Comment by lscharen

> If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier!

This point is underappreciated as it appears in many forms and can really help reconcile things that seems obviously wasteful (they may actually be wasteful, but sometimes financial structure makes this hard to determine in an honest capacity).

Capital costs and operational costs are a similar dichotomy. When I was in graduate school, the university was breaking ground on new buildings at the same time that staff layoffs were underway. On its face this seems grossly unreasonable, but staff salaries were paid from one funding bucket and capital improvements (new buildings) were funded by a completely independent state-level allocation process and those buildings that were breaking ground had essentially been locked in 5 to 10 years prior.