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| Home Front: Politix |
| You Only Die Once |
| 2013-11-04 |
| In 1984 Charles Perrow wrote a book called Normal Accidents, which describes the phenomenon that we commonly call "accidents waiting to happen". "Normal" accidents, or system accidents, are so-called by Perrow because such accidents are inevitable in extremely complex systems. Given the characteristic of the system involved, multiple failures which interact with each other will occur, despite efforts to avoid them. In it he argued that some things are just so complex that eventually something will go wrong with them. One example is us. Something eventually goes wrong with our biologies and we expire. Normal accidents may be rare ('It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.'), but the system's characteristics make it inherently vulnerable to such accidents, hence their description as "normal." For that reason nature often relies on 'loosely coupled' systems. Humanity consists of separate individuals, not a single collective like the Borg, so that the death of the one is not necessarily the death of all. In Perrow's analysis, the systems most vulnerable to "normal failure" have two salient characteristics. They are "tightly coupled" and "interactively complex". These are precisely the kinds of centralized structures which bureaucracies love to construct. A tightly coupled system is like a house of cards. If you move one card all the others must be adjusted to suit. "Strong coupling occurs when a dependent class contains a pointer directly to a concrete class which provides the required behavior. The dependency cannot be substituted, or its 'signature' changed, without requiring a change to the dependent class." The opposite of "tight coupling" is "loose coupling" which occurs "when the dependent class contains a pointer only to an interface, which can then be implemented by one or many concrete classes." Loosely coupled components have ways of working things out between themselves, but they are not directly dependent on each other. One of the changes that Obamacare has made to 1/6th of the American economy is to take a relatively loosely coupled system and tightly couple it. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 tl;dr We're being tightly coupled and we have to leave the money. :( |
| Posted by: Shipman 2013-11-04 15:54 |