Civilizations don't last long enough.
on
Is the Earth Special?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The whole point of the Fermi paradox is that if the earth isn't special, then where the hell is the evidence of alien life? All these posts explaining how we aren't special, and how "life will find a way", just lead right back to it. Why haven't we found so much as a single piece of evidence of any kind?
Probably because the lifespan of technological civilizations isn't that long. Human civilization is about 3000 years old, but only about two centuries of that is technological civilization with enough power to do much. We've had the ability to send radio signals into space for less than a century. We're already starting to run out of natural resources. There are arguments over how many decades are left for some resources, but nobody sees many centuries of resources left. Trying to mine low-density resources requires greater energy inputs for the results obtained, and eventually that stalls out.
If our understanding of physics is roughly correct, fast interstellar travel is hopeless. Slow interstellar travel might be possible, but it currently looks like the closest interesting place is about 500 light years away. Sending a generation ship to a system with no habitable planets is pointless. Sending one to an active civilization means it gets there after they've run down.
If you plug reasonable values for extrasolar planets into the Drake equation and set the lifespan of a technological civilization to 500 years, you get 24 civilizations currently active in the Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 years across.
Many of the security issues mentioned in the paper for Firefox come from the fact that Firefox is, for historical reasons, a single-process browser. It's the last of the single -process browsers.
This is both a performance problem and a security problem. Even add-ons aren't yet running in separate processes. The Mozilla project to make Firefox multiprocess is behind schedule and in trouble.
"Fennec", the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is already multiprocess. But getting that machinery into the main line of Firefox has run into problems, and, after two years of effort, multiprocess Firefox is now on hold."Converting an established product, like Firefox, from a single- to multi-process architecture requires the involvement and coordination of many teams.... Electrolysis requires a large investment of resources and time and has a long timeline for completion. How long? At this point we do not have a definitive answer...."
Now, from the people who brought you the Active-X security hole, we have a new Silverlight-based security hole.
1. Buy Authenticode code-signing certificate.
2. Create web site with hostile code running under Silverlight.
3. Spam to get website trafffic.
4. User visits site with IE, Silverlight content runs, hostile code gets installed.
5. PROFIT!
Microsoft's model of "trusted code" doesn't involve anybody actually testing or looking at the code.
Search result ads can be useful, but it's gotten out of hand. Search Google for "dvd player". Above the "fold", the page shows 7 ads, 5 shopping results, 9 store and brand related searches, and two organic search results. That's overdoing the ad clutter.
I'm approaching this from the other end.
I'm working on a browser-add on which limits the number of ads that appear on a page. The user sets the limit, and we trim out ads accordingly. The ads with lower SiteTruth ratings are deleted first.
This puts the user in control of the ad experience. The problem with on-line advertising today is that there are too many ads per page. This isn't good for advertisers or users.
You have to understand that this is for a catalog shoot: not high fashion, not runway, not super model territory. You're looking at cranking out 100-200 images in a day of 100 different sweaters, trousers, bikinis or what have you. Used to be that you'd hire cheap rookie models for this at (if possible less than) minimum wage.
Right. You meet people who do that in LA. It's the "actress/model/waitress" cliche.
There's been catalog photo manipulation for years.
Much catalog modelling is done in front of a green screen, so that backgrounds can be added later. You'll see the same outfit on the same model on different web sites with a different background. Some sites even let you change the color of the clothes on the site, so that one picture serves for all the color options.
Modelling, as a career choice, sucks. The top 100 or so models in the world make real money, and everybody else would do better in a routine office job. The working life of a model is maybe a decade. There's no job security. But people tell you you're pretty, and for some women, that's what they want.
If you're getting paid for your content, you deserve to have journalist's credentials and a press card from whoever is paying you. But if you're a blogger who only makes a bit of ad revenue, if that, from your site, then you do not deserve the same protections the press gets.
The distinction isn't that strong, nor was it ever. Even in the heyday of the print media, many reporters were "stringers", sending in stores for which they would be paid if the story was printed. Many print reporters today are part-time.
This is a bad idea, and it's being deceptively promoted. The OpenDNS site says "DNSCrypt is a piece of lightweight software that everyone should use to boost online privacy and security." This is willfully misleading.
This isn't a way to make the existing distributed DNS infrastructure more secure. It just establishes an encrypted connection between your machine and one central DNS server farm belonging to OpenDNS. One that makes its money by redirecting nonexistent domains to ad sites.
