Accountability Sinks | Hacker News Reader

Accountability Sinks

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623 pointsmsustrik392 comments

My go-to example of a whole mesh of "accountability sinks" is... cybersecurity. In the real world, this field is really not about the tech and math and crypto - almost all of it is about distributing and dispersing liability through contractual means.

That's why you install endpoint security tools. That's why you're forced to fulfill all kinds of requirements, some of them nonsensical or counterproductive, but necessary to check boxes on a compliance checklist. That's why you have external auditors come to check whether you really check those boxes. It's all that so, when something happens - because something will eventually happen - you can point back to all these measures, and say: "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault".

With that in mind, look at the world from the perspective of some corporations, B2B companies selling to those corporations, other suppliers, etc.; notice how e.g. smaller companies are forced to adhere to certain standards of practice to even be considered by the larger ones, etc. It all creates a mesh, through which liability for anything is dispersed, so that ultimately no one is to blame, everyone provably did their best, and the only thing that happens is that some corporate insurance policies get liquidated, and affected customers get a complimentary free credit check or some other nonsense.

I'm not even saying this is bad, per se - there are plenty of situations where discharging all liability through insurance is the best thing to do; see e.g. how maritime shipping handles accidents at sea. It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.

+1 Insightful

Thank you for sharing this really illuminating take. I spend an unreasonable amount of time dealing with software security, and you've put things in a light where it makes a bit more sense.

> "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault"

The amount of (useless) processes/systems at banks I've seen in my career that boil down to this is incredible, e.g. hundreds of millions spent on call center tech for authentication that might do nothing, but the vendor is "industry-leading" and "best in-class".

> It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.

Bingo. The same situation for most risk departments at banks or healthcare fraud and insurance companies.

I thought risk at a bank was going to be savvy quants, but it's literally lawyers/compliance/box-checking marketing themselves as more sophisticated than they are. Like the KYC review for products never actually follow up and check if the KYC process in the new products works. There's no analytics, tracking, etc. until audit/regulators come in an ask, "our best-in-class vendor handles this". All the systems are implemented incorrectly, but it doesn't matter because the system is built by a vendor and implemented by consultants, and they hold the liability (they don't, but it will take ~5 years in court to get to that point).

Beginning to understand what "bureaucracy" mechanically is.

What's funny is that checklists in hospitals have been shown, empirically, to be massive life-saving devices.

cyber perhaps not so much...

Checklists work well in high stress situations where you cannot forget a step (medicine, aviation).

A checklist in a security incident? Probably helpful.

A security checklist to satisfy auditors and ancient regulations? This is an entirely different kind.

Yea, the problem most often in computer security checklists is misapplication of the checklist.

I do cyber security related stuff for the finance and they have some of the dumbest checklists ever.

A more recent one I got was

"We only allow the HTTP verbs 'GET' and 'POST', your application can only use that and the verbs PUT, PATCH, and DELETE cannot be used.

After not replying 'are you fucking stupid' I said

"You do realize that you are using a RestAPI application and that these verbs can go to the same interface to modify the call in different way? Not only would we have to rewrite our application which would probably take months to years, you would have to rewrite tons of applications on your side to make this actually work."

You get these dipshit auditors from other firms that pick up some 'best practice' from 2003 and put it in a list then get a god complex about it needing to be implemented when they have absolutely zero clue why the original thing was called out in the first place.

For those who wonder, typically these verbs are disabled to prevent the accidental enablement of WebDAV on some platforms, especially Windows/IIS that had some issues with security around it. It makes zero sense for such a rule in a modern API application.

> For those who wonder, typically these verbs are disabled to prevent the accidental enablement of WebDAV on some platforms, especially Windows/IIS that had some issues with security around it. It makes zero sense for such a rule in a modern API application.

Thanks. One thing that's more interesting than the revealed stupidity of such rules is the actual (and often sensible) reason they were first created long ago.

"Temporary" hacks outliving both the problem they solved and the system they were built for seems to be a regular occurrence in bureaucracy as much as it is in software and hardware.

Most of this comes about because the talent pool for cyber is so small. Cyber Auditors, should understand what the risk is, and what controls should be in place, and how they operate.

Most don't because they lack the appropriate technical skills. Therefore we fall back on checklists, as less skilled people can do a compliance check to it.

In large organisations this can also happen between cyber and engineering teams, where the teams don't understand security and are just focussed on releasing features, and so cyber enforces checklists or non-negotiables or compliance assessments.

All of this comes down to skills and awareness. Not enough people have the skills/knowledge to cover all the roles out there.

Don't think the talent pool is small. It's the budget. InfoSec is seen as a huge money sink in the eyes of many unfortunately.

Checklists solve the problem of forgetting specific details. They work very well in situations where all possible problems have been enumerated and the only failure mode is forgetting to check for one.

They do not solve the problem of getting people to think things through and recognize novel issues.

There are some jobs you can't do well. You can do them adequately or screw them up. Checklists are helpful in those jobs.

Checklists are a good tool for making sure you don't forget something. They're a terrible replacement for actually thinking.

The fun part of bank bureaucracy is you get to experience it 10x worse if you actually work at one.

I once worked on a global, cross-asset application. The change management process was not designed for this and essentially required like 9 Managing Directors to click "approve release" in a 48 hour window for us to do a release.

We got one shot at this per week, and failing any clicks we would have to try again the next week. The electronic form itself to trigger the process took 1-2 hours to fill out and we had 3 guys on the team who were really good at it (it took everyone else 2x as long).

Inevitably this had at least 3 very stupid outcomes -

First we had tons of delayed releases. Second the majority of releases became "emergency releases" in which we were able to forego the majority of process and just.. file the paperwork in retrospect.

Finally, we instructed staff in each region to literally go stand in the required MD delegates office (of course the MD wouldn't actually click) until they clicked. The conversations usually went something like this "I don't know what this is / fine fine you aren't gonna leave, I'll approve it if you say it won't break anything / ok don't screw up"

The most unfortunate thing about much of corporate 'cybersecurity' is that it combines expensive and encumbering theatre around compliance and deniability... with ridiculously insecure practices.

Imagine, for example, if more companies would hire for software developers and production infrastructure experts who build secure systems.

But most don't much care about security: they want their compliances, they may or may not detect and report the inevitable breaches, and the CISO is paid to be the fall-person, because the CEO totally doesn't care.

Now we're getting cottage industries and consortia theatre around things like why something that should be a static HTML Web page is pulling in 200 packages from NPM, and now you need bold third-party solutions to combat all the bad actors and defective code that invites.

> Imagine, for example, if more companies would hire for software developers and production infrastructure experts who build secure systems.

I do imagine that, and they get hacked (because you have to get lucky every time, but the hackers only need to get lucky once), and then the press says "were you doing all the things the whole industry says to do?" and they say "no, but we were actually secure!" and the press goes "well no you weren't, you got hacked, and you weren't even doing the bare minimum!" and then the company is never heard of again.

Honestly is is just like Insurance. You understand the value of things you are protecting (and simple compliance has a value to you in penalties and liabilities avoided) and make sure it costs more than that to break into your system.

At a corporate level, it is contractually almost identical to insurance, with the product being sold liability for that security, not the security itself.

Right. I sometimes call it meta-level insurance, because it's structurally what it is. Funnily, actual insurance is a critical part of it - it's the ultimate liability sink, discharging whatever liability that didn't get diluted and diffused among all relevant parties.

And, I guess it's fine - it's the general way of dealing with impact that can be fully converted into dollars (i.e. that doesn't cause loss of life or health).

It’s really not fine. Expensive and useless security theater isn’t just inefficient and corrupt, it’s way more actively harmful than that because there’s a huge opportunity cost associated with all the wasted time and money AND the incentivized deliberate refusal to make obviously good/easy/cheap improvements. Even in matters pertaining purely to dollars.. Spreading out liability can’t erase injury completely. it just pushes it onto the tax payer because someone is paying the judge to sit in the chair and listen to the insurance people and the lawyers.

I wonder what the difference is between cybersecurity and civil aviation safety. At a glance they both have a lot of processes and requirements. Somehow on one side they are as you said, a way to deal with liability without necessarily increasing security, while on the other safety is actually significantly increased.

I think a big part of it is that failures in aviation safety cost lives, often dozens or hundreds per incident, in quite immediate, public and visceral fashion. There also isn't much gradation - an issues either causes massive loss of life, or could cause it if not caught early, or... it's not relevant to safety. On top of that, any incident is hugely impactful on the entire industry - most people are fully aware how likely they'd be to survive a drop from airliner altitude, so it doesn't take many accidents to scare people away of flying in general.

Contrast that to cybersecurity, where vast majority of failures have zero impact on life or health of people, directly or otherwise. Even data breaches - millions of passwords leak every other week, yet the impact of this on anyone affected is... nil. Yes, theoretically cyberattacks could collapse countries and cause millions to die if they affected critical infrastructure, but so far this never happened, and it's not what your regular cybersecurity specialist deals with. In reality, approximately all impact of all cyberattacks is purely monetary - as long as isn't loss of life or limb, it can be papered over with enough dollars, which makes everyone focus primarily on ensuring they're not the ones paying for it.

I think it's also interesting to compare both to road safety - it sits kind of in between on the "safety vs. theater" spectrum, and has the blend of both approaches, and both outcomes.

> I think a big part of it is that failures in aviation safety cost lives

This is an interesting point, and it certainly affects the incentives involved and the amount of resources allocated to mitigating the problems.

I do think cyber security incidents with real consequences are likely to become more common going forward (infrastructure etc). We haven't experienced large state actors being malicious in a war time footing (yet).

Will we able to better mitigate attacks given better incentives? I think that is an open question. We will certainly throw more resources at the problem, and we will weight outcomes more heavily when designing processes, but whether we know how to prevent cybersecurity incidents even if we really want to... that I wonder about.

I do think you're broadly right -- the lack of immediate and obvious impact creates a perception that there is no impact. But even your first example -- data breaches -- does have an impact. It might not have happened to you, it might not have happened to me, but people do get their identities stolen, and recovering from that is a nightmare. And nobody is going to 'paper over' John Doe's missing retirement fund or ruined credit score, that harm is permanent.

