Difference between revisions of "Resilience"

Revision as of 13:11, 29 March 2020

Full Title or Meme

Resilience of any system is incompatible with capitalism's pathologies; that is with highly efficient utilization of resources.

Context

About 7 years ago, the White House introduced The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), an initiative collaboratively bringing together the private sector, advocacy groups, public sector agencies and other organizations to improve the privacy, security and convenience of online transactions. The Identity Ecosystem envisioned in the NSTIC is an online environment where individuals and organizations are able to trust each other because they follow agreed-upon standards to obtain and authenticate their digital identities – and the digital identities of devices.

To achieve this objective, the NSTIC established guiding principles for the creation of an Identity Ecosystem, developed with identity solutions that are:

1. Privacy-enhancing and voluntary,
2. Secure and Resilient,
3. Interoperable and
4. Cost-effective and easy to use.

• Used as source of the principles for the Identity Ecosystem Framework (IDEF).

Problems

• It seems to be a feature of any component of a Living System, (which includes all of societies imposed structures) that the most successful systems migrate towards solutions which make for the most efficient use of the resources at their disposal. For the system as a whole to be Resilient, the inevitable failure of any subsystem that is highly leverage, but not imperil the whole system, or it will not survive change.
• The size of change most likely follow a power law, or the small changes are more frequent than the larger changes. If a system is resilient only to small changes, the the large changes will imperil the system.^[1]
• An example of a big changes brought about by the COVID-19 virus in 2020 was caused by United States Capitalists move to off-shoring manufacturers that involved significant amounts of manual labor as well as the just-in-time logistics theory which meant that any inventory was just unused capital. One example was the manufacture of the face masks that were critical to the health of the working combating the virus. In the mean-time the Trump White House had eliminated the disease experts in the National Security Office. The result was "A very American story about capitalism consuming our resiliency.^[2] Both of these efficiencies made the country susceptible to the shortage of many clinical components, as no planning or control over the recovery of that capability. Note that the was a strategic inventory of medical supplies, link masks, but that it was depleted in the H1N1 virus emergency in 2009 and was never replenished.
• During the reign of Jack Welch at General Electric the company prospered wildly as a result of applying vulture capitalism principles at ever level of the company. Welch retired a hero. The subsequent near-total collapse of the company seems to not have been his fault, but any student of planning and control knows that optimizing for only the short term effects will eventually lead to a situation that was not planned for and cannot be controlled.

Solutions

• In the end, each system must determine the level of efficiency and resilience that it desires. Too much caution will miss out many small changes that occur every day. Too much recklessness will result the the inevitable failure in the long term.

Design and Test

• Most design looks only at the common use cases.
• Design for Resilience requires use cases that are at the edge of performance and attack from malicious or untrained users.
• Test for Resilience requires overloading the system both from a load and from an attack perspective.

References

1. ↑ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) Random House ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2
2. ↑ Farhad Manjoo, How the World's Richest Country ran out of a 75-Cent Face Mask. (2020-03-26) The New York Times p A22