Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

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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.
 ===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.
+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 a chain reaction of successive component failures, chain reactions and unpredictable nonlinear consequences. On 9/11, as Martin Amis put it, 20 box-cutters created two million tonnes of rubble, left 4,000 dead, and transformed global politics for a generation.
-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.
+A financial market is a [[complex system]]. It comprises an indeterminate number of autonomous actors, many of whom — notably participating corporations — are themselves complex systems, interacting in unpredictable ways. It is the nature of a complex system that it is unpredictable — not just in the sense of a jointed pendulum, whose exact path is impossible to predict, but whose possible range of movement, it's design space, is known to 100 percent. The “design space” of a complex system is unknown. You cannot calculate even probabilistically how it will behave. The fact that, for long periods, it appears to closely cleave to simple operating parameters is beside the point.1
 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.