The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. Nearly every major system in use today is chock-full of single points of failure that could have catastrophic consequences but we keep chugging along, rarely stopping to think about the "risk debt" we have accumulated - right up until a catastrophe. I don't know if that should make me feel more secure or terrified.
Take power plants for example: they are all interconnected in large regional grids and deal with such large quantities of power that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process that has to be coordinated with the rest of the system. You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output - all while accounting for geographic distribution losses, predicted load changes, and so on. Theoretically, any discrepancies (like power flow being too high due to phase difference) would activate breakers and other safeties should an adversarial actor decide to bring a power plant online online willy-nilly. Unfortunately, the last few decades have shown that those safeties are barely able to handle common scenarios, let alone an attack. There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US, we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that.
If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces.
> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust.
The way I see it, this is a feature, not a bug. The energy costs of trying to build a civilization like ours on trustless systems would be prohibitive (and no one would be happy about the amount of bureaucracy it would involve).
Trust is not only vital to the continuous existence of our civilization, it's also a very powerful tool for advancing it. That's why the growing lack of trust of the general population worries me. The rule of law works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. Money works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. That's why, for instance, I'm very critical of mainsteam journalism and media platforms - all they seem to be doing these days is to sow discord, burning people's trust in institutions to get their eyeballs. That's why I've been so critical of Uber since the very day they entered the taxi market, as by breaking laws and getting away with it they were eroding trust in the rule of law (half of the blame goes to municipal governments that failed to immediately ban them).
In my view, trust is so important that working to destroy it is antisocial behaviour, and one that should be punished swiftly and severely. Much more than it is these days.
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> If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting.
IMO the examples you give aren't very powerful. Nothing significant happened because of Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches, nor the Cambridge Analytica fiasco led to anything of relevance - when compared with the previous scenario of power grid failures. I'd use the 2008 financial crisis as a better example.
> GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces.
I think you are spot on in the first paragraph that trust is critical for existence and advance of civilization.
That trust somehow builds consistently in small groups -- humans seem good at quickly deciding, based on a few personal experiences, whether to deal with / trust another person. The major challenge is that this approach does not scale -- one does not trust strangers in a large city. Using a few trusted agents (newspapers, TV, etc.) for things you cannot personally see and assess kind-of worked 50+ years ago, but that model has now failed.
IMO building a framework of trust in a larger, denser, more interconnected world, is one of the major existential issues for a modern civilization. Allowing folks to organize in smaller groups (and set their own rules) and not forcing mixing based on federal laws might be a start. It might work better that universal doctrines ("trust the state"), universal technology ("trust the app") or behavior changes ("trust a stranger"). My 2c.
> The way I see it, this is a feature, not a bug. The energy costs of trying to build a civilization like ours on trustless systems would be prohibitive (and no one would be happy about the amount of bureaucracy it would involve).
Oh, absolutely. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe in a trust-based cooperative world. I mean more to emphasize that we aren't really doing any analysis on the risk debt we are accumulating through profit driven global development. Without putting some time and thought into it, we can't make decisions about which risks are acceptable to keep long term and which ones need to be revisited.
> Trust is not only vital to the continuous existence of our civilization, it's also a very powerful tool for advancing it. That's why the growing lack of trust of the general population worries me. The rule of law works only as long as most people trust in its implementation.
Again, I agree, although I don't how you'd go about justly identifying such behavior, let alone enforcing and punishing it fairly.
> What about the Internet? ;).
GPS is a special case because of how expensive geosynchronous access is and how few the points of failure are. The US could just turn off the spigot or Russia/China could shoot down the satellites - the GPS signal they send out is basically a giant homing beacon so it's not as difficult as shooting down spy satellites - and that's that. The tech for laying fiber and connecting to the rest of the world is far cheaper and more accessible making it much harder to disconnect an adversary completely. It's easier to trust a system built to be decentralized instead of dependent on a single constellation.
> Again, I agree, although I don't how you'd go about justly identifying such behavior, let alone enforcing and punishing it fairly.
