Originally published on politi.kov
I have been asked by a bunch of friends from outside of Brazil for my opinion regarding the recent elections we had in Brazil, and it is a bit complicated to explain it without some background, so I decided to write this piece providing a bit of history so that people can understand my opinion.
The elections this year were a rematch of our traditional polarization between the workers party (PT) and the social democracy party (PSDB), which has been going on since 1994. PT and PSDB used to be allies. In the 80s, when the dictatorship dropped the law that forbade more than 2 parties, the opposition party, MDB, began breaking up in several smaller ones.
PSDB was founded by politicians and intelectuals who were inspired by Europe s social democracy and political systems. Parliamentarism, for instance, is one of the historical causes of the party. The workers party had a more grassroots origin, with union leaders, marxist intelectuals and marxist-inspired catholic priests being the main founders. They drew their inspiration from the USSR and Cuba, and were very close to social movements.
Lula (PT) and FHC (PSDB) campaigning together in 1981, by Cl vis Cranchi Sobrinho
Some people have celebrated the reelection of Dilma Roussef as a victory of the left against the right. In my opinion that view is wrong for several reasons. First, because I disagree that PSDB and A cio Neves in particular are right-wing, both in terms of economics and social/moral issues. Second, because I believe Dilma s first government has taken a quite severe turn to the right in several topics that matter a lot to me. Since comparisons with PSDB s government during the 90s has been one of the main strategies of the campaign this year, I ll argue why I think it was actually a pretty good government with a lot of left in it.
Unlike what happens in most other places, Brazil does not really have an actual right-wing party, economics-wise. Although we might see the birth of a couple in the near future, no current party is really against public health, education and social security being provided by the state as rights, or wants to decrease state size and lower taxes significantly. It should come as no surprise that even though it has undergone a lot of liberal reforms over the last 20 years, Brazil is still a very closed country, with very high import tariffs and a huge presence of the state in the economy. There is a certain consensus about all of that, with disagreements being essentially on implementation details, not goals.
On the other hand, and contrary to popular belief, when it comes to social and moral issues we are a very conservative people. Ironically, the two parties which have been in power over the last 20 years are quite progressive, being historically proponents of diversity, minorities rights, reproductive rights. They have had to compromise on those causes to become viable alternatives, given the conservative nature of the majority of the voters.
Despite their different origins and beliefs, both parties share socialist inclinations and were allies from the onset. That changed in 1992, when president Collor, who had been elected on a runoff against Lula (who PSDB supported), was impeached by Congress for corruption. With no formal political support and a chaotic situation in his hands, Itamar Franco, the vice president, called for a national union government to go through the last two years of his term. PSDB answered the call, but the workers party decided against being part of the government.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist who was one of the leaders of PSDB was chosen to lead the Foreign Relations Ministry, but a few months later got nominated to the Economy. At the time, Brazil lived under hyperinflation of close to 1000% a year, and several stabilization plans had been attempted. Economy Ministers did not last very much in office at the time. FHC gathered a team of economists and sponsored their stabilization plan, which turned out to be highly successful: the Plano Real ( Real Plan ). In addition to introducing a new currency, something that was becoming pretty common to Brazilians by then, it also attacked the structural causes of inflation.
Lula was counting on the failure of the Plano Real when he ran against FHC in 1994, but the plan succeeded, giving FHC two terms as president. During those two terms, FHC introduced several institutional changes that made Brazil a saner country. In addition to the hyperinflation, Brazil had lived a debt crises for decades and was still in default. FHC s team renegotiated the debts, reopened lines of credit, but most importantly, introduced reforms that made the Brazilian finances and financial system credible.
The problem was not even that Brazil had a fiscal d ficit, it just did not have any control whatsoever of money supply and budget. Banks, regardless of whether they were private or public, had very little regulation and took advantage of the hyperinflation to hide monstrous holes in their balances. When inflation was gone and regulation became more strict, those became apparent, and it was pretty clear that the system would collapse if nothing was done.
Some people like to say that FHC was a president who ruled for the rich and didn t care about the poor. I think the way the potential collapse of the banking system was handled is a great counter-example of that. The government passed laws that made the owners of the banks responsible for the financial problems, regardless of whether caused by mismanagement or fraud. If a bank went under, the central bank intervened and added enough money to protect the deposits, but that money was a loan that had to be repaid by the owners of the bank, and the owners properties were added as collateral to the loan. As a brazilian journalist once said, the people did not risk losing their deposits, the bankers did risk losing the banks, though. Today, we have a separate fund, filled with money from the banks, that does what the central bank did back then when required.
