Failure Is Always An Option
summary
Tells how engineering choices and surprising user behavior decide outcomes: Saturn V has 6 million parts → ~6,000 expected failures, Apollo 13 survives because of systems thinking and a single SCCE switch flip; the Space Shuttle uses five AP-101 computers (four identical plus one diverse voter) to tolerate faults; the Post Office Horizon rollout wrongly convicts subpostmasters and costs billions when operators refuse to check logs; Kenyan mobile top-ups evolve into M-Pesa, a working digital-cash system lifting hundreds of thousands out of cash-only economics.
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