Para reflexão

No Twitter, o @joaomiranda escreveu:

"Sabiam que, no 11 de Setembro, o voo 93 não foi usado como míssil porque a porta do cockpit não era blindada? (29 de Março)
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Segurança aérea chegou à fase em q nenhuma medida é melhoria de Pareto (2 de Abril)
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Ou se quiserem, estão a tentar fazer trading com ruído (2 de Abril)"

Lembrei-me logo deste postal "and then some":

""We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.
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This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct ..."

E deste artigo "Why rules can’t solve everything" (um francês nunca escreveria isto, o ADN cultural impedi-lo-ia):

"Social work is difficult not because of the kinds of predictable situations that can be mitigated but because of the ones no one saw coming.
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But no amount of rules will prevent every case of child death.  Just like no amount of rules will eliminate every case of discrimination, every war, every instance of every bad thing that happens to humans.
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Rules look after complicated problems in which the cause and the effect are clear going forward.  But the problems we are seeing now are complex, meaning that the cause and the effect are only obvious in retrospect.  ...  Retrospective coherence contains a dangerous pitfall for decision makers: it fools you into believe that the causes of a particular event are knowable."

and then some

"We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.
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This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? Imagine facing a dozen such alerts simultaneously, and having to decide what's true and false about all of them at the same time. Imagine further that, if you choose incorrectly, you will push the system into an unrecoverable catastrophe. Now, give yourself just a few seconds to make the right choice. How much should you be blamed if you make the wrong one?"

Vem-me logo à mente "Eliminar o pivot - esse é o objectivo" e "Diagnosing “vulnerable system syndrome”: an essential prerequisite to effective risk management"
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E, no fundo, é também o que se passa com as sociedades que se tornaram demasiado complexas para este nível do jogo e estão maduras para o reset e o recomeço num nível seguinte... Recordar Tainter:

"Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
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In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change."

Trecho inicial retirado de "Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity"

Medidas fascistas, inconstitucionais, ataque aos direitos adquiridos, exploração capitalista

Aconselho a leitura deste artigo da Bloomberg "Swiss Exporters Mull Euro Wages to Blunt Franc".
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Apreciar a flexibilidade da sociedade civil suíça. Empresas, sindicatos, trabalhadores, n alternativas individuais... não uma resposta simples, rápida, homogénea e... errada.
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Melhor, muito melhor esta receita do que as que se usam por cá que passam por mais tributos, mais jugo, mais impostos...
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"when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
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The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond."
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Há um título de Agatha Christie que é qualquer coisa como "Death comes as the end" que me vem recorrentemente à mente na versão "A bancarrota surge como a consequência mais natural..."

O colapso é o último método de simplificação

Novo governo, novo PEC, o saque fiscal aumenta uma vez mais... talvez o colapso seja mesmo a salvação de quem trabalha. Recordo Clay Shirky:
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"In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output (Moi ici: Juro que ainda ontem à tarde me lembrei disto ao passar numa rua quasi só para peões, ao lado do hotel Dighton em Oliveira de Azeméis, e que nos meus tempos de infância era parte da Estrada Nacional nº 1, a estrada mais importante do país) — but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost. (Moi ici: IP4 versus A qualquer coisa, ou A1+A29+A32 todas paralelas)

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.(Moi ici: Percebo melhor a loucura grega... e a nossa) Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites. (Moi ici: Os incumbentes. Tanto podem ser uma empresa do regime, como os instalados na carreira da Função Pública)

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification." (Moi ici: Há uma poesia nisto...)
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ADENDA: Ontem à noite, 23h25, enquanto ouvia na SIC-N Helena Garrido a justificar a razoabilidade de criar um país com dois regimes, um para os incumbentes demográficos, e outro para os jovens, para salvar os dreitos adquiridos, escrevi no twitter: "Helena Garrido a dar argumentos que favorecem o sentimento positivo com a ideia da bancarrota do Estado português" é a derradeira alternativa de simplificação"

Um corno de Amaltéia ...

"Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years. (Moi ici: BTW, eu lembro-me de ver "A Família Partridge")
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Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.
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A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.
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Any sense of how much of that giant block of free time is being redirected?
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Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year."
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Uma perspectiva interessante sobre a ocupação do tempo livre, do tempo que podemos usar como muito bem entendemos. Uma galáxia de surpresas, de novidades, tudo sem o controlo do Estado ou de um patrão, sem horários, sem salário...
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Trechos retirados de "Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution"