When Picking Apples on a Farm with 5,000 Rules, Watch Out for the Ladders
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
How dare they require legally registered vehicles and insurance at a business. And they'll fine you if you have rats in the food prep areas!
A lot of these super specific rules also seem to be a product of the regulatory culture in the US where you don't regulate things until someone has fucked up really bad. Then you get these super specific rules that cover that one case, but nothing else because people will scream about "unfair over-regulation".
> when they asked to have 22 types of records available.
That doesn't mean that the most onerous and dangerous things can't be checked, but in general systems that run on trust run more efficiently.
Trust is indeed very efficient, but it has certain...limits.
What if the public road is differentiable nowhere?
[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/about-agricultural-and-farm-...
Well, congratulations. Your competitors are trying to grow as many saleable apples as possible, as cheaply as possible, grandchildren be damned. Most of those regulations come over someone's dead body.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Small businesses face more regulation each year. This isn’t a value judgement about regulation, just take a look at the Federal Register. It’s just a fact of life. Agencies and congress are hard at work adding to the CFR.
This is perfect work for the solo developer who wants to own a little niche.
Steps to get started.
1. Befriend small business owner or compliance person in small-medium sized business.
2. Ask how much time they spend on compliance, and how much it costs when they fuck up. Establish a unit cost.
3. Sketch up a paper prototype and iterate with the initial customer.
4. Build basic demo, show to your first customer’s colleagues. Get feedback.
5. Get group of potential customers to commit to buying at a specific price (discounted for them taking a chance on you) and to write you a check up front. Promise a delivery date of what you’ve agreed to deliver. (You can promise full refund if necessary but get a check to get through sales objections).
6. Hold checks. Don’t cash.
7. Build the damn thing
8. Deliver
9. Fix initial complaints because you’re a bozo not a wizard harry.
10. Sell to other people in your niche.
Try to start a restaurant, raise cattle, farm food, or any other business that non-tech people can understand? I hope you have a lot of capital for regulatory compliance staff and government pleasing!
Try that same hacker ethos with an automated vehicle, or a medical device though. In time, as tech starts to live up to its promise, you’ll find your red tape. Sure, there are some bad regulations, but a lot are the result of someone dying or nearly dying. When the equivalent of a countrywide E. Coli outbreak is a techie problem, the rest will rapidly follow.
That standard is generally considered to have arisen out of the deaths caused by the Therac-25 device and its faulty software and design.
Regulation takes time and will at some point catch up. Then startups will face the same problems as small business everywhere: to start a new company is almost impossible.
Unless you are already big. Regulation is a very effective barrier for new entries. It helps the market leaders because they can spend time to research, bend, adapt to the law.
Not Tuesday morning in August to discuss worker safety for peak harvesting. Not Wednesday afternoon in November to review incidents. Peak season, start of the weekend.
I know that in my own state (Wisconsin), the government has been cutting the number of people doing any kind of regulatory enforcement, year after year. That includes agriculture, environmental, etc.
And assuming their workers are working normal hours, Friday would be the least intrusive.
> "The farm sells homemade apple pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts. Schoolchildren arrive by the bus load to learn about growing apples. And as customers pick fruit from trees, workers fill bins with apples, destined for the farm’s shop and grocery stores."
I'm sure it is a burden to have such large accumulations of rules, particularly if 4 out of 5 are just telling you to do things that any reasonably careful person would already be doing. I don't see how to reduce that burden while also not introducing exploitable loopholes for bad actors.
Also - all in all it sounds a lot like farming in europe.
And one of my favorite stories:
This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.
The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.
Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck."
Meh. I am sending my kid to pre-school, and the amount of paperwork we need to submit is around that amount - waivers of responsibility, medical history, acknowledgement of procedures, etc., etc., etc.
There's an expression - "well, that's just the cost of doing business."
Paperwork is just "the cost of life."
So the apple farmer makes sense, why not do that?
Because "applying intelligently" obviously means "applying them selectively at the discretion of whoever's doing the enforcing".
My interpretation is getting to the same result more efficiently, not selectively applying based on that quote.
It would be nice if an average person could do it themselves, but I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect that they should, any more than we should expect an average person to be able to design a building rather than hiring a professional.
The end result is keeping small operations out of the market and protecting larger commercial operations that have the scale to deal with the regulatory burden.