Playing a dominant role in world politics does not make for an easy life. Even very powerful states encounter problems they cannot solve and situations they would rather avoid. But as Macbeth remarks after seeing the witches, present fears are less than horrible imaginings. What really scares American foreign policy commentators is not immediate frustrations or dangers, but the prospect of longer term decline. Recently, the United States has been going through another bout of declineism by one count of fifth in the last 60 years. This one has been caused by the juxtaposition of China's rising power and American economic, political, and military malaise. Just as in the past, the surge of pessimism has produced a counter surge of defensive optimism, with various arguments put forward about the continued value and feasibility of American global leadership. Both candidates for the presidency are, of course, compelled by liberal politics to be optimistic by American prospects, while disagreeing on whether President Obama's policies have strengthened or weakened the United States. What I want to do this afternoon is to assess the prospects for continued American global leadership. I'll make some general judgments, but they are tinged with great uncertainty, since so much depends on decisions that are made, especially by the United States government, but also by other governments. But I hope to lay out some of the forces at work and what the study of comparative history and politics may suggest about the crucial determinants of future American authority in the world. We'll talk in three parts. I'll begin by assessing two fundamental aspects of world politics, authority and cooperation. Of course, interest and power, the classic realist concepts are also important, but I stress authority and cooperation because they are equally important and less often discussed. Part two of the talk is about leadership in world politics and what we know about it and what we don't know about it. And part three compares the leadership potentials for the first half of the 21st century of the United States, Europe, and China. Let me talk about authority and cooperation first. Authority can be defined succinctly as legitimate power, the ability to generate deference and cooperation on the basis of a combination of material power and perceived legitimacy. Authority enables a state to achieve outcomes that it prefers without actually expending material resources. Achieving one's goals through authority is therefore much more cost effective than achieving them through brute force or sheer power. An important reason to focus on authority rather than power is that in the 21st century, no single country will be able to achieve dominance on its own. Both material resources and the ability to mobilize populations have diffused too much. If the United States could not construct a democratic or even consistently friendly government in Iraq after more than a decade of war and post-war, and if it cannot even assure order in the very poor and weak country of Afghanistan, it's not going to dominate the world through military power alone. George W. Bush tried that. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have explicitly rejected it. Instead, the United States will need authority. The current sanctions on Iran demonstrate why authority is more important than sheer power. Unilateral sanctions by the United States will be almost entirely ineffective no matter how tight the provisions were. Sanctions have to be almost universal to be effective. Otherwise, Iran could simply sell its oil and engage in banking operations with other countries. For other states that collaborate with the United States on sanctions, their governments have to believe not only that the US has substantial resources, but it will denote to ensuring that sanctions are effective, but that it has legitimate purposes, not merely serving its own or Israel's interests, but those of a wide set of countries that could be threatened by the consequences of Iran's nuclear weapons. So framing the question of American leadership and of authority is also helpful in another way. Exising leadership through multilateral institutions is essential in a world in which no state commands were in 25% of gross domestic product. As we see on issues from sanctions to peacekeeping, financial crisis to trade, cooperation is essential to achieve effective results. You can't do it on your own. Sustained cooperation requires institutions. And leadership in multilateral institutions is more a matter of authority than of power. So there is ample evidence that the multilateral institutions that were formed by the United States after World War II provide important supports for the contemporary world order. UN peacekeeping operations, with all their limitations, have been shown in scholarly work to actually work on the whole. And NATO has, for 60 years, been an effective multilateral organization. On the economic side, the World Bank provides funds and advice for developing countries. And the International Monetary Fund provides assistance to countries in times of financial distress. And organizations, which has created more recently, have also been important. One of the striking things about the post-recession years is the absence of trade wars. Normally, you expect trade wars to follow this kind of recession. It hasn't followed largely because of the World Trade Organization. So it's not noticed because it's effective in this case. Disputes persist, but they're channeled through multilateral institutions. Even human rights institutions operating under very adverse conditions with few enforcement powers haven't shown to make a difference. So there's a body of evidence now, quite impressive, which shows that multilateral institutions have achieved a lot in the contemporary world. And they are really an invention in terms of their breadth and strength of the post-1945 order. Of course, not all multilateral institutions are uniformly effective. The UN is often stymied by great power disagreements manifested in the veto. Much of what goes on in the General Assembly is political theater for audiences at home. Environment institutions vary in effectiveness. The Montreal Protocol is very effective on the ozone layer. The Kyoto Protocol is not very effective with regard to climate change. The European Union, as you know, has achieved a great deal in many ways, but the Eurozone was badly designed and has a source of uncertainty and stress. So I'm not claiming that multilateral institutions are always effective just if they are essential to manage in the contemporary, multilateralized world. And I'm not denying that the US needs substantial military power either. It needs military power to maintain its leadership role, its alliance with other democracies, and helps to maintain a stable world order. Yeah, it's because military power unfortunately remains the ultimate recourse for deterrence or actual use in a world without government. But military power will not be sufficient. A government with only material resources and military power will be all thumbs or only fists, able to fight and destroy, but not able to achieve more positive or subtle purposes. But my principle folks in this talk is not on the role of international institutions, that's just the commercial beginning. My emphasis instead is on leadership. And that's why I stress the concept of authority. As I said a few minutes ago, we can't be at all certain about the future because much depends on current political decisions, but we can identify some of the crucial choice points and where leadership can matter. So what do we know and what don't we know about leadership in world politics? I wanna say five things that I think can be said with confidence about leadership. First, we know that in the absence of leadership, cooperation is very difficult because states will try to shift the burdens of adjustment to change onto others, not pay the price themselves. And without alliances or other institutions helping to provide reassurance, uncertainty generates security dilemmas with states tying each other with suspicion. So leadership is essential in order to solve global problems ranging from war, danger of war to climate change. Second, we know that leadership is exercised most effectively by creating multilateral institutions that enable states to share responsibility and burdens. Such institutions will not always succeed. As I've said, they may cooperation easier and they reduce the burdens on each side, including the burdens of leadership. Thirdly, we know that leadership is costly. States other than leader have incentives to shirk. This means that the burdens borne by a leader are likely to increase over time and that without efforts to encourage sharing the load, leadership may not be sustainable. Fourth, we know that in a democracy such as the United States, most people pay relatively little attention to details of foreign policy. Pressures for benefits to voters at home inform both the welfare benefits and tax cuts, compete with demands for military spending, and especially non-military foreign affairs spending, which is always under pressure. This means that in the absence of immediate threats, public willingness to invest in international leadership will decline. So it's always threatened. And when it comes then to netting out the sum of all of these factors about leadership, we'll go back to the climate and an optimist. What do we say? Well, we first have to talk about what we don't know. We know these things about leadership