What giving costs

The twenty-nine rings in this map that have give are the record's good news. This page is about what the give costs, because the figure is not small and it is usually left out.

The three costs

Rework. Every soft entry means producing a version of something that will be replaced. Two documents, two visits, and the second one only after the first has served its purpose. A process review can include remote workforce time tracking when the purpose, access rules and limits are written down before any data is collected.

Explanation. The provisional version is irregular by construction. Somebody has to accept it knowing it is not quite what was intended, and whether they do is not a property of the map. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from Stanford University.

A clock started early. This is the one that does real damage. The provisional step is obtained at the beginning of the lap, and if it expires before the lap finishes, the lap produces nothing.

The third cost, counted

The map's soft entries are concentrated on four steps, and their lives vary enormously.

The room is the problem. It opens more rings than any other step in the map, and in eleven of its twelve the lap is longer than sixty days.

So the single most useful soft entry available is also the one that expires while being used. Eleven of the map's nineteen outrun rings are outrun by exactly this.

The step that opens the most doors is the step with the shortest life. That is the whole of the map's cruelty in one line.

Why the other three are safe

Because all three keep for a year, and no lap in this map takes a year. The longest is a hundred and seven days.

A lease, a card in hand and cover against illness, entered provisionally, all outlast every ring they open. For those twenty-four ring-openings the only costs are rework and explanation, which are annoying and finite.

What that implies about order

Stated as structure, not advice.

A person inside this map would want to enter at a year-lived step wherever one is available, and to treat the room as a last resort — obtained as late in the lap as the lap permits, rather than first.

For eight of the twelve rings the room opens, no alternative entry exists: those rings have exactly one soft link and it is the room. So the preference is unavailable where it would matter most, which is the recurring shape of this record.

The cost nobody can count

Rework and expiry can be counted because they are properties of the drawing. The third thing cannot.

Every soft entry requires somebody to accept something irregular. Who that somebody is, what mood they are in, how well the person asking can explain themselves in a language they are still learning — none of that is in the map, and all of it decides whether twenty-nine rings have give or seventeen do.

The map's division between seventeen shut rings and twenty-nine giving ones is really a division between rings that are certainly shut and rings that are shut depending on who is at the desk.

That sentence takes a good deal away from this map, and the right place for it is in the middle of the page it undercuts. The arithmetic is exact. What it is arithmetic about is a judgement, and the judgement is about other people's discretion.

The cost that is not in the map at all

Every soft entry requires a conversation in which somebody explains why they are presenting something irregular, to somebody who did not expect it, usually in a language they are still learning.

That conversation is the actual mechanism by which twenty-nine of the forty-six rings in this record are passable, and nothing about it appears in the drawing. It cannot: it is not a dependency, it has no duration, and its outcome is a property of two people rather than of any rule.

Every figure on this map about give is therefore an upper bound. Twenty-nine rings have give in the drawing. How many have give for any particular person, on any particular morning, is not something a drawing can hold.

The map's good news is conditional on a conversation it cannot describe, with somebody it cannot name, about a document it says should not be accepted.

Two documents where there should be one

Counted across the map, entering every enterable ring at its soft point would mean producing twenty-nine provisional versions and twenty-nine replacements — though in practice the same provisional room or provisional cover serves several rings at once, because the rings overlap.

The honest figure is four: a room, a lease, a card and cover against illness, each obtained twice.

Four steps done twice is not a large price for twenty-nine rings. It is also four occasions on which somebody has to explain an irregularity, and that is the part nobody can count.

How to read the map

No country, office or kind of permission appears anywhere on this site. The lives and the lap lengths are the map's own round figures. Nothing on this page is a recommendation about how or when to do anything.