It's a difficult problem and I'm not sure what even approaches a good - and stable over time - solution; naïve approaches would quickly degenerate into totalitarianism...
> GPS is a special case because of how expensive geosynchronous access is and how few the points of failure are.
Fair enough :). I was just addressing the "created by and for the US armed forces" angle.
Satellites are fragile, but they're also very expensive to shoot down. So I think GNSS systems are pretty safe, as points of failure go. Random rogue actors won't be able to afford destroying them, and if anti-satellite missiles start flying, we'll have much bigger problems than lack of satellite navigation systems.
It should be noted that you don’t need satellites in GSO to triangulate signals between satellites and the ground. It’s not a much more difficult technical problem to have a table of the full ephemeris data for a bunch of satellites in lower orbit, and use that information in GPS receivers. It’s just that our current chips wouldn’t be compatible with receiving data such a system.
IMO the Kessler Syndrome is overblown as a risk. Most of our space infrastructure would go to hell in such a scenario, but it’s not an existential threat like it’s often made out to be.
> IMO the Kessler Syndrome is overblown as a risk. Most of our space infrastructure would go to hell in such a scenario, but it’s not an existential threat like it’s often made out to be.
It's not a threat to existence of life (or civilization) - though losing satellites would have severe economical and geopolitical consequences. GNSS systems are one thing, but then there are also weather satellites, climate observatories, satellite comms, emergency beacon tracking and spy satellites.
The main worry here is that a full-blown case of Kessler syndrome would simply lock us out of space access for couple decades or centuries, depending on the severity of it. You could forget about satellites. Space probes might work if launched straight into some transfer orbit. Manned missions would be most likely deemed too dangerous.
Existential was the wrong word to use. What I mean is geared towards your second paragraph - that we won’t be locked out of space. Our current systems are in a pretty narrow range of ideal orbits which would get cluttered up. But there’s a lot of room in sub-optimal orbits that would still be clear, and can still be used for everything we do today. Just at a little higher technical cost.
> That's why, for instance, I'm very critical of mainsteam journalism and media platforms - all they seem to be doing these days is to sow discord, burning people's trust in institutions to get their eyeballs
And yet here you are, sowing distrust in the media!
This isn't an indictment - I do agree with you on both fronts. I'm pointing out that it's decay-turtles all the way down.
The issue with trust is that it doesn't scale. Or really, as soon as people start trusting symbols (eg institutions), concentrated value is created, which then is profitable to arbitrage away. With the overall trend of increasing communications, we are better able to observe this behind-the-scenes selling out, and thus our trust is eroded.
If we wish to restore faith in our institutions (ie make them trustable again), we need to move their philosophy and governance from "trust" towards "trust but verify".
> And yet here you are, sowing distrust in the media!
Touché.
> Or really, as soon as people start trusting symbols (eg institutions), concentrated value is created, which then is profitable to arbitrage away.
That is the most succinct way of expressing this that I've ever seen. Thanks! It also explains the problem in terms of the same forces that also drive markets, which sounds very plausible (due to simplicity).
Beware that I haven't gotten much utility out of it beyond unbridled cynicism.
Amazon making bank by coasting on a shared hallucination that their prices are competitive isn't really a big deal, societally. The popping of that bubble won't be a big deal either.
Having people view peace officers akin to an occupying military force is a problem (but so was the routine criminality of police before the median person became aware). The troubling bit is that rather than these institutions attempting to self-reform (eg just start prosecuting uniformed criminals), they seem to be digging their heels in - aiming to preserve their power rather than aiming to preserve their justification.
Of course this is the same model-precessing modus operandi common to all established organizations, which is why they die so hard. I think the ethos of creative destruction is so baked into our society that we really don't know how to deal with these organizations that have been adopted as institutions and will not simply be left to fail in isolation.
It's a great way to frame the current political climate and several crucial periods in American history. The author didn't exactly phrase it that way (he is a historian not an economist) but I'd recommend The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White from the Oxford History of the United States series. He starts out the acknowledgments "I have written a book about a time of rapid and disorienting change and failed politics, and now I finish it in a parallel universe" and goes into great lengths about the failure of institutions as they tried to rebuild during the hyper polarized post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Reading it is quite unsettling at times because the later years look almost exactly what is happening now with privatization and erosion of government - symbols that were rapidly arbitraged to the highest bidder.