Compare that to countries where the banking system was saved with tax payer money and executives kept getting huge bonuses regardless, while owners kept their profits. It is hard to find an initiative that is more focused on the public interest against the interest of the rich people who caused the problem. This legislation, called PROER, is still in place today, and it came along with solid regulation of the banking system. It should come as no surprise that Brazil went through the financial crisis of 2008 with not a single hiccup of the banking system and no fear of bank runs. Despite having been against PROER back in the day, Lula celebrated its existence in 2008, when it was clear it was one of the reasons we would not suffer much. He even advertised it as something that should be adopted by the US and Europe.
It is also pretty common to hear that under FHC social questions were not a priority. I believe it is pretty simple to see that that was not the case both by inspecting the growth of social spending and the improvement of social indicators for the period, such as UN s human development index. One area in which people are particularly critical of the FHC government is the investment on higher education, and they are actually quite right. Brazil has free Federal universities and those did not get a lot of priority in the 90s. However, I would argue that while it is a matter of priorities, it is not one of education versus something else, but rather of what to invest on inside education. The reality is basic education was the priority.
When FHC came to power, Brazil had a significant number of children who were not going to school at all. The goal was to make access to schools universal for young children, and that goal was reached. Every child has been going to school since the early 2000s, and that is a significant achievement which reaches the poorest. While the federal universities are attended essentially by the Brazilian elite, given the difficulty of passing the exams and the relative lack of quality of free public schools compared to private ones, which is still a reality to this day, investment on getting children to even go to school for the early years has a significant impact on the lives of the poorest.
It is important to remember that getting every child to go to school is also what gave birth to one of the most celebrated programs from the Lula era: Bolsa Fam lia ( Family Allowance ) is a direct money transfer to poor families, particularly those who have children and has been an important contribution to lowering inequality and getting people out of extreme poverty. To get the money, the families need to ensure their children are 1) attending school and 2) getting vaccinated.
That program comes from the FHC government, in which it was created with the name Bolsa Escola ( School Allowance ), in its turn inspired by a program of the same name by governor Cristovam Buarque, from PT. What Lula did, and he deserves a lot of credit for this, was to merge a series of smaller programs with Bolsa Escola, and then expand the program to ensure it got to more and more people. Interestingly, during the announcement of the program he credited the idea of doing that to a state governor from PSDB. You can see why I think these two should be allies again.
When faced with all these arguments, people will eventually say that FHC was bad because he privatized companies and used orthodox economic policies. Well, if that is what it takes, then we ll have to take Lula down with him, because his first term was essentially a continuation of FHC s second term: orthodox economic policies to keep inflation down, along with privatization of several state-owned companies and banks. But Lula, whom I voted for and whose government I believe was a good one, is not my subject: Dilma is.
On Lula s second term, Dilma gained a lot of power when other major leaders of PT went down for corruption. She became second in command and started leading several programs. A big believer in developmentalism, she started pushing for a bigger role of the state in the coordination of the productive sector, with a clear focus on growing the industrial base.
One of the initiatives she sponsored was a sizable increase on the number and size of subsidized loans given out by the national development bank (BNDES). Brazil started an unnofficial national champions program, where the government elected a few big companies to get a huge amount of subsidized credit.
The goal was for these selected firms to get big enough to be competitive on the global market. The criteria for the choices is completely opaque, if it even exists, and includes handing out milions in subsidized credit for Eike Batista, who became Brazil s richest enterpreneur for a while, and lost pretty much everything when it became clear the oil would not be pumping out of his camps after all, sinking with them a huge amount of public funds invested by BNDES.
The way this policy was enacted, it is unclear how much it really costs in terms of public funds: the Brazilian treasury emits debt to capitalize, lends that money to BNDES with higher than market interest, and BNDES then lends it out to the big companies with a lower than market interest rate. Although it is obviously unsustainable, the problem does not yet show in the balance because the grace period for BNDES debt with the treasury is 2040. The fact that this has a cost and, perhaps more importantly, a huge opportunity cost is not clear because it is not part of the government budget. Why are we putting money in this rather than quadrupling Bolsa Fam lia, which studies show generates 1,78 reais in GDP for every 1 real invested? Worse, why are we not even updating Bolsa Fam lia enough to cover inflation?
