310 - Functional Fascades
Working corruption still beats half-assed bureaucracy.
When an immigration office tells you to go to the border and that no paperwork is required, then the border sends you back (>2 hours travel) to the Immigration office, claiming that they didn't give you what you went there to get in the first place but they failed to provide, then you have a half-assed bureaucracy.
While the alternative of an overtly bribery-based border system may sound corrupt at face value, a crime against humanity is committed in the real example of the above scenario, making both options criminal, but only one option actually works. It isn't the half-assed bureaucracy.
I'd rather deal with a literal mafia if they can do their F$%^&ing job, than someone who can't stamp a piece of paper, because you don't have a different and also utterly pointless stamp, which isn't tracked digitally in any form. That lack of tracking btw, means that it can absolutely be forged, with a handheld printer and trivial effort.
Like the modern joke of the "notary", it adds no security, being trivial to forge. Even the embossing of a stamp can be replicated from a single actual sample with a 3D printer. Real bad actors can and will forge these things, meaning that the only people these interfere with and waste gross amounts of time and money for are ordinary people.
This kind of half-assed nonsense is systemic, even trending, with many committing these crimes in countries around the world every day, increasing uncertainty and greatly reducing the odds that individuals will travel, relocate, or invest abroad. They also reinforce isolationism, racial and national biases, and countless distinct downstream forms of cognitive bias-based nonsense.
Viewing current geopolitics through this lens may explain part of the US's current trajectory, as it moves from a half-assed bureaucracy into overt corruption. The overt corruption may effectively stick for decades to come if they merely make that corruption functional in ways that the previous system never was.
That isn't to say that overt corruption is the goal, but if the half-assed bureaucracy makes simple things 10 or 100 times harder and more uncertain than bribery, people will choose bribery. One country has offered an example of this, as attempts to implement such half-assed policies gradually slide back into systems of bribery, as they don't make sense for the country or its people, and so the enforcement of such policies is abandoned in practice.
The illusion of a functional system is worse than having no system at all. This is also shown in "GenAI", where half-assed AI systems like those of OpenAI and Anthropic are frequently worse to implement than the total absence of such a system. They too are completely vulnerable-by-design to bad actors, with "guardrails"(fraudrails) whose only purpose is to damage the experience and options available to ordinary people, not to prevent any motivated parties for performing any abuse.