Trust is two way. One of the reasons uber got away with things is the taxi system already wasn't well trusted. Municipal governments didn't help me restricting taxi licenses to increase prices. That is uber got away with it in part because the rule of law had already failed.
A default trust society can be much more successful than default deceive/don't trust society. The cost of default don't trust is high. I would say that the wide adoption of the Christian value of honesty with everyone is probably one of the main reasons for the rise of western Civilization. If we decide to go back to a default don't trust society, we will loose something very valuable. We should try very hard to avoid that.
The problem with excluding religion is that it's relevant. Imagine excluding any other branch of philosophy (science, math, photography, morality, logic), and the effect it would have on conversation. It would make no sense, and it would make it impossible to have meaningful discussions about many topics, as well as impossible to arrive at certain truthful conclusions about them. To exclude religion is essentially a (very closed-minded) religion unto itself.
I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector.
The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long.
As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe.
Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival
It can be. You can trust someone to have done the job like they claim, but can still verify it to make sure they did it correctly. A second set of eyes rarely hurt.
That's not quite right; the point of "trust but verify"[0] is to assume in the short term that they did the job they claim (correctly, even), and start doing work that depends on it, but verify in the background, and roll things back if they didn't. This gives you some of the benefits of a high trust environment while still coping with the occational lying scumbag.
Of course, if it's fast/cheap enough, you can go with the much superior "verify and don't even waste time asking", but that's often impractical.
0: Well, the steel-man interpretation anyway; the historical version seems to just be a euphemism for "Don't trust, but claim you do so they look bad if they try to complain about it.".
I think the whole bone of contention with the statement is pretty much a semantic argument.
What is "trust"?
In your scenario, I wouldn't classify it as trust at all, yet I know I've used that word to describe something similar when describing building software.
But if you wanted to pin me down, I'd waffle and say, yeah, I'm not really talking about trust. If I trusted function X, I wouldn't check anything about it, I'd assume it's right.
So in your scenario, I wouldn't classify what you were doing as platonic trust either. I wouldn't call it trust unless the verification came when the deliverable was due. But then by then, your trust has been violated.
For instance I ordered something online. I trust the information FedEx gives me is accurate. It says my package is delivered. I am going home and I expect to see the package at my door. I trust my neighborhood/apt complex enough that I don't expect it to be stolen. That is trust. I don't have anything to confirm what I currently believe, but I still believe it.
In contrast, I stopped trusting the USPS at my old apartment. Because a couple of times, they've claimed a failed delivery attempt even when I was home. So I stopped expecting things to get delivered when they said they would be when they would come through USPS.
And I never trusted packages to be delivered to the house I lived at before that place. I'd get things delivered to work.
When people tell me they "trust, but verify", I tell them it's either or. You can trust or you can verify. When they tell me they trust the results of my work but want to verify it, I explicitly tell them, "I don't want you to trust it, I want you to double-check me to make sure I got it right. I don't fully trust myself. Accuracy is important, I want a critical eye on this in case I missed something. I don't mind being wrong if it means we are right."
> I think the whole bone of contention with the statement is pretty much a semantic argument.
> What is "trust"?
Actually I was talking exclusively about the phrase "trust but verify". Absent context, "trust" is like "know"; it's a useful shorthand but shouldn't be used if you're trying to speak rigorously about what's actually happening.
It's a bit parochial to hear someone in the twenty-first century describe honesty as a particularly Christian value. You do know you're talking to the whole world here? Most human cultures have valued honesty to a similar degree. Even many animal communities value honesty.
Religion has historically and continues to play a major role in geopolitics... there's nothing parochial about it. The Christian belief system was objectively instrumental in the creation of the West's institutions, system of government, beliefs about trade, etc. You don't have to be religious (as I am not) for this to be true.
