Dynamics Between Leader and Led

When you see an advertisement for a car, do you immediately run out and buy it?

I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no' for most of us. Advertising obviously does have an impact - perhaps we just remember the branding, and when we do decide to get a new car we look for that brand specifically. Or maybe the ad reminds us that we want a new car, but we don't want that specific car and we look for something else.

The point is that we're not mindless recipients. Advertising doesn't automatically make us buy the product being sold...

And the same is true for political arguments.

There's a lot of finger pointing and a lot of people asking us how we got where we are today, and while we can point to cynical manipulators and misinformation and disinformation campaigns, those explanations have always felt a little off to me.

Because we don't buy the car in the advertisement when we're not in the market for one.

That's why I look to my conservative friends and family. That's why I ask myself - why do they think the way they do?

And it's been quite the struggle. I get that we have differences in opinion on all sorts of things. Healthcare. Taxes. The role of government.

But the very foundation of our system, the defining feature of our Constitution, is that we resolve those differences at the ballot box.

Don't like what the current government is doing? Vote for the other side in the next election. Like what they're doing? Keep voting for them.

All of this depends on letting elections determine who is in charge.

That's why Jan 6 is so important to me.

Or rather, not Jan 6 specifically so much as everything that led up to it. The insinuations and accusations that were never, ever, backed up by evidence (though Trump's supporters sure believed they were!).

Trump's 'car advertisement', in this case, was that the election was stolen and that he was the real winner.

And his supporters were in the market for the product he was selling.

It boggles my mind. The very foundation on which our government rests, and he attacked it over and over and over again...

And everyone just sort of shrugged and looked the other way.

Even worse, now we've got the gullible fools that believed Trump's lies getting rewarded for behavior that undermined our own government.

Which.... wasn't actually what I intended to write today. Yet another rant about Jan 6? Everyone who sees the problem already knows. 

Everyone who doesn't see the problem... well, that's the question, isn't it?

Why do my conservative friends keep focusing on graffiti on the sidewalk when our entire house is on fire?

Why don't they even notice the smoke? The heat? 

How can they post about things that, relatively speaking, are barely a problem compared to the giant, raging, fire?

Once you see what Trump's been doing, it becomes pretty obvious. Not just his constant claims about the election.

Now you see him go on and on about the 'radical left', all his rhetoric is meant to divide us. To villainize anyone who disagrees with him. To dehumanize them.

There's no room for centrists or independents in his political worldview. If you don't agree with him, you're the 'radical left'.

And God forbid you criticize Christianity (even though many so-called Christians don't seem to have read their own Bible), nor criticize capitalism (even though the current failings are a large part of why he was elected in the first place), nor show hostility towards those who hold 'traditional' views on family, religion, or morality...

I guess those views are too fragile to deal with any dissent or disagreement.

He threatens to send troops to our cities, sticks his nose in things that shouldn't even be his business, and participates in a wasteful in person talk to military personnel where he talks about domestic enemies...

But conservatives aren't saying a word about any of that. 

Just... ugh. 

Warrior Ethos

On Tuesday, Secretary Hegseth has called an in person meeting of senior military leaders, supposedly to talk about the 'warrior ethos'. 

This is unusual for a couple of reasons - first, modern technology makes it easy for people to remotely attend a function like this. If all it is going to be is a speech, there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to be there in person.

Second, the logistics and security risks are unusual. The military will have to fly everyone there, plus pay for food and hotels. 

Meanwhile, they are unable to do their normal duties... And given this is ALL the senior leadership, it raises questions about who is going to be handling everything back at their duty stations. (Plus it's creating a really nice target of powerful people gathered in one place, though it'd obviously be an act of war if anyone actually acted on that.)

It is definitely strange, and I would question anyone who is trying to deny or downplay that.

There's a lot of speculation about what's really going on, though it could be anything from an actual speech as promised (despite the utter waste of giving it in person like this) to some announcement about future activity, like a declaration of war or something (which shouldn't be the case, but when has this administration ever cared about laws and norms).