A few years ago, I was over at Kerner Optical, the Lucasfilm spinoff for practical effects, and they were showing off an early 3D camera with variable separation between the lenses. (Watching that, wearing shutter glasses and looking at a monitor, while someone played with the separation, produces weird feelings in your eyes.)
Since we were in the camera shop, they showed us some of the stuff they had around, including the first 35mm movie camera with a carbon-fiber case. They built that in-house, for scenes where the camera was going to be banged around. It had been used for some Star Wars job and many times since.
They just viewed it as a working tool, not a collectable. It was a film camera, so it's probably been retired by now.
I'll say one thing for Lucas's operation. People stay there a long time. Most of the people at Kerner had been there for decades. One guy with five years on the job said he was still the new guy.
They probably got rid of that to make room for an entire row dedicated to Twilight, Twilight documentaries, Twilight biographies, and Twilight magazines.)
I used to joke with the goths at the local Big Chain Bookstore that if all the vampire books from SF, Romance, Fiction, and Teen were put in one section, they'd be a quarter of the store. Now they actually have four cases of Teen Paranormal Romance, and two of New Teen Paranormal Romance. That's in addition to the Twilight books, which have their own section.
The paper industry is feeling the pinch, too. Newspapers are dying, and paper mills are closing. The latest generation of computer users feels little desire to print anything. The paper industry had a "put it on paper" promotion. That seems to have disappeared.
Paper requires an infrastructure. In business, paper implies filing, filing cabinets, folders, record storage, file clerks, trash cans, shredders, staplers, paper clips, paper recycling, and other cost items. This not only increases cost, it increases head count and makes outsourcing and offshoring harder.
Printed forms are really expensive. Someone has to fill them out, they have to be moved around, sorted, and filed. and probably entered into into a computer at some point. It's been a long time since a forms manufacturer could advertise "the world is run on tracks of printed paper".
There are still many businesses with a lot of legacy paper, but the trend is down.
At the moment, "mozilla.org" is very slow or sometimes not responding at all. "addons.mozilla.org" is returning "Service Unavailable - The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." if you try to do anything that involves the database.
About half of TV is not "watched". It's just "on". (Radio is almost entirely in the "just on" mode today.) A sizable, although shrinking, fraction of the population likes the rigid schedule of TV shows.
3D TV was an awful idea. Everything, including the viewer, has to be positioned properly for it to work. If you lie down on the couch watching a 3D TV, you will have an eyestrain-inducing experience as your eyes try to converge on misaligned images.
Unless they get the price of production down, this won't help.
The problem with Hollywood is the $100 million movie. At that price point, the project needs assurances of success. This leads to sequels, remakes, and the occasional new idea by a known director. That was the trend for 2010-2011. It got out of hand, and sequels started bombing. The low point was probably when "Police Academy 8" was green-lighted.
The comic-book branded movie thing seems to be winding down. The first-tier characters have been done. The second-tier characters have been done. The third-tier characters don't have enough fans to guarantee box office success.
In SF, you have to build a world, as full sized sets, miniatures, or CGI. This costs. If you cut corners, it shows. CGI looked good at first - now you could build Big Things at last. But then you have to fill in all the detail on the Big Things. That's why CGI films list hundreds (sometimes thousands) of staff in the credits. In the Toy Story movies, you'll see long drives or chases through suburbia. Each house is different and has unique landscaping. Somewhere up in San Raphael is the poor schlub assigned to landscaping houses 1030 through 1045, in the cubicle next to the one doing houses 1046 through 1060. Procedural city generation has been tried, but still doesn't look very good. (Procedural tree and forest generation, though, does work quite well. The processes that generate real trees are local and fractal and can be modeled successfully. So far, nobody has built a good automatic architect.)
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started out as a $20 million movie and ended up an $80 million movie for that reason.
If you aren't doing low-level stuff with the browser in your add-on, all you have to do is set the browser compatibility version to something ridiculous... eg. 1.0-77.9
If it breaks, you can still provide an update. If it doesn't, users can continue to use it up to version 77.9...
That's true for old-style add-ons. Unfortunately, the new "Jetpack" add-ons are implemented with a kludge that includes the libraries which implement the new API into the add-on. Those libraries change with each release of Mozilla, but they're not part of the Mozilla distribution. So every add-on using them has to be modified on the add-on server and reloaded into upgraded versions of Mozilla. This only works if the add-on is on Mozilla's servers.
