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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.

I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.

We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.

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I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.

The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.

> I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.

I agree in general but there are some places where gray areas benefit the employer more than the employee and I think this is one of them. If everyone is forced to cheat the regulations to get their jobs done then it's no longer just a gray area and the regulations are pointless.

> Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born.

Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.

They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.

If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.

I may be missing something, but increased enforcement sounds like a great way to solve the corruption problem?

Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs

To me adjusting the level of enforcement is like the “fine” knob. It absolutely needs to be adjusted according to the situation.

But it’s not the “coarse” knob. You can only turn enforcement up or down so much before you need a paradigm shift.

You make it sound like you have convincing evidence that is the case. Do you?

There's no set of laws that can efficiently govern dishonest people. Or in "low trust" environments, if you prefer think of it amorally.

Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.

The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.

I have mixed feelings on this. I actually think this is a reasonable response to overly rigid systems but also creates fertile ground for unethical behavior. Ideally, I think we need systems with rigid guardrails, but that the distance between them is proportional to the amount of risk incurred by what you call the practice of "art".

Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.

From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.

> vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules

The new rules save lives. Crash accidents involving large trucks statistic: https://zarzaurlaw.com/category/blog/trucking-accidents/

'Sure, that will save a few lives but millions will be late.' is a Simpsons quote, not a good argument.

For some reason the number of accidents has been increasing since 2008 (which is a min point, by the way).

Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.

At least in this case, breaking the rules kills a lot of people - IIRC out of all the truck-caused fatalities, more than 1000 deaths/year in USA can be directly attributed to drowsy driving.

Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.

In systems that are safety-critical? Yikes.

The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

> That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

I believe it's "selfish greed" on behalf of the company, but a reasonable response to difficult constraints, on behalf of the driver.

Massively endangering others by the thousands is not a reasonable response just so they can shave a few hours off their trip

I think the argument more is that truckers ignore safety rules around maximum hours out of perceived (or actual) economic necessity.

Exactly. I want absolutely zero gray areas when I'm on a highway in the middle of Indiana at night and cross paths with at least a few hundred semi trucks. The less gray the better.

Hey some of us live here :)

To your point, a few winters ago I was driving up the NY Northway (north of Albany) in January, in a heavy snow storm, and cargo trucks were consistently passing me at 70+ mph.

One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.

That’s great until we’re talking about safety. I’m not willing to have my family run over by a semi truck with a drowsy and over worked driver for the sake of protecting these grey areas.

Safety rules are written in blood, after all.

A good regulatory scheme will give people flexibility in how they comply with the rules so that productivity and innovation aren't (overly) constrained. If you find that you constantly need to break rules to be productive then it means you need regulatory reform, not less oversight or enforcement within the current regulatory context.

> I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules.

I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.

We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.

The breaking of the rules here is not for the driver's benefit, though. Its the owners greed pushing serious costs on their employees. Disruptive innovation doesn't always make things better.

What are some examples of artistic and ingenious rule breaking?

If there's a useful gray area, then the law should change to legalize it.

All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.

- I think stability depends on what time frame you look at. Pushing how much time you spend driving, how little you sleep and so-forth may be stable for some period (weeks, months, a few years..) but it's not stable for a person longish term. Letting wages drift downward, so you wind-up hiring people with more problems (say, amphetamine addiction) may also be short-term stable but not long term stable.

The actually instability of the situation I think is illustrated by "chameleon carrier". Companies that shutdown and restart when they accumulate too safety violations.[1]

The thing about the situation is when things are being continually jury rigged to keep people working in the most profitable conditions for the carriers and the worst conditions for them, it's the opposite of stable, it's extremely fragile.

[1] https://www.teletracnavman.com/resources/blog/the-hunt-for-c...

Saying the system as a whole is stable does not mean there are no unstable parts. Goods get delivered at an acceptable cost with an acceptable loss rate - even with chameleon carriers and any other bad actors that exist. Suddenly changing how easy it is to break the rules, without changing anything else, could destabilize that equilibrium.

> I think stability depends on what time frame you look at.

What is the timeframe that you are thinking of where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?

What is the timeframe that you are thinking of...

-- When we're talking of a system, "stability" is roughly the property that a small perturbation in the system causes it to return to the position that it was previously in. The pandemic was significant shock but the notable thing we see is that the system.

...where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?

The individual rule-breaking (working more hours than a person could stand) still allowed day functioning of the system but it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them. Hence, the system was fragile to shock.

> it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them

That situation seems pretty exceptional to me. I think it's fair to call an equilibrium that requires a covid pandemic to disrupt "stable." I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.

If you just mean that capitalism is inherently unstable, then yes of course, but that doesn't seem closely related to the space for rule breaking as the space varies from place to place and industry to industry.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.

