Or, to put it differently, one doesn’t try to eliminate the holes in the Swiss cheese—by compacting all cheese into cheddar, for example—but rather to keep the holes in the cheese from lining up, from becoming one big hole that runs through the entirety of the loaf. The holes will be there (trees will be too tall, budgets will be tampered with, regulators will be put off, computer bugs will worm their way in), but they won’t snowball into total systems collapse the way they did in August 2003, and the way they very nearly did at Davis-Besse a year earlier.