and we also know at a fifth point that autocracies are less stable fundamentally than democracies. That autocracies have a disadvantage in this respect and China's leadership crisis during the spring of 2012 marked by the detention of Boji Lai and his wife illustrates this point. What we don't know though is at least as important. Will major powers in the international system, especially China, maintain their social and political coherence and avoid civil war? Will the instabilities in the global economy be exposed by the 2008 financial crisis be corrected or merely papered over and thus left a cause potential havoc down the road? Will ideologically driven regimes such as the one in Iran be prudent or reckless in their quest to develop or even use nuclear weapons? And will threaten states like Israel act prudently or imprudently in response? Will the trend in recent decades toward greater global democratization be maintained or will it give way to an anti-democratic trend? And perhaps most important for this issue discussed today, can the United States as a society summon the political coherence and willpower to define a sustainable leadership strategy for the 21st century? So we know some things. We have some general knowledge. We don't know an awful lot of things about it. So we're not gonna be able to make point level level predictions. When it comes to netting out the sum of all these factors, declinus are pessimist and anti-declinus are optimist. But pundits in both camps tend to blend knowledge and speculation making it difficult to be confident about their claims. Instead we should carefully note the degree of uncertainty associated with our inferences. We have to understand the general patterns and believe and realize that we can't make specific predictions about what's going to happen and people who do are probably charlatans. But even without confident predictions, we can hope to understand world politics better by understanding sources of authority in world politics. And I wanna focus on six in this third part of the talk. And what I'm gonna do is to mention six sources of authority and I'm gonna try to rank the United States, China and Europe on each of these six and reach a conclusion about where leadership is likely to come from in the next 20 or so years. The six sources are geography, first demography, second, economic resources, third including technological competence and economic organization as well as sheer economic size. Fourth, reliability, that is policy coherence across issues and over time. Fifth, what Joseph Nye calls soft power, fostered by admiration of one society, by others. And sixth, nationalism. I include nationalism because it's a source of solidarity and therefore both of power and legitimacy, but it's also a source of weakness. So it's a double-edged resource. So for each source of authority, I'm gonna rank the US, China and the European Union, which I think are the only three plausible candidates for leadership in world politics in the first half of 21st century. And then we'll see, which at least in my view, country or region, seems best situated to exercise global leadership. So you can imagine a kind of matrix with six sources of leadership and three countries or entities, the US, the European Union and China. First geography, a Halford MacKinder declared a century ago that geography is destiny, comparing land powers with sea powers. Geography may not be destiny, but it plays a major role in world politics. The European Union, which really have had many fewer than 27 states, if we're not for the Alps, the Pyrenees, the English Channel, the North Sea, and the Irish Sea. Unlike China and the United States, Europe is naturally divided and division reduces authority. China and the United States are both large countries, not divided by nature, with substantial coastlines. They're both in mountain ranges, so they don't divide up the areas that way. But as my friend and colleague Jonah has remarked to me, while the United States has two oceans and two neighbors, China has one ocean and more than a dozen neighbors, giving the United States an advantage. Geographically, the ranking has to be the United States, it's the most advantageous situation, China's second, Europe's third. Second source is demography. Now, size is a potential source of power, and insofar as it can be derived from power of authority, that is population size. China has 1.3 billion people, the EU has 500 million, the US has about 305 million. So that's the order in strict demography. China's number one, EU's number two, US's number three. Third, economic and technological resources. One dimension of authority is material. The resources available to states to use in their foreign policies. I think it's very unlikely that in the next decade, the United States will become poorer and therefore weaker. If the US does, it's gonna throw a monkey wrench into all of my calculations. Scientifically and technologically, the US is by far the most important center of innovation in the world. From Apple to Google to Facebook to Twitter. And extending to more dubious innovation, such as collateralized debt obligations. It helps to bring the system down. Innovations aren't always good, but the US is a very innovative society for better and for worse. The dollar is still a strong currency. The US has the deepest capital markets. US government credit is good, despite the deficit and interest rates are very low. And the United States, maybe most of all, remains a magnet for talented people. Despite its political divisions, the American economy is too multi-dimensional and too resilient for an absolute material weakening to occur, barring some very unlikely disaster much greater than Hurricane Sandy. But relative power is what really counts in world politics. Great Britain and Germany are wealthier and more populist than they were when they were great powers. They have declined in relative but not absolute terms. So we have to examine the prospect of American relative decline. And in discussing the prospects of American relative decline, China is the first subject that comes to mind. China's economy is growing at a remarkable rate for 30 years, riding an export and investment boom. But China is still a relatively poor country with all that low per capita GDP implies about technology and organization. Its investment-led growth can continue at a rapid rate forever. And China will have to shift toward a more consumer-led economy and toward an economy that does not just purchase, borrow, or steal innovation but innovates itself. Most seriously, the Chinese demographic profile over the next 20 years will become older. As the impact of the one-child policy of the last several decades works its way through age cohorts. China will become older, which will slow down growth. China will keep growing economically but it's impossible to project 8% growth rates which double every nine years indefinitely into the future. At official exchange rates, China's GDP is now about half of the United States and this figure overstates the real difference on a purchasing power parity basis. US is about a third larger than China in terms of its economy. China has about four times as many people as the US so the US GDP is about five times as large as in China per capita. As China keeps growing faster than the United States it will increasingly have sufficient resources to challenge the United States militarily and now has built its first aircraft carrier as well as to engage in economic competition in a wide variety of fields including high tech. But the United States will for the next decade I suspect longer maintain advantages derived from large previous high technology military investments, higher educational and technical competence in its population, better educational institutions and especially from a more dynamic and creative high technology sector. A movement toward equalization of material power between the US and China will continue but it's unlikely to lead in the next decade or two to an overcoming of America's material power advantage. More serious United States could be the much more marked decline economically of its major allies, Europe and Japan. In GDP terms the EU is the world's largest economy but I don't have to tell this audience about Europe's financial problems or its lack of significant net economic growth over the last five years. If we look not just at aggregate GDP but at physical unity, rate of economic growth, technological capabilities, the US is a stronger economy. Japan has been stuck in a high level growth equilibrium for 20 years. Since the United States has relied in many ways on European and Japanese financial support for its foreign policy from the Gulf War of 1991 onward the fall on the sides of its allies economies relative to those of central adversaries actually weakens the United States. But the most serious threats to American material strength come neither from the inherent weaknesses of the American economy which I think can be overstated or from its allies weaknesses but from its own political system. The US budget deficit is very large and future prospects are grim unless efforts are made to reform entitlement program especially social security and Medicare. The United States has taken bipartisan action in the past on such issues. Notably during the Reagan administration when a Democratic Congress and a Republican president agreed on a deal that prolonged the life of Social Security for 30 years. I'm really optimistic that whoever wins the election there's likely to be a budget