Replacement and repair. Cost is high and it requires complex methods/parts.
Conditional: If electricity isn't produced locally, there is a dependence on a remote power source.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a good example of “true cost” economics that is not taught in business schools, schools of public administration, or any form of government. “True cost” and “360 degree cradle to grave” analytics is what a mature intelligence community should be pioneering.
We have all experienced the benefits of dialogue when we openly and thoughtfully confront issues. We have also experienced the frustration of interminable discussion that does not lead to progress. The Institute for 21st Century Agoras and CWA Ltd are dedicated to the application and installation of the Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD), and the use of the CogniScopeTM software, in designing and conducting Co-Laboratories of Democracy, which enable large, diverse groups of stakeholders to dialogue and generate positive results. Many group processes engender enthusiasm and good feeling as people share their concerns and hopes with each other. Co-Laboratories of democracy go beyond this initial euphoria to:
Discover root causes;
Adopt consensual action plans;
Develop teams dedicated to implementing those plans; and
Generate lasting bonds of respect, trust, and cooperation.
JOURNAL: Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire
Here's some thinking that draws on decision making theory. It's very much in line with how the late John Boyd (America's best strategist) would approach it.
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One of the most interesting underlying reasons for the decline of the Soviet Union, and soon the US, is misallocation of resources due to central planning.
Misallocation in this context means that year after year, decade after decade, the wealth of a nation is spent on the wrong things. The wrong projects are funded. The wrong things are built. The wrong things were bought and so on. Eventually, the accumulation of bad investment made them so fragile that even the smallest shock could topple them. The reason for this the Soviet's reliance on central planning. A system of economic governance where small group of people — in the Soviet Unions case bureaucrats — had all the decision making power. They decided what was spent and where. They decided badly.
Why did they decide badly? The massive economy of a modern superstate is too complex for a small group of people to manage. Too much data. Too many uncertainties. Too many moving parts.
The only way to manage an economy as complex as this is to allow massively parallel decision making. A huge number of people making small decisions, that in aggregate, are able to process more data, get better data (by being closer to the problem), and apply more brainpower to weighing alternatives than any centralized decision making group.
Of course, the misallocation due to centralized decision making wasn't supposed to be a vulnerability of the West. To allocate resources in our economy, we had a more efficient mechanism: markets. Markets are supposed to be a mechanism that allows massively parallel decision making.
Those assumptions are proving false. The succession of market bubbles and finally, the global financial collpse of 2008 is prima facie that gross misallocation is occurring. The wealth of the West, particularly the US, is being spent on the wrong things year after year, decade after decade. We are now as fragile as the Soviet Union in the late 80's.
It's impossible to fully measure the impact of disruptive attack on a complex system until it actually plays out. Why? There might be hidden negative or positive feedback loops in the system that either dampen or accelerate the initial damage of the disruptive attack. That's the problem with the fight in the US Congress over the debt ceiling. The system that is being upset is soooo complex that we don't have a clue what the damage will be or how much damage has already been done until it plays out.
What we do know is that the financial and economic system that is being disrupted is extremely leveraged. Further, the entire global economy is entirely dependent on massive deficit spending just to avoid another collapse. Which means that nearly any disruption can result in damage far in excess of the original attack. It is also tightly coupled on a global level. This means that any event in Washington can quickly spread to the rest of world in seconds. The best analogy I can think of at the moment is a pilot of an F-16 trying to rewire his cockpit's instrumentation while in a high G turn to evade a bogey on his six. Needless to say, it's unlikely to end well.
The only silver lining I can take from this is that all of the factors causing a slow unwind of the current system have the potential of being accelerated. That's good? Yes, if only for one reason. We're not as bad off as we would be in a couple of years if this current trajectory continued. The problems would only be worse and our ability to recover from them less.
Regardless, take this opportunity to really think about how you can make a living and protect your family in a full blown global economic depression with all of its negative consequences. A six month stockpile of canned/freeze dried goods and two dozen boxes of ammo won't get you through it. You need a real game plan.
In 2001 the Co-Intelligence Institute released a breakthrough compilation of more than 100 democratic innovations. At that time there was no other comparable resource on the web.
This year we decided — and began — to update this list, to fix its broken links, to add new innovations and resources, and to make it into a wiki to allow other people to add democratic innovations they knew about. You can see our initial progress online.
While preparing a grant proposal to expand the project, we researched the web for other lists of democratic and participatory practices and resources. We were surprised to find quite a few.
We decided that to add the most value in the context of this great wealth of resources, our project should
The times they are a' changing. I was asked to comment on the recently published Reference: Protecting Sensitive “Open” Information and do so gladly. The author of that work means well, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the substance of what he expouses. It is simply not reasonable nor feasible in context.
I know this better than most because I have been here before. In 1990-1994 Winn Schwartau sparked a public debate and ultimately testified to Congress on the likelihood of an “electronic Pearl Harbor.” Congress chose to ignore him just as it had ignored all the well-documented warnings on Peak Oil, Peak Water, AIDS, and so on in the late 1970's. Peter Black and I and others published articles outlining how easily America could be taken down, and how irresponsible the government and the private sector were being about the fundamentals of information security and data integrity.
“Congress must take the lead in challenging the laws and practices that have allowed excessive secrecy to become the dominant feature of our national security culture,” the American Civil Liberties Union urged in a new report on government secrecy.
“The excessive secrecy that hides how the government pursues its national security mission is undermining the core principles of democratic government and injuring our nation in ways no terrorist act ever could,” wrote Mike German and Jay Stanley, the authors of the ACLU report. “It is time for Congress to make the secrecy problem an issue of the highest priority, and enact a sweeping overhaul of our national security establishment to re-impose democratic controls.”
The report provides a fluid account of current secrecy policy, along with a critique from first principles as well as from recent experience. Highly readable and thoroughly footnoted, the 51 page report covers a spectrum of secrecy issues, from the state secrets privilege to secret law to the role of national security whistleblowers, and a lot more. It concludes with a menu of recommended reforms that Congress could and, the authors say, should undertake.
