Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. Joining me today is Hans Noel, Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America from Cambridge University Press. He has also authored many articles, one of which is the subject of today's episode. Ten things political scientists know that you don't, and Hans actually informed me that he is turning that into a book, which makes me very excited because I have recommended this article many times to many people because I think it is very important that people realize this. So, welcome to Free Thoughts Hans. Thanks. Thanks for having me. What prompted you to write the Ten Things article? Well, so I was approached by the editor of the journal that it's in, the forum. They were doing a special issue on, actually on things that political scientists could learn from practitioners and so forth, which is a great issue. And those, that's really great. And I said, oh, you want to contribute something to that. But I think that's really good. But I'm a political scientist, so I don't know what, what they, what we can learn from them. I know what those, some things that maybe others don't always know if that we can teach the other way. And so that led to that conversation. And then I said, like, let's put this piece together. And it has been very well received. And a lot of people use it and assign it in classes. It's getting a little bit, a little bit older now, which is why I'd like to update it with the book. But I just sort of felt like, you know, there's a lot that political scientists can and should learn from people who are actually doing politics. But there's a lot of commentary about people doing politics from people who are doing politics that is a little bit ignorant of the things that social scientists have at this point figured out. Yeah, at the end of your article, you write, people would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things. Politics might, however, be the last thing on that list. That seems a strange thing to say. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, for me and for you and presumably for a lot of the listeners now, politics is really important because we're really interested in it. But, you know, we have other things that are interesting in our lives. I'm spending the year now in Florence, Italy, as we mentioned a minute ago. And, you know, everything that is all this great arts and architecture and history here, none of which really has anything to do with politics. And you can and should be able to live a very full life without being that involved in politics. But as I go on to say in the piece, that's as much as we'd like to think you'd be able to live lively how, you know, happy life without involvement in politics, we think that people have a responsibility to know about politics or at least to know about it if they're going to participate in politics. And so we may as well figure out what it is that the experts on politics have to this point managed to learn. And it might be the case that people are disappointed in that, though, some of the things that the experts know might disappoint some people. Oh, I think that's definitely true. And, you know, unlike in most other disciplines, we think, well, you know, if this isn't how it works, maybe we should be able to change it. And that's probably, you know, legit in some cases. But it would be, you know, it would be useful to have a better understanding of what we think we already know before we start going around saying, well, I don't like how our system works. And we ought to be different and ought to be changed. That's not going since those those eggheads in Washington don't know what they're doing. Maybe they don't. But if we knew better what they think they do know, we'd be better off. So let's start. Let's start at the beginning of the list. The number one thing is it's fundamental.  What is what is that thing that you know? Well, so that's a riff on the line from the Clinton campaign in 92, the Bill Clinton campaign, which they, you know, they their mantra for their campaign was it's the economy stupid, meaning let's keep our focus on the economy because the economy is the thing that we think people are going to vote on and it's going to cause them to vote for Clinton, which in fact is is what happened. And that that phenomena that strategy that Clinton had in that campaign generalizes, we think in general that the thing that drives most election results is how happy are people? And in particular, how happy are they with the big things that the government's responsible for like the state of the economy? So when the economy is doing well, incumbents tend to get reelected when the economy is doing poorly, incumbents tend to get booted out. And then of course, when the economy is doing just sort of so so, then you tend to get really close elections, which is what we've had in the last couple of presidential elections in the United States. You know, in that sense, you don't need to know anything else about Clinton versus Trump or whatever else was going on in 2016. The state of the economy was that you'd expect a incumbent party, the Democrats, who've been in the power for two terms to have a hard time winning. And in fact, Clinton outperformed that expectation by a couple of points. But you sort of expect that that would be a year when the Republicans would would probably win. And that that tends to be what happens. And so we want to really overinterpret every election into all the different nuances of what happened. And that's nothing wrong with that because the other stuff also probably mattered. But a baseline is when things are going well, people return the incumbent to office.  So does that mean that campaigning doesn't matter or at least doesn't matter as much as people might think it does? Well, probably not. I mean, campaigning definitely matters in some ways. And there's sort of two broad things that campaigns are doing. One is, you know, they're mobilizing voters and they're getting them to the polls and so forth. And what we basically have seen is that in most good elections, both parties do a pretty good job of that. So it's a little like saying, well, you know, does advertising not matter because the the market share between Coke and Pepsi hasn't changed very much? Well, but if one of them stopped advertising, things might be different. And so there's a little bit of that that's going on. The other thing that campaigns do is they can focus and shape the conversation around the state of the economy.  Let's talk about the economy. Let's talk about the fundamentals and push it in that direction. He could have done something different and then that might have had some other effects in the other direction. So things matter on the margins. And if the elections are going to be very, very close, then all kinds of other things that are in the campaign probably matter. In 2016, the election came down to fewer than 100,000 votes in three or four states. Those people are going to be affected by the campaign. The magnitude of a campaign effect might be small, but if the race is close, then it could still matter. So we don't want to say campaigns don't matter at all, but they matter in the context of a sort of baseline that is set by the fundamentals. How popular is the president? How is the economy doing? And so forth. It reminds me though, because it seems that if they both stopped, if they agreed to stop campaigning, which of course is this huge pie in the sky, all these political ads. I mean, some political scientists say this is just almost wasted money. A lot of people think they have huge effects. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. And it sometimes seems like a destructive equilibrium, which is, you know, if everyone stands up at the concert, if one person stands up at the concert, then everyone has to stand up. But if everyone could just agree to sit down, then we could be, you know, relaxing. And then if someone brings a box and everyone has to bring a box, and eventually you could have the entire crowd standing on 200 boxes, because no one can agree to just, okay, let's take away all the boxes and just stand on the floor again. It seems kind of destructive sometimes. I mean, maybe it is. But one thing that's important is, you know, empirically, we find this pattern that the economy has this effect and the fundamentals in general, it's, you know, other things like foreign policy and like have this effect, but we only observe it in a world in which there are campaigns. So it might be that if there were no campaigns at all, then things wouldn't work out this way. The other thing about campaigns is that, you know, we talk a lot about how there's like all these ads and it seems annoying and destructive. Well, that's, again, to people like us who pay a lot of attention to politics and maybe don't need advertisements to know what's going on with politics, you know, it seems like it's a distraction. But one thing that we know is that the more ad campaigns that exist, the more of that whole phenomena plays out, the more informed people are about politics. And so it might be that while the campaign is not necessary to determine who wins, it does actually inform people a bit about who is running and what they stand for and what direction they are. And that may not necessarily be a bad thing. And given that the cost of campaigning isn't, you know, it seems like a lot, we talk about a lot of money, but it's nothing like the cost of campaigning and for, you know, a consumer product or something. You know, it's maybe not such a bad thing that people have a high attention to campaign. You might worry about the tone, what if it could be more positive and all of that. But now it seems like we're on the, you know, at a level of fine-tuning something, like, oh, if only some people would just be nicer, that, you know, while, you know, while I'm sure that would be nice, I'm not necessarily, you know, if I was working on reforming the political system. That's one thing that way in which politics is different than some other disciplines. Like, you know, in chemistry, you just, this is how it works. But in political science and in other, you know, social sciences, learning about it, we can actually change what we do and we could actually steer things in different directions. If I were working on doing that, I think getting rid of campaigns wouldn't be high on my list of reforms that I'd be interested in trying to implement. So number two, the will of the people is incredibly hard to put your finger on. Yeah, so I think the issue that I'm getting at here is that it's, we'd like to think about why I took a poll and a poll says this is what people believe and what they think. But, you know, most people are not that interested in politics and therefore they don't actually have well-defined opinions about things. It maybe makes more sense to say people just don't have an opinion on something rather than saying that 60% support something and 40% disapprove. But if you ask people, if you call them up and say, hey, what do you think about the death penalty or do you prove the job that the president is doing as president, they're going to give you an answer, right? But it's not a well thought out answer. And that's not their fault.  