Exactly! But isn't the take-home message that these are escalating costs and complications can be seen coming, with high confidence, a long way off?? I think reporting on them in hindsight is only useful if it leads to sharing the foresight by those like me who realized that our productivity model included the need to manage ever more complex physical systems with ever less physical effort. It's a problem to have a system that requires ever more complex solutions to remain stable, with lines of whole system instability then sure to be crossed.

I'd like more information on the ways aid, both short term and long term, disrupts local cultures and their sustainability, and to discuss that. In Haiti over the past 20 years, as in Mexico, there seems to have been economic development that resulted in floods of population to cities and collapses of traditional village cultures with major societal impacts. I'm a natural systems scientist. Cultural systems have their local infrastructure and technologies that deveop as a network of parts designed to work together. How the are pushed to adapt to change can be disruptive. That applies to indigenous communities or advanced societies alike, as the advanced societies seem to be experiencing now as well. Any links or contacts would be welcome. My contact and other work are at www.synapse9.com Phil