Life is high dimensional. Hard requirements are low dimensional. Any hard requirement must not only fit in words, it is constrained by the attributes the author thought of at the time of writing. Since most [[Most Affordances are Implicit]], hard requirements miss most of what makes a system pleasant or unpleasant, an approach efficient or wasteful, an implementation elegant or a kludge. When you want to discourage something in a team of developers, don't forbid it, disincentivize it. Even better, if you trust your belief that Thing X should not be done, then have the courage to neither forbid nor disinventivize it. If you're right, reality will teach the lesson for you, to anyone who attempts it. --- Ask 100 people the following questions: 1. Should it be illegal for a business owner to racially discriminate against customers on the basis of race? 2. Should prostitution be legal, assuming no one is forced to do anything they aren't comfortable with? A reasonably large number of people will answer "yes" to both questions. Now take them aside, and ask the following: 3. Suppose a prostitute is racist. Maybe a white woman refuses to sleep with black men, or a black woman refuses to sleep with white men. Should she be forced to sleep with them anyway? Nearly 0% of people will say yes to this. This behavior is often described as "inconsistent," but that term fails to meet the human mind on its own terms. This is simply how our minds work, and it is a feature not a bug. In isolation, we largely agree racial discrimination is wrong. In isolation, we largely agree that no one should be forced to sleep with anyone if they don't want to. If we force a human mind to give us a yes or no answer, the high dimensional state inside the mind is transpiled into an extremely lossy format: a single boolean. Every rule, regulation, and law carves the world into the small number of dimensions explicitly considered at the time it is written. Nearly all systemic problems in large modern societies are a result of hard constraints where the mind demands soft.