There’s a nice post over at Charlie’s place (he’s a fun sci-fi author) about complex systems and efficiency.

Our civilization runs on a much slimmer margin than most of us realize. As a cost-saving measure, the corporate policy of the past three decades has been to abolish warehouses and stockpiles wherever possible and to use information technology to streamline logistical processes.

…these brittle networks propagate the side-effects whenever a single node breaks down. It may be that some time in the future, the US economy is brought low not by a hurricane in the Gulf taking out domestic oil refinery capacity — but by a typhoon in the Pacific damaging some unmapped critical dependency in the supply paths used by the world’s largest companies to keep their pipelines moving. Simply making the USA — or the EU — self-sufficient in energy supplies isn’t enough; to address the problem, we need to wean ourselves off the cult of efficiency at the expense of resilience.