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Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions
Template:M intro design System redundancy (view source)
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, 1 August 2023→On the virtue of slack
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To be sure, the importance of employees, and the value they add, is not constant. We all have flat days where we don’t achieve very much. In an operationalised workplace they pick up a penny a day on 99 days out of 100; if they save the firm £ on that 100th day, it is worth paying them 2 pennies a day every day even if, 99 days out of 100, you are making a loss. | To be sure, the importance of employees, and the value they add, is not constant. We all have flat days where we don’t achieve very much. In an operationalised workplace they pick up a penny a day on 99 days out of 100; if they save the firm £ on that 100th day, it is worth paying them 2 pennies a day every day even if, 99 days out of 100, you are making a loss. | ||
===Fragility and tight coupling=== | |||
The “leaner” a distributed system is, the more ''fragile'' it will be and the more “single points of failure” it will contain, whose malfunction in the best case, will halt the whole system, and in [[tightly-coupled]] [[complex system]]s may trigger further component failures, chain reactions and unpredictable nonlinear consequences. | |||
A financial market is a [[complex system]] comprising an indeterminate number of autonomous actors, many of whom (notably corporations) are themselves complex systems, interacting in unpredictable ways. | |||
The robustness of any system depends on the tightness of the coupling between components. How much slack is there? In financial markets, increasingly, none at all. | |||
When the JC started practise a millennium ago, to convey an urgent written communication one gave it to a chap on a bicycle. Well — one gave it to a secretary, who sent it to the mailroom, and ''they'' gave it to a chap on a bicycle. [[Facsimile]] was the innovation: while quicker than a bike courier, it was still manual and bounded at either end by analogue processes such that the communication began and ended embedded in a physical [[substrate]] which you couldn’t easily reply to, forward<ref>Not at least without time, manual intervention and loss of fidelity.</ref> let alone cut and paste from. | |||
The analog universe thus imposed its own immutable sobriety upon the conduct of business: there was a genteel maximum at which matters progressed, and that was that. Time is its own natural fire break. You could charge down to the mail room and call back an ill-advised letter in a way you can’t with an intemperate email. Just having the letter typed meant it passed through multiple hands, that effluxion was itself a kind of self-enforcing circumspection and a kind of natural brake upon precipitate behaviour. | |||
In any case ''slow'', loosely-coupled chain reactions have a better chance of being stopped, or contained. The liquidity crunch that ruined Silicon Valley Bank unfolded in minutes, not hours, and did for [[Credit Suisse]], an unrelated bank on a different continent before bank executives could work out what was going on. | |||
So, yes, financial services are tightly coupled. The increasing speed and complexity of the system’s interconnectedness aggravates crash risk. The more interconnections, the faster information flows around the system, the more quickly it can swamp whatever systems we erect to contain it. Credit Suisse had its own fundamental problems, to be sure, but the speed at which it was brought down by entirely unconnected system events should surely give pause for thought. | |||
Redundancy — slack — in this environment, is a virtue. | |||