> The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. Naturally everything that ends up happening has a cause and happens for _some_ rea

> The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. Naturally everything that ends up happening has a cause and happens for _some_ reason; that's nearly a tautology. But I think the is that there are many things that don't happen for any _good_ reason, many often for bad reasons. And it's also common to find that the reasons for these things aren't discernible. Someone made a mistake decades ago, and now no one wants to correct it because there must have been a reason for it, but we can't figure out what it was. Years ago I was the member of a local governing board, and there were many people there who thought that because we were part of a bureaucracy, we should act more bureaucratic. The more work we did, the more we required of other people, the longer the meetings, the more trainings for systems we'd never use, the better. I remember one particular situation where another agency was asking our input about an application in our jurisdiction, and the chair told me to tell the applicant about all the extra paperwork they would need to file with our board. I contacted the agency the application was actually filed with, and they told me they already handled that, and they were only notifying us in the off-chance there were any special considerations in our district the agency needed to be notified of. As far as I could tell, the dozens of boards who oversaw other jurisdictions didn't have our additional requirement either. When I told our chair that the agency wasn't asking us for the additional paperwork, he replied "but that's how we've always handled this." At some point years before somebody on the board wanted to add additional paperwork (and it's questionable whether they actually had the authority to do this), and the rest of the board just mindlessly followed along for years.