deal. I'm not sure I should be so optimistic but I still optimistic on that score that keeps the US running over the physical cliff. That reforms entitlements to make them more sustainable but I said this is more a statement of faith than a research-based analysis and this is very uncertain. So we should label this prognosis as very uncertain because of the political issues that are involved. So overall on economic and technological capability I would rank the United States first, Europe a close second, China third. Although this ranking is contingent on cooperation between the Democrats and the Republicans which at this stage seems more difficult than cooperation with other states in world politics. Fourth, coherence of policy. Any election campaign is full of phony differentiation between the candidates, appealing to different groups of voters. What was striking though about the President's debate on foreign policy a week ago in addition to the lack of any questions from the moderator about Europe, you have just been forgotten about, totally, don't exist, was the almost total agreement on policy. Governor Romney and President Obama both seek to fight terrorism, support the American alliance system, cooperate with China but be tough on its economic policies, favor democratization in the Middle East but a little idea of how to achieve it and want to disentangle the United States from the war in Afghanistan without discussing the consequences of failure there. In other words, they agree on general policies and they agree on the avoidance of some of the most important issues. So in the American expression there was not a dime's worth of difference between them in the recent foreign policy debate. To draw contrast between them, each of them had to move to domestic taxation, domestic social policy. And quite strikingly, neither candidate criticized the manifest unrealism of the other's position because he shared it. During the Cold War, the United States belied the notion that democracies could not be steady in foreign policy. It keeps showing remarkable bipartisan agreement on the essentials of foreign policy which won't be very different whoever wins the election. China's current leadership is quite coherent as well although the Bojila instant indicates there's a possibility of a difference that our leaders coming to the fore, but not right now. And as we will see, Chinese nationalism is strong and potentially destabilizing. Europe, due to its financial crisis, is the least coherent of these three entities. Greece may leave the Euro and great efforts will be needed to keep other Gryffindor countries inside the zone. Europe does not, despite many efforts, have a coherent foreign policy. So on coherence of policy, the rank order is clear. United States first, China second, Europe third. I turn now to soft power. Joe and I has coined the phrase soft power to further the ability of a country to attract support because of the nature of its society. Throughout my lifetime, the United States has enjoyed enormous soft power. Even people who criticize the US harshly want to visit it and many of them want to live and work there. Even studies of anti-Americanism show that many people who express anti-American sentiments also think that people who emigrate from their own countries to the United States lead better lives. Many features of the United States from its popular culture to its economy to its political openness are widely admired around the world. The fact that the US welcomes immigrants on the whole as well as visitors magnifies its soft power. China falls on the other end of the spectrum of soft power. Chinese culture is universally respected, that's much more closed than American culture. China appears to many people to be an expansionist power as well as to have a sense of its own superiority, neither of which contributes to soft power. As a rising power, it has sharp elbows, most notably in the South China Sea. Machiavelli said that it's better to be feared than loved. So China qualifies on that count. But he also said that it's best to be both loved and feared, which is widely true of the United States. Until the crisis of the Euro, European proponents trumpeted its soft power in economy, welcoming of refugees and support for human rights. European openness is indeed an asset, but soft power suffers when economic crisis appears and hard power is diminished. So in soft power, I put the US first, Europe second, and China a rather distant third. Finally, I want to talk about nationalism. Now, it may be surprising for me to add nationalism as a resource to this list. And it would be surprising if you assume it's a positive resource, but it can be either positive or negative. Nationalism creates social solidarity and energy, it's the positive side. Ernest Renan, a 19th century French writer said famously, quote, to have had glorious moments in common in the past, a common will in the present to have done great things together and to wish to do more. These are the essential conditions for people, unquote. Countries with no national feeling because they're divided in allegiance may or may not have civil wars, but they can accomplish little in world politics. They can't accomplish great things. So nationalism in a certain sense a necessary condition for accomplishing great things for the kind of self-sacrifice that's required. Europe banished nationalism ideologically if not in practice after World War II, a good thing in view of European history, but it makes Europe unable to do great things together in Rehman's phrase if they involve emotional solidarity or require emotional solidarity. Europe wants to make contributions to global governance, but its lack of nationalism makes it veer into self-admigration as on climate change and to allow others to exploit it. In world politics, there is some merit in leading by example, but it's not necessarily effective. Nearly the United States and North China suffers from a lack of nationalism. The Chinese government both manipulates and contains nationalistic demonstrations from below. Anyone who watched the US presidential debates cannot doubt the depth and extent of American nationalism. In both cases, nationalism provides solidarity, energy and willingness to sacrifice for the ambitions expressed by political leaders. In both cases, however, it can also lead to distorted one-sided perceptions or judgments warped by self-love. For China, nationalism is on balance of weakness. It generates animosity to our nearby countries over territorial and historical issues that are of no large importance to China and makes it more difficult for the Chinese government to set priorities and to forge alignments for mutual benefit or to avoid meaningless territorial quarrels, such as those about the islands in the South China Sea that China and Japan are disputing. For the United States, nationalism is probably a strength. It provides energy, but liberal constitutionalism and a commitment to multilateral institutions has recently kept it largely in check. Overall, the US benefits from the best balance of the three of the kind of energy of nationalism and the constraints on nationalism that constitutional democracy provides. So if I had a chart, I would draw you one, but I will tell you what the overall picture looks like. If we think about the various dimensions, the only dimension on which China is first is demography. It's by far the largest, has a very talented and large population. That's the only dimension on which the US is last. On geography, economy and technology, reliability, soft power, and on the balance of nationalism, the United States is in the most advantageous position of these three entities. The United States, Europe in general comes in second in most cases, although it's least strong on geography and nationalism. China first only in demography and otherwise either second or third. So it seems to me that it's pretty clear if we can go through these six sources of authority and source of leadership that the United States has the clearest path to continue leadership in the 21st century. If, big if, it can avoid financial and policy gridlock and maintain policy coherence. That is the only thing the United States has to fear is itself. The EU and China with quite different strengths and weaknesses are far behind and effectively in my little listing tied. Only the United States has the material capacity and political unity to exercise consistent global leadership. It has shown a repeated ability to rebound from economic and political difficulties. The size, youth, and diversity of its population, the stability and openness of its political institutions, and the incentives that its economic system creates for innovation means that it remains the most creative society in the world, keeps reinventing itself. It also has major problem, major problems, most striking in which is the intense domestic partisan conflict that prevents problems from being resolved when even when they have fairly clear solutions like raising the age for Social Security. And that comes with a major threat to continuing American global leadership. The United States will have to solve these problems to fulfill its promise. So I'm consciously optimistic that American leadership will continue through the first half of the century. But given the mix of the known and the unknown, the unknown being quite large, safest conclusion for readers interested in the next era of world politics is probably the familiar aphorism. Never make predictions, especially about the future. Thank you very much.


