New York city is like a really antiquated legacy codebase with tons of redundant checks that were added with good intentions and impossible to remove because you don't know what's truly holding the system together. It's far too complex for an individual to see the big picture well enough to slash the right things, and there's certainly an expectation that lawmakers to continue adding complexity in the name of simplicity but that obviously fails because they're overspecialized to the point where they are so far removed from the problem and without any kind of skin in the game they have no incentive to get their hands dirty and understand the plight of the regulated. Sometimes I wonder if the best course of action is to rewrite, but as with a codebase that's usually a mistake.