This reflects some political division within the Mozilla organization. Jetpack wasn't originally "official", and so it didn't get distributed with Mozilla. Now it's official, but the update kludge remains.
There would be political panic in the US if Iran sent a drone over the East Coast to have a look at NYC or Washington. Iran does have drones, and could launch one from a freighter in the Atlantic if they were so inclined.
The Firefox add-on system has been infected with this problem. It used to be that you could write add-ons for Firefox, put them on a web site, and let users download them. Now, Firefox has what's essentially an "app store". Add-ons have to go through an approval process which takes about two months. Then they have to be hosted on Mozilla's site. Mozilla tracks how many users are using each add-on through a back channel in the browser. Because of the new policy of very frequent updates to Firefox, add-ons have to be updated regularly, and for add-ons on the Mozilla site, this happens automatically and remotely. So your add-on is now tied to Mozilla's "cloud".
Firefox itself is slaved to Mozilla's "cloud" now. It's become much more demanding about insisting that it be updated when Mozilla issues a new version.
It's still possible to host add-ons on your own site, but warning messages appear if they're loaded, and they rapidly become obsolete and break as Firefox changes. It's still possible to turn off updates of Firefox, but by default, you get nagged. The jaws are slowly closing on Firefox users.
Google's giant R&D operation is starting to look like a huge flop. Google has never originated a successful post-search product in-house. The ad system was acquired from DoubleClick. They had to acquire YouTube because Google Video was a flop. The hard part of Gmail, the smart filtering, came from Postini. The Android software was acquired from Android, Inc. PIcasa was acquired from Picasa, Inc. Google Earth was acquired from Keyhole, Inc. SketchUp was acquired from @Last Software. Google Voice was acquired from Grand Central.
In-house, they produced Google Answers, Base, Lively, Knol, Buzz, Wave, Gears, Page Creator, etc - a collection of cool hacks, all now discontinued.
They're good at improving and scaling up stuff. That's what smart junior people are good for. Google is terrible at developing new technologies. They don't have enough people with experience to do so.
That's a pretty simplified way of putting it, but basically correct. Major equipment vendors have been slow to adopt more advanced queuing strategies (Stochastic Fair Queuing integrated with some of the more advanced flavors of early discard.)
Right. The problem is not big buffers, per se. It's big dumb FIFO queues. There's nothing wrong with one big flow, like a file transfer, having a long latency, provided that other flows with less data in flight aren't stuck behind it. That's what "fair queuing" is all about. Each flow has its own queue, and the queues are serviced in a round-robin fashion. (With stochastic fair queuing, some hashing is done to eliminate some of the bookkeeping on flows, but the effect is roughly the same.)
I figured this out in the early 1980s (see RFC 970) and by the late 1990s, it was an established technology. We shouldn't be having this problem at this late date.
I wonder how much of the trouble comes from devices that are doing TCP-level processing in the middle of the network. Stateful firewalls and ISP ad-insertion engines can introduce substantial latency.
If you want to test for bad behavior, try running two flows, one that never has more than one packet outstanding, and one that just does a big file-transfer like operation like a download. If the latency of the low-traffic flow goes up to the same as that of the bulk flow, there's a big dumb buffer in the middle. If the packet loss rate of the low-traffic flow goes up, there's a small dumb buffer in the middle.
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries.
Switzerland does have some socialism, but it's local, as in communal heating systems for a town. As for "general social trust", a typical Swiss railroad ticket booth has armor glass, banks go much further than that, and the country has bomb shelters for the entire population. There are hidden underground military facilities throughout the country, everyone in the military reserves has an assault rifle and a combat load of ammo at home, and they all have to requalify on the range every year. Social trust in Switzerland exists but is not given lightly.
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The whole point of the Fermi paradox is that if the earth isn't special, then where the hell is the evidence of alien life? All these posts explaining how we aren't special, and how "life will find a way", just lead right back to it. Why haven't we found so much as a single piece of evidence of any kind?
