Ninth law of worker entropy

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Once known as the “anal paradox”, Otto Büchstein’s theory of negotiation has since become recognised as the JC’s ninth law of worker entropy — numerically challenging, since it easilypredates the first eight, and indeed forms the basis for one or two of them.

The JC’s ninth law of worker entropy: As the number of people involved in negotiating a contract goes up, its brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down. The longer a negotiation continues, the more compendious, and tedious, will be its“fruits” — the verbiage, in the vernacular — even as its meaningful commercial content stay constants (or, more likely, declines to vanishing point).

Hiring a dredger is expensive, and since the operating assumption of all lawyers is that no-one ever got sued for writing an unintelligible agreement, you leave it (perhaps tossing in a disclaimer for good measure) until one day your contract nears the event horizon of intelligibility, beyond which it risks collapsing in on itself, taking you with it, and precipitating the boredom heat death of the universe.

It almost happened in 2008, so don’t joke about it.

See also

• Laws of worker entropy
• Adding value
• Schwarzschild radius

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