When Dilma got elected in 2010, the first signs were pretty bad. She was already seen as someone who did not care much for the environment, and on her first month in power she made good on that promise by pushing to get the Belo Monte Dam building started as soon as possible regardless of conditionalities being satisfied. To this day there are several issues with how the building of the dam is going: the handling of the indigenous people and the small city nearby are lacking, conditionalities are not met.
Beyond Belo Monte, indigenous leaders are being assassinated, deforestation in the Amazon forest has increased by 122% in 2014 alone. Dilma s answer to people who question her on these kinds of issues is essentially: would you rather not have electric power?
Her populist authoritarian nature and obsession with industry are also pretty evident when it comes to her policies in the energy area as a whole. She showed up in national tv on the eve of our independence day celebration to announce a reduction in electric tariffs, mainly for industry, but also for homes. Nobody really knew how. The following week she sent a fast-track project to Congress to automatically renew concessions of power grid operators, requiring those who accepted it to lower tariffs, instead of doing an auction, which was already necessary anyway because the concessions were up on 2015. There was no discussion with stakeholders, there was just a populist announcement and a great deal of rhethoric to paint anyone who opposed as being against the people.
And now, everything went into the crapper because that represented a breach of contract that required indemnification, and we had a pretty bad drought that made power more expensive given the need to turn on the thermal generators. Combining the costs of the thermal generation, indemnity, and financial fallout that the grid operators suffered, we are already at 105 billion reais and counting, nobody knows how high the cost will reach. Any reduction in tariffs has long been invalidated. And the fact that industry has lowered production significantly ends up being good news, we would probably be under rationing already if that was not the case.
You would expect someone who fought a dictatorship to be pretty good in terms of human and civil rights. What we see in reality is a lack of respect for those things. During the world cup, Dilma has put the army on the streets and has supported arbitrary behaviour from state polices throughout the country. They jailed a bunch of demonstrators
preemptively. No shit. The would be demonstrators were kept in jail throghout the tournament under false accusations. Dilma s Minister of Justice said several times that the case against them was solid and that the arrests were legal, but it turned out the case simply did not exist. Just this week we had a number of executions orchestrated by policemen in the state of Par and there is zero reaction from the federal government.
In the oil industry, Dilma has enacted a policy of subsidizing gas prices by using a fixed price that used to be lower than the international prices (it is no longer the case with the fall in international prices). That would not be a problem if Brazil was selfsufficient in oild and gas, which we are not: we had to import a significant amount of both. The implicit subsidy cost Petrobr s a huge amount of cash the more gas it sold, the bigger the losses. This lead not only to decreasing the company s market value (it is a state-controlled, but open company), but to reducing its capacity of investment as well.
That is more problematic than it sounds because, with our current concession model, every single oil camp needs to have Petrobr s as a member of the consortium. Limiting the company s investment capacity limits the rate at which our pre-salt oil camps can be explored and thus the speed at which we can become selfsufficient. Chicken and egg anyone?
To make things worse, Dilma has made policies that lowered taxes on car production, used to foster economic activity during the crisis in 2008-2010, essentially permanent. This lead to a significant increase in traffic and polution on Brazilian cities, while at the same time increasing the pressure on Petrobr s, which had to import more and more gas. Meanwhile, Brazilian cities suffer from a severe lack of mobility infrastructure. A recent study has shown that Brazil has spend almost twice as much subsidized money on pro-car policies than on pro-mass transit projects. Talk about good usage of public funds.
One of the only remaining good news the government was still able to mention was the constant reduction in extreme poverty. Dilma was actually ellected promising to erradicate extreme poverty and changed the government s slogan to A rich country is a country with no poverty (Pa s rico pa s sem pobreza). Well, it turns out all of these policies caused inequality and extreme poverty both to stop falling as of 2013. And given the policies were actually deepened in 2014, I believe it is very likely we ll see an increase in both when we get the data for 2014, next year.
Other than that, her policies ended up being a complete failure. Despite giving tax benefits to several sectors, investment has fallen, growth has fallen and inflation is quite high at 6,6% for the last 12 months. In terms of minorities, her government has been a severe set back, with the government going back on educational material against homophoby saying it would not do advertisement of sexual choice , and going back on a decree that allowed the public health system to perform abortions on the cases allowed by the law (essentially if the woman has been raped).
Looking at Dilma s policies, I really can t see that much of the left, honestly. So why, you might ask, has this victory been deemed a victory of the left over the right? My explanation is the aura the workers party still manages to keep over itself. There s a notion that whatever PT does, it will still be more to the left than PSDB, which I think is just crazy.