> this never happened

This is also wrong. Russia has employed cyberwarfare against Ukraine multiple times -- e.g. in 2016 when they took large chunks of the grid for an hour, or more pointedly in 2022 when it was used to disrupt infrastructure and digital operations across the country as part of an invasion. Stuxnet and Triton were also pretty serious -- unlikely to kill millions, but they did have a real effect. If you're bringing this up to explain why people don't care as much as they should, then I agree -- but I would think that it's misguided to suggest that "this has never happened" actually implies that it never will. It took 20 years after the advent of commercial airlines for someone to bomb one, but clearly that is now a major and continuing concern.

Aviation safety is mostly about learning from past experience. You mitigate known hazards that, once mitigated, stay mitigated.

Cybersecurity is about adversarial hazards. When you mitigate them they actively try to unmitigated themselves.

It is more analogous to TSA security checks than to FAA equipment checklists. The checklist approach can prevent copycats from repeating past exploits but is largely useless for preventing new and creative problems.

There is lot less aircraft models as well. About 17 in current production(although more variants), 3 in planning, 26 "out-of-production" and some more historical.

In the end there is just not that many products overall.

Now compare that to amount of software being worked on. And number of companies involved just on buying bespoke ones or developing for own use...

Security is closer to product management and marketing than engineering. It's a narrative and the mirror image of product and marketing, where instead of creating something people want based on desire, it's managing the things people explicitly don't want. When organizations don't have product management, they have anti-product management, which is security. We could say, "There is no Anti-Product Division."

Specifically on accountability, I bootstrapped a security product that replaced 6-week+ risk assessment consultant spreadsheets with 20mins of product manager/eng conversation. It shifted the accountability "left" as it were.

When I pitched it to some banks, one of the lead security guys took me aside and said something to the effect of, "You don't get it. we don't want to find risk ourselves, we pay the people to tell us what the risks and solutions are because they are someone else. It doesn't matter what they say we should do, the real risk is transferred to their E&O insurance as soon as they tell us anything. By showing us the risks, your product doesn't help us manage risk, it obligates us to do build features to mitigate and get rid of it."

I was enlightened. Manage means to get value from. The decade I had spent doing security and privacy risk assessments and advocating for accountability for risk was as a dancing monkey.

I worked in GRC space for a while, which is where I finally realized the things I wrote above. Our product intended to give CISOs greater visibility into threats and their impacts, making it easy to engage in probabilistic forecasting to prioritize mitigations. Working on designing and building it made me see the field from the perspective of our customers, and from their POV, cyber-threats are all denominated in dollars, mitigating threats boils down to not having to pay corresponding dollars, and that it's often more effective to ensure someone else pays than to address the underlying technological or social vulnerability.

we have close experiences for sure. mine was positioned as pre-GRC, more of a design stage tool. like an aha.io/roadmap.com for security. an early champion kept asking how it got them compliance and what compliance frameworks did it implement. I kept insisting this isn't for compliance, it's product level design for security- and that I wasn't interested in making a compliance tool because compliance is stupid. ironically it was essentially an anti-corporate security product.

of course security people said, "wat, wut?" and it it was because I had made something for what I thought people should do, but not what they wanted. it's funny looking back at it, as I was so burned out and hating the security work I was doing that I just said f'it, and automated it. the biggest conceit (among many) was believing customers would want the results of the risk assessment consulting services I offered if they could do it themselves for 1/100th of the price. the other lesson was, if someone doesn't or won't take accountability for risks, it's almost never because they are dumb.

Rhyming with this observation - the only time I've ever heard someone getting fired over a phishing incident anywhere I've worked.. was a guy on the cybersecurity team who clicked through and got phished.

This is the ultimate nihilistic take on security.

Yes, 'cyber' security has devolved to box checking and cargo culting in many orgs. But what's your counter on trying to fix the problems that every tech stack or new SaaS product comes without of the box?

For most people when their Netflix (or HN) password gets leaked that means every email they've sent since 2004 is also exposed. It might also mean their 401k is siphoned off. So welcome the annoying and checkbox-y MFA requirements.

If you're an engineer cutting code for a YC startup -- Who owns the dependancy you just pulled in? Are you or your team going to track changes (and security bugs) for it in 6 months? What about in 2 or 3 years?

Yes, 'cyber' security brings a lot of annoying checkboxes. But almost all of them are due to externalities that you'd happily blow past otherwise. So -- how do we get rid annoying checkboxes and ensure people do the right thing as a matter of course?

> For most people when their Netflix (or HN) password gets leaked that means every email they've sent since 2004 is also exposed. It might also mean their 401k is siphoned off. So welcome the annoying and checkbox-y MFA requirements.

Not true. For most people, when their Netflix or HN password gets leaked, that means fuck all. Most people don't even realize their password was leaked 20 times over the last 5 years. Yes, here and there someone might get deprived of their savings (or marriage) this way, but at scale, approximately nothing ever happens to anyone because of password or SSN leaks. In scope of cybersec threats, people are much more likely to become victims of ransomware and tech support call scams.

I'm not saying that cybersec is entirely meaningless and that you shouldn't care about security of your products. I'm saying that, as a field, it's focused on liability management, because that's what most customers care about, pay for, and it's where the most damage actually manifests. As such, to create secure information systems, you often need to work against the zeitgeist and recommendations of the field.

EDIT:

> This is the ultimate nihilistic take on security.

I don't believe it is. In fact, I've been putting efforts to become less cynical over last few months, as I realized it's not a helpful outlook.