This is Chris Pike. My friends come a big see back in Asher today. We're talking blood and zombies That's right guys blood and zombies. I got not one Three free keys for you. That's right. What is it? Let me tell you about the game. You know, what's up?  It has zombie shooter Don't get me wrong, but it's better because it also has tower defense wave defense So yeah, you're gonna be dealing with tons of enemies.  Well rest our guys. Anyways, this game is great. It's in early access It's got great reviews already and the developers are very responsive and I got free keys So it's worth trying out. I'll give you a free copy. How do you get a free copy simple? You just add me on discord big c number four seven two five My information is in the description below or in the comment section. Just add me I'll send you a copy the first three people to send me a message get copies. That's how it is guys Anyways, enjoy this video Get your copy get on that turtle Start shooting. All right guys. Thanks for watching. Tell more stuff coming up. Stay tuned


Hello! It's been a long time since I last recorded a video and quite a few people have been asking how I am and how my therapy's been going and in particular I've had a lot of questions about my EMDR therapy and yeah people have been asking about whether I'd recommend it and that kind of thing and what is it so I thought I'd do a video about that today. I fear it might get a bit rambly so I'll try and keep it relatively short and if you've got other questions about it afterwards then let me know and I'll try and address those in a future video. So okay to start from the beginning so I have a diagnosis of CPTSD which is complex post-traumatic stress disorder and one of the nice approved therapies for PTSD is EMDR which stands for eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy and I had read all about it a long time ago but my therapist who I've been seeing for a long time like as in years wasn't trained in it and I didn't want to start with any therapist and also I thought EMDR sounded a little bit kind of witchcrafty so it involves things like literally your therapist moving their fingers across like this and you're kind of following them with your eyes like this and I just I don't know it yeah didn't float my boat but you know time went on I was still really ill I was going in and out of managing and not managing and nearly dying and yeah in the end thought yeah let's give it a go and my therapist trained up in it so I have this year 2018 finally given EMDR ago and I'm a big fan so in the meantime I've learned loads about it if you want to learn about EMDR then and you're a geek like me I would recommend this book which is the kind of I don't know Bible on it it might not be for you it's really written for the clinician but I tend to read all their stuff as well as the patient stuff anyhow so the basic premise is that if you have post-traumatic stress disorder like me then you have a whole bunch of memories in your head which have not been appropriately processed and that means that you have things like flashbacks and anxiety attacks and things like that when you feel as if the thing which was a problem when the trauma happened whether it was one trauma or many traumas is kind of happening again right now like you relive it you feel those feelings again you you re-experience it and it's really horrible I did a video a while back on a day when I was having a lot of flashbacks and yeah those of you who watched it saw how distressing it is to be going through that for me my flashbacks can be quite like in my face and they can literally send me off course I'll be walking along and it's like being hit yeah it's it's tough so what happens with EMDR is you're essentially trying to reprocess those memories so you're kind of taking everything out the cupboard shaking it up in the right order and allowing your brain to kind of reformat them and then go okay that's a memory it's in the past so it kind of happens fairly quickly actually so a lot of the therapy I've done has been quite long term but with EMDR there's a bit of prep and then you do some sessions and it's quite intense and I think for some people it can be as few as like four or six sessions I'm still going maybe 12 or 14 sessions in but then I had quite a lot untangle and undo and my trauma wasn't one incident it was many but what happens is you work with your therapist first of all to like understand the nature of the trauma you don't have to go into too much detail if you don't want to and then you also learn about your kind of safety behaviors you learn that what you need to do in order to keep yourself safe during the sessions and beyond the sessions so one of the tricky things with it is that it's going to like churn up some difficult thoughts and feelings and memories and you need to be able to keep yourself safe in between the sessions so one of the first things that I learned to do with my therapist for in EMDR was to create a safe space in my head and so for me that was involved my kids and it was a place that I could take myself to really easily I could think of being with them and I could imagine that and I practiced that a lot with my therapist and that was kind of a really good grounding technique for me so if ever than things did become too much in a session or outside of the session then I've got a place I can kind of go back to so you learn you learn to do that and you also do lots of planning for what will happen like when you leave the session what happens if you get flashbacks or kind of suicidal or self-harm ideation in between I use a lot of my dialectical behavior therapy skills basically we drew on lots of other stuff because we knew this was going to be a bit of a tough time and realized it was going to be quite as tough as it was though so what happened was for me and it'll be different for everyone so you may remember this is one story just my story what happened for me was that literally in the first session of EMDR it was like I don't know like a dam got broken down so I have lived my entire I was gonna say adult life maybe life very emotionally blunted so I found it very difficult to manage a lot of the stuff that happened to me and I guess one of my ways of dealing with that was just not to engage emotionally with anything and so yeah I lived everything with a big emotional buffer around me and for whatever reason the EMDR very quickly was able to break those barriers down and it meant I felt things a lot more intensely now that was super tough because actually the the difficult feelings I had were more intense than they had ever felt before I had feelings of sadness I hadn't had feelings of anger lots of very desperate difficult feelings that made it very hard to manage and then I had to be really really careful in planning not to be alone and I had to also specifically think about how to keep on top of my eating because the anorexia was keen to flare back up but on the other hand I also that same week for the first time experienced kind of really happy feelings and feelings of love that I had never experienced in quite that way before and I remember feeling really overwhelmed with kindness of others at one point so one time in that week I went climbing as I do often I went climbing because I just was really struggling to cope and I turned up at the climbing wall and our centre manager Gareth kind of you know basically took one look at me and you went I'm aware of what's going on I follow you on social media so you know do you want a cup of tea and hug and he's like you're in your safe place now have a cup of tea calm down and then and then climb and and it was a really simple thing he did and a kind of thing he would do for anyone and the kind of thing that other people have done for me before but that time it I don't know registered in a in a whole new way and yeah I was overwhelmed by that kindness so yeah it was a week of that very first week in particular was a week of massive highs and massive massive lows so then when I returned to my therapist I had to do a lot of planning around safety planning making sure that I carried on eating making sure that I didn't self-harm that I wasn't at risk of suicide because all those things felt like very very real possibilities again which was frustrating because I had got to quite safe place and I was managing okay and so this felt like a massive backward step but I was also able to see that clearly things were moving and that this would be difficult like really difficult in the short term but I had to work through it and that then things would begin to get better and and weeks on now I'm able to say that that certainly was the case so in terms of like how it works in a session what happens is you you kind of you decide on a specific traumatic memory event feeling that you're going to work through and you think about how that makes you feel you think about how it feels in your body and what sort of negative self-beliefs that it brings to mind so for example one of mine would be I was raped and so it might be you bring to mind the most difficult part of that scenario and then you would think so what negative self-beliefs did I feel I learned for me I guess the the most difficult ones there were that you know that this was my fault and I was I was weak and I shouldn't have let it happen I deserved it you know there were lots of feelings that that kind of went with that and and you do some kind of ranking exercises and you do some ranking exercises also around like how intense those feelings are then you also think about what you would like to believe about yourself rather so rather than the beliefs you have you think about what you'd want to believe so in my instance you know I was a child I was overpowered so I was 14 and the person who raped me was 19 and physically much stronger than me I was an anorexic 14-year-old yeah I yeah anyway I'm not gonna sit and justify it I was yeah it wasn't my fault that was something I need to be able to believe and there are a series of others and so then what you do is you go through the very strange reprocessing process I find it very strange there's different ways you can do it I think for some people they do tapping for some people they use a light bar my therapist has one now but I prefer the way we learn which was just literally following his eyes and so literally what happens then