There is also a fair amount of idealizing Dilma just because she is Lula s proteg . People will forgive anything, provided it is the workers party doing it. Thankfully, the number of people aligned on the left that supported the candidate from PSDB this election tells me this is changing quite rapidly. Hopefully that leads to PT having to reinvent itself, and get in touch with the left again.
A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is was. She then told them to tell it they re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bullies another child, they may say they re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home.
( Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/awesome-bullying-lesson-from-a-new-york-teacher )
Another PSA: something surprising about XML.
As you might all know, XML must be valid UTF-8 (or UTF-16 (or another encoding supported by the parser, but one which yields valid Unicode codepoints when read and converted)). Some characters, such as the ampersand & , must be escaped ( & or & , although & may also work, depending on the domain) or put into a CDATA section ( <![CDATA[&]]> ).
A bit surprisingly, a literal backspace character (ASCII 08h, Unicode U+0008) is not allowed in the text. I 
Hello, World
Been a while since my last blog post - things have been a bit hectic lately, and I ve not really had the time.
Now that things have settled down a bit I m in DC! I ve moved down south to join the rest of my colleagues at 
Apparently, people care when you, as privileged person (white, male,
long-time Debian Developer) throw in the towel because the amount of
crap thrown your way just becomes too much. I guess that's good, both
because it gives me a soap box for a short while, but also because if
enough people talk about how poisonous the well that Debian is has
become, we can fix it.
This morning, I resigned as a member of the systemd maintainer team.
I then proceeded to leave the relevant IRC channels and announced this
on twitter. The responses I've gotten have been almost all been
heartwarming. People have generally been offering hugs, saying thanks
for the work put into systemd in Debian and so on. I've greatly
appreciated those (and I've been getting those before I resigned too,
so this isn't just a response to that). I feel bad about leaving the
rest of the team, they're a great bunch: competent, caring, funny,
wonderful people. On the other hand, at some point I had to draw a
line and say "no further".
Debian and its various maintainer teams are a bunch of tribes (with
possibly Debian itself being a supertribe). Unlike many other
situations, you can be part of multiple tribes. I'm still a member of
the DSA tribe for instance. Leaving pkg-systemd means leaving one of
my tribes. That hurts. It hurts even more because it feels like a
forced exit rather than because I've lost interest or been distracted
by other shiny things for long enough that you don't really feel like
part of a tribe. That happened with me with debian-installer. It was
my baby for a while (with a then quite small team), then a bunch of
real life thing interfered and other people picked it up and ran with
it and made it greater and more fantastic than before. I kinda lost
touch, and while it's still dear to me, I no longer identify as part
of the debian-boot tribe.
Now, how did I, standing stout and tall, get forced out of my tribe?
I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any
storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn
down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there.
There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy
and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in
systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of
incompetence.
Our code of conduct says, "assume good faith". If you ever find
yourself not doing that, step back, breathe. See if there's a
reasonable explanation for why somebody is saying something or
behaving in a way that doesn't make sense to you. It might be as
simple as your native tongue being English and their being something
else.
If you do genuinely disagree with somebody (something which is
entirely fine), try not to escalate, even if the stakes are high.
Examples from the last year include talking about this as a war and
talking about "increasingly bitter rear-guard battles". By using and
accepting this terminology, we, as a project, poison ourselves. 
Big changes are always a complicated thing to get done and can be the harder the bigger or more diverse an organization is it is taking place in.
Transparency
Ideally every change is well communicated early and openly.
Leaving people in the dark about what will change and when means people have much less time to feeling comfortable about it or arranging with it mentally.
Especially bad can be extending the change later or or shortening transition periods.
Letting people think they have some time to transition only to force them to rush later will remove any credibility you have and severely reduce their ability to believe you are not crossing them.
Making a new way optional is a great way to create security (see below), but making that obligatory before the change even arrives as optional with them will not make them very willing to embrace change.
Take responsibility
Every transformation means costs.
Even if some change did only improve and did not make anything worse once implemented (the ideal change you will never meet in reality), the deployment of the change still costs:
processes have adapted to it, people have to relearn how to do things, how to detect if something goes wrong, how to fix it, documentation has to be adopted and and and.
Even as the change causes more good than costs in the whole organization (let's hope it does, I hope you wouldn't try to do something if the total benefit is negative), the benefits and thus the benefit to cost ratio will differ for the different parts of your organization or the different people within it.
It's hardly avoidable that for some people there will not be much benefit, much less perceived benefit compared to the costs they have to burden for it.
