Tom Walker wrote:
And what has appeared to my artist's eyes is
something that seems
not to have been seen by the bean counters themselves. It is a small
technical oversight with consequences that far exceed the turmoil caused by
the year 2000 computer problem. It is a similar type of problem to the year
2000 problem: back when they implemented the systems, they didn't anticipate
the long term consequences and changed circumstances.
not to have been seen by the bean counters themselves. It is a small
technical oversight with consequences that far exceed the turmoil caused by
the year 2000 computer problem. It is a similar type of problem to the year
2000 problem: back when they implemented the systems, they didn't anticipate
the long term consequences and changed circumstances.
Thomas
I have read and reread your posting as well as
Theobalds several times and have been surprised that there has been no response
to either posting because there is some real meat in both postings. It has
been awhile since I have read in the area of "chaos" and the
mathematics that have developed from that discipline. One of the findings
is that enormously complex effects can come from very simple inputs. Take
for example "fractals" in which a simple formula can produce a pattern
to infinity. Cybernetics posed the challenge of feedback and self
correcting systems. It would seem that your posting points to a
"fractal" type error in the accounting systems of business and a
denial of the "cybernetic" feedback mechanism which would indicate a
constant refinement. The same analogy could be applied to the Year 2000
problem. As you have unveiled another potential problem, one has to ask,
how many other potential problems of the "fractal" nature still lurk
undiscovered.
In a mechanical sense, say a crankshaft in a
car, a distortion in the grinding of the cams of a very tiny amount can over
millions of piston firings, stress metal and increase wear and cause unexpected
breakdowns, to say nothing of the ongoing inefficiency of the release of energy
trapped in the fuels which is being exploded at less than optimum
potential. After an intense period of change such as the last 150 years,
could it be that we will see unexpected breakdowns in systems that we have not
installed "cybernetic" type self - auto - or manual correcting
systems. One of the things I have noticed is that we have taken the
redundancy out of systems under the mandate of "efficiency". An
example would be "just in time inventory" in which assembly plants
depend on absolutely predictable delivery dates to assemble complex
products. It is conceivable that thousands of cars, fully assembled, could
not be sold because the windshield wipers made in Indonesia were not shipped in
time because of smoke from forest land clearing that was normally safe because
of the dependency of monsoons. El Nino being the apparent causal event and
the loss of hundreds of automobiles being the resultant. Of course one
could postulate that the cause of El Nino was the heat trapped in the atmosphere
by the release of carbon from petroleum based products through the
automobile.
A major article in the Ottawa Citizen today
lists all the areas that the government has privatized since 1980, it is quite
lengthy. Now on one hand, one could say that this has reduced the size of
government which has lowered costs and allowed Canada to achieve its first
balanced budget in decades. On the other hand, one could point to the
Airport Improvement Fees being charged by most major airports as a tax imposed
by private industry. The recent crash in New Brunswick in which there were
no fire trucks on duty and no air traffic controllers in the control tower are
examples of a public system with redundancy and a private system of
efficiency. In 99.9% of the cases, the private system works just fine.
When if fails, it's failure is often worse in cost than the inefficiencies that
were in a government system that provided redundancy. When we build
airplanes or space ships, we realize by the remoteness of assistance that we
need to build in redundancy often providing three or more backup systems.
One of my fears is that what we have gained in efficiency has been at the
expense of redundancy and that at some point efficiency ceases to be efficient
and becomes accident prone. This could also be happening in our major
economic systems.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
