How Other People's Health Affects YOU

That brings up the issue of fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is the distance between a system at optimum function and a system that ceases to function. If it can take a licking and keep on ticking, it has a lot of fault tolerance.

Right now, many systems in America have little or no fault tolerance. They are always running close to the edge. If a business runs with minimum employees, and someone gets sick, there is nobody to cover -- not enough fault tolerance to absorb the temporary absence of a single person. The health care system struggles to handle the surge of a normal flu season; a bad one overwhelms staff and facilities. A real epidemic would be crushing.

This is the kind of foolishness that comes from watching the bottom line and nothing else. Cutting corners, cutting personnel, cutting facilities - all of that saves money but most of it comes right out of the fault tolerance. Then when something goes wrong, there is little or no leeway for adaptation and recovery. Disaster commences almost immediately as a marginal system collapses under the strain.

We really, really need to stop scraping the bottom of the barrel and build up fault tolerance in more areas.

*sigh* This is really disturbing, all the more so because it's typical of how many places are functioning these days. Barely.

>>In chemistry- and perhaps in biology (my background is chem)- that's called buffering, and the lack of buffering/fault tolerance makes for a fragile and volatile system.<<

Yes, I think the term is used similarly. In chemistry, a buffered system avoids extremes, particularly along the acid/base scale. (You can, for instance, buy buffer powder to keep aquarium pH stable.) In biology, a buffered system recovers quickly from shocks and returns to normal. An unbuffered system takes much longer to return to normal. An unbuffered system with an exaggerated feedback system gets worse and worse.

>>Our economic system has been decreasing the buffering of society for many decades now, and we're starting to see the results of it being pushed to the brink of failure- in all kinds of systems, including human and climate.<<

Yes, that's true. It drives me crazy that economists will say things that are obvious nonsense and other people believe that stuff. Dude: it's a sine wave. It goes up. Then it goes down. It will always go down. A really big upward spike is going to end in a really big crash at some time.

I keep wondering why people don't understand the personal implications of some things they are lobbying for or against. So I've taken to trying to explain stuff in as straightforward a manner as possible.

This is really good to hear. It's hard for me to tell when I'm doing something genuinely useful in sharing news, or just preaching to the choir. So I appreciate it when people tell me that what I'm writing is helpful in illuminating or clarifying things they didn't know a lot about or didn't have an established stance about.