[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.