is he will sit there and he will make my eyes follow his fingers as I do this and this triggers REM sleep type movement with your eyes and kind of triggers the reprocessing process and you basically use it and you do that and you allow the thoughts that need to come to come and it can go off in any direction and sometimes it's it's quite a clear narrative sometimes it's you know it can be can go off in all sorts of strange direction but you just sort of let it happen and every now and then the therapist checks in with you and says what are you getting now what are you feeling and what's happening and you I think the idea is that you communicate back in my case I tend to get so distressed when I'm caught up in these memories that I'm not really able to communicate much at all sometimes I cry every now and then there's a moment of respite and I can say something like it's getting better or something but but often it's just very hard that the good thing about this therapy is you don't have to actually say and it's not really about what you're saying it's about what's happening in your mind so the thing that my therapist will always remind me is this is all old stuff it can't hurt you now you're safe and if we need to return to my safe space but the ideal is that you just keep driving through so I think of it like when you're driving your car on the motorway when it's raining really really heavily and you feel like you want to pull off onto the hard shoulder and but actually you know that it's raining so hard that somebody might career into and actually you're safer just really holding your nerve following the tail lights in front of you and just driving on through until the rain passes and it's the same with these really difficult thoughts and feelings and memories and the EMDR you just keep going you just keep going you just keep going and it usually does after a while you begin to come to a place of safety and then in the memories become more easy to manage and I don't know how that works for other people for me what normally happens is that when I start a session then I'm very much on my own in a very difficult and dark place and as I work through the session then I tend to find that I've got people with me my children my husband my best friend other people might be there too and I realize that I'm not alone anymore and I'm not helpless and that tends to be how that process goes yeah so it's been different for different things I mean I've had a lot of different traumas I needed to work through some which were more sort of generic around sort of neglect and ongoing abuse whereas others were about specific incidents and yeah those were processed differently there's still some more work to do on some of them so it's not like you do a memory once and then it's it's done you sometimes need to revisit and revisit and how much you do that is kind of up to you and your therapist but for me it's been good I mean yeah I now feel like I still get some flashbacks and I still have days which are really tough but actually those days are getting fewer and less yeah fewer and further in between and I'm having less night terrors my life isn't dominated by the PTSD now which it really was even though life felt like it was much better before I started the therapy and actually life was very much dominated by by the PTSD and I yeah I feel like I'm getting control of that now and that there is a way forward I think it will always need active management but yeah it's been yeah two or three months of a really really tough therapy with really careful planning in between but it's making a huge difference I think for me one of the biggest differences has been that so part of it's about being able to have a better understanding of some of the things that happen so I struggle with dissociation and so that's kind of kind of absenting myself almost like literally when things are very difficult so that's something that happens often to people who've experienced trauma from a very young age so it can happen to me still now very occasionally but I had that issue like the night of my rape I had had lots of flashbacks but I'd never really been able to piece it all together and actually through this process I have been able to put together a clear narrative of how it worked and I never knew that I had the whole story in my head although it all made sense once I put it together what I don't know is how much that is about me actually remembering and how much of it is about my brain trying to make sense of something and filling in the gaps but it doesn't actually matter because what I end up with is something which is kind of more tangible more dealable with and actually something I can talk about without crying and breaking down and yeah I can talk about it I yeah I can yeah yeah the fact I can sit and yeah say out loud so kind of say it on Twitter sometimes but I don't often yeah out loud talk about the fact that yeah I was right I'm not able to deal with a lot of the other stuff that came out that yet that's you know for another time but anyway progress so I did say this might get rambly I fear it has there's a bit about my experience with the MDR as I say it's just my experience so today I'm sharing as yeah personal as a person a personal experience rather than as a professional I would suggest that if EMDR has been suggested to you as a therapy to think really carefully about it I found it to be very positive very powerful but I have found it that during the initial period at least I had to plan very carefully I needed to really not be working but to have a very clear timetable so that I wasn't alone make sure my eating was all fully supported I lent more heavily on my medication than I had done previously and I had to have very very clearly timetabled times to enable me to manage so my climbing my walking my piano playing my singing all those things became even more important than they have been before and obviously having supportive people on the end of the phone yeah just having that support in place was key but yeah I definitely would do it again and I'm continuing to work through it so grateful to my therapist for training up and and yeah grateful for the chance to finally tackle some of this stuff so yeah there you go EMDR my experience of EMDR yeah any questions if there's stuff I haven't answered because like I mean it's a massive topic then do feel free to leave them below and I'm sorry I don't respond to all the comments that come in on my videos it's just because there's so many of them especially on some of the videos and some not always able to but if you have specific questions about EMDR then post them on this video then I will respond to those or else tweet me at pookieh yeah cool and yeah anyone else who's kind of going through the same thing then good luck keep going and just remember like the car driving through the rain just keep going keep going keep going keep following these tail lights ahead of you and you'll get there I heard a lovely quote the other day Wendy Mitchell who wrote a beautiful book about early onset dementia called somebody I used to know she talked about how when when you're struggling in like fog or in my case like very very heavy rain when you're driving it's much easier and you feel much safer when you've got the tail lights of someone in front of you to follow and she kind of felt that she was able to be those tail lights to other people because she was sharing her story of early onset dementia so yeah I guess I want to kind of yeah borrow that and hey maybe I can be your tail lights if you're thinking about going through this similar kind of therapy yeah so it's tough but it's totally worth it okay okay see you next time bye


Item number SCP-1049 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-1049 is to be kept in a 1 by 1 by 3 meter aviary. Other than a perch 2 meters above ground, feeder, and water container, no foreign objects are permitted in SCP-1049's enclosure. SCP-1049 must be kept tethered to the perch at all times. If entry to SCP-1049's enclosure is required, protective clothing must be worn and timed spent inside the enclosure must be kept to a minimum. SCP-1049 is to be fed a diet consisting mostly of beetles, crickets, and locusts. Small bats or mice may also be offered once per week. Personnel must not enter SCP-1049's enclosure to feed it. The feeder attached to the aviary allows for food to be offered from outside. Description SCP-1049 is an adult male black-and-white owl. It is physically identical to any other member of its species safe for its eyes, which are reddish pink. Its dietary needs and hunting behaviors are similar to those of any other owl. However, SCP-1049 exhibits the ability to remove the skeletons of humans by unknown means. It is presumed that it does this only to humans, as SCP-1049 did not appear to have used this ability on any other creatures prior to containment. SCP-1049 was found at the police in ████████. SCP-1049 made reports of boneless corpses being found in a nearby jungle, with no signs of external injury or another person having committed the crime. However, one victim had been found with several feathers resting on the corpse's chest, which were identified as belonging to an owl. Locals in the area reported seeing an unusual red-eyed specimen near to where the corpses were found, and claimed that it had caused the death of the victims. Police immediately discounted the victims. Human officials received a report during routine intelligence checks and searched the area, eventually finding SCP-1049. Before SCP-1049 could be contained, it alighted upon the shoulder of Agent ██████. SCP-1049 bit an Agent ██████ face, although Agent ██████ suffered no injury. After several seconds, Agent ██████ collapsed. Agent ██████'s body appeared to cave in on itself. The remains of Agent ██████ were found to be completely boneless. Cause of death is believed to be pressure and shock applied to the brain after the loss of the cranium.  Testing confirmed that the fragments belonged to Agent ██████, SCP-1049 will attack any humans it sees in this manner, resulting in a complete loss of bone tissue and resulting death. Addendum, examination of SCP-1049 reveals no internal anomalies or any indication of what causes the reaction seen in Agent ██████ is also unknown how bone fragments are ingested by SCP-1049, as it does not attempt to eat its victims.