Probably because the lifespan of technological civilizations isn't that long. Human civilization is about 3000 years old, but only about two centuries of that is technological civilization with enough power to do much. We've had the ability to send radio signals into space for less than a century. We're already starting to run out of natural resources. There are arguments over how many decades are left for some resources, but nobody sees many centuries of resources left. Trying to mine low-density resources requires greater energy inputs for the results obtained, and eventually that stalls out.
If our understanding of physics is roughly correct, fast interstellar travel is hopeless. Slow interstellar travel might be possible, but it currently looks like the closest interesting place is about 500 light years away. Sending a generation ship to a system with no habitable planets is pointless. Sending one to an active civilization means it gets there after they've run down.
If you plug reasonable values for extrasolar planets into the Drake equation and set the lifespan of a technological civilization to 500 years, you get 24 civilizations currently active in the Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 years across.
Many of the security issues mentioned in the paper for Firefox come from the fact that Firefox is, for historical reasons, a single-process browser. It's the last of the single -process browsers.
This is both a performance problem and a security problem. Even add-ons aren't yet running in separate processes. The Mozilla project to make Firefox multiprocess is behind schedule and in trouble.
"Fennec", the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is already multiprocess. But getting that machinery into the main line of Firefox has run into problems, and, after two years of effort, multiprocess Firefox is now on hold. "Converting an established product, like Firefox, from a single- to multi-process architecture requires the involvement and coordination of many teams. ... Electrolysis requires a large investment of resources and time and has a long timeline for completion. How long? At this point we do not have a definitive answer...."
Now, from the people who brought you the Active-X security hole, we have a new Silverlight-based security hole.
1. Buy Authenticode code-signing certificate.
2. Create web site with hostile code running under Silverlight.
3. Spam to get website trafffic.
4. User visits site with IE, Silverlight content runs, hostile code gets installed.
5. PROFIT!
Microsoft's model of "trusted code" doesn't involve anybody actually testing or looking at the code.
any more than 0 ads on a page is too many ads.
Search result ads can be useful, but it's gotten out of hand. Search Google for "dvd player". Above the "fold", the page shows 7 ads, 5 shopping results, 9 store and brand related searches, and two organic search results. That's overdoing the ad clutter.
I'm approaching this from the other end. I'm working on a browser-add on which limits the number of ads that appear on a page. The user sets the limit, and we trim out ads accordingly. The ads with lower SiteTruth ratings are deleted first.
This puts the user in control of the ad experience. The problem with on-line advertising today is that there are too many ads per page. This isn't good for advertisers or users.
You have to understand that this is for a catalog shoot: not high fashion, not runway, not super model territory. You're looking at cranking out 100-200 images in a day of 100 different sweaters, trousers, bikinis or what have you. Used to be that you'd hire cheap rookie models for this at (if possible less than) minimum wage.
Right. You meet people who do that in LA. It's the "actress/model/waitress" cliche.
There's been catalog photo manipulation for years. Much catalog modelling is done in front of a green screen, so that backgrounds can be added later. You'll see the same outfit on the same model on different web sites with a different background. Some sites even let you change the color of the clothes on the site, so that one picture serves for all the color options.
Modelling, as a career choice, sucks. The top 100 or so models in the world make real money, and everybody else would do better in a routine office job. The working life of a model is maybe a decade. There's no job security. But people tell you you're pretty, and for some women, that's what they want.
If you're getting paid for your content, you deserve to have journalist's credentials and a press card from whoever is paying you. But if you're a blogger who only makes a bit of ad revenue, if that, from your site, then you do not deserve the same protections the press gets.
The distinction isn't that strong, nor was it ever. Even in the heyday of the print media, many reporters were "stringers", sending in stores for which they would be paid if the story was printed. Many print reporters today are part-time.
This is where he should sue CNet for slander of trademark, and tortious interference with business relations.
This is a bad idea, and it's being deceptively promoted. The OpenDNS site says "DNSCrypt is a piece of lightweight software that everyone should use to boost online privacy and security." This is willfully misleading.
This isn't a way to make the existing distributed DNS infrastructure more secure. It just establishes an encrypted connection between your machine and one central DNS server farm belonging to OpenDNS. One that makes its money by redirecting nonexistent domains to ad sites.
There have been slimy DNS providers before. Comcast is notorious for this. The Wikipedia article on OpenDNS summarizes the privacy issues, conflicts, and problems with OpenDNS. At one point, OpenDNS tried redirecting address bar searches to their own search page., which is apparently permitted by their terms of service.