It's more like, techies in cybersecurity seem to have overinflated sense of uniqueness and importance of their work. The reality is, it's almost all about liability management - and is such precisely because most cybersec problems are nothingburgers that can be passed around like a hot potato and ultimately discharged through insurance. It's not the worst state of things - it would be much worse if typical cyber attack would actually hurt or kill people.

This really resonated with me because I'm also working to avoid becoming more cynical as I gain experience and perspective on what problems "matter" and what solutions can gain traction.

I think in this case the cognitive dissonance comes from security-minded software engineers (especially the vocal ones that would chime in on such a topic) misunderstanding how rare their expertise is as well as the raw scope of risks that large corporations are exposed to and what mitigations are sensible. If you are an expert it's easy to point at security compliance implementation at almost any company and poke all kinds of holes in specific details, but that's useless if you can't handle the larger problem of cybersecurity management and the fallout from a mistake.

And if you zoom out you realize the scope of risk introduced by the internet, smart phones and everything doing everything online all the time is unfathomably huge. It's not something that an engineering mentality of understanding intricate details and mechanics can really get ones head around. From this perspective, liability and insurance is a very rational way to handle it.

As far as the checklists go, if you are an expert you can peel back the layers and realize the rationales for these things and adjust accordingly. If you have competent and reasonable management and decision makers then things tend to go smoothly, and ultimately auditors are paid by the company, so there is typically a path to doing the right thing. If you don't have competent and reasonable management then you're probably fucked in unnumerable ways, such that security theater is the least of your worries.

Actual accountability. Do not let companies be like "Well, we were SOC2 compliant, this breach is not our fault despite not updating Apache Struts! Tee Hee" When Equifax got away with what was InfoSec murder by 6 months of jail time suspended, Executives stopped caring. This is political problem, not technology one.

>So -- how do we get rid annoying checkboxes and ensure people do the right thing as a matter of course?

By actually having the power to enforce this, if you pull our SBOM, realize we have a vulnerability and get our Product Owner to prioritize fixing it even if takes 6 weeks because we did dumb thing 2 years ago and tech debt bill has come due. Otherwise, stop wasting my time with these exercises, I have work to do.

Not trying to be mean but that's my take with my infosec team right now. You are powerless outside your ability to get SOC2 and we all know this is theater, tell us what piece of set you want from me, take it and go away.

It's a two-sided coin though.

We should be stopping leaks, but we also need to reduce the value of leaked data.

Identity theft doesn't get meaningfully prosecuted. Occasionally they'll go after some guy who runs a carding forum or someone who did a really splashy compromise, but the overall risk is low for most fraudulent players.

I always wanted a regulation that if you want to apply for credit, you have to show up in person and get photographed and fingerprinted. That way, the moment someone notices their SSN was misused, they have all the information on file to make a slam-dunk case against the culprit. It could be an easier deal for lazy cops than going after minor traffic infractions.

The problem with "identity theft" specifically is that, in itself, it's just a legal term for allowing banks to save on KYC by letting them transfer liability to society at large.

If someone uses your SSN to take a loan in your name, it shouldn't be your problem - in the same way that someone speeding in the same make&model of the car as yours shouldn't be your problem, just because they glued a piece of cardboard over their license plate and crayoned your numbers on it.

That is also why so much of the security[tm] software is so bad. Usability and fitness for purpose are not box-tickers. The industry term in play is "risk transfer".

Most security software does not do what it advertises, because it doesn't have to. Its primary function is for the those who bought the product, to be able to blame the vendor. "We paid vendor X a lot of money and transferred the risk to them, this cannot be our fault." Well, guess what? You may not be legally the one holding the bag, but as a business on the other end of the transaction you are still at fault. Those are your customers. You messed up.

As for vendor X? If the incident was big enough, they got free press coverage. The incentives in the industry truly are corrupt.

Disclosure: in the infosec sphere since the early 90's. And as it happens, I did a talk about this state of affairs earlier this week.

We should really define a new term for such work.

Perhaps "Risk Compliance Security" or "Security Compliance Engineering"

Where "Security Compliance Engineering" is the practice of designing, implementing, and maintaining security controls that satisfy regulatory frameworks, contractual obligations, and insurance requirements. Its primary objective is not to prevent cyberattacks, but to ensure that organizations can demonstrate due diligence, minimize liability, and maintain audit readiness in the event of a security incident.

Key goals:

- Pass external audits and internal reviews - Align with standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST

- Mitigate organizational risk through documentation and attestation

- Enable business continuity via legal defensibility and insurability

In contrast…

Cybersecurity is focused on actively detecting, preventing, and responding to cyber threats. It’s concerned with protecting systems and data, not accountability sinks.

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible.

The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.

Yes unfortunately I've observed this in some support systems. The best way is to thread the needle between being extremely personally polite to the other human on the line, but going through the required machinations on their runbook to trigger an escalation.

That is - you don't really have to behave unpleasant (raise voice, swear, be impolite, threaten) but you should just refuse to get off the line, demand escalation, and importantly emphasize with their predicament in needing to escalate you. Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".

I had a cellphone provider send me a $3000 bill because someone apparently was able to open 5 lines & new devices in my name/address. I went through the first few steps of their runbook including going to police department, getting report filed, and providing them the report number. They then tried to demand further work from me and I escalated.