But they will give us an answer. And the reason why that's important is because in maybe a different context where an election will say to come up, well then there would be a campaign and there would be a conversation and that might change people's minds about things. And so we do a survey and we say, oh, you know, 60% of people approve of the job the president's doing or, you know, right now Donald Trump's approval rate is really low. Okay, so that tells us that he's not going to win re-election. Oh, but what's going to happen when the campaign turns around? He starts trying to sell some people on himself. Well, then they might change their minds. And so it's not that you can't ask surveys or you can't do this, do these things, but you want to realize that people's, the public opinion, people are very responsive to things and particularly responsive to partisan messages, right? So what Republicans are telling people, Republican voters are going to believe and what Democrats are telling people Democratic voters are going to believe. And so given that that's this sort of dynamic, we should just sort of imagine that public opinion is this independent force in the world that I've just I've tapped it by asking this question. And now I know what the people want. Well, they want what they have been told they're supposed to want because they're only answering survey questions and the survey questions are asked in an information environment that was shaped by partisan politicians who are trying to shape that information. Yeah, this issue comes up, but I do a lot of work on campaign finance policy and it comes up a lot. And what I see is kind of an implicit premise that is often unstated when people criticize spending money in elections is they often say, oh, the Koch Brothers or George Soros are distorting the will of the people or they're distorting American democracy. And it seems like the implicit premise there is that there is some sort of real political opinion will of the people almost were so in and when someone comes in and spends money to speak to the electorate, sometimes that's distorting, but I don't even really know what that would mean. Now, I think that's right. I think it's sort of nonsensical to talk about there being this pure thing that could be distorted. Now, you can still say, oh, I'm concerned that too much money from these people is going to create an information environment that's going to steer things this direction or that direction. And what we'd like to do is have a, you know, conversation that includes everyone have a voice or whatever you can worry about that. But that's very different than saying, well, we just can't have people spending money, we just need to get out the pure thing. There is no pure thing. And so then we got to be thinking about what, you know, what, how are we getting a diversity of voices that are being affecting the information environment are the facts that are in the information environment true, those kinds of things. It's a very different question than, well, I just need to know what people really think. Number three, that leads into number three, which is the will of the people not only is it hard to put your finger on it may not even exist. Yeah. So this is an interesting finding that, you know, it's been known in political science for a long time and economics for a long time, that, you know, as we tend to think about, we'll just aggregate up people's preferences. If we know, do we want to have a, you know, do we do a change our immigration policy to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country? And so let's just, you know, see what everyone thinks. And if mostly let's let's lay aside the question that they may be having thought about the issue already, let's, let's figure out what they mostly think, what's informed them, whatever. And then like they want this policy. Oh, so now we know what they what they think. But the thing is that if the dimensions of policy that exist are in any way more complicated than just there's one question, yes or no, which of course they are on all issues, then it's quite possible that people might prefer a majority might prefer something prefer, you know, some policy A that to policy B, but B is preferred to policy C and then C is preferred to policy A. Right. So this can get a little technical and I don't want to get too deep into it here. But the idea behind this was get the era was a economist working at Rand in the 50s is kind of interested in the question of well, so we keep talking about our international competition and the Cold War. And we keep thinking like, let's just understand if we're rational and they're rational and everybody knows sort of understanding what happens when you aggregate things up. And so you got to go off on this question of like, can we aggregate up people's preferences into something that's sort of coherent and rational. And what you know, then he said, okay, we don't want to be democracy. So what should a democracy have a democracy to have so like one person doesn't decide everything that would be a dictatorship. And if everybody wants something, well, that should they should get it. Right. So it's laid out a handful of things that he thought you might expect a democracy to have. And then the end is you can't do that. Right. Something that we think is important for democracy is at least plausibly going to fall apart. The thing that's most likely to fail is we'd think that a democracy should work no matter what people want. They should want all the different, you know, we should have any possible set of preferences. And we just said a minute ago that those preferences are all kind of mushy and they could go in all different directions. Any possible set of preferences should be acceptable and we ought to be able to aggregate them up. Truth is any aggregating system that we have, whether it be a majority rule or some other, you know, super majority or anything we do might possibly give us some sort of perverse outcome where the whole country votes for Donald Trump. But in fact, somebody else, the whole country would prefer. And we just didn't the system didn't allow them to make that choice. And we never observed that. And that's possible. It's just a mathematical fact. And so I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, we saw that in 1912, right? We saw that in 1912 kind of with Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, I think the 1912 was probably the most clear example. The Republican Party in 1912 was represented by Taft, who was probably the least progressive of the major candidate's progressive being a particular dimension. It's not quite the same as progressive we mean today, but at any rate, Taft. And then he was challenged by Theodore Roosevelt, who had been a Republican president in the past and he wants to run again. And he's probably the most progressive again in this historical context. And so it splits the Republican Party and then they're faced face off against Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats, and Wilson wins. But it is quite possible that had Taft or Roosevelt by themselves been the candidate that either one of them would have beat Wilson. If you look at the votes in the across the country, in most states, the Wilson, sorry, the Roosevelt vote and the Taft vote add up together to about what Taft had gotten previously. So we imagine that the Republicans literally are splitting their vote and there were more Taft and Roosevelt votes together than there were for Wilson. So maybe we got the wrong president. And the one thing to say there is, oh, well, we got the wrong president because the Republican Party was split and we shouldn't have let them be split. But that's not completely the answer, because well, how do they not split? Should they have nominated Taft? Should they nominate Roosevelt? Which one was better? Well, they faced off within the party and we got one answer, but it's hard to know. And so I think the end result is whatever you do in a collective action, you can't be too confident that it really is what the people wanted. It just depends on the system that you used. It depends on the rules that we had in an application. And there's not anything wrong or right about those rules, but different rules give you different outcomes. If that's the case, if different rules give you different outcomes, then it's very hard to be very confident about any particular outcome, because a different set of rules that are just as reasonable would have given you a different one. Which leads nicely in number four, that there's no such thing as a mandate. I'm sure probably Woodrow Wilson might have said something like giving his inaugural speech in 1912. I have a mandate from the people, but that seems probably a stretch. Yeah, at least what we think of as a mandate is now the people have said that I should be the president or the people have said this policy platform is the one that we should implement. Given all the squishingness about what people want and the problems with aggregation, it's hard to believe that is ever the case. And so instead what happens with mandates is it's just it becomes a rhetorical argument that politicians use to convince you that they should go along with this. And I think maybe we shouldn't trust it very much, but more again, political scientists have studied this question directly and said, well, what happens when people say that they have a mandate? We found that they try to create this narrative. There's a nice book by Julia that argues that presidents use the mandate argument. In some cases, exactly when they need it the most because their political support is the weakest. That is that they don't have an overwhelming majority. They don't have a majority everywhere else. So they have to use that rhetorical argument to justify what they're trying to do. If they weren't using the mandate language, that might be because they didn't need to because they just had their party has control of everything and so they could just implement policy. Yeah, like Roosevelt in the 30s or Reagan in 84, not having to say you have a mandate because he won by so such a huge amount that it wasn't really necessary to build it up. That's right. Yeah. And you don't have to make an argument to the other party in Congress that you should be listening to me because the other party in Congress is a minority already and your party is there doing what you want. But the key there is that the notion of a mandate, we should think of it as a rhetorical strategy and not as some kind of true, well, he won. So whatever he wants to do, we ought to do. It's a rhetorical strategy. And what do we do with that as a citizen? Well, if you like what the president wants to do, you probably want to say, hey, you should still do it. That's how our system works. And if you don't like it, then you're going to be, ah, there's no mandate. It doesn't really tell us much what to do, but we should be thinking about it as a rhetorical strategy rather than some sort of right of the leadership because they were represented by a majority through some particular system. Number five is, is it DuVergere or DuVergere? It's DuVergé. He's French. DuVergé. Okay. Or that number three. DuVergé, it's the law. So DuVergé's law is the one of the few things that I think political scientists would be willing to call a law. It's really probably not a fair to do that. We don't have laws in the same way that we have, you know, Newton's laws of physics or anything like that. We don't have those kinds of laws and social sciences. But DuVergé's law has been called that and it's a finding that in fact, doesn't really hold up perfectly empirically, but it's still an important one. The idea behind this is, well, why is it that we only have two parties in the United States? And the answer that DuVergé would propose is, well, in the United States, we have first past the post election rules. And so when you have, that is to say, in order to win a seat in Congress, you just get the most votes in the congressional district and then you get it. Places that have that kind of system tend toward fewer parties and maybe especially even to two parties. And the reason is that say you're running for office, let's think about the presidency, which is similar thing. Say you're running for office for the presidency, got Clinton running, got Trump running, you're like, I don't like, I want a third party choice. But now you go to vote. And you're going to go vote on between Clinton or Trump. But now you don't like either of them, you'd rather have a third party choice. But, you know, as much as you might like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, you've got to be pretty confident they're not going to win because you can see the polling minute and you see that it's unlikely that they're going to win. Meanwhile, you probably have an opinion between Trump and Clinton. So why vote for the third party candidate when the, well, you know, you have