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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why.
A major corporate merger several years after that completely dissolved us into a larger petrochemical firm, causing a significant institutional and personnel shakeup. Maintaining a continuous gradient of ages in the company probably helps, so you don't fall off a memory cliff when one cohort of employees retires. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples, leaving only fragmentary maps and diagrams.
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