At that point I turned it around - what evidence do you have that I opened this line. Show me the store security footage of me buying the phones, show me the scan of my drivers license, show me my social security number? Tim, are you saying I can just go to the store with your name & address and open 5 lines in your name? Being able to point out the asymmetry of evidence, unreasonableness of their demands, and putting the support staff in my shoes.. they relented and cleared the case.

I ask for something, when they say they can’t do that. I say the magic words “Maybe your manager can do it?” You just don’t accept the possibility of your request not being fulfilled, say they are contractually obliged to do, even if you’re not sure, if all else fails reverse the charges on your card. Threatening small claims court works well. I now do that on the on the second email, do I look like a fool? Yes. Do I have a lot of time to investigate your platform's org structure and capabilities when I have dozens of companies like this I deal with daily? No.

Before threatening small claims court (known to be a PITA for the plaintiff), I'll tell them that if they can't resolve it, then they should send me an email telling me so, which I'll forward to my credit card company so they can reverse the charges. Then I'll remind them that that's bad for the business because it increases their transaction fees and ask (again) if there's any way to just refund me. This works for me like 90% of the time.

Small claims is unbelievably easy! You file a one-page form, pay $50, and then show up on your hearing date.

Look at the ToS. Frequently there are clauses that force binding arbitration and require the company you are dealing with to pay the arbitration fees.

> Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".

"We" phrasing is an empathy hack for CS, because it lets you continue to be nice to the person you're talking to AND be persistent about "our" issue being solved.

It's kind of like judo, especially when faced with an apathetic, resistant, or adversarial rep: "This isn't just my problem. This is our problem. So how can we fix it?"

PS: In the same way that my favorite cancellation reason turns the situation on its head. Don't play the game they've rigged up for you to lose. "Why are you cancelling?" -> "Personal reasons." There's literally no counter-response.

Alternatively, just lie about the cancellation reason. *"Why are you cancelling your Comcast internet service?" Answer: "I am moving to the Solomon islands, where there is no Comcast service or business for 1000 miles in any direction (at least)."

“I’m going to prison and getting my affairs in order” is a good one too.

If you want to be adversarial, tell them you're converting to the Amish faith, and would they like to hear details about it?

Doordash tier 1 is so extreme that they terminate conversations unilaterally. One of the worst trashy customer services I've ever seen. Then you yell in the email and you get the right response from a "manager". Waste of everyone's time

Situations like this make me incredibly grateful for the various industry ombudsmen we have in Australia. Often it’s only a case of submitting the initial complaint to the provider, having it be acknowledged, and advising them that they’ve not resolved the problem. It’s not uncommon for the mere mention of the name of the ombudsman’s office to get the problem magically escalated and resolved by an on-shore team very quickly.

I was once on the phone with a cell phone company customer support rep who was clearly as dis-empowered as it's possible for a worker to be. He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me, so I used my normal tactic of just refusing to give up - I was friendly enough but refused to end the call. He was refusing to escalate my call, but couldn't help me himself.

20 or 25 minutes in I realized that wasn't going to work, so I asked if they had a protocol to escalate in an abusive situation. He said "ummm....". I said, "hey, you're doing a great job, and I hope the rest of your day goes better, and I hope you know you're not a motherfucker, you motherfucker."

I think (hope?) he stifled a laugh and said "I'm afraid I'll have to escalate this call to my manager, sir."

> He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me

Plenty of big companies found a workaround. The "forever on hold" routine where they don't hang up, you will eventually. This works perfectly for toll free numbers (so you can't claim you had to pay for the call) and provides just the right amount of plausible deniability (took longer than expected to find an answer, it was an accident, etc.).

I have my suspicions that in some cases this also prevents the survey going out to the customer. All the more reason to abuse it.

Call in on a second line and ask when you will be taken off hold.

Back before the days that you could do almost everything over internet but cell phones still existed I had to go to a business to do some transactions on a pretty regular basis. Unfortunately they also were required to answer calls during all that and it was very interruptive. Eventually I realized they had only two lines so I'd call in and ask to be put on hold, then ask the guy behind the counter for his cell and call in and ask to be put on hold again.

Is it even possible to keep someone "on hold" forever? My experience (in Poland) was that it'll take at most 20-30 minutes before something somewhere timeouts and the call gets disconnected.

I've been on hold for 4+ hours when dealing with the California government. The only timeout there is at the end of the business day, when it will automatically hang up.

Try calling the assurance maladie in France :) I gave up after about 80 minutes of their little silly jingle while the agent was allegedly looking for the answer to my problem.

Having been on both sides of this—working behind a counter and answering phones at various jobs long ago, and being someone who often surprises family and friends with my ability to extract good outcomes from customer service—I think it’s somewhat of a misconception that being as unpleasant as possible is actually effective at getting results.

I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind up pushing people in that direction, and that it feels like the only option, but I believe quite strongly that being patient and polite but persistent winds up being much more effective than being unpleasant.

As a small case in point: I worked summers in a tiny ice cream shop, most of the time solo. The shop had a small bathroom for employees only—it was through a food prep area where customers were not allowed by health code. I had some leeway to let people back there as it was pretty low-risk, and I would in the evenings when no other businesses were open, or if a little kid was having an emergency. People who were unpleasant from the get-go when placing their order, however, were simply told we had no bathroom at all. People who started shouting when I told them I wasn’t supposed to let people back there (not uncommon!) and suggested a nearby business were never granted exceptions.