an opinion over the two people who are most likely to win and you could affect the outcome in that direction. So what DuVergé says is, you know, it doesn't tell you what to do. He isn't saying that, you know, that's right or wrong. He just says most people are going to think that way. And if they're going to think that way, most politicians, therefore, are going to think that way. And so then really skilled politicians are not going to run as third party candidates. Right. This is the smart thing that both Trump and Sanders did, for instance, both of them were outsiders. And neither of them said, I'm going to run as a third party independent candidate because that wasn't going to work. They said, I'm going to run and capture one of the party nominations because that's what's going to be the way to ticket to winning. And so if that's what's going to happen, you're going to reduce yourself down to two parties. And so then people who complain in the United States, well, I wish we had a third party choice. And I think there's a legitimate sense that maybe that would be a good thing. I won't take aside one way or the other on that. But people who complain about that tend to think, oh, we just need to let these third parties flourish and we should stop, you know, saying not nasty things about Jill Stein or whatever if they're running, we should be, you know, nice about the third party and they'll win votes. But the system is not geared toward having that. So if you want to have a third party, a viable third and fourth party, as we do have in many countries around the world, in a different system, probably a system that is proportional in some way. A proportional representation is where the system where instead the way that you would get seats in the legislature is by what proportion of the vote you get. You get 20% of the vote, you get 20% of the seats. And so then you don't lose anything. There's no harm in voting for a minor party because you can still help them get a little bit. It also matters that some countries have a parliamentary system rather than a presidential system. Presidential system is sort of like a single member district on steroids, right? The presidency is a single seat and you have to win it. Whereas in a parliamentary system like in Great Britain or in Canada, where they do have slightly more viable minor parties, there still tends towards two large parties, but you tend to have more viable third parties. There too, though, you can you send them to parliament and then, you know, they can make a coalition government or something in parliament. Whereas in our system, a third party would just be, you know, an appendage that have to ally with one of the main parties than they would not be able to succeed at trying to influence the executive or as a parliamentary system where you're choosing the your executive, you're choosing your prime minister from the legislature and the legislature is choosing and selecting them. Having a voice in the legislature is enough. So those dynamics, again, the rules that we have affect the outcome there. And if you really want a third party, then we got to be changing institutions. And until you do, the metaphor I like is it's a little bit like saying, well, you know, I really wish we had better public transit in my in my city. And so I'm going to go down to this corner where the train ought to be there and wait for the train to come until until you build the transit, you there's no point in going and waiting for the train. You want to get a change the institution first and then you can, you know, you can vote for your third party. But occasionally third parties in America, I mean, he said, as you said, it's not a perfect model and a perfect law, but occasionally third parties like Ross Perot and 92, who a lot of people decided that they weren't throwing our vote away with him getting 20% of the vote. And then 1860 is another example of third parties. It happens. Is there any sort of theory about why at these times third parties might be more successful? Because a lot of people thought it might have been this year or this last election with distaste for Republicans and Democrats and it ended up not being a very big third party year. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when you have a clear division within an existing coalition, that's going to happen.  And so some Republicans thought this was the right person and someone else thought that was the right person. You know, much depends in this Duverger logic, much depends on who we collectively think are the top two candidates, right? I mean, you know, Trump and Clinton are the representatives of the two major parties. And so they're the two that everyone should vote for. But if everyone believed that the race was really a Johnson versus Stein race, then everyone should switch and vote the other way. So there are going to be times when the political alignments and shifts and so forth are such that the parties are torn apart a little bit, there's some uncertainty about the direction, and then that's going to lead us to these kind of unusual places.  And then the Republican Party is now has an element that is going to talk about it.  And then meanwhile, you already have the existing divisions over the tariff and other things that were, were dividing the parties. And so that kind of creates these pockets, and it's not clear who you're at, who your partner is supposed to be.  But it may take a while to get to that new equilibrium with its clear two parties. And so whenever, you know, there's a, there's always a pressure towards two, two parties in the system, but there's also a pressure towards tearing things apart because nobody likes to, you know, we all want what we think is right. So I have my policy preferences and they do not match up with any party. I disagree with this party on this thing and I disagree with that party on that thing. That's what politics is about is about coordinating with people, but we don't like that. We want to be able to say, this is what I want my own choice.  And sometimes people say things like, well, I can't, we have, if I can have 31 choices of ice cream, why can't I have at least three choices for, for politics? And as you know, it can see why people may think that. But the difference is, if we go to the ice cream place and I want chocolate and you want vanilla and someone else wants Rocky Road, well, that's what we'll get. Each of us gets what we want and we get to take it home. But politics isn't like that because we only get to have one present and we all have to share. So it'd be a little bit like at the end of the day after everyone's gone to buy ice cream, we tallyed up and we found out which ice cream sold the most and then we all have to eat the same ice cream. Right? That'd be a terrible business model, right? That's why we don't do that for businesses. But politics is, is literally, I mean, in some ways politics is that set of things that we don't get to be that way about, right? We have to either, we all have to have one immigration policy. We all have to have one, you know, tax policy, even to the extent that we would say, okay, well, different states could do different things, right? That solves that problem. We still have to, we all have to either live in a world where every state can set its, its taxes or they can't, right? And then each state gets to do what it does. So you have to agree on, you know, have to coordinate in some way. So that changes your logic completely. Now it's not like, which, which ice cream flavor is the one that I want the most? It's of the ice cream flavors that lots of people want, which one do I want the most? And that changes your thinking about it and therefore drives you to a different logic when you're, when you're voting and building parties and everything. Now you put it very clearly in the essay. Perhaps the most important lesson to draw from Duverger's law is that voting is not about expressing your opinion. It is about coordinating with other voters and your institutions determine how you must coordinate that kind of says it all right there. Then that gets into parties, which is number six, where you, you break, you attack the fantasy of it seems every election, especially presidential elections that someone's going to come into Washington and just sit down and put aside partisanship and just make good decisions about for the country. And of course, candidates like to say that they'll do this. They like to be outsider candidates to say that they will do this. Why don't they do that? Yeah, this is, I mean, we saw that this just this week, there's this conversation about whether or not Donald Trump is an independent or not, eventually came around to all I see this potential for a third party in Donald Trump. And journalists love this. They really do. But it's, it's, it's a little bit of a strange idea that, you know, that what matters is just what, you know, let's just do good policy. The reason is we disagree on stuff. We really do. And those disagreements would be easy to set aside if we are if we're talking about ice cream, something where we all can just go and do our go our own way. But, you know, we don't on a set of things that we're our politics, we don't agree that about those things. So, you know, and even on the question of like, well, let's let let people decide, right? So should we have a minimum wage or should we let businesses go their own way and like sort of buy their own ice cream in terms of of that? That's the policy decision about whether we're going to live in a world with minimum wage or not. Or, you know, do we want to let people have, you know, just find how they think about what marriage is on their own? Or are we going to impose that as a system? And different people have different senses about, well, like this is something we have to impose to have a social effective order. And these are things that we don't. I don't think anybody thinks that should be literally nothing, right, that we have, which is okay, we all should very least follow the traffic laws and, you know, grab on the right side and not be able to rob and steal and, you know, harm one another. Right. And so what are the things that we have to do? And we disagree. And so if we're going to disagree, then we may as well disagree in a way that's sort of not systematic. The thing that parties do is that they can they encourage people to set aside internal disagreements. Right. So again, the ice cream metaphor, you know, it is a question of like, there's lots of those. So there's your like, your fruit kind of based ice creams.  And maybe, you know, you don't like either of those. And you're really frustrated. But at the very least, you could say, okay, I'm going to go in this direction. And maybe I don't really, I really would rather have, you know, Oreo, something, instead, I'm going to end up with with a double chocolate fudge, but at least they're both on the chocolate direction. And I can have work out the sort out that that compromise there. So what parties do is they force people force groups to form compromises in smaller levels. And then they go together and so get ready to set aside some of our disagreements for the goal of trying to capture government and implement the things that we we do agree on. And that's how the system is going to work. And part of that, you know, both as a normative thing, like, okay, fine. So let's accept parties and expect them to do that. But even independent of that, that's what people are going to do. So even if you get rid of parties and get rid of the stuff, people are going to coordinate like that. The nice thing about parties is it makes it very transparent. And you know, which coalition you're buying yourself into and which one you're supporting, which one you're opposing. And you have a quote from Schatzneider from the 40s. Democracy is unthinkable, save in terms of parties, which we always also hear when you study the founding era that everyone was sort of lamenting the fact that the parties arose. But it seems like they're necessary. Oh, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing, you know, it's a modern democracy, right?  