OpenDNS isn't that bad. They're only a little evil. But they're also unnecessary.
I'm amazed what fans will pay for.
A few years ago, I was over at Kerner Optical, the Lucasfilm spinoff for practical effects, and they were showing off an early 3D camera with variable separation between the lenses. (Watching that, wearing shutter glasses and looking at a monitor, while someone played with the separation, produces weird feelings in your eyes.)
Since we were in the camera shop, they showed us some of the stuff they had around, including the first 35mm movie camera with a carbon-fiber case. They built that in-house, for scenes where the camera was going to be banged around. It had been used for some Star Wars job and many times since. They just viewed it as a working tool, not a collectable. It was a film camera, so it's probably been retired by now.
I'll say one thing for Lucas's operation. People stay there a long time. Most of the people at Kerner had been there for decades. One guy with five years on the job said he was still the new guy.
Mozilla's sites are still badly broken. See status here.
They probably got rid of that to make room for an entire row dedicated to Twilight, Twilight documentaries, Twilight biographies, and Twilight magazines.)
I used to joke with the goths at the local Big Chain Bookstore that if all the vampire books from SF, Romance, Fiction, and Teen were put in one section, they'd be a quarter of the store. Now they actually have four cases of Teen Paranormal Romance, and two of New Teen Paranormal Romance. That's in addition to the Twilight books, which have their own section.
The paper industry is feeling the pinch, too. Newspapers are dying, and paper mills are closing. The latest generation of computer users feels little desire to print anything. The paper industry had a "put it on paper" promotion. That seems to have disappeared.
Paper requires an infrastructure. In business, paper implies filing, filing cabinets, folders, record storage, file clerks, trash cans, shredders, staplers, paper clips, paper recycling, and other cost items. This not only increases cost, it increases head count and makes outsourcing and offshoring harder.
Printed forms are really expensive. Someone has to fill them out, they have to be moved around, sorted, and filed. and probably entered into into a computer at some point. It's been a long time since a forms manufacturer could advertise "the world is run on tracks of printed paper".
There are still many businesses with a lot of legacy paper, but the trend is down.
At the moment, "mozilla.org" is very slow or sometimes not responding at all. "addons.mozilla.org" is returning "Service Unavailable - The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." if you try to do anything that involves the database.
Remember the Sony Memory Stick? How did that work out?
About half of TV is not "watched". It's just "on". (Radio is almost entirely in the "just on" mode today.) A sizable, although shrinking, fraction of the population likes the rigid schedule of TV shows.
3D TV was an awful idea. Everything, including the viewer, has to be positioned properly for it to work. If you lie down on the couch watching a 3D TV, you will have an eyestrain-inducing experience as your eyes try to converge on misaligned images.
Unless they get the price of production down, this won't help.
The problem with Hollywood is the $100 million movie. At that price point, the project needs assurances of success. This leads to sequels, remakes, and the occasional new idea by a known director. That was the trend for 2010-2011. It got out of hand, and sequels started bombing. The low point was probably when "Police Academy 8" was green-lighted.
The comic-book branded movie thing seems to be winding down. The first-tier characters have been done. The second-tier characters have been done. The third-tier characters don't have enough fans to guarantee box office success.
In SF, you have to build a world, as full sized sets, miniatures, or CGI. This costs. If you cut corners, it shows. CGI looked good at first - now you could build Big Things at last. But then you have to fill in all the detail on the Big Things. That's why CGI films list hundreds (sometimes thousands) of staff in the credits. In the Toy Story movies, you'll see long drives or chases through suburbia. Each house is different and has unique landscaping. Somewhere up in San Raphael is the poor schlub assigned to landscaping houses 1030 through 1045, in the cubicle next to the one doing houses 1046 through 1060. Procedural city generation has been tried, but still doesn't look very good. (Procedural tree and forest generation, though, does work quite well. The processes that generate real trees are local and fractal and can be modeled successfully. So far, nobody has built a good automatic architect.)
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started out as a $20 million movie and ended up an $80 million movie for that reason.
If you aren't doing low-level stuff with the browser in your add-on, all you have to do is set the browser compatibility version to something ridiculous... eg. 1.0-77.9 If it breaks, you can still provide an update. If it doesn't, users can continue to use it up to version 77.9...