I'm Joe Gordon. I'm a developer at HPN OpenStack. I have a show of hands who here knows anything about OpenStack. Okay. So this isn't about OpenStack, luckily. This is only partially related to OpenStack. So OpenStack is a cloud platform. So cloud operating system, I think, is that marketing term we're using now. APIs, provision, resources, sort of straightforward. Amazon Web Services, GCE, that kind of thing. In a nutshell, OpenStack is a really big project. It's Python, lots and lots of Python. It is one of the latest numbers here. It's 2.3 million lines of Python in one project. I think that's the biggest open source Python project in the world. I don't know of anything bigger. We're also a big number of developers. The last year we've had 2,000 developers, 64,000 commits, almost 500 developers in the past month, and these are pretty average numbers. As you can see here, we actually had a drop in contributors recently. That's been due to a big release. I think a few people are burnt out and there's vacation in New Year's going on. But overall, they've been growing and growing. This is a massive Python project. And Python is not really the language you use for big projects. We have a few problems with that. We have some basic design principles we try to follow. Never break trunk. So when you have 1,000, 2,000 developers, you don't want to actually break the code for all 2,000 other people. You have a lot of people anger at you and IRC for hours and hours, and that's no fun. Nobody likes that. We also have people who are trying to deploy this continuously. So Rackspace, Cloud and HP, Clouds are deploying this continuously. I think Rackspace is about a month behind trunk right now. Give or take. So that means you put a patch in. They're running it in production a month later. So we have to make sure this never breaks. Transparency. We try to do everything that's open to our big believers in open source and all that. Automate everything. At this scale, you can't do things by hand. We try to automate as much as possible. Reduce the burden on people. Egalitarian. This is an open project. And we want to try to be strict and reduce the burden on the reviewer. So we automate as much as possible here. So you put a patch up. What happens if you put a patch up? You run a lot of tests on you. We have a style guide test that's PEP 8 in Python. I run unit tests. We support Python 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4 now. And we support 2.6 for some older versions. We have an integration environment called DevStack that's development and testing environment for us. And we run Tempest, which is our integration test suite on top of that. We run that a few times. Different configurations we support. In our testing, we test MySQL and Postgres. We test a few networking configurations. We have two networking drivers right now. We test both of them. So you have a lot of different configurations we're testing all the time. And furthermore, we have upgrade testing it called Grenade. A lot of users don't like upgrades failing on them. So we test upgrades all the time to make sure we never break upgrades as well. When you're doing continuous upgrades and continuous deployment, that becomes really important really quickly. So inside of this integration environment, we're running hundreds and hundreds of secondary VMs. So all these jobs are running inside of VMs and then the VMs are spinning up VMs inside of them. QMU, small empty VMs for testing. So you put a patch up. This is a real example. You fix a spelling bug and it goes up and you get the code review comes back and our Jenkins system runs some tests on your reports back to you. And it fails. But that doesn't make any sense because this isn't actual code failure. Nothing about this change could have caused any failures and ever. This is just a comment. Somebody made a mistake. It's a spelling error. No tests are actually covering this. So what happened here? We see this a lot and this is really frustrating for developers. You make a change, it fails not because of you. So what happens when you're actually running these tests we have anywhere from 5 to 10 dev stacks running depending on the project. So that's our integration environment. 10 to 1,000 integration tests running inside of those integration environments. I think we're at, I think 1,000 integration tests per tempest job and we have a few of those running on some projects. A lot of data. We have a huge stream of data coming through and we have a lot of patches coming through and our high water mark is in one week we merged 561 patches in a week. So that's how we did patches a day. Thousands of viewers, thousands of developers working on this. So this is a really big problem. We have a lot of these failures happening all the time. Put a patch up, something fails, not your fault. And then furthermore we have a lot of patches going through. We have every 40 days or so we go through 10,000 new patches. So that's not including revisions of old patches. We have a lot more new patches coming in on that. Our test node cluster now I think is 800 machines and I think we're using it most of the time. So that's 800 machines or so running all our tests for us. And that's running pretty continuously at a high capacity. So let's talk some basic probability here for large numbers. We have the chance of events, the number of events per run. So let's say boot instance. You may run that a lot of times and do that a lot of times in a test. The number of runs. So this is a real example we had. GitHub is down 0.05% of the time. That's actually a great uptime. That's really quite good. But you're on 20 clones per run. That number is actually much higher now. I'm not sure the exact number we're in now but it's quite higher than that. 1000 runs are more per week. That means we're having GitHub failures 15 times a week. So 15 people are pushing patches up and failing through the GitHub. And as a result we don't clone from GitHub. We have our own massive Git server farm that does this all for us. These failures come from, some of them are just sort of internet breaks. We have transient timeouts, all kinds of things. But also OpenSax is a big complex piece of code. It's thousands of developers, 2 million lines of code. I think it's 30 or 40 binaries running for the whole thing if you're running all the services. This is actually a very outdated image. This is, I think, two years old at this point. And it's twice as big now if not bigger. It's this big complex thing. There's a lot of services. Developers working on it. And we have a lot of hidden complexity in this. So how we did this before, how do you manage these failures? You push a patch up, something fails. It's a race condition, let's say, in the code. One service is talked to another service but not handling the race properly.  You look into it. You realize it's not your problem. You run recheck. We have a recheck command to re-trigger the test jobs if you realize it's a mistake. And that's okay. But then how do you actually manage these failures and fix them and see what's going on? So you ask them. You say, hey, have you seen this? You point to a URL with all the logs and collect all our logs for records and analysis. And you look at it and it turns out you're not good at, humans are not good at looking at this stuff. Our brains are not big data solutions. You can remember a little bit at a time. You can't remember 100 bugs at a time. And then a few years ago we turned on parallel testing. So before running a single test runner for everything. And then we turned on, I think we're running two or four tests concurrently only given time now. And that broke everything even more. We had a lot of race conditions we started hitting then. And everything started failing. Now we had tons of failures and we couldn't figure out what was going on. And you can't remember all the failures. And having 1,000 developers remembering what stack traces and what bug doesn't work. People get really grumpy when they waste time looking at these bugs. And you don't even know what bug it is until you have to go through all the data and figure out a gig of logs and sort it all out. And it was really unpleasant. So we changed it to have a tool called Elastic Recheck to try to address this problem. So the key thing we're trying to address here is have you seen this recently? So we used a basic Elk stack, Elastic Search, Log Stash and Kibana stack. So this is Kibana. So we have a nice Kibana interface, LogStash.openstack.org and you can actually go and type a query in. We collect all their logs on there and you can type a query, put a log in there and see when it happened. Put a stack trace in a new stack trace you started seeing, you see when it started happening. And it's been really great for actually being able to visualize these failures and better grapple these logs. Have you seen this recently? We actually removed that, hey, have you seen this part where there's a single person or a small group of people who know what the failures are and everybody