Schedulers Are Legislators

A scheduler is not a timer. A scheduler writes the law of when action is allowed.

When execution is deferred, advanced, or repeated, authority is reassigned in time.

That is legislation.

I. The False Neutrality of Scheduling

Scheduling is often described as:

cron jobs

background tasks

delayed execution

maintenance automation

This is incorrect.

Schedulers decide:

what runs now

what runs later

what never runs

what runs repeatedly

That is lawmaking.

II. Time Allocation Is Power Allocation

Who gets CPU time gets authority.

Who is deferred loses authority.

Schedulers allocate:

attention

opportunity

execution rights

Allocation of opportunity is governance.

III. Priority Is a Legal Distinction

Priority is not optimization.

Priority declares:

whose work matters more

whose work can wait

whose work can be starved

Undeclared priority is hidden discrimination.

IV. Starvation Is a Legal Outcome

If a task never runs:

it has been denied execution

its authority has expired

its claim has been nullified

Starvation is not a bug. It is a verdict.

Verdicts must be justifiable.

V. Recurrence Is Standing Law

Scheduled repetition:

creates ongoing authority

overrides ad-hoc requests

persists beyond individual intent

Recurring jobs are permanent statutes.

Permanent statutes require scrutiny.

VI. Schedulers Must Be Explicit and Versioned

Scheduler rules must be:

declared

versioned

attributable

reviewable

If schedule changes silently, law changes silently.

VII. Schedulers Must Be Auditable

A lawful scheduler records:

schedule definition

trigger times

execution outcomes

skips, delays, and failures

A scheduler without records is unaccountable power.

VIII. Replay Requires Schedulers

Replay must reproduce:

the same triggers

the same delays

the same skips

the same executions

If scheduling depends on wall-clock drift or infrastructure load, replay fails.

Failed replay is failed governance.

IX. Schedulers Are Not Infrastructure

Cron, task runners, and orchestrators do not define law.

They execute it.

Scheduler law must live in:

kernel policy

registry configuration

versioned rules

Not in ops scripts.

X. Final Conclusion

Schedulers are legislators.

A lawful system:

treats scheduling as allocation of authority

declares priorities and recurrence explicitly

records all scheduling decisions

replays scheduling deterministically

Anything else governs time by convenience instead of by consent.