A friend wrote, “…I have soured on what can really be done. The EPA and the state Environment Department are easily bought out… .” Sounds like a rabid tree-hugging environmentalist. Actually, I think he votes with the conservative cause.
Citizens are everywhere discouraged, feeling that their governmental agencies and the people in those agencies lack integrity. “Briefcase-carrying bureaucrats” Continue reading
RCRA (reckra) exemption? Sounds like the Shawshank Redemption. But this is no movie. It’s a story with few evil villains and handsome heroes, but plenty of villainy and heroic struggle. It’s an illustration of how a self-destructive behavior emerges in our supposedly-free society. Continue reading
In our society, we create new laws (e.g. Medicare) by legislation as done by congress, state legislatures, county supervisors, or town councils. We create new regulations (speed limits and plumbers’ license requirements) through agencies who get their authority from higher legislation. Each law or regulation is intended to fix a previous problem, and sure enough, each law or regulation generates at least one new problem. Continue reading
A system is two or more things acting on each other. Like a weight bouncing on a spring. The weight pushes on the spring and the spring pushes back on the weight, with the result that the weight can bounce up and town. That’s a simple system. The scientific concept of complex systems arose during the last twenty years as the advances in computers enabled scientists to investigate nonlinear systems. Continue reading
So what? I see the world changing, largely due to technologies that few people understand and even fewer feel empowered to control. The world has always been changing, but now the rate of change is proportional to the sum of all changes that have occurred before. That’s what we mean by the term, “exponential,” a term used so often in the media that it is accepted as meaning “large,” without the understanding that it means larger than large. The purpose of these pages is to offer an analytical review of where we’ve come, and where we’re going, and why. The WHY is embedded in the unnoticed rules by which humans affect each other. Understanding the rules by which the individual parts affect each other—that’s the key to understanding and to controlling complex systems, about which these pages will say more. Continue reading