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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sure many will argue about government control vs entrepreneurial freedom, what fascinates me most is the inefficiency. Reading that it takes '77 steps' or '63 steps' or whatever doesn't bother me. My programs have thousands of steps, but the wall-clock step time makes them disappear. No it's the inefficient parts, in-person visits, lack of consolidation, processing delays. All the things that computers are supposed to have solved by now.

I'd reframe this movement not as 'business vs government' but 'everyone vs inefficiency.'

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Most of those steps exist because of some asshole who did asshole shit.

You need to have an inspection by the water board to size the grease trap because some asshole dumped his cooking waste down the drain and created a fat berg that clogged the sewer. You need fire inspections because assholes block emergency egress, disable smoke alarms, etc. We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.

Entrepeneurs are great, but many will cut corners to make it work. I’d rather not get poisoned to advance their dream.

There's no such thing as absolute safety. There are only tradeoffs. You don't get safety for free. You have to pay very dearly for it in wasted time, unnavigable bureaucracies, and ultimately lost productivity. Those costs impose a real burden on real people's lives. In some cases that tradeoff is worth it, but you should always be thinking of it as a tradeoff.

A restaurant is one thing, but anybody who has ever hired somebody in the trades to do work on their house knows that the default is not pulling permits at all. If you hire an electrician to add a switch to the light in your closet he's not even going to bother. In many contexts the permitting process is so slow and stupid and inefficient that almost everybody ignores it.

You can't keep upping the ante forever and expect people to go along with it. In the end you might just make things worse.

Are permits typically required for something like adding a switch to a light in your closet? Genuinely curious, since I have not heard that from contractors, although I have heard permitting concerns for other projects involving electricity and/or plumbing.

It's going to be up to your local building codes -- the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction), in National Electric Code parlance -- but the answer is, "almost certainly." Pretty much any time you're running new wires you should get a permit. Adding a switch? Permit. A couple new recessed lights? Permit.

Reality: almost nobody does this.

This is a pretty good list of situations where you will/won't need a permit. In most cases you can replace an existing outlet/fixture without a permit, but anything new will require one:

https://www.lightingtutor.com/electrical-work-done-without-a...

It's one of those things that seems like overreach but when nearly every single 3-way switch in your house is wired incorrectly, it starts to make sense. We had a little outbuilding with a pool pump, some gazebo lights, a fan, etc. wired with a 100ft run of 240v 3-wire 14ga romex buried maybe 6" deep and not on a GFCI breaker.

Codes/permits aren't aimed to stop the median person from doing their own work, they're to stop the 10th percentile dummy creating an unsafe environment for anyone who comes into contact with their work product.

Everything is awesome until it ain’t. It’s structured into your insurance.

The risks vary. If you replace an old electrical socket, the risk is pretty low. But when someone gets electrocuted due to some dumb-dumb improperly running electricity to the pool, it’s probably not gonna be your house anymore.

Exactly. The rules may be complicated, but I bet if you threw them all out they'd mostly gradually reappear one by one over the years in response to problems that occur.

> We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.

We are about to have a natural experiment take place related to this. In several states they have amended their health codes to take away the power of inspectors to actually do anything when they find such code violations other than tell the restaurant that they should fix it.

Their county/city health departments can only act now when there is verified report that someone was actually seriously sickened due to the restaurant's actions.

Link to where this is happening?

I have often wondered if any place would do something like this… although I hoped it wouldn’t happen.

Also, do you know if this is somehow in response to Covid restrictions? Or just a general “let’s see what happens, we haven’t heard of anyone getting really poisoned by food lately” attitude?

I didn't save a link when it was mentioned in a few news stories sometime last year (or maybe early this year?).

And yes, it was in response to COVID restrictions. Most red states have passed laws limiting the power of state and local health authorities. I think the majority of them are just aimed at infectious disease prevention measures. I think the ones that also removed the ability to preemptively close a restaurant until it fixes a major health code violation that hasn't yet hospitalized anyone did so due to hasty and sloppy drafting rather than intent.

People can do harmful actions unknowingly. There's not much use labeling any inproper action as "asshole." Most of the time people are just making honest mistakes where they didn't adequately consider all the outcomes. You've either got to stomach honest mistakes, or implement rules that prevent them from ever happening. People aren't magically born with the ability to "not do anything an asshole might do"

Incompetence and malice have the same result.

The Restaurant manager may have intended to streamline a process by leaving the tray of chicken out for 4 hours instead of in the walk in. I don’t care - the customers will get sick from contamination.

The movie theatre manager may block an emergency egress because gangs of teenagers are letting their friends in for free and he doesn’t have the budget to station an employee there. I don’t care - dying in a fire or stampede isn’t for me.

Brakes are what allows cars to go fast. I’d rather have some assurance that there’s a baseline level of competence than to try to figure out whether some asshole will disregard my safety or be unqualified to make the decisions they are making.

correct. and to continue the reasoning, we experience this as bureaucratic inefficiency because the inspectors / regulators / etc are chronically underfunded relative to the growing number of users requiring their service. and that's for two related reasons: the bureaucracy is a lagging response as you and others note, and our government has gotten woefully incapable of forward thinking (because of multi-decade sabotage).

Nah, the assholes are the exception, not the rule. This level of bureaucracy is never for the good of the people.

You could have a process that approves things optimistically and have inspections coming later. You could have some form of certification program that let's you say "It's not my first rodeo. I know what I am doing, please let me do it and I take full responsibility for any shit that might happen if I deviate from the best practices."

And the rest of us don't really care about your restaurant going up or not, most of them fail anyway, we want to know that the food inspector didn't go "nah, you've done this before, A."

And how does this contradict what I am advocating?

I'm not saying that there won't be an inspection. What I am saying is that there are plenty of steps in the process that could be done with less gate-keeping.

