papering over the cracks · upkeep

Maintenance that covers a growing drift by holding the surface state, while the underlying parameter moves toward a wall.

Papering over the cracks (noun) means: Maintenance that covers a growing drift by holding the surface state, while the underlying parameter moves toward a wall. It emerges from maintenance, drift, wall, parameter: The surface is held while the parameter beneath changes without correction, narrowing the window until maintenance can no longer reach the new state. In the EmergenceLexicon it sits at computed level 15, chaining down to the four foundations (space, time, energy, pattern).

ordinarily means: Trying to fix problems in a way that only hides them, not solves them.

Examples

• The Fukushima Daiichi reactors required constant cooling, but backup power failures after the 2011 tsunami papered over the cracks until meltdowns began. engineering
• Lehman Brothers' 2008 balance sheet showed stability while repo accounting masked growing leverage. economics
• Windows XP continued running on many ATMs past support end, hiding OS decay with patches until hardware failed. computing

Emergence

Chain to foundations

Neighborhood

Concepts that depend on this one above; what it is built from below.

Provenance