[roughly]

Yeah, this is the turkey’s dilemma - life on a farm is a lot better than life in the wild for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.

The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.

[Xelbair]

"Just in time" is a phrase I hate with vehement passion. You aren't optimizing the system, you're reducing safety marigns - and consequences are usually similar to Challanger.

This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.

Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.

What's even more annoying that we have solutions for a lot of those problems - in case of electric grids we have hydroelectric buffers, we have types of powerplants that are easier to shutdown and startup than coal, gas or wind/solar(which cannot be used for cold start at all).

The problem is that building any of this takes longer than one political term.

[exe34]

> You aren't optimizing the system

Of course not, they're optimising shareholder profit.

[Marsymars]

> Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.

How do you make those systems antifragile rather than simply highly resilient?

[baq]

Things which can’t self improve can’t be antifragile by definition. NNT alludes to this multiple times - systems together with processes and people running them can be antifragile, but just things cannot.

I postulate the grid as a whole is antifragile, but not enough for the renewable era. We still don’t know what was the root cause of the Spanish blackout almost 24h after it happened.

[shermantanktop]

Step 1: read a book by nnt

[Marsymars]

Yeah, I have, that’s why I’m asking the question.

[signatoremo]

JIT isn’t about reducing safety margin. It was pioneered by Japanese companies, namely Toyota. They are known for risk adverse, safety first.

> This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.

What kind of comment is this? Toyota has been using and refining it for decades. It wasn’t invented yesterday by some “teenagers”. Such a state of HN’s comment section.

JIT is definitely not perfect as exposed during the Covid period, but it isn’t without merits and its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”.

Then we have JIT in computing, such as JVM.

[phil21]

> its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”

Sure it is. That's exactly how it achieves the higher profitability. Safety margin costs money. Otherwise known as inefficiency.

Slack in the system is a good thing, not a bad thing. Operating at 95% capacity 24x7 is a horrible idea for society in general. It means you can't "burst mode" for a short period of time during a true emergency.

It's basically ignoring long tail risk to chase near-term profits. It's a whole lot of otherwise smart people optimizing for local maxima while ignoring the big picture. Certainly understandable given our economic and social systems, but still catastrophic in the end one day.

[Xelbair]

It literally is reducing safety margin(buffers) of a whole distribution system by definition, and it is also being applied in places where it does not fit - like systems that should be resilient to disruption and/or anti-fragile.

I would expect a paid professional in management discipline to be aware of such nuance but alas proven wrong again.

[LorenPechtel]

Challenger wasn't really about cutting safety margins, but about kicking the can on a known problem: blowby in the motor joints. It was a gut feeling by the engineers that the problem was related to temperature, but there was enough of a random element to it that there was nothing specific to point to.

That should have been enough to scrub anyway, but there was clearly political pressure to launch.

I do agree that they need to specifically design anti-fragile.

[maxerickson]

What are some examples of modern system collapse?

We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.

[exe34]

For the people who died of normally preventable death during covid while the health services were overwhelmed, the damage is irrecoverable. The chips shortage lasted years. Every year we become more, not less, dependent on the supply chain working. Every year we become less, not more, resilient.

[maxerickson]

I don't think it's crass to separate the deaths that occurred from a novel disease from the impact it had in society. In the medium term, it's a blip, never mind the long term. There's a huge chunk of society that thinks there was a huge overreaction!

The chips shortage has been difficult, but it's also been little more than an inconvenience when you look at it in terms of goods being available to consumers or whatever.

[tehjoker]

That chunk is heavily influenced by the propaganda that over a million dead people isn't a big deal. The propaganda is economically incentivized because slowing down the economy is bad for business even if it protects human lives.

[maxerickson]

Do you consider this significant failure a collapse?

I fell into the other poster's trap, talking about something emotionally charged that isn't really responsive to what I said initially.

[tehjoker]

Nearly all collapses are of limited temporal duration (except for extinction events....). I think it is fair to call a health system that failed to protect the nation and world a collapse. It failed to perform its function in a dramatic way. Now, the fact that most of us survived at least is being exploited to say it was no big deal and actually, why not trash every public health institution so the economy is never shut down again?

Sad whomp whomp horn: the economy is going to be negatively affected by covid disability and death on an ongoing basis and a new pandemic will still cause so much fear the economy will shut down.

[LorenPechtel]

The post you are replying to is not talking about the Covid deaths, but rather about the deaths from other causes triggered by the Covid disruptions. When a trauma case dies of the lack of a ventilator because they're all in use on Covid patients. When the trauma case bleeds out at the scene because the ambulance is running a Covid patient to the hospital.

And a lot of people thinking it was an overreaction proves nothing. People don't get a vote on reality.