@JoonasIlmavirta Good!!

@Cerberus It is indeed! I must admit I was surprised, but in the most positive way.

@Adam I have always been strict with my principle of not letting a bakery item guard my wallet.

@JoonasIlmavirta I guess it is always worth it to try and fight.

@Cerberus Yeah. That goes together with the observation that many such initial decisions are made with very little preparation.

"Oops, it never occurred to us that there might have been a benefit to someone in the thing we were going to abolish to save money."

@JoonasIlmavirta Yes, exactly!!

People taking decisions are often inexperience in the things they decide about. They should talk more to the people who do the actual work they decide on.

@Cerberus It's natural to be inexperienced in the details; the more power you hold, the broader the spectrum of things you have to have an opinion on. But not discussing properly and openly is inexcusable.

I think, if you don't know a lot about it, you should talk to people who do, until you know enough.

In principle, yes. But in practice there can be time pressure. And if you are in a committee making a decision, not everyone will be informed the same way or on the same level. And you may worry about proper procedure when approaching people.

Not great excuses, but in my unfortunately growing administrative experience very real ones.

There's certainly room for improvement in the academic decision culture.

I imagine that is how it can happen.

But it is bad.

@Cerberus I fully agree.

Seeing things from the inside has shown me several processes that don't go as they should.

Yeah so I would expect!

It's easy to imagine things being worse, so I'm not saying everything is bad. It's just that there's unnecessary injustice or imbalance in many places.

As has been the case in all human systems at all times. But it's no excuse not to improve.

So it is.

I sometimes wonder why people all throughout history always think the past was better.

Just like people now, they hardly seem interested in all the things that have improved, they see only the bad things.