But any kind of modern democracy requires that. And the interesting thing about the founders is, yeah, so the founder of founders said they worked, didn't like parties, Washington's under his farewell address is concerned about, you know, factions. Madison's worried about factions in the, in the Federalist Papers. Jefferson said, you know, if he could only go to heaven with a party, he'd rather not do it. And yet within a few elections, they were building parties. Oh, yeah. They were already in each other's throats. Yes. And they were, and they were doing, they were going out and organizing. They were saying, okay, we need to win this election. So who do I need to win? Who are my allies? Who are not? So like, even if you didn't want to have parties, people are going to do it. So we may as well, from a, you know, perspective of trying to organize and understand our politics, we had to accept that we have them and then maybe try to steer them in useful directions. Because people will, out of one side of their mouth, say parties are terrible. And then the other side of the mouth actually start to organize them. I'd much rather it be transparent that that's what they're doing. I imagine that Jefferson and Hamilton as sort of leaders of their respective parties probably would have said something like, well, the only reason I'm doing this is because Hamilton is organizing his party or vice versa, which just says, you know, ultimately, you know, we shouldn't be doing this, but when you have people on the other side who are organizing, you have to do it. But maybe we can get past it someday and not thinking that, no, we're never going to get past that. It kind of touches back to this idea of, you know, if only, if only they would stop. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, if only they would stop.  I think a lot of the founders had this idea that we talked about a little bit earlier about, there really is some public will. And I'm on the side of what's in the interests. And then they're, you know, they're interested in special interests. They're a faction, they're a special interest. They're a faction. They're a special interest. But, but I'm not. And, and I think that's where a lot of that grows. And what was sort of a, appreciate that that's not really how things work then, then the sort of naivete of trying to get rid of parties becomes seen as exactly that naivete. And it's always a, I study the founding era a lot because I do constitutional law here is one of the things. But, and you look at opinions about public opinion, which to me are some of the most fascinating opinions around, not so much your own opinion, but a person's opinion about how other people form their opinions.  They're being manipulated by their donors, where we're not being manipulated at all. And of course, you see that throughout the, all of American history. Yes. Yeah. And that, and that's a good way to go into number seven, which is how most independence are closet partisans. And we talk about independence all the time as this great, rare thing out there with people who just dispassionately look at the issues and have a voting record that is, you know, goes back and forth between parties. But that, that's kind of a myth, isn't it? Yeah.  But, you know, building on several of the points that we've mentioned already, if people aren't, don't actually have well-defined opinions. And if they don't know, sort of pay attention a little bit, and they need the cues to help figure out what they're thinking. And if politics is organized by elites into parties, then when you go to vote, it's probably not the case that you're carefully evaluating the two choices, you kind of are leaning in one direction or another. And one of the things that we found is, well, it is in the case that more and more people today claim to be independent than used to be. If you ask, are you a Democrat or a Republican, or you're independent, no, I'm independent. But the increase in people who are independent is mostly among people who still, when they go to vote, vote consistently for their party and not for the other. And so it's not, it's not something sort of sensible to say, well, there's this huge group of voters out there that are up for grabs, because most of them actually aren't. And one of the interesting things about this, I don't want to diminish the importance of independence, because people, there is a change there, it must mean something. There's a really great book by Samara Klar and Yana Krupnikov, that's just out a couple years ago, on the subject on independent voters. And one of the things that they find is that people are more likely to say that they're independent when you remind them that politics can be contentious and that so many people in politics are nasty and hostile and jerks and everything. And so I think what part of it is, people just like, I don't want, party politics is people are mean and they argue with each other. And I just want a sensible, common sense compromise. That's what I would like to have. And so then it's what they say who they, that's what they want. And then they say that they're independent. But of course, well, most of us, when we want a sensible compromise, what we really want is when we want the other side that's crazy to compromise. And so some research on this, too, is a nice piece by Laura Hargrave and Harbridge, sorry, and Neil Mahotra, I think, that shines this where they ask people, what do you want in terms of compromise? And what they mostly, well, now do is they'd like the other side to stop being so entrancing and to come over to where they are more or less. And so that's common sense. People would think that way. And so it's sort of not surprising. But as a consequence, it's not reasonable to say most people are independent. Most people have chosen sides. And what they believe is going to be shaped by what side they're on. And so really what we have is this contest between the two sides. And therefore, it very much matters what the leaders of those two sides decide what the battle lines are going to be about. And that's the common sense phrase, which aggravates me to no end, sort of always betrays that. And we just need common sense solutions to X, which of course is considered crazy by the other side. And the other interesting thing about independence is the idea of someone who is super interested in politics, but does not have partisan allegiances, is kind of, like someone who's really independent probably doesn't care about politics at all, correct? Yeah, yeah, you would think that. I mean, there's, again, there are surely some people like that. And, you know, any of those, anybody who's like that or really, really cares about politics, but there's kind of, you know, above the fray, like there might be the person who's listening to this podcast. But for the most part, no, people like that tend to take sides. And even if you don't think you're taking sides, you know, odds are you probably still tend to find one side to be more persuasive than the other. And therefore, you're going to lean that direction, even if you think you're arriving at an independent decision every time. Number eight is a provocative sentence that, especially for this town in Washington, D.C., where I am, that special interests are a political fiction. Yeah, well, I think this builds on the topics that we've just been discussing in the last couple of items here. And that, you know, we like to think of like, there's some like right thing that is common sense, or that is the general what's in everyone's interest.  Problem is like, what's a special interest? A special interest is any interest that is mainly shared by a particular group and not everyone. But we have a diverse society and there's almost nothing that we all want exactly the same. Even things that we broadly all want, we're still going to have one accomplish in slightly different ways. Right. So what is a special interest? Special interests are, you know, business leaders, that's a special interest and labor groups, their special interests, they disagree on things. So they both have their interests. Pro-life and pro-choice activists are going to be this and just about anything that you can imagine is going to be a particular group and that's everybody. What a reasonable approximation of what a special interest is, is it's the interest of anybody who's not me because what they want is not what's in the common good, but of course, whatever I want is in the common good. So again, echoing this notion about common sense principles and compromise. And so, you know, this is what the founders understood as a problem. They said, look, the founders, the founders said, oh, we've got all these different groups, these different factions. We can't expect them all to agree. We can't expect people not to have their differences. So we'll just try to have a system that prevents them from organizing and political parties do more organizing than Madison imagined would happen and what he was writing in Federalist 10. But that is that landscape of people who want different things is sort of how political scientists approach things. And that's sort of we come to this and say, okay, there's lots of different interests and how we're going to aggregate them and the parties, there's our ideology, what sort of structure is this. But we approach this question initially as there's lots of diversity in what people want. And we don't tend to imagine that there exists some kind of general interest that if only we could just set aside our biases, we could arrive at a good policy. We recognize that just about every policy effect helps some people and maybe doesn't help some other people. And that's what political conflict is about. Yeah, you write that the most important distinction is not between special and general interests, but between organized interests and unorganized interests. Exactly, yes. So when you think about sort of sort of broad groups that are maybe, you think policy doesn't help, it's not helpful for those groups. So I think this sort of classic example of this is the unemployed. There's a large group of people who perhaps face difficulties because they're losing the child, but that group changes. So from year to year, some people with persons unemployed now and they're not later. And so policies that might help the unemployed and help reduce unemployment level or whatever else are hard to do because that group isn't going to organize in the same way that say a religious group is going to organize where this group is always identifies that way and they're going to move or a racial ethnic group is going to say like we have particular interests and we know who we are. And so less organized, organization is important. Again, cutting back to political parties and there's a certain way in which this whole essay could have been about the importance of political parties in one way or another because one of the things the parties do is they help to mobilize and organize otherwise potentially unorganized groups and pay attention to policies that might sort of bring a bunch of small diffuse groups, bring them together and form a majority coalition. But without somebody doing that, the interests of certain groups are going to be underrepresented. And number nine, I think grows from this too, the grass does not grow by itself, which is the question of what is a real grassroots movement versus what is an astroturfing. I think this question is very tied to things we've discussed where a lot of people, they think the other side is somehow faking their political coalition or it's somehow created by dastardly and special interests who are manipulating public opinions, all these things we've already discussed. Whereas my grassroots movement is real and natural why is that this whole attitude mistaken? