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THE TECHNOLOGY ENTROPY TRAP: Productivity vs. Chaos By Mark Anderson Why Read: It seems it's always the thing you didn't see coming that turns out to be the thing that gets you. This, for example, is why we warned members just after April 29 about the yen/dollar-ratio weakness as a leading indicator for the systems derangement now occurring in global markets. In today's discussion, we will take a similarly high-, systems-level look at the world from a different perspective - that of the inexorable and currently dangerous role of something most people have rarely, if ever, thought about: Entropy. - mra ______ It's a sunny summer morning a few weeks ago, and you start the day by going to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. For unknown reasons, there was a short power outage last night, and the machine is flashing red, showing that it's off. You turn it back on and realize that the settings need to be re-entered. You spend a couple minutes doing this, since it's been a while since the last outage, and you aren't quite awake yet; and you make your coffee. To start your day, you pick up your phone and check for messages and emails; for some reason the emails are either not working at the moment or your connection is very slow. You turn to your kitchen iPad instead. While the iPad is working fine, Microsoft Office apps, which your company uses for almost everything, are having problems. You launch the News icon, pick the Wall Street Journal, and find out there has been a massive failure worldwide, apparently the result of a corporate cyber company update - but due to an internal mistake, they say, not a hack by the bad guys. Later that day, you get a message from Norton, your own cyber provider, telling you that your personal data has appeared for sale on the dark web, whatever that is, and that you should consider changing all your passwords, as well as buying its special ID protection services. You pass on both; it's the third time this month you've heard about some massive security fail and ID theft. You doubt there are any fresh IDs left to steal; China (which almost always ends up being the hacking nation) must have them all by now. When you get to work, you find out that your PC is still telling you that your Teams app isn't working properly, and for some reason the Outlook email refresh is having trouble. You find out that over 8 million PCs are similarly affected. Since you live on an island, and you're planning to go to the mainland later today, you check the ferry service; you discover that, because of a crew shortage, your trip has been scrubbed. This means canceling your reservation and rescheduling a day or two of preplanned personal meetings. You read the online news for a while, check your social network connections, look at Twitter feeds, maybe go to Reddit or Quanta for a bit, and then catch a fascinating story on your browser home page regarding missile technology that sends you to a deeper science page about hypersonic weapons and then back to something on Russia's updates of its nuclear arsenal, then over to the new incursion by Ukraine into Mother Russia. It occurs to you that you haven't started work yet. Although this is pretty much a normal day, if your productivity had been measured per hour so far, it would've totaled exactly zero. Without realizing it, you've been living in an entropy trap.
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