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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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