has to ask them, ask them for, hey, what happened? So we actually report back to the user, hey, we think you saw this bug. You should go ahead and validate that, make sure that's the bug that you saw. And that way they can see, oh, this failed not because of me, this is another bug in the system that we know about. And they can run recheck. So now they don't have to go through, you know, several gigs of logs and spend hours sorting out what service failed. Is it a raised condition? Is there a stack trace? If there's no stack trace, it could be something else. You have some really simple bugs in there sometimes. And this helps make it much easier to figure out what's going on. And so the recently part is really important for us as well because bugs appear and disappear. This isn't the current example we have. This is actually a really bad example of a bug. This is a bug saying we're logging into a VM, which this can mean 100, 200 different possible things to go wrong to cause this. But you can see this is over 10 days and some trends in it. The trend here isn't actually that important here because you can see, I believe that's the weekend where the spike drops. But sometimes you'll see a bug happen to occur in the last 10 days. Something happened, maybe it was a something underlying system sometimes it's a new patch went in and you can actually see this bug started five days ago. And they could go back in the logs and figure out, oh, it must have been these three patches and you look at each patch and figure out what happened. So what happens now when you submit a patch? Same thing happens before in a lot of tests. And then Elastic Recheck sits all behind that. When the test complete, the question sent back to Garrett for the user to see on Garrett's overview system. He reports back to that and says, hey, these are the results. At the same time throw all the logs in a static log server. And I think that's still under, is that under Swift yet? Not yet. We started a big, we started all the logs in the, this is for record keeping. Our logs are actually so big they now crash Firefox sometimes. So we now have a server side filtering as an optional thing because you load up a 40 meg file in Firefox it doesn't always work unfortunately. So you can actually, this is because even the logs are so big that we're crashing browsers now. We don't actually collect all the logs in Log Stash. We ignore all debug logs because we just have no much information. We can't store that much information in our Log Stash cluster currently. So anything that's info or higher we store in this Log Stash or Elastic Search cluster. And then we have two Elastic Reaching at the same time. One is listening on the Garrett stream for events. So that's where Jenkins reports back, hey, these are results of your job. And at that point we actually go through and look for a failure in that and then we have a bunch of fingerprints and known patterns for failures. And we run our patterns on the logs via Elastic Search and see if we find any bugs that we know about in there. So a simple example. So we see a stack trace in a Nova Compute service, let's say. And we know it's known to cause a certain bug. We do that by hand currently. We can say, hey, we saw this job failed. We saw this stack trace in your log and this log, it's probably this bug that you saw. At the same time we actually want to have long term statistics that we track on a higher level. How often has this bug happened? So that big view, not the per patch view. And we have a script that runs every 30 minutes, I believe, that updates a website that lists all the bugs we have. And that is... So this is that page here. Actually we have 87 or 80 or so known bugs today. So this list is up to I believe. We see a whole bunch of bugs here, different patterns, different frequencies. Things are actually working pretty well right now. We only have this bug that has 62 failures in the past 24 hours. That's actually pretty low considering how bad some of these bugs could get. You see all kinds of different trends in here for different bugs. A lot of the bugs are really infrequent. Here's a good example. We had a issue that came out. And you see this massive spike of bugs that we fixed and it mostly went away. So here's an example you can see on January 9th a new version of Bodo came out and then we fixed it shortly after the same day. And it's now mostly fixed. So when we started this out we thought there were maybe 6 to 10 major bugs at any given time. We got so many bugs at one point and things got so bad that we actually had to stop development and fix all the bugs. We had to tell everybody stop pushing patches and nothing was passing. When you get enough bugs in the system, the odds of a single job running that has a thousand, 2,000 tests in it is almost zero. Then we have a bunch of these jobs running and so the combined effect was that it was really hard to land a patch. People were grind away saying recheck, recheck, recheck. Nothing was merging. The backlog would get 70 hours to report back if your patch passed or not of that kind of thing. What really happened is it turns out we have a lot of bugs. We have a lot more than 6 to 10 major bugs. Right now we have 80, 90 bugs and that's a pretty common number we have. It turns out we're really bad at recognizing lots and lots of patterns. Humans can only detect a few patterns. Phone numbers are 10 digits for a reason. We can't remember a 50-digit number that easily, that kind of thing. We found a whole bunch of different categories of bugs here. We found upstream service providers. We have all kinds of things. We have Pi, Pi as bad certificates. App mirrors that fail. We use every so often some app mirror doesn't work that well and it breaks us. The providers from our HP and Rackspace infrastructure, infrastructure as a service cloud will break sometimes. Access issues, GitHub outages. We have bad upstream pip releases. We had one a couple days ago in fact. All kinds of problems like that. Upstream things that we can't out of our control. As a result of some of this we cashed as much as we can and we try to stay away from the network. Having a network call in a test turns out to be really unstable sometimes. Our infrastructure breaks every so often. It doesn't happen a lot anymore thankfully, but it happens every so often. The images we build things on may break occasionally. Our mirrors could break, that kind of thing. We're in the progress of making that better and better all the time. We have a lot of bugs in open stack itself. That comes to all that inherent complexity of having thousand developers writing in Python a big asynchronous system with no compile time static analysis in Python. It's a big complex system. There's no one designer of it. It's very organic. We have a lot of all kinds of bugs that we have. There's a lot of asynchronous work. This is a slow thing. You don't get a result right away. There's a lot of asynchronous communication happening for that across a lot of services. We have database deadlocks. We have a lot of those every so often. We have race conditions with multiple workers. We had a bug in Nova schedule. Two schedulers. They could race each other or that kind of thing. We had bugs in the tests. When we went to concurrent testing, we had all kinds of unsafe global states. We also had things like time stamp assumptions in the test. You assume the time stamp is not changing your test. You're looking for something as a time stamp in it. Every so often you hit a threshold, the time stamp changes and it would fail. There are really fun bugs which are our dependencies. We've had all kinds of liberate bugs. Maybe half dozen at this point. We had a great bug which was network block devices and open v-switch were breaking each other. If you're on our volume storage service and our networking system on the same machine it would break. I'm not sure what happened with that one or whether the root cause was there but it was some bizarre thing that we got fixed. We've had all kinds of errors and we're constantly working with upstream providers and upstream packages to fix things. Contributing a pattern is actually really easy. This is one of the important things. At one point we thought about trying to automate the process of identifying. A fingerprint is a piece of the log that you could search and elastic search that matches a bug. We do this right now manually. It's not too hard if you understand the log formats and things like that. If you're sort of familiar with that it's not too hard to find these on your own. We tried some things to automate that and we're getting mixed results with that. Yes, this is a great example. Yeah, so we have a whole bunch of these bugs. This is actually an older bug when we've had this three or four more times in different variations. Turns out we're not always great with managing our database issues. This is a great example of that. This is a good example of actually how sometimes these failures are pretty easy to understand. You go through, you find the