## Notes from 08 March 2026 [[2026-03-07|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-03-09|Next note →]] Read [[Julia Willemyns]]’s **"[Don’t blame the HR lady](https://britishprogress.substack.com/p/post-haste-dont-blame-the-hr-lady)"**. Her central argument is that "HR culture" is a rational adaptation to a legal environment that punishes judgment and rewards documentation. The creeping bureaucracy isn’t the result of "feminization" (what a ridiculous idea), but of a system where the only way to survive a tribunal is to maintain a paper trail for every subjective decision. The best part of the piece is her description of the **mechanics of firing** in the UK civil service. She “translates” how the near-impossibility of dismissing underperformers leads to the “Passing the Lemon” phenomenon: managers, facing a year-long bureaucratic war to fire someone, give weak employees glowing reviews so they get promoted into other departments. The key analytical move is to reframe HR as "**guard labor**" (or, as [[Jennifer Pahlka]] would say, "[stop energy](https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-trump-appointment-that-could?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=go%20energy%E2%80%9D%20and%20%E2%80%9C-,stop%20energy,-%2C%E2%80%9D%20much%20as%20a)"): work whose purpose is to monitor and defend rather than build. The mistake made by idiotic culture-war critics is to treat this as a moral or gendered failing. Willemyns argues that as long as regulations keep increasing (22 changes in 25 years in the UK), the compliance burden doesn’t disappear—it just gets redistributed. If you cut the HR department without changing the incentives (as [[2026-03-06#The Clinton trap|Clinton]] did, and as [[2025-12-19|Reform UK]] says it plans to do), you haven’t solved the problem; you’ve just pushed engineers and builders to spend 40% of their time acting as amateur lawyers.