<story><title>Reversible and irreversible decisions (2018)</title><url>https://fs.blog/reversible-irreversible-decisions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>Decision reversibility is much overlooked in resilience engineering.&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world we&amp;#x27;d have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where we
forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options until one
or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from Digital Vegan;&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;quot;Consider how the UK government let our drinking water reservoirs be
  sold off for property development, believing that advanced JIT (just
  in time) management technology, smart metering and so forth, would
  dispense with them. Then climate change came. Reservoirs are like
  power supply capacitors; they absorb as well as smooth out
  supply. Now in the UK we have housing estates built on flood plains.
  Rivers burst their banks with every downpour. Knocking down
  thousands of peoples&amp;#x27; houses to regain reservoir capacity is much
  &amp;#x2F;harder&amp;#x2F; than it was to sell the reservoirs to developers.&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a net
gain in &amp;quot;order&amp;quot; (entropy reduction) because it seems to create value,
but considering the system as a whole (cost of losing infrastructure)
it increases disorder.&lt;p&gt;Similarly our gushing project toward an &amp;quot;online cashless society&amp;quot; is
playing with dangerous forces. It&amp;#x27;s a net destruction of wealth and
order. It won&amp;#x27;t be cheap or quick to re-open shops, print and
distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling facilities once the
terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital economy becomes
clear. Those imagining &amp;quot;Nothing can possibly go wrong with the all
Bitcoin + Amazon society&amp;quot;, haven&amp;#x27;t thought through the reality of what
happens when tens of millions of people can&amp;#x27;t get food even though it&amp;#x27;s
in a warehouse less than 100 miles from their house.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reversible and irreversible decisions (2018)</title><url>https://fs.blog/reversible-irreversible-decisions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scared333</author><text>I guess russian leadership failed to consider this when they started their illegal imperial war to annex Ukraine. People of russia are almost irreversibly becoming the new &amp;#x27;nazis&amp;#x27; of whose attrocities the kids will learn at school and of whom they will learn to despise for the rest of of their lives (while the earlier ones will be just another chapter in the history books that is read with the same enthusiasm that most study geopolitics behind WW1 currently).&lt;p&gt;This is not to suggest that the attrocities (at this point anyway) would be comparable, but that history is moving ahead.&lt;p&gt;Sorry about political angle, but due to my circumstances, I am very angry of what is happening, and I think these things cannot be repeated too many times.</text></comment>