That's true for old-style add-ons. Unfortunately, the new "Jetpack" add-ons are implemented with a kludge that includes the libraries which implement the new API into the add-on. Those libraries change with each release of Mozilla, but they're not part of the Mozilla distribution. So every add-on using them has to be modified on the add-on server and reloaded into upgraded versions of Mozilla. This only works if the add-on is on Mozilla's servers.
This reflects some political division within the Mozilla organization. Jetpack wasn't originally "official", and so it didn't get distributed with Mozilla. Now it's official, but the update kludge remains.
95% of what the USPS delivers to my mailbox goes directly into the recycling bin. This is no great loss.
There would be political panic in the US if Iran sent a drone over the East Coast to have a look at NYC or Washington. Iran does have drones, and could launch one from a freighter in the Atlantic if they were so inclined.
The Firefox add-on system has been infected with this problem. It used to be that you could write add-ons for Firefox, put them on a web site, and let users download them. Now, Firefox has what's essentially an "app store". Add-ons have to go through an approval process which takes about two months. Then they have to be hosted on Mozilla's site. Mozilla tracks how many users are using each add-on through a back channel in the browser. Because of the new policy of very frequent updates to Firefox, add-ons have to be updated regularly, and for add-ons on the Mozilla site, this happens automatically and remotely. So your add-on is now tied to Mozilla's "cloud".
Firefox itself is slaved to Mozilla's "cloud" now. It's become much more demanding about insisting that it be updated when Mozilla issues a new version.
It's still possible to host add-ons on your own site, but warning messages appear if they're loaded, and they rapidly become obsolete and break as Firefox changes. It's still possible to turn off updates of Firefox, but by default, you get nagged. The jaws are slowly closing on Firefox users.
This is what passes for "open source" today.
What baffles me about this whole situation is that we haven't erected a guillotine in front of the bronze bull and gotten down to business...
Occupy Wall Street should have set up a guillotine. Just to make people nervous.
Google's giant R&D operation is starting to look like a huge flop. Google has never originated a successful post-search product in-house. The ad system was acquired from DoubleClick. They had to acquire YouTube because Google Video was a flop. The hard part of Gmail, the smart filtering, came from Postini. The Android software was acquired from Android, Inc. PIcasa was acquired from Picasa, Inc. Google Earth was acquired from Keyhole, Inc. SketchUp was acquired from @Last Software. Google Voice was acquired from Grand Central.
In-house, they produced Google Answers, Base, Lively, Knol, Buzz, Wave, Gears, Page Creator, etc - a collection of cool hacks, all now discontinued.
They're good at improving and scaling up stuff. That's what smart junior people are good for. Google is terrible at developing new technologies. They don't have enough people with experience to do so.
That's a pretty simplified way of putting it, but basically correct. Major equipment vendors have been slow to adopt more advanced queuing strategies (Stochastic Fair Queuing integrated with some of the more advanced flavors of early discard.)
Right. The problem is not big buffers, per se. It's big dumb FIFO queues. There's nothing wrong with one big flow, like a file transfer, having a long latency, provided that other flows with less data in flight aren't stuck behind it. That's what "fair queuing" is all about. Each flow has its own queue, and the queues are serviced in a round-robin fashion. (With stochastic fair queuing, some hashing is done to eliminate some of the bookkeeping on flows, but the effect is roughly the same.)
I figured this out in the early 1980s (see RFC 970) and by the late 1990s, it was an established technology. We shouldn't be having this problem at this late date.
I wonder how much of the trouble comes from devices that are doing TCP-level processing in the middle of the network. Stateful firewalls and ISP ad-insertion engines can introduce substantial latency.
If you want to test for bad behavior, try running two flows, one that never has more than one packet outstanding, and one that just does a big file-transfer like operation like a download. If the latency of the low-traffic flow goes up to the same as that of the bulk flow, there's a big dumb buffer in the middle. If the packet loss rate of the low-traffic flow goes up, there's a small dumb buffer in the middle.
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries.
Switzerland does have some socialism, but it's local, as in communal heating systems for a town. As for "general social trust", a typical Swiss railroad ticket booth has armor glass, banks go much further than that, and the country has bomb shelters for the entire population. There are hidden underground military facilities throughout the country, everyone in the military reserves has an assault rifle and a combat load of ammo at home, and they all have to requalify on the range every year. Social trust in Switzerland exists but is not given lightly.