Resilience?

The Citizens' Press focuses a lot on "just-in-time" manufacturing, enshittification, neoliberal cuts to public services, financially justified underinvestment, minimally engineered products, and the overproduction inherent in capitalism. The result is a global system that is skimping on necessary investment in order to pad the pockets of capital and offload risk to the public.

The examples are nearly endless:

• Bridges and roads not upgraded to deal with current threats (like larger boats hitting them).
• Natural gas pipelines leaking methane faster than it can be burned because of lack of maintenance.
• Shipping disruption because of just-in-time removing the buffer for delivery of goods.
• Centralization of chip manufacturing so that manufacturing is reliant on the same supply chains as regular consumers.
• Rail companies reducing staff to unsafe levels because of "precision railroading".
• Automation carried out to replace workers instead of augmentation in safety processes in critical safety sections of our infrastructure including oil and gas, railway inspection, aviation, and health products.
• Loss of regulatory capacity of the state to find and track flaws and fraud in aviation manufacturing.
• Cuts to government oversight of food safety, leading to a massive increase in recalls.

The list goes on and on. The program of reducing investment to pump up profits was driven in large part by the privatization of audit and compliance, outsourced to firms with no sense of public interest.

This morning we have another example.

Microsoft, Crowdstrike, and risk assessment auditors have essentially colluded to bring many parts of our necessary computer infrastructure down.

Crowdstrike is a firm that produces anti-malware and snooping software that runs on supposedly "important" infrastructure. It monitors everything that the computer does and reports it back to central IT services in the firm. It is proprietary software.

This morning, as often happens in Microsoftland, an automatic update was pushed to all computers running Crowdstrike Falcon. The software is minimally checked and passed to an OS (Windows in this case) that is produced for ease of use instead of security.

Crowdstrike Falcon monitors everything happening on the computer, so on Microsoft Windows it is given access to the kernel at the highest level of permissions.

Of course, this setup is just waiting to fail in exactly this way.

The supply chain for software on critical parts of our infrastructure has been left to the private sector to regulate. And this is what you get. Poorly designed safety, security, and implementation.

The fault results in a boot-loop or a blue screen, and manual intervention is needed to fix it.

Not only is this an example of how poorly planned, profit-driven IT services work, but it also shows how private audit firms push this kind of setup as a solution to the growing risk of malware and corporate data theft. Monitoring, they say, is part of the risk mitigation for firms.

No sensibly regulated sector would operate this way, but this is the mode of operation on which all of our physical and software supply chains are converging.

We have undermined or removed the capacity of government planning (because it is expensive, but it works) to build resiliency into our critical systems. It is a move towards security theatre. Profit-driven fads are expertly sold to corporate and government "leadership" who have no idea how things actually work. We have promoted a model in which private audit firms bully risk compliance offices and those who actually know how things work into establishing minimal investment programs across all infrastructure.

We have done all this to delay the inevitable, under the guise of "modern" risk assessment programs.

Do not get me wrong, I acknowledge that accidents happen. They are not always avoidable. But this is part of the problem. Resiliency is about establishing infrastructure that can deal with accidents, partly because we know they are going to happen.

Yet, as with climate change, plastic pollution, forever chemicals, rail disasters, blocked canals, pandemics, and the rest, we have built a castle on sand. And we are letting capitalists dig underneath.

Are there solutions? Yes, but they cost money and are uncompetitive. The only solution is to establish regulations above the level of the corporation, industry, and economy, based on principles that understand how the real world operates. Those principles must be established on a democratic foundation where regulators and the public understand the complex world we live in, so as to ensure that regulators have enough experts to oversee the risks.

Only socialists have a program to do this.

In a November 2023 report, the UN Environment Programme estimated the global adaptation funding gap at between $194-366bn per year. (FT)

Companies are at events and looking at costs of dealing with climate change. At the same time opposing measures above the level of the company that would reduce that cost burden by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It is equivalent of businesses opposing the establishment of a fire station on their street and fire related building codes, but each company buying their own fire fighting infrastructure.

The World Economic Forum is calling it "heatflation" in their attempt to highlight that it is both stupid and inevitable.

The logic of capitalism results in this tragedy and the world economies have adopted it without hesitation.

We see things like this everywhere. There are expos on dealing with extreme heat through purchasing gadgets (that use energy produced by burning fossil fuels), silicon valley tout AI as a solution to climate change while using so much new energy that coal fired plants have to start-up again, companies move from California and the north east of the USA to climate counter-resilient Texas, and Alberta calls on the federal government to give it money for forest fire damage while giving massive subsidies to massively profitable and unregulated oil and gas.

The confused hand waving coming from elements of the liberal management class is hard to watch. Serious climate research organizations are wondering out loud why the USA government is allowing companies and people to migrate to areas of the country that are going to be unbearable for the next generation. These same organizations wonder why the world cannot address climate change through market mechanisms.

Without a clear understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism, how do we expect to address any of the issues resulting from this system?

In some quarters of the corporate investment community they tell you the answer: they have no intention of investing in addressing climate change. Just as they have no intention of addressing any issue that will not produce profit. Outside of window dressing for mitigating negative press of exposing too much uncaring for the future of the species, there is no drive to transition.

In the Olympics, we can point to the ways that athletes are being forced to deal with extreme heat on top of trying to perform well.

Once-temperate Paris has warmed 1.8C since it last hosted the Olympics in 1924, according to a recent report that also details a rise in “scorching days” and a 2,100% increase in tropical nights. The same stone buildings, zinc rooftops and narrow streets that make Paris so charming can also make it swelter. (Bloomberg)

That's right, who would have thought that Paris is not well designed to deal with increasing heat of the summer? Basically anyone who has been to Europe in the summer.

Heat stroke is a real threat to the health of athletes in these games. Of course, the same goes for workers out in these temperatures all day, every day.

Changing weather patterns and a global economy hit by all the bad things has pushed-up food prices driving many people into food insecurity.

The global hunger rating shows the precariousness of all the "progress" that was made over the previous decades on reducing hunger. It was not, as it turns out, permanent decreases in global poverty and permanent increases in food availability.

The Green Revolution of using ever increasing amounts of oil to produce food for the world's people and the reliance on China to bring its population out of poverty and dragging down the global poverty index, have run into a wall.

Overall, a higher portion of people are undernourished today than 10 years ago, according to UN estimates. This leaves the world on course to have a projected 582mn people chronically undernourished by the end of the decade.

There is no resilience in the economic programs that set the foundation for our food system. Small shocks, of which there are an ever increasing number, result in a ratchet that moves in the wrong direction.

The main issue highlighted in the UNFAO report is that the "donor countries" need to spend more on support for "farmers to adapt to climate change."

There is no adaptation to the kinds of impacts climate change is having on poor, small scale farmers.

With only three per cent of climate financing going to agriculture and food systems, this is unlikely to change any time soon.