In Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, he muses on efficiency and inefficiency:
There is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency
To explain the idea of "good inefficiency," he uses the example of oxbows. An "oxbow" is where a river makes a big, wide U-turn.
Isn't that beautiful? Very inefficient though. If you wanted to get the water from its meltwater source to the ocean more directly, you'd use a big straight line. Maybe some pipes, pumps. Plumb it out.
KSR loves the oxbow though, despite its inefficiencies. Because of, even. Here's an excerpt from Green Mars, where he describes a fictional Martian river.
The water in the slower stretches was opaque, and the color of rust. In the rapids and waterfalls it foamed bright shades of pink. Classic Martian tones, caused, Diana said, by the fines that were suspended in the water like glacial silt—also by the reflected color of the sky, which was today a kind of hazy mauve, going lavender around the veiled sun, as yellow as the iris of a tiger’s eye. But no matter the color of the water—it was a running river, in an obviously riverine valley, placid in some places, agitated in others, with gravel fords, sandbars, braided sections, crumbling lemniscate islands, there a big deep lazy oxbow, frequent rapids, and far upstream, a couple of small falls.
Lovely.
A pipe makes a lousy habitat for a fish, or some sort of semi-aquatic bird, or a bug. You know, living things. If you're alive, the oxbow is the place to be.
the oxbow i'm in
I'm thinking about oxbows in rivers because I'm at work on a Saturday. Not much happens when you work security, and that is especially true on a Saturday.
Me and three other people are watching two other guys assemble some cubicle dividers. We're all getting paid. I hope the guys doing the actual work are getting paid a bit more, but it'd be gauche for me to actually ask them.
The inefficiency is where the money is. I've been reading Ludicity lately, and he talks a lot about how inefficient most organizations are. He also recognizes that a lot of people are mired in these inefficient organizations where they are unable to make changes because they got debt, kids, whatever. That's where I'm at in my life. I'm trying to be more zen about it.
From Ludicity's Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things, I was introduced to the following quote from The Tao of Programming:
A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"
The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"
Acceptance is key, right?