. Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection that I can find throughout Burke's book, has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Although it would be easy, and many have done exactly this, to dismiss the key point in Burke's passage along with his purple prose, this would be a mistake. The spirit of chivalry, argued Burke, was being destroyed by those rationalistic champions of the Writes of Man who rejected any tradition that could not meet the test of reason. At first glance, this may appear nothing more than a rationalization of power, an excuse to justify and maintain the deference of subjects to their rulers. But this simplistic criticism misses what Burke had in mind. Unfortunately for readers, Burke's central thesis appears in bits and pieces and is scattered throughout his book. So let's try to pull all this together. The first thing we need to understand is Burke's defense of prejudices. These are sentiments, random mixtures of feelings and unreasoned opinions, not conclusions of discursive reasoning. And this is why rationalistic philosophers tend to sneer at sentiments, while arguing that governments should be constructed entirely on rational principles. This is a serious mistake, according to Burke, because it ignores the nature of human beings who are not especially rational and, more often than not, are motivated by their impulses, which in turn depend on their sentiments. Now these impulses can be very destructive, or they can be relatively civilized. And only if civilized sentiments are widespread can a society maintain itself with any degree of order and justice. So what serves to civilize our sentiments? Certainly not tracts and lectures on the rights of man. Rather, we become civilized as we assimilate the traditional values and customs of our culture, often without knowing or caring what the rational justification, if any, of those social mores may be. And Burke believed that the mores associated with chivalry were largely responsible for the high degree of civilization that 18th century Europe had attained. This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry, and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss, I fear, will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. As Burke goes on to explain, the traditional values of France did far more than render Frenchmen respectful to their kings. More importantly, it also made kings trust their subjects. And this trust served to lessen dramatically the amount of brute force that rulers had previously used. The traditions of France, in other words, had civilized both subjects and rulers. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power. It obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners. Burke understood that sentiments based on tradition, especially in matters of political power and obedience, are nothing more than pleasing illusions. But he also believed that society itself is a mystery that does not admit of rational analysis. Such mysteries are unacceptable to those philosophers who are so wedded to their abstract principles that they overlook the relatively minor role that reason plays in human affairs while tearing asunder the true foundation of social order. So what happens when reason conquers all, causing people intoxicated with their rights to demand that their government conform to abstract principles of justice or be rejected as illegitimate? Since no government ever has been or ever will be able to meet the demands of these abstract criteria, rulers unable any longer to rely on traditional sentiments will resort to naked force to compel obedience. On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or conspire to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But power of some kind or other will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish, and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men. Plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle. This brings us to the most telling part of Burke's criticism of the French Revolution. The Revolution had been justified in the name of the rights of man, but the revolutionaries, after gaining power, would quickly learn that they could not govern according to those self-same principles. Instead, like every government before them, including the government they had replaced, the revolutionaries would find that governance is impossible without violating some of the same abstract rights to which they had appealed to justify their revolution. Thus, having repudiated the traditional sentiments which had previously motivated obedience, the revolutionaries would be left with nothing more than naked force to compel obedience to their decrees. Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours, for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore, the moment any difference arises between your national assembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you. Or, rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. Massacre, torture, hanging, these are your rights of men. These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted. You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. The revolutionary leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feudality as the barbarism of tyranny, and they tell them afterwards how much of that barbarist tyranny they are to bear with patience. As they are prodigal of light with regard to grievances, so the people find them sparing in the extreme with regard to redress. Whatever one may think of Burke's arguments, they have a certain inner logic that many of his contemporaries found compelling, as do many conservatives today. So how should a radical libertarian respond to Burke's reasoning? Although I cannot say how all libertarians would respond, I have my own ideas and criticisms. But for those, you will have to wait for part four. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.