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I wrote this essay right as the Tea Party was becoming a major movement and so everybody, a lot of people were saying, look, there's a Tea Party isn't really this movement, it's just the Koch brothers or the so-and-so is fueling this. And no, it's not no one really has these grievances. And the thing is that you could point to organizers, you could point to groups who are doing things to mobilize the Tea Party activists, you could point to Fox News running news stories that were clearly having the effect of mobilizing people and making them think of their cells as part of a movement. And so you're like, oh, that's what's happening. Well, but that's always the case. Every movement is like that. The civil rights movement had leaders who were mobilizing and the like. And so I think again, it's sort of unfortunate that we want to imagine that there's just people wake up one morning and say, I'm frustrated and I'm just going to walk down to the street and then they know if I'm lucky, maybe when I get to the town square, there'll be other people who are also frustrated and will have a protest. All protest is going to get organized in some way. And so now you've got the flip side where you have the town hall meetings that where people are showing up and it was before it was to be able to show up to the town hall meetings and it was liberals who were saying, oh, the only people who are coming are being dragged there by some nefarious funding organization. And now it's no, no, it's, you know, Soros is paying these protesters to go to these groups. Nobody is, you know, pulling out a checkbook and paying protesters to show up at these things. But someone is mobilizing them. They're saying, hey, look, there's going to be this town hall meeting. You got to go down there and talk and we need you to come and we need to have a larger voice. And so that's, again, how sort of dynamic sort of grassroots popular politics requires that kind of seating. And then the difference is, if there were no, there was nothing to mobilize or no public opinion to get down there, then people wouldn't would respond. You'd say, look, we have to go down there and protest against this, you know, policy that's going to raise marginal, marginal tax rates on the, on the wealthiest people. And, you know, I'm the Koch brothers, I don't want that to happen. No one's going to show up unless there's some interest. Right. And so that's not the message that they have. They sell the message in some other direction. And if you don't like that message, then that's, that's, you know, a concern. But your concern is not just with the, you know, Soros or the Koch brothers. It's also with the other voters who bought that message and then went more mobilized by it. So number 10 is all these things that, that political scientists know. Number 10 is we do not know what you think you know, which is the things that a lot of myths that people believe about politics. Yeah. I mean, a big part of what, what was behind my mind as I was writing this essay, and I'm thinking about in general on this is, you know, for some of the things that we say, including some of the things that we've said in the last, you know, in this hour that we've been talking, people are like, oh, well, that's obvious. Right. If you have course, there's a mandate, it's just rhetorical thing. And we, that's obvious. So part of that is, well, yeah, it's obvious now that we laid it out and we had some people went out and found examples and so forth. But the exact opposite could have been seemed obvious to you too. And so that's part of what social science is about is taking some things, some of which seem obvious and sorting the out and figuring out, is this really what's going on? Or is it not? And there's a lot of seems obvious things that we don't think are true. We want a real really common one that political scientists get upset about a lot is this idea that gerrymandering is what's responsible for polarization. And I think there probably is, Joe, some kind of gerrymandering that the way in which districts are drawn does have consequences. But among their consequences is probably not that you have increased polarization. It's not like you draw lots of safe Republican districts and lots of safe Democratic districts. And if you think about it a little bit, it actually doesn't make sense that gerrymandering would do this because if I was a partisan person, I wouldn't want to draw districts that would be good for both parties. I'd want to make them good for my party and not good for the other party. And then, of course, the other party is going to be pushed back the other direction, going to end up with changes. And so we don't think that gerrymandering is why polarization. And of course, one way we know that that's not true is that if it were the case, that changing drawing districts is what is causing things to become more polarized, then you'd see polarization in the house where we draw districts. But we wouldn't see polarization in the Senate because those districts are states and they've been the same since the beginning. But in fact, you do see polarization in the Senate. So that suggests that polarization is about something more than just gerrymandering districts. But people all around think the way to solve polarization is to get rid of gerrymandering districts. And as I say, there might be other consequences of gerrymandering that we're concerned about, but that is not probably one of them. And we have this, you know, what exactly is the cause story of polarization, that I don't know, right? I have a bunch of theories about what might be driving things. But we try to, you know, disabuse people of some bad of some things that we think that they do know. But the real tricky thing, the real point of this last item in the list is there's a lot of stuff we don't know. And it might be that it really matters. How much effect does the economy have versus a campaign? I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but this is why we keep doing research and we keep trying to find good answers. Another common, I mean, maybe the most common belief, I don't know if this is true, but at least belief about Congress and Washington, D.C. is that everyone is sort of purchased by their quote-unquote special interests and money just buys the votes of your average congressman. And even this widely accepted tourism, which I'm sure most people think that political scientists can easily prove is not easily provable. Yeah. I mean, the one obvious alternative explanation is, well, if I, it's not so much that I, you know, I want certain outcomes and so I'm going to bribe you, but well, I'm going to give money to the kind of candidate who I think is going to do the things that I want. And so then I give money, you know, so then the pharmaceutical industry gives money to a candidate and then that candidate does good things for the pharmaceutical industry. Well, maybe because that's what that guy wanted, would have done anyway. I'm probably, there probably is some influence of money. We think most of it's actually more about access than bribing. So it's not like, if I get this, if I don't get this, you know, I get this donation from this, you know, this interest group or this PAC, then I'm going to do whatever that PAC wants, because honestly, you could just go somewhere else if that was the case, right? You could just, okay, fine. I don't, you're voting that for that thing is going to be bad for my constituents. I can find resources someplace else for on that one thing. What's more likely is, okay, but now the pharmaceutical industry or whatever the PAC is, now they get some access. They get to come talk and influence things. And then that might have some consequences, but it's much more indirect. And it's more about signaling. And of course, politicians that I don't know what the right policy is, I got a bunch of different things. Well, this group has a lot of money and they're a lot of organized and they say, this is a good idea. Well, maybe I'll listen to that. Maybe not even a bad idea to have that ability for different groups to organize and try to impress your folks. We talk about lobbying as if it's some kind of, you know, the various vote buying kind of thing, but the logic behind lobbying is just, here's some people who know a lot about something, they're going to camp out in the lobby and try to tell us stuff. Yeah, that's at least not obviously a problem. And so how big of a, what are the consequences? I'm not, I think money does have some pretty serious effects on politics, but it's very tricky to figure out exactly what it is. And it would be a strange way to try and change the world. I often make an analogy, let's say that there was some billionaire who was a flat earth or who was trying to change the world and make sure that we could have better policies for flat earth. It would be a weird strategy to find politicians who do not currently believe in the flat earth position and give them enough money until they believe it, as opposed to finding people who believe in flat earth and then giving them money to try and get them elected. Yeah, no, that's a much, much more reasonable strategy. And then part of it is becomes you don't even need to do that, because what political parties are doing is they're recruiting people who believe in a whole host of ideological things. And if flat earth becomes part of what it means to be one of the parties, then you're going to bring along people who are educated in that information environment. And so you end up with flat earth as sort of a bonus from supporting that ideology if flat earth were to be that thing. So yeah, I think that that's exactly makes much more sense. But then we've both described a way now in which money could influence outcomes is just more complicated. And so it makes sense to her to think about how does that work? And then what kind of policies should we implement? So if it's the case that the way in which money influences outcomes isn't by buying people off straight, but is by steering and shaping things, then one problem, one thing that we might imagine is the more in which that money goes through central organizations like political parties where they have to balance off lots and lots of interests, that's better. Whereas if the money is going straight at people, then they can mobilize a flat earth person and just get flat earth people on the on the parties platform. And so we should have campaign finance regulations that don't undermine parties, but undermine individual contributions, for example. So that's one plausible thing if that's the case. And there's the research that suggests that that's what you ought to do. There's a book by Ray LaRosha and Brian Shaffner that makes that argument. And I don't know if that's right. And I've talked to lots of really smart people in campaign finance who don't think that's true. And I don't know. And that's exactly the point is that we're not quite sure about exactly how it is that money influences outcomes. Now, we look at our politics, and I'm not sure if it's opinions about politics or opinions about Washington DC have ever been lower than they are today, shared by both sides. And we have Donald Trump, much to everyone's surprise in polarization and all these things. And one lesson I think people can learn from your excellent essay, and I'm excited about the forthcoming book, is we might be expecting too much from politics. If we don't accept it as sort of a nitty gritty, this is how we hash out compromises and make deals, then we might actually have a difficulty using politics for what it is, which is a way of trying to get people with many different interests and attitudes to live together cooperatively rather than combatively. Yeah, I think that's a fair reading is that we do have a large expectation. We want things to work. And it goes beyond politics, right? You're like, why is this traffic this way? And why are these roads steer in this direction? And why can't we have a more effective way of getting to the beach and all these other things? We just think, you know, somebody, they did it wrong. The difference is that politics is actually a place where we are able to influence and get involved in outcomes. And so then it's not just being angry at the system. It's like we could actually participate in it. And so yeah, it would make a lot more sense to appreciate that what we could expect out of it won't be a policy that makes you happy or that makes me happy, but it's going to be something that's going to be some amalgam of the various forces that were allowed in to the system. So I think that was a good ending, unless there's something that you think I missed. So one final thought I'd make for people who are going to be steered towards this article is that, you know, this, I'm glad people would read it. I think it was a good piece. I'm glad to write it. I am writing a booklet version. And part of the reason I'm writing a booklet version is because there's been a lot of demand for it. But also because some of the stuff that's in the piece, you know, social science has marched on and we have a better understanding of things. And I would say things slightly differently here, which doesn't say I'm not going to give you all the caveats here, but that's the part of the point about social science is that we, you know, we keep learning and we keep building on things. And yet there are some sort of enduring things, you know, we don't, you don't need to be up on the latest research to know what's going on. You know, the important thing isn't that you have access to a political science journal. The important thing is that you have access to your sophomore political science lecture notes in a lot of ways, because there are some enduring things to be found there. And if you find that in the article that I wrote, that's great, but you can also get that from your own education. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