What seems most likely,to me at least,is something historians have already brought up - a loyalty test of some sort. Maybe even an attempt to get these senior leaders to swear an oath - not to the Constitution, which we all already did when we joined the service. 

But perhaps to Trump directly. In which case I hope and pray that they unanimously refuse.

The Constitution is more important than any single political figure, and our current oaths should be enough. Asking for anything in addition to that should be a large, red, neon warning sign blaring a siren call. 

No president loyal to America would ask for such a thing.

Whether this administration is actually going to try that or not? I guess we'll find out on Tuesday.

Venting

My uncle shared a post on Facebook the other day.

Perhaps I should elaborate a bit.

My deeply conservative uncle, the one who listened to Rush Limbaugh, had received enough pushback (from other family members according to my cousin, his son) that he posted to Facebook saying he was "open to hearing differing opinions on war, crime & punishment, taxes, the economy, sports teams... But it really helps to know where people are coming from when they express their beliefs" and he asked us to share our belief origin stories.

Now, I have had a lifetime leading up to my current beliefs, and tbh I'm not sure how sincere he was in this, but I took the opportunity to share what has become my spiel on Jan 6.

I have no idea how it was taken, as there was no response from him - or what I presume is his conservative friends who may have read the post. Just some things from my cousin and another random person.

Still, it got me thinking.

The military leans conservative, and part of that is our whole awareness on the importance of unity. On "supporting the chain of command" and "good order and discipline." 

That sure, you can have your own private opinions on all sorts of things... but unless it's an illegal order (or, personally, if the stupidity is enough to get people killed and you're willing to take the consequences of disobeying) then you follow orders. (As an aside - I have no idea if Hegseth is calling all those generals and high ranking officers in to try and force some sort of loyalty oath, but if he did then that is the definition of an illegal order and I pray to God that all of those officers refuse.)

Anyways, I've made the argument before, but I want to say it clearly and with emphasis again - claiming that the election was stolen without the evidence to support your claim is an attack on the Constitution. At least, when it's coming from a sitting president (or former president) and not some dumbass drinking beer in a bar.

It undermines the legitimacy of the government that did win. It undermines the agreement that we resolve our differences at the ballot box.

It is even more of a threat to American than any flag burning imaginable.

Every time Trump says his bullshit about a stolen election it feels like he's taking 100 American flags and burning them in a giant heap.

And all those people who claim to be patriots, but ignore that? Everyone who focuses on some stupid shit?

All of them are enabling Trump as he attacks our very foundations.

And it just keeps getting worse. We are not even a year into his second term in office, and he's been escalating the violence. 

Charlie Kirk's assassination is, of course, terrible. But so was the attack on those Minnesota legislators. The way Trump is using that assassination to try and drum up support for further attacks on the left is horrible.

And, just like Jan 6, something his supporters willingly ignore.

The part that bothers me, the thing that has me questioning my fellow Americans, is how blatantly obvious it all is.

For Jan 6 - months of unsubstantiated claims that attacked the results of that election. Anyone paying attention knew some sort of shit was going to go down that day. 

And all of the nonsense we're dealing with today? Predictable. 

Maybe not the exact shape or form, but it was obvious (if you were paying attention) that Trump didn't actually care about the Epstein files, or know how to make America great again, or have interest in doing anything that would help the average American. 

He hadn't even started his second term before we started hearing test balloons checking on whether they could change the law preventing a president from serving more than two terms.

There is practically zero chance that he is going to peacefully leave at the end of his current term in office.

And yet - it's like we are living in two different Americas.

One where this is blatantly obvious and we're all horrified and scared and wondering what new fresh nonsense is going to come our way...

And the other where they act as though nothing is wrong. Or act as though what's wrong is the Left, and completely ignore anything the Trumpists (formerly 'the Right', but they're not really conservative any more either) did to create the situation - and cheer Trump on as he continues his madness.

How can any veteran, anyone who understands the problem with 'undermining the chain of command', not see what Trump has been doing?

Not see him constantly undermine the legitimacy of Biden's elected government, and in the process undermine the legitimacy of any elected government. Unless, of course, he wins. Then it's all fair and aboveboard. (Except that's not how legitimacy works. If you undermine it when it means letting your opponents win, you're also undermining the results when you win.) 

