Watching Sausage Making

Nobody asked but …

Have you looked under the hood of your car.  Unless you have a huge collection of information, as well as the gift of tolerance for its complexity, you had better leave that jumble of kludged systems to someone who does.  Sovereignty is knowing when the division of labor works.  Sovereignty is understanding comparative advantage.

The innards of an automobile are a kludge because they are the 4-dimensional accumulation of work-arounds.  Each system plugged into a car has a place (space, length/width/depth) and a time (a historical appropriateness as a system, supersystem, and subsystem — contemporaneous with its role in the whole system).  Typically, the newer system is orchestrated among the older systems.  The existing, working parts are not re-engineered around the newer.  Therefore, the resulting overall system is a collection of sub-systems that work together — more or less well.

In the sense demonstrated above, all systems are kludges — Wall Street, the Pentagon, a commercial airline, schools, POTUS, self-ownership, ad infinitum, ad absurdem, ad nauseum, …

How shall they be revolutionized?

— Kilgore Forelle

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