People, especially Americans, conflate Christianity with Western culture. But this is erroneous thinking:
1) Western liberal values are not co-extensive with Christianity. Christianity is geographically much larger. This has been true historically, and even more true today with the rise of Christian nations like South Korea and various nations in Southern Africa.
2) Western liberal values came to predominate in Europe centuries, even millennia, after Europe was Christianized.
3) Many Western liberal values are easily traced to pre-Christian movements, such as Greek Stoicism.
4) The Christianity of most Western Europeans today is not the Christianity of centuries ago, let alone millennia ago. The Protestant Revolution was like a giant flask where people took Christian doctrines and mixed them together with contemporary civil and philosophical values which emerged from the Enlightenment and then the dawn of the scientific and industrial ages. It's one thing to say that Christianity was conducive to the emergence of those other phenomena; it's quite another to say that they were Christian.
1) Christianity has been a major export of the West through missionaries and colonization. It was hardly the native religion of, say, Mexico or the Philippines.
2) That's hardly a compelling case against the influence of religion on Western values. It could even be a contributor, or neutral.
3) These values were well-documented but, for whatever reason, did not spread to the Muslim or Hindu world first. Islam had its brief progressive renaissance but was not able to sustain liberal values over the long-term. There are some small exceptions - Ismaili Muslims are quite liberal - but they're a tiny fraction of the Islamic world.
4) America was essentially founded by religious zealots and/or adherents to marginalized religions. The very architecture of early America - the gothic styling of Boston, for example - is of that era and persists. You can't wipe out that kind of influence in 100 years.
I'm not saying religion is the ONLY factor, but I find it odd that people try to ignore the impact it's had on the shaping of the modern world. I'm an atheist so I view this more as a historical fact - I'm not a fan of organized religion and would be perfectly happy if it went away.
It's a problem of timing and geography. Eastern Orthodox falls under the Christian religious umbrella, but it's very different under the surface demonstrating how western culture has influenced Christianity.
The Protestant Reformation was a religious movement, but ended up importing a lot of western beliefs into Christianity. Democracy for example is a western belief, Christianity is closely tied to Kings.
Nobody is arguing that religion did not have a substantial and dramatic impact on western culture, though it's disputable whether much of that impact was at all positive, let alone a net positive.
EDIT: wahern's reply above is far better than mine. Read that one instead. I'm removing most of what I originally wrote except for this bit:
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I would argue that Christianity has influenced western culture far less than western culture has influenced Christianity. And that the key benefit attributable to Christianity—insofar as it was the lucky religion which happened be closest to the people who built western civilisation—is arguably its adaptable and relatively non-invasive nature compared to many of its contemporaries.
We do have a parallel universe. Christianity and "the West" are not co-extensive. Christianity was and is much more widespread. The West emerged from a corner of the Christian universe, and what made that corner unique is readily distinguishable from Christianity. At best one could say that the Christian universe was relatively more conducive to the emergence of Western values.
For example, Christianity is tolerant of the concept that God primarily operates indirectly through physical laws, a concept which was normatively rejected early in Islam (circa 1100). Thus, Christianity was relatively more conducive to the emergence of science. But, Christianity is hardly the only religion so tolerant, so it's not like it deserves special credit in that regard. Indeed, this tolerance is sort of a fluke and really a vestige of Roman and Greek influence--influence that Muslim scholars were deliberately rejecting.
Western philosophy predates the Christian belief system. It's slightly more accurate to say Christianity was influenced by western culture than western culture was influenced by Christianity. (Though clearly adoption occurred in both directions.)
Christmas trees and holly are obvious, but compare old vs new testament and it's much deeper than that. On top of that you get the Protestant Revolution which really westernized Christianity.
I've not heard honesty considered a peculiarly Christian virtue. They're sort of orthogonal.
Perhaps you're thinking of guilt and conscience, which means people might think that not being affirmatively honest could be considered wrong. Christianity is sometimes conflated with guilt culture (which emphasizes personal conscience), but Western guilt culture comes from Greek Stoicism and it took awhile to permeate through Europe--much longer than Christianity (like millennia longer). And there are plenty of modern Christian converts (entire countries, in fact) which are devoutly Christian but absolutely have not internalized a guilt culture. Very little, if anything, about Christianity requires a guilt culture--indeed, all of the Old and much of the New Testament is perfectly consonant with a shame/honor culture.