It's also obvious that he constantly belittles his political opponents. Constantly uses his power to inflame our divisions, dehumanize any opposition, and tries to use any and every lever in his reach to take out any opposition. Threatens and bullies anyone who doesn't kiss the ring.

I don't know how to even look at the Americans who still support Trump. I can't stand more than skimming Facebook, because all too soon I'll find some post that might have been interesting in a normal political environment - but in the current one? It feels like someone whining about the weeds in their garden while their house is burning down.

It makes me sick.

AI

Someone made a post discussing which jobs will be made obsolete by AI, and it raised some concerns for me.

See, most people seem to forget that if you want someone capable of doing complex tasks that require experience - they need a path to gaining that experience.

That's part of why I talk about pipelines so much. 

Okay, I generally talk about leadership pipelines, but it applies to practically every task that isn't an entry level role.

Companies keep putting out these posts asking for '5-10 years experience', but where do they find the people with that experience?

Generally by hiring someone who got that experience somewhere else... which means that if they're not growing their own talent then they are compete for the (limited) pool of talent that someone else developed.

Basically, any time people complain about a shortage of workers you should ask yourself where the pipeline to building that talent is. And if the company doesn't have one, then they're honestly part of the problem.

But let's get back to AI.

AI takes some of the same challenges with automation and escalates it to the nth degree.

What I mean is this...

Automation is fantastic. I love it. It makes my job easier. Any time you have a repetitive task that needs to be done in the exact same way, the exact same order, repeatedly - automate it! You are only limited by the time and effort it will take to create the automation tools.

Heck, you can even create some type of 'self-healing', where you even automate a response to certain events.

At the same time, there's a very real problem that occurs when whoever created your automation moves on to a new role and the people remaining don't understand the tools they're using.

Need to update your automation in order to take into account changes to your business? Somebody has to understand what your tools are doing, so they know where and how to update it.

Have some bug that causes your automation to error out? Somebody needs to know enough about it to troubleshoot the issue.

Anybody can go to a CI/CD resource and click the button to run a pipeline that does whatever they're configured to do.

The real problem comes when that's not enough. 

When it breaks, or needs updated, or requires knowledge that goes beyond just going to your Jenkins site, or Azure DevOps, or any other CI/CD tool and running it.

You cannot get away from human involvement. You may reduce the need, maybe one super-experienced DevOps expert can do what used to take 5 people to do, but you. will. always. need. someone. who. understands. it.

Someone who knows what your application or program or pipeline is supposed to do, how it does it, and how to revise it as needed.

And here's the thing... if you use AI to take away the first tier jobs, those entry level jobs?

Where are you going to get the people with the experience needed for the second tier? The ones who maintain your tools?

I don't have a problem with AI per se, I do have a problem with people treating it like some miracle tool that will allow you to get around basic people management.

Tech keeps getting more and more sophisticated, which is awesome. It also means that there's more and more places where things go wrong (to quote Murphy's law), and the more that complexity is hidden away in layers, the more difficult it is for the people maintaining it to understand the problem.

I think that's part of why I did so well in my last DevOps role, tbh. We've got all these complex tools to do all sorts of things, and once you get past the superficial basics like running pipelines or monitoring dashboards and alerts, most of the issues require a deeper understanding of the application. Like understanding why a bad record in one particular kafka partition will eventually stop all consumption in that consumer group. Or understanding how to check those partitions in the first place. Or understanding how to update your consumer so that it skips a bad record.

In some ways, this reminds me of qualitative and quantitative analysis. See, quantitative analysis deals with cold, hard facts. At least, it does if you're doing it right, for example by successfully creating questions that aren't biased and try to push survey takers to give a certain response. 

Quantitative analysis let's you say 'oh, 56% say x' or 'there's a relationship between income, education, and support for y'.

But the thing of it is, quantitative analysis requires you to already know enough about the topic to know which questions to ask. If there's a relationship between income, education, and support for y... but you never ask your responders for information on their education level, then you won't ever be able to tell whether there's a relationship or not.

