Decision reversibility is much overlooked in resilience engineering.
In a perfect world we'd have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where we
forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options until one
or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from Digital Vegan;
"Consider how the UK government let our drinking water reservoirs be
sold off for property development, believing that advanced JIT (just
in time) management technology, smart metering and so forth, would
dispense with them. Then climate change came. Reservoirs are like
power supply capacitors; they absorb as well as smooth out
supply. Now in the UK we have housing estates built on flood plains.
Rivers burst their banks with every downpour. Knocking down
thousands of peoples' houses to regain reservoir capacity is much
/harder/ than it was to sell the reservoirs to developers."
The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a net
gain in "order" (entropy reduction) because it seems to create value,
but considering the system as a whole (cost of losing infrastructure)
it increases disorder.
Similarly our gushing project toward an "online cashless society" is
playing with dangerous forces. It's a net destruction of wealth and
order. It won't be cheap or quick to re-open shops, print and
distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling facilities once the
terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital economy becomes
clear. Those imagining "Nothing can possibly go wrong with the all
Bitcoin + Amazon society", haven't thought through the reality of what
happens when tens of millions of people can't get food even though it's
in a warehouse less than 100 miles from their house.
In a perfect world we'd have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where we forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options until one or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from Digital Vegan;
The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a net gain in "order" (entropy reduction) because it seems to create value, but considering the system as a whole (cost of losing infrastructure) it increases disorder.Similarly our gushing project toward an "online cashless society" is playing with dangerous forces. It's a net destruction of wealth and order. It won't be cheap or quick to re-open shops, print and distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling facilities once the terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital economy becomes clear. Those imagining "Nothing can possibly go wrong with the all Bitcoin + Amazon society", haven't thought through the reality of what happens when tens of millions of people can't get food even though it's in a warehouse less than 100 miles from their house.