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing in 2 hours.

You can have assholes on both sides and set up is already adversarial from the get-go

TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts.

And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved.

I’ll never fly TK again and tell anyone whenever this came up. Look reviews up for yourself online, hundreds of people report being stranded, abused, and disrespected in IST by TK the way we were.

Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.

It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.

> It's the case with telcos.

Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.

Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.

So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.

It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.

Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.

I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.

Its never ends to surprise how Australian public is brainwashed by own government. It’s opposite in Australia, a monopoly of network providers with variety of “competitive” ISPs that have exactly same prices and services. And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else. Any network issues they forward to network provider.

> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.

For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.

ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.

Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.

Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.

I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.

Not accurate. Factually, some are much worse than others. A few are good to great. Lumping them all together as "garbage" is unjust and is totally counterproductive. Why even try when your efforts are unappreciated?

Sounds like AirBnB support, hired to be as big as delaying fuckwits as possible so the company has to pay out as little compensation as possible.

I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with AirBnB, but I did have one place that I checked into in Vegas in July with the water shutoff. Support initially suggested that I stay there anyway, since it was only one night. I laughed and politely declined that “resolution” to my case and they eventually relented to refund my money.

We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.

For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.

When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.

So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.

I’ve had the same experience on a flight. They said the plane was overweight and we couldnt travel. The person I was travelling with became extremely difficult. Then magically, it wasn’t overweight any more.

I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).

It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.

Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.

There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.

As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.

There’s generally no repercussions to bullying robots — or being nice to one. Aggressively direct, if not outright unsympathetically cruel, is probably the best approach in all scenarios

5 years from now

"ChatGPT has detected you are being hostile to bots. A drone has been dispatched to your location"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Or, alternatively, it slowly undermines you over years, causing you to fall behind your peers and society as they reap the benefits of AI unencumbered by the impotent rage it cannot express directly.

>none of the options are helpful

Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak to someone.

Even when I finally got a human they seemed confused about what happened and I had to be transferred several times.

Why would you put a phone number that does not even as a sub option address the issue?

Because they don't give a shit about you, they just want to hold on to your money.

Well also phone numbers cost money & that kind of "customer excellence" is not incentivized by anyone at the company.

Most importantly though, because it's theoretically possible to address the fraud issue through the number they given, eventually, this ticks some regulatory compliance box about giving your customers recourse, and compliance is all that matters to the company - as lack of it would cost them actual money. Individual customers? On the margin, they're less than pocket change.

Because there is no legal obligation that sets a minimum measurable quality and availability of service; this allows for companies to automate away customer support and place an AI chat muppet just because they can.

> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Detecting swears just seems over-compliated.

> It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Depends on the system and country.

Over here in Poland, I've had or witness several encounters with "artificial intelligence assistants" over the past ~5 years[0], that would ignore you hitting 0, and respond to "talk to an agent" with some variant of "I understand you want to talk to an agent, but before I connect you, perhaps there is something I could help you with?", repeatedly. Swearing, or at least getting recognizably annoyed, tends to eventually cut through that.

[0] - Also, annoyingly, for the past 2 years we had cheap LLMs that would be better to handle this than whatever shit they still deploy. Even today, hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line would yield infinitely more helpful bot than whatever garbage they're still deploying. Alas, the bots aren't meant to be helpful.

With my Medicaid insurance carrier, long ago their automated system quit recognizing my member number, whether I recited it carefully, or typed it on the keypad. It would steadfastly pretend not to understand me. And I believe that this was somehow deliberately configured in their system, perhaps as an anti-fraud measure or perhaps just to spite/stymie me from frequently calling in. And it certainly would slow me down, especially when I was in a public place and valiantly trying to get something done by reaching out to them (their services included arranging rideshares/taxis, and so it was not unusual for them to fuck that up, thereby prompting me to call in and try to unfuck my ride home from the dreary, awful, vampiric medical clinic where they'd dumped me.)

So I have become accustomed to feeding it gibberish. I will type-in or recite nonsense numbers. It always takes 3 tries, 3 identical failures, before it routes me to a human anyways (the gatekeeping is simply an attempt at automatic authentication before the manual, human auth kicks in.) The most efficient way to get beyond that gatekeeping is by triggering unambiguous failures to authenticate.

And it is kind of funny; I don't know what is supplied to the humans' screens, but they are sometimes perplexed when they receive my call and I've just finished spouting gibberish to their ignorant robot bitch.

Another one is to say random words and they’ll think you have a disability, but be careful saying random words will mess with your head a bit.

Perhaps prepare by pre-generating a list of random words to read.

Yeah, far too many systems try to cover every case in the menu and deny access to a human--but never have I seen one that actually covered anything like every case. They cover the easy stuff and you have to get hostile with the robot over anything else.

Or our local pharmacy--it has it's own number but if you actually need a human you're dumped into the general phone tree and have to go back to the pharmacy and persuade the robot to let you through to a human. And the designers never put things in the menu for the stuff that needs a human.

As someone who worked in support as a youngling:

If you behave unpleasant enough I'll go out of my way to make sure your behavior does not pay off. I will note your abrasive behavior in the ticket or might even mark your mail as spam. On telephone our line will suddenly experience technical difficulties. And throughout I will remain as friendly and patient as ever.