All laws cater to the exceptions because if a behavior was the cultural norm there wouldn’t be a law against it.

Your solution has the same level of bureaucracy but delays it and even adds, essentially, an addition licensure so it’s not really the bureaucracy but the timing.

> All laws cater to the exceptions because if a behavior was the cultural norm there wouldn’t be a law against it.

I agree to a point (history is filled with cases of laws that were created precisely to curb perfectly "normal" behavior which was not favored by the elites) but anyway it does not follow that just because a law exists we need to implement ubiquitous policing.

E.g, we put traffic lights in busy streets as a way to coordinate people and traffic, not as a way see to chase those who deviate from the "rules".

> even adds, essentially, an addition licensure

The idea of a certification would be as an alternative, not a substitute.

+1. I agree with your point and I think you are absolutely right but your answer seems to fall into the trap the parent was warning about.

Having controls does not mean that they must be inefficient. In fact, bureaucracy and inefficiencies are the enemies of the end goal because they tend to devalue the work of government agencies (or whoever enforce those controls). And then you end up with a libertarian outlet like Institute for Justice telling you that you need half a century to open a donut store.

Yeah, there may be some shock at the 92 number, but really what is a step? I can probably come up with a shocking number of steps to make coffee in the morning... I think it's more important to understand if the process is well defined/laid out and if the overall time from the first to last step is reasonable. Plus, depending on the situation, I'd rather the work be in my hands because I know I would be efficient, at least.

Yea, the article would've been more interesting (and probably more convincing?) if it had detailed what some of the steps actually are. I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that inefficient regulation is an issue, but just quoting an opaque number of "steps" seems, if anything, to make the case less convincing by making it feel like they're obfuscating.

28 steps to make my cup of coffee in the morning in you were wondering. (plus a few more to clean up afterwards)

If you can't afford (in terms of time as well as money) to put up with it you can screw right off. The city doesn't need or want your low buck development.

Making the process inefficient raises the floor of the minimum viable business. And, more importantly, it raises the floor for who can start one so that you don't get people closing up shop and being bankrupt when something bad happens.

The institutions designing these processes are chock f-ing full of people of questionable intentions. You hear "affordable prices" they hear "trashy clientele". You hear "thin margins" and they hear "can't afford to be taxed more than they currently are". You hear "small family owned business" and they hear "people who have no other assets we can threaten to lien in the case of a dispute". And just to be clear, these people aren't evil (well their actions are, but they're done with good intentions). It's just that the regulatory agencies they work for are set up in such a way that the 2nd and 3rd order "nice to push for but not technically within the scope of what we do here" opinions of all the people involved seep through. At its root this is a diversity problem. There aren't enough Ron Swansons and people who've been f-ed by government bureaucracies working for government bureaucracies so you get bureaucracies doing things that are completely and totally tone deaf.

Edit: And before anyone puts any more words in my mouth, they have no intention of making the process onerous and exclusionary. They have just settled into that equilibrium over the centuries because that is the local maximum their crude "did our last round of changes do what we wanted or not" hill climbing algorithm has found.

I agree it's entirely possible that some bureaucracy is intended as a trial by fire. That said I think that is a tiny minority of the time. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

The people implementing these regulations don't have the time, resources, or expertise to create holistically efficient systems. Instead they can have meetings, write rules, have more meetings, vote on the rules, and then add another step to a process that assumes you go to an office and fill out a form because that's how it was done the first time someone had to come up with the permitting process.

If I approach a rule maker and say "you're trying to over regulate!" then I'm challenging their raison d'etre without demonstrating understanding of their limited toolset. If, on the other hand, I say, "let me reduce your costs, save you time, and help you collect money faster" then (I believe) I'm going to have a better time. It's for that reason that I feel the "everyone vs inefficiency" argument is more likely to succeed.

> ”can't afford to be taxes (sic) more than they currently are”

This is such a weird take. You get taxed on profits. If you don’t turn a profit you pay zero tax.

Oh, and payroll is not profit.

It's obvious you've never worked or had a business.

In California, an LLC pays $800/year taxes even on zero profit; you must pay for a business license tax, and you pay "property taxes" on the equipment and fixtures in your facility. (See: https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/property-information/b... )

You also must pay for certain professional licenses, and pay for certain inspections. Just one example, I have to pay about $150/year for a "water backflow valve" inspection, even though our computer consulting office has no equipment that connects to the water supply.

I have a 20 year career of which 5 as a solo business :)

But you’re right, running a business in the US sounds _terrible_. Condolences. My assumptions were based on institutions not being hostile.

Let me guess, white collar business, fairly large gross margin, no process equipment or physical inputs/outputs except from the office printer. Was I close?

None of that carries over to the blue collar world.

California is not uniquely terrible, but in most of the country little or none of that applies.

Licensing fees, requirements for X or Y be implemented, etc, etc, that kind of stuff. At the small business level that's the stuff that's really onerous. If it were just taxes on profits far fewer people would be complaining. It's all the shit that kicks you when you're down that really hurts.

In that case the business idea wasn’t good enough. If you can’t afford the cost of doing business it’s not a viable business idea.

In the same category: “I can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage”

Every time some politician gets on a high horse about "we're gonna make errybody who's doing X also do Y" that's a cost.

A bike rack out front. A change in the ratio of hand washing stations per employee. It's all "cheap", and most of it's good stuff that's easy to justify. But it adds up in a big way. And you let this stuff run for awhile and this is how that "authentic" taco stand or used book store you loved gets pushed out of business.

This is nonresponsive to the point being made. The costs under discussion are imposed mostly by the government, they are not a thing that merely exists like the weather. Reasonable people can disagree on the amount of bureaucracy required to just sell things.

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