The meltdown of capitalism has reminded me that I should really write up my idea of having a logarithmic scale for assessing the consequences of a system failure, because the usual metric -cost- doesn't work that well when money is something that governments can and do manipulate, and people value some things (life) more than others.

The Loughran-Guijarro Scale, then, is the list of Julio and Myself on bad things that system failures could do. There is also a level 0, system works as expected.

1. Remote server reboots, user has to hit reload.
2. Loss of evening's work
3. Destruction of machine and rebuildable state stored on, rebuild effort and recovery; no permanent loss other than time.
4. Loss of irreplaceable data (e.g complete family photos)
5. Cars crash (ABS failure, engine control accelerates car into wall, &c), other loss of life.
6. Airplane falls out the sky
7. Loss of small city few people care about. this is why CERN is in Geneva.
8. Loss of city.
9. Loss of country. The Chernobyl test could fall into this category, at least for a small country: "let's test that our reactor doesn't melt down when we turn off the cooling, by turning off the cooling".
10. Accidental nuclear exchange, end of humanity.

Question is, on this scale, where would 'complete collapse of financial system' come? 8-9?