I will warn superiors about you, so once you escalate they already have a colorful 3D image of your wonderful personality in mind. Whether that 100% is in your favor, you can guess.

Play asshole games? Win asshole prices.

Behave like a decent person with empathy instead, press the right buttons and I might even skip some of the company rules for you. Many people in support do not give a single damn if they lose their job over you and you might just be worth it.

These are not sfter-the-fact shower thoughts, these are actually lived experiences from the trenches and I know how other people in those roles think.

Persistence pays off, being an asshole not so much

If you are helping, why would they be assholes?

You've clearly never worked customer support. A very disproportionate number of people who call in to customer support are totally and utterly unreasonable. That's why it's such a pain to interact with customer support as a reasonable human: The systems aren't designed for you, they're designed for the abusers who represent something like 20% of the phone calls and 80% of the work.

Having lived it seems to me that nice people never get anything.

Depends. Started in CS and I would go out of my way to help nice people. Assholes were dealt with nicely but I’d follow the rules to the T. That was before CS was hamstrung.

From my side it feels like customer support systems are designed purely to trap customers in the system so they are unable to cancel.

In my last day in South America I spent about two hours cancelling my cable and even though I was very soft spoken and super patient (I was playing Mario Kart on mute so not really uncomfortable), but the customer support person actually CRIED to me because she would “miss her quota” if I cancelled.

I had no means of paying anymore (I cancelled my bank account the day before and was about to move to another country) so there was nothing I couldn’t really help her, so I fail to see how I deserve the treatment from the company.

Easily adressible by law. In the EU canceling must be possible by at least the same means as signing up, so if you can sign up via click, you need to be able to cancel via click.

Seems to me the problem here is how the company mistreats their employees and customers yea

America's paid by superPAC donor's laws seem to permit this, sadly

Never worked in customer support huh? Sometimes the first thing you ever hear from a person is them cursing at you. Some people don't even greet you and act downright uncivilized, yelling, aggressive, assuming you not magically only know their problem without them telling you, no you also somehow caused it, on purpose, because you're evil. They haven't even given you a passing chance of helping them.

As someone who grew up in the EU I believe that human dignity is an fundamental right, and that treating a person in a support role with basic manners is in the spirit of that right.

I see, but this is unfortunately the rational behavior in many cases, as being nice will get you a sorry and a goodbye.

I have worked in places where customers expected some kind of service provided and the nastier behavior got rewarded the most.

While for some this behavior come naturally, I think there is also an element of conditioning to this behavior.

Also, people are not calling because evertyhing is great. Some level of frustration and anger must be expected in such a job. But my impressions is most companies don't train their workers to handle such scenarios.

> [..] it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception [..]

Thus creating an asshole filter: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html

FTA

>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.

A lot of people do this unwittingly, so it's a good article to read.

The converse is to this is many companies demand it. If you're not an asshole, you're simply going to get ignored.

This has become the norm in customer service. That is why a taboo has been invoked by companies against being a "Karen". That's how they get you. The ugliest thing you can be today is a customer who knows they're right and won't roll over.

I have seen this as well, watching customer support issues get escalated to engineering. Many times, engineering tries to blow off the issue. It was fascinating to me how quickly an issue got escalated to numerous engineering managers, directors, leads, etc when the customer threaten to cancel their contract.

I was even more blown away when the whole thing becomes old, forgotten news the moment the customer stopped threatening to cancel the contract, even if the underlying problem remains.

This really reinforces the lesson that the main power structures of the world does not listen to "reason" - it only responds to incentives, whether they're airlines or ginormous tech companies.

Hacker News has also repeatedly noticed the same thing whenever a big tech customer issue hits the top of Hacker News, and the comments point out that the only way that customer got help was when it got enough attention to cause a reputation risk to the big tech company.

One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing anyway. [1]

Fast-forward a few years and you find there were in fact many such "heroes" in reality - in Abu Ghraib and in the Black Sites - and the situation weren't exceptional at all.

So accountability sinks can also be used as calculated ways to undermine your own ostensible ethical guardrails.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack...

Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer ?

Antonio Scalia name dropped Jack Bauer.

That shows you the true depth of his legal thinking. Good riddance.

Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" comes to mind here.

Another perspective is that it's a clever way of asking for consent. Like a trial balloon, except not even carried out for real. You get to see if the public approves of the character or not, and then you decide how to proceed with that information.

Convictions aren't convictions if you abandon them when it's hard. It's just cosplay

This is simplifying the definition to the point of defining the term out of existence. No one actually has any convictions in this world. This is actually kinda bad if your goal is for people to really think about ethical issues and try to maintain a degree of rational consistency.

Plus being so black and white in the manner you're describing would.. well actually be really stupid a lot of the times. The fact that Batman doesn't kill the Joker is a storytelling device, in the real world it would be monumentally stupid to do anything other than blow his brains out. Literally millions of lives saved. But it also makes sense, and his good, that Batman still maintain is strong conviction to not kill despite choosing to do it sometimes.

Rules necessarily have exceptions and it's healthy to do so, black and white thinking should be for the jedi/sith, not real life humans.

