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Elvis wrote:I can't think offhand of an especially worthy site to mention that people wouldn't already be familiar with, but thanks for the atlasobscura link---I've just been reading up on ancient history, including some of the places shown at atlasobscura. Looks like a great adjunct to my reading. Ruins like the ones at Samothraki fascinate me no end. I can see I'll spending some time on that site!
Complexity is an important issue in our times because it "describes" the inevitability of certain processes occurring in systems. While we might discuss exactly what is bound to happen exactly when, the overall drive and direction are indisputable: systems, as they grow, increase their levels of complexity, until they no longer can. That is, until it’s their very complexity that inhibits further growth. Then a move towards decreased complexity, or increased simplicity, must begin, a move that can be extremely painful, since parts of the system become redundant and must die off.
This is very relevant to our economic situation today. Pandurangi provides a nice example: much of the stimulus packages the US and other governments have issued will never reach the intended goals; the complexity of our societies forces much of it into the hands of all the separate layers the societies are composed of (example: 159 different US government institutions are involved in processing Obama's new health care bill).
In the same vein, you might look at our debt conundrum through the "eyes of complexity". Increasingly complex debt instruments have increased debts (disguised as easy credit), whether they are personal, corporate or governmental, to such levels that they can no longer grow -we can't pay them off anymore without assuming additional debt-. And since we have built our entire financial and economic systems on credit -and hence debt-, there must follow a period of deleveraging. A warning sign should be that for every additional dollar put into the system, returns today are diminishing to the point that they threaten to become negative.
It's hard to see how this could not be extremely painful for most of us. Joseph Tainter's pivotal work is called the Collapse of Complex Societies for a reason. In nature, in physics, systems don't collapse gradually, or very rarely so; in 99% of cases, it's more like sticking a needle into a balloon.
norton ash wrote:Lemonparty...urrrrrrrrrrrrk... kak. Not recommended. Unless live action clips that could be re-enactments of the Aristocrats joke sound good to you.
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