Shannon, in the paper that launched the theory of information, identified the basic tradeoff that engineers still grapple with today: the more resistant to noise you want your signal to be, the slower your bits are transmitted. The presence of noise places a cap on the length of a message your channel can reliably convey in a given amount of time; this limit was what Shannon called the capacity of the channel. Just as a pipe can handle only so much water, a channel can handle only so much information.
Good political discourse rule too
