<story><title>“Peak Civilization”: The Fall of the Roman Empire (2009)</title><url>http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5528</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lambdasquirrel</author><text>Only tangentially related, but I can’t possibly be the only one who read this and thought about a particular codebase...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The answer to these crisis and challenges is to build up structures - say, bureaucratic or military - in response. Each time a crisis is faced and solved, society finds itself with an extra layer of complexity. Now, Tainter says, as complexity increases, the benefit of this extra complexity starts going down - he calls it &amp;quot;the marginal benefit of complexity&amp;quot;. That is because complexity has a cost - it costs energy to maintain complex systems.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>“Peak Civilization”: The Fall of the Roman Empire (2009)</title><url>http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5528</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ptrincr</author><text>Last time Rome popped up as a topic on hackernews, someone mentioned &amp;quot;The history of Rome&amp;quot; podcast. It&amp;#x27;s absolutely fantastic. I mention it so that perhaps someone else can enjoy this masterpiece as much as I have.</text></comment>