17 Comments
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Edward Dutton

As someone who spent my career designing and building complex IT systems I can only call bs in the excuse given for the software problems with the ATC system. There are at least three errors I can see without even looking at the system:

1) no backup system when the system failed. As a critical system I would want at least two probably three backups available and failsafe. One of which would be manual

2) Insufficient testing. If one piece of data can cause the system to crash there is absolutely no way the system has been tested properly

3) Cut price development. The above leads me to believe this mission critical piece of software has been offshored to people with little understanding or care for the outcome. If you live in India and the British ATC system you wrote goes haywire it's not going to affect you once you've been paid and left the contract

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Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Edward Dutton

We have had issues like this in the Netherlands recently with trains. Things break down and it takes days to fix them. Simple solutions like getting people home by bus or trajectory changes that were common in the past, are completely overlooked. It is like a bunch of schoolkids has taken over the national rail.

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Aug 29, 2023Liked by Edward Dutton

In America they forcibly speed up this downfall of all complex systems, hiring workers not by their competence, but by their gender and color of their skin,to comply with the woke ideology. And then they have tough times firing an incompetent worker under the threat of them suing the company over “discrimination” XD

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Look at the Maui fires, where we still don't know how many hundreds died from multiple incompetencies.

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at least when that happens we’ll go back to pre World War One borders

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Aug 29, 2023Liked by Edward Dutton

They will increase salaries and hire more intelligent people to fix the problem. Of course, the wealthy will keep flying private and won’t have any issues.

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The "chaos" question is whether this effects Western Nations only or if it is a worldwide phenomenon. My guess is it's unique to the West because Third and Second World countries are, essentially by definition, not complex or as complex. We living in First World countries appear to be returning to Second and Third World levels, hopefully not in a castastrophic manner but this remains to be seen.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

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People who think 'technology will save us' see technology as a kind of magic not as the strenuous efforts of millions of people through time building technology up to what it is today. Our technology is absolutely being optimised in a few very narrow dimensions i.e. speed and performance and not robustness, serviceability and resilience. Unless you have a good idea of complex systems you don't realise our critical systems are now so complex and interdependent that even minor failures in a few key nodes can cause cascading failures that will effect pretty much everything power, travel, finance, industry you name it.

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These are the same morons happy to offshore technology to places like India and China which have low quality and safety standards and might one day decide to stop providing us with their tech skills. The fact is when you hand manufacturing and coding work abroad you are at the mercy of the govts in those countries.

As for interdependence there should be firebreaks built into any software system to prevent a cascading of problems.

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Forget about firebreaks they are being actively removed and yes degrading skills in Western countries is yet another axe swing at the stability of our system of systems. You really do need to think about insulating yourself from the larger system (or at least not being completely dependant on it). To make our overall system robust at this point is beyond difficult mainly because the majority of people haven't got a clue why that is important they will only get the motivation when something happens to them or (God forbid) the whole thing really breaks down.

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You can't insulate yourself. You can't grow enough food for yourself because you don't have the land or the knowhow and you can't make medicines.

The rest of what you say is simply wrong, complex systems have been around for well over a 100 years (just go and look at the UK railway system back in the 1930s if you don't believe me) and there is the knowledge and the brains to set them up and run them. The whole thing will never break down (it didn't after the Roman empire ended). What is needed is a return to a more insular way of dealing with business, the same sort we had in the 1970s. then we had contingency plans and govt intervention to stop business and capital flowing abroad, we need to return to that.

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No man is an island but if you go to the third world you will see the sort of insulating i'm talking about. It doesn't mean that a recovery won't happen but the time between the start of a real crisis and the end will be pretty terrible for people who expect everything to function perfectly all the time like we have been accustomed to for many decades. Yes we need to reverse globalisation but that will take time.

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Ed have you read Emil’s review of your book At Our Wits End & The Past is a Future Country

If not, perhaps take a look

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The semiconductor supply chain maybe even more complex, if not the most complex one of all. Such incredible high iq engineering done on a nanometer scale, where just one small dirt particle can ruin a whole production run. I wonder when the dysgenic induced failures will start to crop up in this industry; looking at east Asian birth rates, this might be right around the corner

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Building the Saturn V rockets and the lunar spacecraft required thousands of NASA engineers to work without fault. Every one of them didn't want to be the one that caused the cock up. It was that, according to the astronauts, that prevented any mistakes and the subsequent successful missions.

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Aug 30, 2023·edited Aug 30, 2023

But Ed.... the 'free market' will solve this problem (given an infinite number of free market monkeys and an infinite number of free market typewriters)! What you say: 'We don't have an infinite number of free markets typewriter ribbons, and I've got to finish my quick pint before the heat death of the universe..'? That's just being wet. Cheer up!

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