Easance
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Office anthropology™
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Easance
/iːzˈᵊns/ (n.)
A JC-own coinage meaning the opposite of a hindrance.
Something — a tool, a technique, a convention, a consensus — designed to take away faff, defeat jobsworths, eliminate those whose pettifoggery with form comes at the expense of substance.
Terms and conditions are an easance. Definitions, generally, are. The ISDA Master Agreement is — well, started out life as — an easance.
Easances are, by nature, states of higher order. But it is in the nature of the entropic universe — the laws of worker entropy, as a set, predict that order tends to deteriorate — that easances, when not actively defended, will decay and in time invert, converting themselves to hindrances. Where easances are states of functional order: good design, efficiency, clarity and effectiveness, hindrances are states of disorder, haphazard organisation, confusion and disfunction. Easances have low entropy; hindrances have high entropy.
This has, per our argument here, happened to the ISDA. The upper bound of a hindrance is described by the eighteenth law of worker entropy — which is the point at which a hindrance is such a pain in the arse that the thing being hindered is no longer worth doing at all, whereupon one must m
The magical thing about hindrances is that, as the thing being done — call this an “enterprise” — increases in scale, the relative amount of hindrance its sponsors will tolerate also scales, in increasing proportion to the value of the enterprise. Ie, the ratio tends toward — but, we think. never quite gets — to 1.