Ready States
The cost of being prepared for something that may not happen.
Observation
A desert seed can sit for years in a state that is neither alive-and-working nor dead. It is holding a position: low metabolism, high sensitivity to one specific cue.
Readiness here is not activity. It is a maintained ability to act, paid for continuously.
Pattern
Systems that must respond to rare events tend to hold reserve capacity in a reduced state and gate its release behind a narrow trigger.
Two failure directions appear: triggers too loose, and reserves quietly spent while nothing was happening.
Elsewhere
Warm standby servers, on-call rotations, strategic reserves, and pre-approved credit lines are all versions of this. So is a team that keeps ten percent of its time unassigned.
The unassigned time is usually the first thing reallocated, which is the seed being eaten.
Question
Is there a way to make the carrying cost of readiness visible enough to defend, without making the reserve look like waste on a spreadsheet?
Break
Dormancy works because a seed's environment eventually delivers the cue. Institutions face events that may never arrive, and cannot wait indefinitely without justification.
The analogy assumes patience that budgets do not have.
The resemblance is the beginning of the question, not the answer.