test that failed in our integration suite, you backtrace that to the logs in the code. This is the neutron server and you see a stack trace from the database system. Oh, that's not supposed to happen and then you file a bug for it. You add a query and like this and you say whenever that happens it's this bug and then you automatically detect that in the future. We also have a, we'll try to keep up with our classifications that we have. We know the number of jobs that are failing and we try to make sure that we're actually tracking that and making sure we don't have too many unknown failures in the system. So this is, I believe, the current status of it. You can see our classification rate isn't that great. It's about 90%. If it's lower it generally means that there's a bunch of bugs that we don't know about that are in the system. We also have the ability to filter this down by the past few days. So sometimes we'll just look for the things the past two days or so. See if there's any new bugs in the system that started happening that we haven't been, we don't know about yet. Some next steps. We don't actually have any reference for how bad these bugs are. We can't answer the question of what percentage of jobs is this bug hitting? It turns out that it's actually not as easy as we thought it would be to do. We haven't got around to actually implementing that solution. The UI is a bit wonky and we can do a better job of making that more intuitive and more useful. We've talked about this for a while. We actually hit elastic search pretty hard and our logs are really bad in general. There's a lot of work to clean up our logs and make them more sensible and all kinds of things like that. This is sort of the beginning of our process to help us better manage our failures. This is also really useful for downstream employers of OpenStack. If you're running this big complex system, we actually know all the failures you're going to see probably in production. If your system is remotely like ours, even in small amounts, you may see these bugs every so often. We could tell you these are known bugs and you can track how often they happen and things like that. I'd like to thank everybody who's worked on this. We had a big lot of people working on it. A lot of these people are working on submitting fingerprints, which is a lot of the hard work to actually get this working. It's a constant challenge to keep up with all the failures in the system. I think every week probably three or four patches coming in to file new bugs with the system. Thank you. Any questions? I have a question stick. So this elastic recheck, can it be used is it hardcore for OpenStack or can it be used by other projects as well with the elastic search and all that? Yes. The code base is somewhat tied to our infrastructure, but the code is actually really small. It's maybe a few hundred lines of Python. The basic model on a lot of the code actually can be reused. I would love to work with somebody from another project to help pull out the parts that are specific to us and not specific to us to make that more accessible. And it checks the bugs in Launchpad, right? Yes. We use Launchpad although we have our own bug tracker coming up and we're probably going to have to add support for another bug tracker as well. Any other questions? No, but it wouldn't be hard to add that kind of support in it. As I said, right now when we wrote it, it was mostly proof of concept that sort of stuck and we haven't really gone back and really flushed it out and pulled out the parts that are really tied to our infrastructure. The format of Garrett, that kind of thing, but that's something I'd be very interested in doing is working somebody on that if they're interested in adopting it. The hard work of this seems to be building fingerprints and search queries into elastic search. Do you have any insight into how you might automate that part away so that you could be automatically pulling tracebacks out of bugs? Right, so it's actually not... there's sort of a few answers to that. That's now the hard part. That wasn't the hard part before. We've actually moved the problem to just doing that as opposed to when you see a failed job to figure out what happened. So if it's a stack trace, it's really straight... it's actually really simple. You look through, you look for stack trace in your logs, you find the stack trace. If your system is... our system stack trace every so often when there's not a failure, but usually you can figure those out. So if it's a stack trace, it's pretty straightforward. If it's not a stack trace, or an obvious error, it could be a network outage, that kind of thing. Those are pretty straightforward to understand if it's more complex than that. We tried things like using CRM 114, which is the spam filtering, and we've gotten mixed results with that. It actually works okay. I think the answer we found is that it's... if you're comfortable with your logs that you generate, it's not too hard. It takes... one of the problems with it is really complex, really subtle failures. We had one which is crosstalk between RPC, our message bus, and our REST APIs. So we're getting RPC calls to REST and vice versa, and that took us like a month to figure out. I think we had a... we could actually say this job failed for this reason, and we could actually track the failure in the test side, which isn't great. It's not the root cause, but it was something. So I don't think the automation... I don't think that's actually as hard as people as you think it is, unless you don't understand your log format at all, which that should be worked on as well. Just in terms of filing the fingerprints, is more monotonous than challenging?  So there's 20 total fails. So what I would do is I would open all those in a separate tab, and then find the stack trace and find the similar failure. So it may be that 15 of those are all the same failures, so one fingerprint will get rid of 15 of those, and then you have five that you actually have to look a little bit deeper. I'm talking about habits and so on, so I'll talk a little bit about habits. Part of the problem is it's monotonous, and you don't have any way of people actually tracking your work that you did something. Whereas if you're doing code, if you're doing something else, you get to wave a little flag at the end, whereas if you're classifying bugs, other than Joe saying, thank you very much, and posting your name on the slide, you really don't get much to show for your time, so it's hard to motivate people to do it. The monotony is why I asked the question because I understand that that's the difficult part, and I think the CRM114 answer is possibly a really good way, basing and classifying is a pretty interesting approach. I was just curious if you had thought about automating away this part of the pipeline that you've now built. It probably didn't come out in Joe's talk, but this is a very, very, very complex problem with a lot of moving parts because you have to totally understand all of the infrastructure interactions, which is a 20-minute talk on itself, and then you have to understand the additional part of Log Stash and Cabana, and there's probably about five people who have the knowledge, and the thing of it is that they're so busy fixing and classifying bugs and helping people and communicating that they don't have the time to go back and fix the infrastructure. Well, we should probably not go too far into afternoon tea, which I think is now. So, thank you very much. APPLAUSE


Hello, my name is Lynn Griezmer. I'm president of the Amherst town council. The town council thanks the members of all of our town committees, boards and commissions for your service to the town of Amherst. It is highly valued, and we could not do it without you. The town council is beginning its annual evaluation of the town manager. We specifically invite you as a member of a committee, a board commission to join in that effort by submitting written comments to us by midnight on Friday, October 27. The town manager's performance goals, including both policy and management goals can be found at www.amherstma.gov slash town manager. When you get to that site, then click on the link for the 2023 town council performance goals for the town manager. A new feature this year is the opportunity for you to read the town manager's self evaluation. That self evaluation can be found at the link provided in this email. Please be aware that your submissions will be read by every town counselor and the town manager. However, they are personal documents and as such are exempt from public disclosure. Submissions may be emailed to the town council at or actually town council at amherstma.gov and or they can be sent to town hall to the attention of the Amherst town council for Boatwood Avenue Amherst mass. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the town council office at<PHONE_NUMBER> or write the town council at town council at amherstma.gov. Thank you for your participation. We look forward to hearing from you.