Note that not telling the truth is not the same as lying. For example, you could choose simply not to disclosure unless asked. Also, the Abrahamic commandment, "thou shall not lie", aka "thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor", was a legal rule. Most societies have this rule. Twisting it into a personal moral rule about how you go about your daily life is a result of our guilt-based culture which, again, is separate from Christianity, per se.
Barring the Christianity angle, I strongly agree. Trust is a very powerful optimization that humans have figured out. It gives us absurd efficiencies across the board - because without it, we have to add lots of complexity to verify things, and then some more to patch loopholes.
That's why I'm suspicious of technologies and systems that are meant to be trustless. They seem like a step in the wrong direction.
One, it's stated vaguely. What would qualify? Which religion, and which society? You would likely claim that there was some society somewhere which already had such a standard, and that therefore religion had nothing to do with it. It's too easy for you to dismiss any example because your requirements are not well defined.
Second, how far back are you willing to go? Go far enough back in human existence and we can't trace the provenance of a certain moral value.
Third, it depends on your existing beliefs about religion, creation, etc. If you believe that humans were created by a creator being who endowed them with certain abilities and tendencies, then who's to say whether a certain tendency was a matter of religion or society? If one believes that the tendency first came innate from our creation, and later was made explicit in revelation, was that tendency from religion or society?
On the other hand, if you believe that life happened spontaneously and that humans gradually evolved from single-cell organisms, then you have already eliminated religion as a possible source of anything, because no religion would be true, in which case everything would fall under the category of "society." (Alternatively, anyone can claim, "A god spoke to me and you should do what I say," and that would qualify as religion. In which case, I could claim that a god spoke to me, and that you should therefore believe everything I say. And then "religion" ceases to be a meaningful category, leaving us once again with only "society.")
So, as you can see, your request is not so simple, and is really just fodder for useless Internet arguments. If you want to discuss it seriously, you will have to address these matters first.
Let me further specify my request: provide a documented example of any religion (existing or disappeared) that introduced a new moral value which was not present (and documented) in the society where said religion appeared (absorbed moral value), or in societies with which said society was in contact (imported moral value). No need to go back to prehistoric periods.
This is completely orthogonal to the belief question: that is, you could perfectly believe that Jesus is the son of God, and still you will observe that all moral values introduced by Christianity were already present in the existing society.
Note: actually, to be precise, discussion with believers will always reach a point where rational discussion completely breaks down, since, by definition, humans can not understand the ways of God. At some point I will struggle to understand a situation which says the "wall is black and the wall is white", and a believer will rightly point to me that understanding this is simply over my head, and that I just need to accept it as it is.
Even easier, you can take out critical parts of substations and other electrical infrastructure with a high-powered rifle.
The world lives on the knife-edge of chaos. It's trivial to cause mass panic by driving a car into a group of people, or by a multitude of other means.
The only reason society manages to even exist is that we generally trust each other. It's the fundamental underpinning of society. Most people are generally law abiding citizens. The reason that people don't murder each other isn't because it's illegal, it's because they don't want to.
Society relies on the fact that we are generally nice people.
I would argue it's because there is no financial incentive to destroy the grid. Humans are willing to make entire species (overfishing, poaching, etc...) extinct for a quick buck.
I'm genuinely surprised at this and and some of the other comments. I'm not sure why people find this a) unexpected or b) frightening. Contrary to popular belief the whole world isn't out to get "us" and we're not on the verge of imminent global societal collapse at the hands of evil foreign powers and terrorists. No more than at any other point in history, anyway.
Many of these SPOFs are tolerable because attackers are easy to track down, and those points of failure are not so bad as to destroy the ability of the system to track down and punish attackers. Where things get scary are when this deterrent effect disappears:
1. The attacker might be too powerful to deter, or might be able to make a coordinated attack that would prevent their punishment. A general great-power war would bring down many of these systems in the first few hours.