One reason is you have to get through me to get to lunch. It was somewhere around midnight. Halfway through the nasty data center migration, when the exhaustion began to take hold. Hi, I'm Mervo, and I'm the least interested part of this presentation. This is Fair Living in Systems and Illustration. But first, a little housekeeping. This talk isn't endorsed by anyone. This is me. I'm just a boy standing in front of his community, asking me to love him and make things a little better. Will I take questions? Yes, but after the show, I only have 30 minutes, and I'll probably spend too long anyway. So if you really want to talk, I encourage you to propose an open space. If you heckle, if you must heckle, you have to be funnier than me. So of the attendees, how many people are first-time Dev Ops Day participants? Wow. So if nobody else has said so, welcome. Welcome to our community. Of the audience and people who are paying attention to me, how many would call them, well, show of hands, call themselves systems people, ops people, network storage? That's pretty good, actually. How many would be developing software engineering architecture likewise, a good participation? The often neglected, very technical, DBA security, things like that. A small but noticeable amount. How many people are product or management? Perhaps familiar, useful, but now they deal with other things. I'm kidding. That's actually some of my favorite work. How many people are straight-up business-type things? I'm talking financial, legal, HR, administrative. Yes. Any more? So the best thing about Dev Ops is that it's the entire company.  Even though it's not listed, we just really don't want to make the name any longer than it has to be. So is there anything I missed? Any rules that I missed? OK, don't say anything. So given the many, many conflicts, you might be expecting to hear lovely stories about sunshine and rainbows and happiness and cooperation and so on and so forth from our favorite unicorn companies. These stories are fantastic. And they give us hope and a goal, but they seldom destroy the struggle or the path. They describe what they have now, or at least the ideal now, and they describe where they came from, and probably a key change that they made. There are some missing steps. There's also usually enough content to participate in the Dev Ops drinking game. So instead of talking about the glorious utopia that is the Dev Ops promised land, I'm going to talk about the first steps of the path. Now, one final point in my preamble. I'm going to be moving pretty quickly. So here's the safe road for my talk. If at any time you're feeling overwhelmed, please say the safe road clearly, clearly, and we will take a break. So let's get on with the show. There's a Chinese proverb that says, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So the number of times I hear this phrase, Dev Ops doesn't work, is amazing. The best thing about this phrase is that the people who say it are almost completely right, even if for very wrong reasons. Who says this? I'm going to use the word sysadmin as a shorthand for a very broad group. Other times I get a lot of feedback. I'm going to use operations or ops engineering, things like that. I'm talking about largely the same group of people. The people in this group have widely varying titles, but it's most commonly a combination of systems, networks, and operations with administrator, engineer, technician, or analyst. And even though the suite of names is shared, the actual day-to-day job can vary so widely that the people doing one job might be completely incompatible with another. In some places, they have the best computers. In other places, they have the worst. The workplace probably isn't very nice and almost certainly has no natural light. If there's a page rotation, they're certainly on it. If there isn't a page rotation, they're on it all the time. The work is largely invisible until something fails, in which case it's the talk of the town. Define operations. And if anybody's keeping track, the mean tone to thought leader is now. The typical day looks something like this. But if one word could be used to describe these people, I think we could all agree that would be cynical. So who has ever had a party? Their management says, we launched a thing and it's awesome. We're going to have a party to celebrate. Who's ever been stuck behind keeping that success breathing a lot of people? And it's typically your systems, your ops staff, who are keeping it running. So for them, it doesn't look like a success. So you may be going about the course of your day when you see a new project announced and they begin to hire some more people. So you go, well, oh, that sounds great. Who's going to support this thing? The response is probably a blank stare. And you are. The, of course, might not be vocalized, but it's probably there. So I think, great, how many people do I get to hire to add to my support workload? The response is, ooh, sorry, there wasn't anything left in the budget. Come on, it won't be that much more work. Or a variation of the team player, good soldier speech. Anybody receive that? They will not know what that is. Moving on. Well, I have your request for training or conference budget rejected at hand or because another group, like you used it all. These people probably have a basic working knowledge of a half dozen programming languages, even if they don't do any of them full time. They most often likely think in a shell. They probably know at least three ways of testing whether a TCP port is open. And they probably have a soft spot and their heart for a couple of terminal commands. I'm not kidding. They have no patience for people who won't try to help themselves. They may have seen or participated in a DevOps initiative, but let's be honest, that largely consists of a team or a position rename. Or they're helpful when you suggested that you should install some Chef or some Jenkins and some monitoring so we can DevOps now or so we can Agile now. When we hear DevOps or Agile, what they're really hearing is now let's take the same people who can't handle a planned release schedule or make whatever effort that they need to squeak by the change board and let's give them unfettered access to production. Because clearly, I'm not paged often enough. When bringing a problem to management or engineering, they're likely to be told, but that means the developers will have to do additional work. I don't want to give them more work. Can't you just deal with it? So what you hear is, well, you clearly think they're more valuable than they. And you had to know this when it was coming. Why does this mean so pervasive? Because this attitude is pervasive. It's not intentional. Nobody's going to go on the record and say it, but actions speak louder than words. And these things become patterns when they happen often enough. You see if you don't start becoming cynical. So what is one to do? How do you maintain your sanity in the face of increasing job scope, increasing demand for access and security, and little hope for an effective head count? Not to mention continuing to juggle the existing volume of requests and continuing to keep the gears greased so that the machine keeps running. Now, please note, I'm not saying just. There's nothing simple about this. There's nothing just about the situation. There's nothing simple about it, and justice hasn't been involved in a long time. Making these changes will be difficult. They will take work, and they're going to have to convince other people and other teams to get on board. But the first step towards getting help is admitting you have a problem. And the problem isn't technical. It's almost entirely social. Because the saddens are typically responsible for the environment, and the easiest way to assure that the state is maintained and is stable is to lock everybody else out from it. Now, by doing that, you met the goal of keeping out unexpected changes. I have a number of side effects. Now, aside from decreased velocity, a kind of learned helplessness sets in. Your customers and your teammates became so used to being hands off that they don't know what a reasonable level of effort is to expect. Now, some teams settle on hands-off production, but you can make changes to staging and whatever else you have. But this is fraught with peril. Now, since your customers are uncomfortably making any changes, all changes still end up being made by cis admins. Now, they're frustrated because they have to do work that they gave you right to do. This leads to your time being taken up by a lot of low-value tasks. And the most common problem here is configuration drift. Now, config drift is when you have different settings in one environment versus others. When the cost to discover what production looks like is high, like I have to go talk to those bitter cynical people, people are more likely to just take a guess or use defaults, make assumptions, or use the settings in their IDE. So it works on my machine indeed. Again, this is well said by config management tools, but you need to be willing to trust your peers and give them access. If you want to be part of the process of validating changes, you put in place a pull request and code review system. Not even a system, just a workflow, let them into it. This is something your software engineering peers should be very accustomed to. Granting access to see the existing configs and the ability to propose changes also shares the responsibility for your team's environments and contributes to feelings of ownership. Denying your colleagues the ability to make necessary config changes, it contributes to the problems of config drift and learned helplessness. You need to stop feeding the machine. Your value isn't doing the work, but being able to make the decision of what needs to be done. And I'll be the first to say that automating all the things is a flawed goal. It's usually said in the context of a project rather than the philosophy of continual improvement. While I agree everything should be automated, not everything should be automatic. And certain main companies, they're there, but the vast majority aren't. These are common problems I see everywhere. So decision making is complex and trying to codify all the possible decision trees is a fantastic way to make yourself insane. Not to mention documenting your decision making process might be an unwanted look inside your brain. That may just be me. But you shouldn't have to engage in an automation project to improve your environment. Build some time into your schedule to review, propose, and make changes towards a better environment. Pick something that's rough, manual, and repeatable and remove a small piece of friction. Move on to the next one. See, an automation project, my friends, is ocean boiling if I've ever seen it and I'm really good at ocean boiling. Ideally you should have time blocked out for continuous improvement. And if not, create a meeting or a weekly project, review the issues you've experienced lately and pick something to fix. Make this habit. Whatever you don't automate has to be documented.  