Oryx and Crake

By Margaret Atwood

Lately, I've been struggling to find a good read. I usually finish a couple of books a month. Things are slow now. I have a few books 'in rotation', I'm slowly working my way through these. I'll check one out of the library, read it a bit every night, return it when due, then check out the next. Making progress. Not in a rush to finish.

Orxy and Crake is different. I've powered though it since I started less than a week ago.

It is dark and dystopian. On many levels. The science at the forefront of the story is about genetic modification and biological warfare. There are layers of dystopia under that. The characters live in a world with non-existent government, where corporations and private security have filled in the power vacuum. Where the news is mostly there for shock and titillation. Where the people watching it can't tell how much is real, how much is staged.

It looks a lot like our world, just two steps in the wrong direction.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

By Eldar Sharif

Scarcity can mean many things. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough food. Sharif discusses the nature of scarcity, how it affects our thinking and our actions. How we can plan with it and around it.

Scarcity causes a mental tunnel vision. Where we struggle to think past our scarce resources. Take a deadline, for example. For many people this really focuses our attention and allow us to get things done. That is the downside... our attention is focused on the deadline. It's difficult to think outside the box.

Hunger, food scarcity, causes the same thing. It's difficult to get someone who is short on food to think past their hunger. They will make many poor short term decisions to get food immediately, rather than thinking long term, to create a long term supply of food.

Slack-- In the drive to be efficient we often cut slack out of the schedule, or the budget. This can cause greater problems than it solves. It means that the plan must be upended the moment there is an unforeseen crisis, and there are always unforeseen crises. The solution here is to build some slack into planning so that emergencies can be dealt with.