Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

It's Risk. Humans are typically insanely bad at understanding risk, how to assess it, and how to mitigate it.

For most, if something is risky, it's just a black box, perhaps with some odds, and it's either feared or ignored (or both).

Few understand the critical difference between using knowledge, skill, technology, and planning to manage and mitigate risk, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it for a long time.

Using knowledge, skill, technology, and planning to manage and mitigate risk has gotten humans to great heights - we can make entire careers living in environments in which random behaviors will kill us in seconds (e.g., aerospace, underwater, large construction, metals refining, etc.).

But most people think much more naively, and even do so in professional environments unless required otherwise (and even sometimes where they are). So, they just think that if something isn't obviously a risk, or only happens occasionally, ignore it.

This is just rolling the dice. Even if you get away with it for a long time, that only makes you more falsely confident and therefore more vulnerable. From the last mild pandemic, there are over a million dead and close to half million suffering long disease from this attitude.

And you see it in your work - you simply point out an obvious very damaging failure mode, even just to document it, and you get a hostile reaction.

I'm not sure what to do about it. Perhaps rock climbing should be a required activity in school, learning to viscerally manage risk, and showing that it is usually actually easy to to?

On the business side, Toyota - the progenator of JIT manufacturing who still warehoused chips to deal with a shortage exactly like what happened - flourished at a time where others floundered. As an added bonus, they were still able to remain profitable prior to the shortage, despite having warehoused chips.

I think the "buy cheap not good" is more of a proactive excuse from companies who want to sell cheap goods to maximize their profit. Kind of an extension of the "never ask customers what they want, they'd just want better horses" or "they can have it in any color so long as it's black" tropes.

I think that this is something that has only become insisted upon in very recent history (when it was seen as a technical and social possibility), and that governments functioned just as well without. Ways of identifying strangers should be annoying, tedious, and expensive.

edit: When I was a kid, you could spend a week in jail and be released without the justice system having any way to verify who you were.

edit: What I'm really saying is that the "national identity verification type service" is as much a problem as the corporate databases, which it's also not really distinct from (the corporate databases work as a national identity verification service.) The problem is this desire to account for and control everything. Everyone with a little power is overcome with data FOMO.

Technically you can also set up an additional Authenticator on your computer. But my bank authorization are either app based or phone number dependent - so one main phone featuring both and additional phone having the app set up.

I don't like it either.