It's something shared that people can see. Now, beyond the typical benefits of documentation, like the bus factor, it also serves as functional requirements for someone to pick up when they can help you to make this better later. You have to try to recognize whether documenting or automating takes longer. Perhaps this piece of documentation would be better served as executable documentation, meaning code. You should attempt to pick apart your pieces of your work and attempt to describe them.  Code cleric, or release ranger, et cetera. Or are you an internet plumber? How much legacy systems spelunking do you have to do? Could you describe your role as a production customs official? I mean, are you the gateway to production? And if so, are you really equipped to do that? And a quick test for that. If you say no, that can't go live, do you get overridden? Because if you do, that's not your job. More importantly, is this what you wanna do? Before you can ask for help, you need to prepare. So, it's no secret, most just admins do not have a healthy relationship with the rest of the business. You'll need to initiate the healing. Take someone to lunch, preferably someone you don't know well. Ask questions and listen to the answers. This isn't the time to defend yourself or your team. It's time to find out what the business needs from someone else's perspective. Ask what they think your team's role is toward achieving that success. Align to business goals. Ask them what they think your team does well and what you need improvement on. You probably recognize the words and you may even use the same ones, but in different contexts, even within different divisions or teams, the same words can have vastly different meanings. You need to go out of your way to speak on their terms. To communicate your message, you have to speak on their turf. Now, this may seem terribly unfair. Why can't they meet me on my terms? But I'm guessing that hasn't been a winning strategy so far. Otherwise, I wouldn't be giving this talk. So, not only do you need to use their language, but you need to communicate over their medium. Probably not IRC, and sending an email is a really good way to get it ignored. If you're speaking in management, you need to write a slide deck. Executives love presentations. It doesn't have to be slick. It shouldn't have any sounds, minimum of transitions, if any. Gifts are fine, trust me. But this can help to lay the groundwork for a conversation.  It's entirely possible, and likely even, that the people and teams that you support don't actually know what you're responsible for. It could be argued that most of them shouldn't need to know. But if you've been saying no to protect yourself, it's a sign that you're significantly overtaxed. You need to have a real discussion with your leadership about your role, scope, and staffing. In order to have this discussion, you need to prepare. You need to come up with a fairly comprehensive list of the products and teams that you support. This is a list of every team and every product that each of them makes. The components and tasks that belong to you for each. Now, don't forget about all those components that nobody owns, but somehow people keep coming to you to either implement or fix. Most commonly, what I've seen is CI and source code, repository, any ticketing or project systems, wikis, these are really common that nobody owns, but, well, fix it. Are you also responsible for directory services, the virtualization platform, mail, chat, phones? Do you do workstation purchasing? Do you have to deal with printers? Do you manage the storage and networking layers? Seriously, get into detail. This is not the time to skimp. Here's the thing. Your leadership might not know what LDAP or directory services are, but they'll understand if nobody can log into their machines, they can't pull information to build reports, and, by the way, code can't deploy because that credentialing is kind of important. Are you sure you understand what the company's goals are? Would your CXOs agree with your take on it? So what do you need to succeed? How much more staff do you need? What tooling or equipment do you need to help you work more efficiently? Does code get deployed even when tests fail? And how many outages have or wasn't because, let's admit, that happens. In order to have a meaningful discussion with the people in your company who aren't necessarily technical, you need to be able to relate to a language that they speak. Regardless of team duties, the lingua franca of most teams is money. As engineers, we prefer to think in terms of the tech itself, but in order to describe an impact, everybody can translate to money. It's helpful if difficult and important habit to get into, but I encourage you to consider the components of cost that go into every incident or task. What's the cost of a main site outage? How much revenue does this feature bring in? Why are you spending so much on infrastructure and effort to make this component highly available? Why does it matter that you do that piece of maintenance? You have to show the negative value of doing things the way they are or opportunity costs versus time invested to improve the situation around it, including providing automation and delegation and self-help tools. Describe how doing this maintenance work reduces your contact switching, unplanned outages and lost reputation of your company. Describe the benefit of enabling technologies so they have increased visibility to the business and the agency that other teams have to do their own work. If they claim that they're doing agile but they can't do continuous delivery, they're not doing agile. And the whole point of that framework is to improve delivery of value to the customers and the business. Further, you need to show how systems relate. It doesn't have to be terribly detailed. Describe the features that customers use or rely on X, Y, and Z pieces of infrastructure. Draw the lines from LDAP to storage to your CI to testing to artifacts delivered to production. Then show all the other systems that have those same dependencies. Once the picture emerges showing how everything's reliant on certain pieces of unexciting things like LDAP and your storage cluster and that janky collection of angry pearl and shell scripts that keep everything working, realization will begin to dawn. Congratulations. You've just effectively communicated value. So, I mean, this is a DevOps talk and if you're playing the drinking game, we have Conway's law now. Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. So, to most people, that means an odd chart. And you see how smooth and linear those lines are. Yeah, that was redundant. And how many lines separate you from somebody else? But this is missing the point of Conway's law. It's the communication structures that are key. If you have regular communication with people outside of your reporting structure, those are communication structures. Lunches and friendships, not status meetings. Don't pollinate. A key to making the business work better and improving the life of operations is the pager. Are you held responsible for applications written by other people? Who gets paged when the app goes down? And how does that make sense?  Sysadmin should be available to be escalated to. Devs can triage and troubleshoot their own apps more readily than you can. They can look at the error log and go, oh, that's a normal error. That's a normal error. There's the problem. Instead of me reading through like 200 lines of Java stack trace, that's not a good time. Especially for me. This is especially true if you have full stack engineers. Hey, go debug this kernel module for me. I was hoping for a laugh on that one. All right. Can't win them all. So they get to call the cavalry when they get stuck. They don't need to know everything about the system. They don't need to resolve everything. But when a fault occurs and they need help, they stay on the call. They pair with you as you diagnose and triage and bring about resolution. That way, they don't need to escalate to you for that thing the next time it occurs. They can collaborate. They can stop, collaborate, and help work on a permanent fix. See, when teams aren't responsible for their products, when they're not paged, when it fails, they're numb to the pain that they inflate. They're not trying to cause pain. They just don't feel it. And it's especially easy to argue for this when they're using agile. They claim they want continuous feedback. Well, there is no feedback, more visceral, than being waken up by a pager in the middle of the night. When the inevitable exclamation comes at, we can't interrupt our developers. Ask if that makes sense to interrupt somebody else. Even being aware of the pain, seeing your friend tells you about how many times you got woken up by the pager last night. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. That's a far cry from being woken up yourself. Here's another thing. If you don't wanna be woken up at 3 a.m. because of something you wrote, how do you think your ops team feels about being woken up for something they didn't write? Further, this is a list of responsibilities as for. Ask each team to take responsibility for their own products. You likely still have a hefty list of things that you're responsible for. But as he's set in, as he's realization set in of who owns what, who's responsible for it and really takes care of it, the staffing numbers are gonna start making more sense. Now, this may just be a matter of the places I've been, but I've never seen a developer to systems or ops ratio of less than five to one. And most places, it's like 10 engineers for every systems person. Most places, it's even higher than that. By adding teams to pager rotations, they drastically reduce the load on you. By not adding them to pager rotations, they are complicit and you're burnout. Now, as the sediments have a reputation for saying no. The people who are asking, probably aren't trying to make your life worse, they're just trying to get their work done. They may not know what their simple request involves and all of that it might not even be necessary. But by not having responsibility aligned with authority, you may have been stuck with the pain of other people's wishes. You know the fulfilling their request is gonna cause you pain so you understandably say no.   All hope is not lost. Stop saying no. Yes, but is extremely powerful. Yes, but can get you help. Yes, I can set that up for you, but we don't have the capacity to be responsible for it. We can't run it for you. What happened there? You agreed their request was important and reasonable. You set expectations for the level of support that you can give, none. You left the requester with several options for going forward. They might have hiring requisitions that they can't fill. You can negotiate for some of those. You can negotiate to have some of their engineers join your team as you're clearly understaffed. Perhaps some of their engineers join your team on a rotation or just a plain lateral move. They'll need mentorship or training, but this kind of trust training is invaluable. It's a force multiplier and it also sets precedent. So maybe they take responsibility for the thing. They run it, they get paid for it. Of course, you'll probably have to be an escalation point at some point to help when it fails, but it's their product. They feel ownership. Again, you're setting precedent. Most assignments are stuck doing tasks that provide very little value because they restrict access to their peers. In my mind, there's a perfect example, and I call it plain telephone. When I say plain telephone, this is like the situation where somebody, say, developer wants some logs. So you go fetch the logs for them and get it to them in some awkward way. No, not that log, this log. No, I'm not seeing what I'm looking for. Can you check over here somewhere else for this thing? And so on and so forth.  