Those are the people whose good will you want to fight for, not the people you want to fight against.
They have to pay with their labor/resources and thus their good will for your benefit the overall benefit.
This is much easier if you acknowledge that fact.
If you blame them for having the costs, claim their situation does not even exist or even ridicule them for not embracing change you only prepare yourself for frustration.
You might be able to persuade yourself that everyone that is not willing to invest in the change is just acting out of malevolent self-interest.
But you will hardly be able to persuade people that it is evil to not help your cause if you treat them as enemies.
And once you ignored or played down costs that later actually happen, your credibility in being able to see the big picture will simply cease to exist at all for the next change.
Allow different metrics
People have different opinions about priorities, about what is important, about how much something costs and even about what is a problem.
If you want to persuade them, try to take that into account.
If you do not understand why something is a reason, it might be because the given point is stupid. But it might also be that you miss something. And often there is simple a different valuation of what is important, what the costs are and what are problems.
If you want to persuade people, it is worth to try to understand those.
If all you want to do is persuade some leader or some majority then ridiculing their concerns might get you somewhere.
But how do you want to win people over if you do not even appear to understand their problems.
Why should people trust you that their costs will be worth the overall benefits if you tell them the costs that they clearly see do not exist? How credible is referring to the bigger picture if the part of the picture they can see does not match what you say the bigger picture looks like?
Don't get trolled and don't troll
There will always be people that might be unreasonable or even try to provoke you. Don't allow being provoked. Remember that for successful changes you need to win broad support. Feeling personally attacked or feeling presented a large amount of pointless arguments easily results in not bringing proper responses or actually looking at arguments.
If someone is only trolling and purely malevolent, they will tease you best if they bring actual concerns of people in a way you likely degrade your yourself and your point in answering.
Becoming impertinent with the troll is like attacking the annoying little goblin hiding next to the city guards with area damage.
When not being able to persuade people, it is also far to easy to consider them in bad faith and/or attacking them personally. This can only escalate even more. Worst case you frustrate someone in good faith. In most cases you poison the discussion so much that people actually in good faith will no longer contribute the discussion. It might be rewarding short term because after some escalation only obviously unreasonable people will talk against you, but it makes it much harder to find solutions together that could benefit anyone and almost impossible to persuade those that simply left the discussion.
Give security
Last but not least, remember that humans are quite risk-averse. In general they might invest in (even small) chances to win, but go a long way to avoid risks.
Thus an important part of enabling change is to reduce risks, real and perceived ones and give people a feeling of security.
In the end, almost every measure boils down to that:
You give people security by giving them the feeling that the whole picture is considered in decisions (by bringing them early into the process, by making sure their concerns are understood and part of the global profit/cost calculation and making sure their experiences with the change are part of the evaluation).
You give people security by allowing them to predict and control things (by transparency about plans, how far the change will go and guaranteed transitions periods, by giving them enough time so they can actually plan and do the transition).
You give people security by avoiding early points of no return (by having wide enough tests, rollback scenarios,...).
You give people security by not letting them alone (by having good documentation, availability of training, ...).
Especially side-by-side availability of old and new is an extremely powerful tool, as it fits all of the above:
It allows people to actually test it (and not some little prototype mostly but not quite totally unrelated to reality) so their feedback can be heard. It makes it more predictable as all the new ways can be tried before the old ones no longer work. It is the ultimate role-back scenario (just switch off the new). And allows for learning the new before losing the old.
Of course giving the people a feeling of security needs resources. But it is a very powerful way to get people to embrace the chance.
Also in my experience people only fearing for themselves will usually mostly be passive by not pushing forward and trying to avoid or escape the changes.
(After all, working against something costs energy, so purely egoistic behavior is quite limiting in that regard).
Most people actively pushing back do it because they fear for something larger than only them. And any measure to making them fear less that you ruin the overall organization, not only avoids unnecessary hurdles rolling out the change but also has some small chance to actually avoid running into disaster with closed eyes.
TLDR: Using the 
On Friday October 31, 2014, and Saturday November 1, 2014, around thirty-five graduate students and faculty members attended a 
If you have users behind NAT, you ll also need a TURN server for relay:
In both cases, setup is not too difficult, particularly if using 
I joined the board of directors of the 
If someone would have told me that I would visit three feminist events this year I would have slowly nodded at them and responded with "yeah, sure..." not believing it. But sometimes things take their own turns.
It all started with the 
I've taught my laptop to wake up at 7:30 in the morning. When it does, it
will run