To hide or dissemble Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King secretsgovernment
We infantilize ourselves Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don't understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King societygovernmentpoliticsmoralitycivics
Feature parity An Article martinfowler.com Whilst Feature Parity often sounds like a reasonable proposition, we have learnt the hard way that people greatly underestimate the effort required, and thus misjudge the choice between this and the other alternatives. For example even just defining the 'as is' scope can be a huge effort, especially for legacy systems that have become core to the business. Most legacy systems have 'bloated' over time, with many features unused by users (50% according to a 2014 Standish Group report) as new features have been added without the old ones being removed. Workarounds for past bugs and limitations have become 'must have' requirements for current business processes, with the way users work defined as much by the limitations of legacy as anything else. Rebuilding these features is not only waste it also represents a missed opportunity to build what is actually needed today. These systems were often defined 10 or 20 years ago within the constraints of previous generations of technology, it very rarely makes sense to replicate them 'as is'. softwarefeaturesrepair