jumpingfish

They went up. They looked around. They came back down. What a way to start the day.

Krugman: America Has Become a Digital Narco-State

Imagine … if the United States were to legalize … heroin… [It] would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry [and] would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does.

…

If this story strikes you as extreme or implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.

Or replace “heroin” with “plastics” or “fossil fuels” or “opioids” or … 

Unbounded GDP growth. Ash nazg durbatulûk.

Search around a bit. Look for the terms “Airbus 320” and “radiation” and “grounding”. 

What you’ll find in most cases is a pseudo-technical summary of the so called “root cause” of the problem that led to the recent emergency Airbus 320 recall. It’s the sun, you see — solar radiation corrupted the flight computers. But search a bit more. What’s the prescribed fix? It’s to revert to the previous version of the flight software. 

Wait. What?

Reverting the software eliminates solar radiation corrupting the avionics!? Of course not. Reverting the software restores a capability that the avionics previously had: to be resilient to bad data. 

And so, it seems, it was not the sun. Not the radiation. Not corrupted data. These are proximate causes. The problem stemmed from a software update. Yet even that is a proximate cause. Don’t blame the update. Software mistakes happen.

No, this was a faulty update to critical flight software that didn’t get caught during testing. And so the root cause was a breakdown in the testing process.

The sun is off the hook.

“Let me tell you how my day started, Mr. Hasan,” Matt said.

He was fidgeting in his chair, something he doesn’t usually do. He was particularly animated, waving his hands around with a huge smile on his face. And he wasn’t waiting for me to ask him how it started.

“My dad and I went to Taco Deli,” he said. “We go there in the mornings.”

“Mmm…Taco Deli,” I mused. 

“Let me tell you what I had…”

“An Otto,” I said, imagining the refried black beans, the bacon, the avocado, the cheese…

“That’s right!” he said. “But, let me tell you the best part.”

I was thinking chips. Coffee. Maybe another Otto.

“Three Ottos,” he exclaimed rather loudly. The students around him were listening intently. “My dad said I could have three. And I added an egg to each one! And that was just the beginning of…” 

The bell rang. It was time to pass out the Unit 3 test.