I never said trucking was unusually fragile for the America today. Many other industries follow the paradigm of barely paying enough and relying on a trickle of people willing to put with their framework and all of them are whining but not actually changing [2]. The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1] is also a description of how a lot of industries operates. It's fragile, ugly and profitable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28918853 [2] https://coloradosun.com/2021/10/03/labor-shortage-missing-wo...

> The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1]

Look, are you talking about trucking or are you talking about capitalism writ large? The larger capitalistic structure is both unjust and deeply unstable - but that topic is outside of the specific conditions of trucking and the accuracy of monitoring systems. The limits of the accuracy of surveillance systems are relevant, as far as I know, to all economic systems.

Or, to put it another way, I will ask again: what period do you see this system being unstable over? If it's just the covid pandemic then I see the disruption, but I disagree that the system was not 'stable' before. It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.

> It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.

It really wasn't, though; IIRC, the current reading of the evidence is that the mass extinction started about 10 million years before the impact delivered the coup de grace.

But I think you were assuming the somewhat popular fiction where things were stable, but then the meteorite wiped them out.

Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?

That's called "the cops".

Also Public Service Commissions.

I think we will see "micro fines" and electronic car systems in the next 10 years. Go over the speed limit for a certain period of time (eg, 10 mins)? Microfine. $5. Park in a no parking area for too long? Microfine. Don't signal your turn? Microfine, $0.50.

Yes, a nightmare.

Thankfully, in the context of laws in the US, I believe the 4th amendment may be helpful here. But other places will not be as lucky.

This is a terrible idea. It fixes the cost for speeding or not signaling to something that a well off person can easily afford. Even I would consider just paying a $5 fine in order to speed to get to an important meeting, etc. A $500 fine for 10 minutes of speeding would make me think twice

I think that actually illustrates the above commenter's point about gray areas? the highway does not devolve into lethal chaos when people exceed the limit by 10 mph. even 20 mph over is not so bad when the relative speed among vehicles is low. or on the other hand, a few outliers are not a huge problem when proper lane discipline is maintained (ie, don't pass on the right, keep right except to pass). it's not a big deal if most people occasionally speed to get to an important appointment. it's also not catastrophic if a few people who can afford it take the hit and speed everywhere. mostly, it just offends our sense of fairness.

The thing that would hold that back is the huge stock of existing analogue/gas vehicles. For all the talk of going electric, no one is going to buy everyone a new electric car and no one is going to just prevent the gas cars from driving since the economy needs people to work. Not that I'm in favor of the CO2 pollution this implies - though I'm not in favor of your Orwellian scenario either, which would be plausible otherwise.

Nah, you don't need a fancy car for the nightmare. Insurance companies are already letting you put in a device that measures your driving. It connects to the OBD-II port - standard on all vehicles since 1996.

Microfines was tested in Israel and backfired: https://priceonomics.com/effectiveness-of-fines-for-late-pic...

Reminds me of driving a cab in 5th Element :-/

But, if this were to come to pass, rich people would just speed and pay the fines as the cost of running the business. It's why fines to pick up late from the daycare backfired badly.

The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.

That’s not even close to how it used to work.

Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove.

Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency?

Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours.

Those days are long gone now…

Would you support speed limit enforcement by checking license plates at the beginning of a stretch of highway and at the end and auto-ticketing anyone who averaged over the speed limit?

If you raise the speed limit 15% to where it should be, sure.

To what, 55 mph? It's the most fuel-efficient speed for the majority of vehicles, and is far less likely to kill people in an accident, than a collision at 70*1.15 = 80mph.

why stop there? pretty much any form of transportation is more dangerous and/or generates more emissions that humans on their own two legs. collectively, we have decided to trade some of that away to actually get places in a reasonable amount of time. but if you don't feel comfortable driving in 65+ mph traffic, there are plenty of surface roads that run parallel to interstates.

Average speed cameras? They already exist in the UK and certain parts of Europe I’m familiar with.

Yes, can confirm, such cameras exist in Serbia and generate electronic tickets available to the vehicle owner on a government website if the calculated average speed is above allowed.

I do not think the method you are describing would usefully increase safety so it seems like a bad idea to me.

Next 50 yrs? This will be lucky to still be an issue in 5 to 10 yrs. Soon enough, the long haul routes will be autonomous. Humans will handle the short haul from some rural / suburban hub to the suburban / urban final destination. Autonomous might not be able to do "the last mile" but that's not what cause ppl to not want to be drivers.

I'm personally skeptical about the immediate practicality of autonomous driving, but either way, I was not just speaking about driving. I was talking about nearly every area of rule around 'public order.'

Long haul is practical and doable. Full door to door autonomous is unnecessary in the short term. Simply cracking the long haul nut is going to be significant.

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