No laugh. I don't know what you're hoping to prevent by restricting access, but if the scenario ever happens, you should know you're providing negative value. You're making things worse. Again, let's try to remember that your peers are not out to get you. They can probably be trusted to be reasonable people. They're human beings, and they will meet you halfway. So with that framework in mind, it's time to demonstrate some trust and delegate to them. Give them access. Look, your value is not in the credentials that you have. Otherwise, you're just a poorly implemented terminal as a service. Even better than giving access is giving tooling, logging into a server should be an anti-pattern. You need better tooling. So with the example of logging, let's talk tooling. First, logging into a box to get logs is just plain dumb. Sure, you could wrap a tail command in a RENDEC job, but let's centralize those while we're talking about it. Look, syslog's better than nothing, but not by much. Shipping logs is easy, but consuming them to something useful isn't. Batteries are not included. If your company wants to spend money on Splunk, then encourage that. It's a fantastic suite of tools, but I would wave you away from it if you're not gonna use it for everything.  Some things, some logs just aren't captured anywhere. I like elk, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, or use a cloudy elk or elk as a service for a middle ground. If you run it yourself, it's free, it's in beer, and it's very featureful. But centralize logging tool of choice, provide access to your customers and the URL and point them to the docs. Let them get out of the way. Again, terminal is a service. You don't need to run all the things. Someone asked you to run this command for me. You need to put a button on it. Rendex, a fantastic tool for putting a button on it. It's pretty easy to make HA. You can tighten the LDAP for credentialing and you can manage permissions for specific jobs or projects. And by shipping it's logs, see what I did there. You get auditing of who ran what and when. It's just an, it's a REST API. That's a redundant slide. So if you have some data that must be restricted, try to isolate those specific cases from the rest of your environment. You shouldn't have to restrict everything just because something needs to be kept in isolation. Why would you want to deploy other people's code? Do you really provide any value in that activity? If the deployment goes poorly, you're launching straight into another game of telephone. What if you make it easy for them to do it and power them with trust and tooling, make it easy for them to do the right thing? Logs are a start. Metric dashboards that show changes in performance conditions and error rates will make it plain to see if it worked. This freedom doesn't come free. Providing tooling doesn't dissolve the development team of the need to communicate. In fact, it's likely they'll have to communicate a lot more. They'll need to be watching those dashboards and logs to see for themselves the success of every deploy. Look, I say they a lot in this article and that's because by default, most organizations have a strong component of us and them, us versus them. It's only natural for there to be an us and a them. And while it may not be my job to do foo, it's our job to ensure that the team and the company is successful. Well, that may sound like some happy-go-lucky tree-hugging-pop-psychology nonsense, and it is. The goal here is to get you, the beleaguered sysadmin, the help that you need in order to improve the capabilities of the business. And if I may be permitted one final thing. The psychological damage done to sysadmins by their peers makes us bitter and cynical. I encourage my people to try to see that they aren't trying to make life difficult for you, but it's very likely that responsibility and authority are misaligned. I likewise encourage my people to take steps to make their lives better. A ship's courses change in small increments over time. And it may seem like the onus here is on the part of the sysadmins. They're keeping the plates spinning and much of the work here described as on them, and that's a fair point. We sysadmins, operations people, we have to put in the effort to make our lives better for ourselves, because the way we've been working clearly isn't working out well for us, or anyone else. Look, there's so much more to this topic, particularly the shift away from a systems team supporting a bunch of projects towards a series of largely self-sustaining product teams, but that's gonna have to wait for another day. So when somebody says DevOps doesn't work, they're absolutely correct. DevOps is a concept, it's a philosophy and a professional movement based on trust and collaboration among teams to align them to business goals. A concept doesn't do work and a philosophy doesn't meet goals. People do. So please remember that just like soil and green, DevOps is made up of people. So I'd like to take a moment to thank my editor, Sean Moten, for the help he did on the original article. Our DevOps organizers, could we get a hand for our organizers and volunteers? They're a little bit of an awesome. This event went fantastically smoothly. And the DevOps community at large, we, for being so welcoming and shaming. So, as your thought leader, I advise you to take one antagonist, one company credit card and two lunches. Let's go plant some trees. And with that, thank you. Lunch.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we discuss the following question which says, in the given figure pqrs is a parallelogram and the line segments pt and rt dash by 60 angles pnr respectively show that pt is parallel to rt dash. Before moving on to the solution let's recall a fact which says a quadrilateral is a parallelogram one pair opposite sides this is the key idea to be used in this question. Let's proceed with the solution. Consider this figure here we have pqrs nnogram then is given that pt by 6 angle p rt dash by 6 angle r and we have to prove that pt is parallel to rt dash. Now in triangles st qt dash we have ps is equal to rq so these are the opposite sides of the parallelogram pqrs and we know that opposite sides of parallelogram equal. Also observe that in triangles pst and rqt dash we have angle s is equal to angle q since and the s and angle q are opposite angles of the parallelogram pqrs and we know that opposite angles of a parallelogram are equal. Now we have angle p is equal to angle r since they are the opposite angles of the parallelogram and we know that opposite angles of a parallelogram equal. So this would give us half of angle p is equal to half of angle r we know that pt by 6 angle p so half of angle p would be given as angle spt now this would be equal to half of angle r and we know that rt dash by 6 angle r so half of angle r would be given by angle qrt dash so now we get in triangles pst rqt dash we have ps is equal to rq angle s is equal to angle q and angle spt is equal to angle qrt dash so therefore we say that triangle pst is congruent to triangle rqt dash by congruent criteria now since these two triangles are congruent so this would give us st is equal to qt dash cpct that is they are the corresponding parts of congruent triangles then we have so this means that sides are equal that is pq is equal to rs that is now pq from the figure as you can see is equal to pt dash plus t dash q and this would be equal to rs which from the figure you can see is equal to rt plus ts now since we have got that st is equal to qt dash so just t dash q and st or ts cancels so we are left with pt dash is equal to rt now we also have pq is parallel to rs this would obviously mean that parallel to rt now in the quadrilateral rt we have pt dash is equal to rt to rt so from the key idea which says that a quadrilateral is the parallelogram if it has one pair of opposite sides equal and parallel we say that quadrilateral pt dash rt is a parallelogram one pair of opposite sides equal and parallel that is pt dash is equal to rt and pt dash is also parallel to rt now since pt dash rt is a parallelogram therefore this means that parallel to rt dash so health proved that pt is parallel to rt dash this completes this session hope you have understood the solution for this question


Hello, this is Hans van der Kras, senior lecturer at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. In this video I'm going to demonstrate how to use the lake flood tool from the Processing Toolbox. It's a SAGA tool. To use this tool we start with a lake polygon and digital elevation model. And in raster analysis it is very important that the inputs, the raster inputs have the same dimensions. So we are not going to use the rasterize function for the lake but we are going to use the clip function from SAGA, just to make sure that the rasters that the tool needs have the same dimensions. So go to the Processing Toolbox and we search for clip and there are many clip functions but we use the clip raster with polygon from SAGA, the DTM as an input and the lake polygon as a polygon that we want to use to clip and let's call the output lake raster. In this way we are sure that the clipped raster has the same properties and there is the result. Now we go to the raster calculator and we are going to add the lake raster and we say if it has values, so let's say larger equal than minus 9999, put it in brackets then if that is true then do times 100, so if it's true it's 1 and then all the values will end up with the value 100 and if it's false it will be 0 and then times 100 will be 0. So this will result in all the lake pixels to have a value of 100 which will be our first lake level that we are going to use for the flooding. Let's save the output and let's call it level100.tiv and now an important step we need to choose the layer extent of the DTM, otherwise it will have not the same dimensions and we can't use it in the tool later, it will give errors. Now we have all the inputs for the tool, so the tool we are going to use is the lake flood tool from SAGA. Here you see that our level100 has no specified projection, so let's specify it first as good practice and then use the lake flood tool. As an input we use the DTM and we are going to flood it from the level100 pixels and let's call the output of the lake that it will create lake100, that will simply be the elevations of the lake and flood 100 for all the areas that are above the flood line. There we go and of course it makes more sense if we are going to style it, so I choose single band pseudo color and what I would like is to have all the flooded pixels blue and everything that's above to have the elevation model colors that we have below. So if I use this clip out of range values to make sure that everything above a certain value that I specify will not be visualized. So let's use that to create classes and I use here a value of 100 because that was our threshold for the flood and then everything that is flooded will have value 100 and all the other things are clipped to the elevation, but the elevation model is not stretched in a way that we can see a lot of elevation differences so let's also stretch it from value 100 to the maximum and in this way we see now the area that is flooded and I can repeat the steps for different flood levels and here you see the result. So with these tools we can flood from specifying a certain lake level and then visualize it in a proper way to see which areas are flooded. Of course this can't replace a full hydraulic model, it's a quick indication to simulate inundations. I hope you liked the video, if you want to see more of these videos please subscribe to my YouTube channel and for free tutorials have a look at GIS OpenCourseWare.org.