An idle observation about bureaucracy:

In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.

Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:

- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.

To:

- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.

I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.

And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.