This is where qualitative analysis starts getting important, because it allows you to have focus groups and in-depth interviews with people involved with a topic, which can give you a much better sense of what questions to ask and what factors might have relationships worth investigating.

This is not an either-or thing. One is not better than the other. They are complementary, and work together.

In the same fashion, human judgment and computing technology is complementary and should work together.

I am absolutely for anything that helps reduce the stuff I hate doing. The boring, repetitive tasks. Especially ones that are easy to screw up if you're having a bad day and aren't thinking too clearly.

Using a pipeline to make sure our application is created correctly, in the right order, every time? Yes, please. Even using one to run through the thousands of calculations and steps needed to prepare a daily report?

Yes please.

But that does not and should not mean you can replace people entirely. Especially if you ever want to update your pipelines, or migrate to new technologies... or ever need anybody who actually understands what your application does and how it works.

And all of that? Applies to AI, to an even more exaggerated degree. 

My last company tried getting us to use a company AI for a bit, and yes... it's nice when it can clearly summarize and articulate something about our application. Makes it a lot easier for me to understand things that were kind of hard to figure out.

Except...

It's basically making up for the loss of tribal knowledge. And given its ability to 'hallucinate', it does a poor job of making up for that loss. I mean, it's better than nothing? It can be convenient? But... it'd be even better if there was a good onboarding program to make sure everyone knew what they needed to know. (and yes, we did have one. We had a whole list of videos on relevant topics, as well as multiple company wiki pages. Much of it quite disorganized, and you could search the wiki to find some of what you needed to know but the pages were often made for quite specific issues and didn't necessarily give the broad overview. And as for the videos? You had to have the time to work through them, which... well, is kind of hard to fit in sometimes.)

Anyways... it just seems like people are pushing these things because they don't understand or want to deal with the basics.

Build your team. Create your talent pipelines. Capture institutional knowledge and make sure it gets passed along to new members. 

And make sure you have people who understand what your tools are supposed to be doing, how they do it, and how to fix it if needed.

Feels Fake - Addendum

 When my Catholic school talked about abortion, they talked about the sanctity of life. They said that you can't pick and choose when to value life, basically. And that if you wanted to be pro-life, you also needed to be against the death penalty and other things.

I am not sure I agree with some of their arguments - mostly about end of life. I can't help feeling that the last round of chemo hastened my Mom's end, and that quality of life matters. That, for example, if you can't survive without life support that extending your misery for a few days with life support isn't really worth it, but at least their arguments are consistent.

Which is part of why I find it fascinating when 'pro-life' people also support the death penalty. Seems they don't really agree with that argument.

Anyways, to get back to Charlie Kirk's assassination. The point I was trying to make with my earlier post is that you have to be consistent. That if assassination and murder is bad, it's bad in every case. All the time.

It's bad when it's Minnesota legislators.

It's bad when it's school children.

And when we've created a callous society that shrugs and moves on when those people are murdered, it seems inconsistent to suddenly be upset and start caring just because it was a right wing influencer.

I said that if you actually cared about his death that you wouldn't want to escalate things... but that's not quite true.

Or rather, given some of what Charlie Kirk has said... maybe he actually wanted to escalate the violence, even if it meant his own death?

I personally find it hard to believe. I think it was probably more along the lines of 'it's okay for other people to die, but not me'... but I can't claim to know him that well. Given what he said about the 2nd amendment, maybe he'd understand that his own death was also worth it.

Still, the outrage feels fake. Feels more like people are just upset when the natural consequences of their positions affect people they actually care about.

Feels Fake

I feel like I should say something about Charlie Kirk's assassination, but tbh I never paid attention to the guy. 

What I do find interesting is that the right is really getting spun up about it. I say 'interesting' because we already had legislators shot in Minnesota, and yesterday also marked yet another school shooting. 

Why is this any different? 

No, seriously. If you're actually upset about Charlie Kirk's assassination, were you also upset about those other shootings?

The responses just feel kind of performative and fake to me. I mean, if they were genuine than they'd also want to deescalate the violence. 

After all, deaths of people you care about is a natural progression of escalation and only a fool would think they wouldn't be affected too.