2. The attacker might be able to avoid detection or identification. This is the bucket most of those security fall under - if an attacker can take advantage of these systems anonymously, there's no deterrent effect.
Cambridge Analytica is a bit of a hybrid case; it was used by powerful probably-state actors for deniable attacks.
Almost all human interactions involve trust. Political systems just exist because enough people trust in them. Same for money, juridical
systems, laws, contracts, etc.
That's why people who attack trust (mainly social engineers, but other types as well) annoy me so much. Not if they are doing it because someone asked them to, but when they abuse trust and then act like it's a bug of the system and are all high and mighty that they got away with it.
Pompous social engineer blog post: "Dunkin Donuts is laughably insecure. I was able to steal lots of donuts by lying and abusing the trust of employees. Hahaha, Dunkin Donuts security sucks, what a joke. They don't even question that my story was completely fake and that I was just a good actor, what a trash company"
Could you give any example of such catastrophes? While I understand there are lots of such points of failure, relatively speaking, I personally feel the consequence of them failing is often exaggerated, and more importantly, human civilization are really good at make quick fix when it matters.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 [0] was set off by a trees taking out a power line. It caused a local failure that increased the load in surrounding lines, tripping breakers, which increased the load in further surrounding lines, etc, cascading into a blackout over a huge chunk of North America.
I think there's a good reason for the trust as well: mutually assured destruction.
Sure, you can knock out a power grid with seemingly trivial means. But once you do, you're just as shit out of luck as the other guys.
It's pretty much the "too big to fail" scenario. Too much of the infrastructure we've become dependent on is just not worth taking down in an attack. Sure, GPS may have a single point of failure... but GPS is kind of useful for you as well so you don't really want to knock it out. You can't afford to replace it.
It's like these systems are just sitting around saying "Fuck with me and I will burn this whole place to the fucking ground. The fucking ground"
Civilization has proven very resilient in the face of one of its hidden SPOFs being destroyed/attacked. The same is true for two and three of those SPOFs being damaged at the same time.
I'm not convinced there wouldn't be a system degradation cliff after that point of 3+ SPOFs being attacked, e.g. a GPS issue, a massive BGP hack, Tier 3 Comm. or equivalent outage, and a DNS issue--all around the same time.
That "cliff" could cause a biblical amount of damage.
I'm sure those could all be mitigated, but the idea of them failing all at once, even coincidentally, is terrifying.
> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust.
That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive.
> that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process
Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day.
> You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output
This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations.
> There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US
There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1]
> we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that.
Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level.
> If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting.
Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP?
> I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces.
What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another.
> That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive.
The entirety of modern economic and psychological theory can be reduced to "it depends on incentives." That's utterly unhelpful.
> Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day.
I said "bringing a power plant online." You said "connected and disconnected from the grid." They're not even remotely the same thing: the latter is a tiny step in implementing the former.
> This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations.
Uhm... what? Power flow adjustments have been "done by computers" since at least the 1970s and the frequency is only relevant in so much as it sets physical limits on how fast geographically distributed hardware can respond to changes in the system. It doesn't really matter what the frequency is, as long as everyone agrees, the system will be fine.
> There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1]
Are you arguing with me or agreeing?
> Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level.
> Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP?
Relative to where we were less than a decade ago, when Facebook was nothing more than some Ivy League hook up site.
> What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another.
The alternative is fucking vigilance. Vigilance of tradeoffs. Vigilance of bad faith actors. Vigilance of the legislative branch. Vigilance of our public servants.
Take power plants for example: they are all interconnected in large regional grids and deal with such large quantities of power that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process that has to be coordinated with the rest of the system. You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output - all while accounting for geographic distribution losses, predicted load changes, and so on. Theoretically, any discrepancies (like power flow being too high due to phase difference) would activate breakers and other safeties should an adversarial actor decide to bring a power plant online online willy-nilly. Unfortunately, the last few decades have shown that those safeties are barely able to handle common scenarios, let alone an attack. There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US, we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that.
If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces.