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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

I wish it were possible for similar prompts to appear before all sorts of policy-makers and bureaucrats. "It appears you are about to institute a policy which will require 400 million patients to sign an additional waiver every time they visit a clinic, this will waste a total of 354,921 human hours within the next year alone. Please type 354,921 to proceed."

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The motivations are different: the cost to the rule maker of the effort by all those people is nil. While the cost of not adding the paper is the risk of something happening in the future which could cost them their job. This is why the shoe removal theatre was added to flying: the risk of something happening is essentially nil, but if it did, heads would roll.

This is not a criticism of bureaucracy or regulation BTW (I'm a fan of both, in general). It's simply a recognition that there's a misalignment of objectives.

Not sure how to analyze the calculus in the case of rachaelbythebay's observation. Certainly there is one misalignment which is if the tool has sharp unprotected edges (e.g. can take the company's whole site down) the person who ran the program will be blamed, not the person who wrote it. Unless they are the same person, it's hard to get a proper feedback loop in place. The only tools we have are coding standard and code reviews: bureaucracy!

In my experience, the protections are added after a Learning Review from an incident.

Yeah, it's quite surreal. "Hey, privacy is important, so let it make so that to handle people's private data, you'll need a permission from them". All right, now whenever you try to e.g. send a (paper) mail, you have to sign the waiver that yes, you do allow the post office to see and handle your name and your mail address. Not only that, all such waivers seem to be written as "I hereby allow <insert the legal entity> to handle my private data in whatever way they want to", so we're back on square one, just with more perfunctory paperwork required.

closely related: the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995

https://digital.gov/resources/paperwork-reduction-act-44-u-s...

it requires the office of management and business to calculate the impact of records-keeping requirements impact on time and privacy, among other things.

I do not believe it has resulted in a reduced recordskeeping burden. For the most part I simply see an estimate of how long it will take to complete my tax forms and permits, on the form itself. Perhaps others have different views.

Hard to say, knowing the cost of a new process could have informed a new design or requirements. We don’t know what the other path held. But I believe in general having more information allows us to make better decisions so this is a good act.

How do you know it was a waste? Maybe that was time well spent.

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