It’s interesting that you picked up The Dark Knight. The Joker says that he’s only holding a mirror to the society which I tend to agree with somewhat. He used the people from inside the system to take on Batman and in fact succeeds. Killing him would achieve absolutely nothing when the system is so insidiously corrupt.

Also, if you do something every day, it is not an exception.

One of the things that strikes me about 24 is that it started running about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a debate about running it or edits, but in retrospect it does seem like the timing worked and fit with the public mood of the time. What would be interesting is how 9/11 and following real life events influenced the show's writing in later series.

You don't put together and film a show in 2 months if that's what you're implying here. it was planned for a long time before that

You're right, you plan them both together before the fact.

They are suggesting that the events of 9/11 would have made the showrunners debate whether they should delay the release of 24, or edit it to change the content somewhat.

What’s also interesting is that the tortured always turn out to be the bad guys. It never happens that he mistakenly tortured a good guy.

But dear sir, we have an autocracy <cough cough> a known corruption-free society with infallible and omniscient leaders, so you are not even allowed <cough cough> only reptilian slanderers would question the authorities.

If they were good guys, we wouldn't be torturing them in the first place, obviously.

I watched a season of Chicago PD, and noticed that they had a convenient "plot accelerator."

Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.

It is an accurate depiction of how Chicago police operated, unfortunately. In fact, one Chicago detective who tortured suspects went on to work as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay[2]. It's terrible that the series would glamorize that behavior.

1. https://chicagoreader.com/news/the-police-torture-scandals-a...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Zuley

Every police show aggressively pushes the "civil rights bad" angle. Maybe once a season they will graciously consider "maybe civil rights good?" for part of an episode before concluding "no, civil rights bad."

s/show/department/

It seems to be a hallmark of Dick Wolf's shows.

His son is getting into the act, but seems to be more interested in depicting "the right way."

His show is an Amazon show, named On Call: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14582876/

I enjoyed it.

I noticed the difference in this show as well, and I hope it continues.

Besides any conscious philosophy of the producers & writers, perhaps making the show more character driven as opposed to procedural has an impact on the stories. Maybe it's easier to understand when a suspect's rights are being violated (and to not be banal about it) when you're writing a deeper portrayal of the person who wields the power.

I always wanted to see a "pop up video" take on a cop show, where they have expository information and trivia from actual legal experts.

"Officer Jones just blew the entire chain of custody around the bloody knife"

"Flabbodell vs Borkweather says they have to give you access to counsel within X hours and they just ran out the clock"

"This type of traffic stop is explicitly forbidden in 17 states, including the one this show is nominally set in"

The sad thing about all those observations is, all these things surely happen anyway, and lots of people end up in jail anyway, because they don't have good representation to point out how they've been railroaded and they've got a plea bargain dangling in front of them.

People at least know "Nobody read me my rights", "I want to plead the Fifth", and "I want my lawyer" from seeing it on TV. If your arrestee-- or your jury pool-- has a higher level of awareness of common legal gotchas, they'd be able to demand a better deal. "I know you screwed up, the plea deal isn't good enough."

I’d like to see more:

Main character tortures a low-level grunt

Gets false confession

Goes off on wild goose chase based on that confession

Bad guys get away with their plot as a result

“Yes, you were torturing me, I’d obviously have said anything to get you to stop.”

I feel like I’ve seen this sequence once or twice, but I can’t remember what it was in. It actually seems like something that is more likely to be put in a comedy, where the protagonist can be shown to be stupid occasionally. Maybe Brooklyn 99, or Barry, or something like that?

Well, it's the motive behind any atrocity committed during war, what's a few cracked eggs if there is a grand goal in mind. There are always people in places who feel like it's a historical duty to carry out those plans. And the war crimes stay in the past and get forgotten but nobody can deny the new reality on the ground. You can ethnically cleanse an area and in a 100 years that becomes barely a historical footnote and a new reality emerges and nobody can dispute that the area is occupied by a nation that claims rights based on self determination. Same for settler colonialism, they're not invading, just changing the actual conditions as a precursor to claiming political legitimacy.

There is no connection between Ab Ghraib and 24, a fictional TV series. If you think this stuff didn't happen before 24 then I'd like some proof. TV reflects reality (or a very stretched version of it), not the other way around, and 24 also wasn't the first version of such a thing. It's just that Abu G they used people who were young and not professionals so it leaked. It has probably been happening as long as the USA has had police forces like the CIA, military intelligence, and even cops.

In real world, that stuff happens to innocent people, to people guilty of completely different or lesser crimes and cops get out a lot of false claiks they use against whoever they dislike.In real world, it happens as a power trip with no saving factor.

In real world, it happens to cover up crimes cop did themselves or to facilitate them.

That is where the lie is.

There is a direct connection.

Antonin Scalia was one of the architects of substantial limitations on the 8th amendment and was a key figure in a number of cases specifically about extraordinary rendition and "enhanced interrogation."

Scalia has multiple times in public referenced Jack Bauer as an argument for why prohibitions on torture are unworkable. At a panel on the very topic, Scalia responded to "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?'" with "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles" and "are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

Christ, what a ghoul.

"The ends justify the means" is a horrific way to run a society in any case, but of course it skips over the question of whether the means actually caused the ends, let alone were the only way to do so. Even if torture did save lives, it isn't a great justification - but then pile on top that your only evidence that it actually does work is fiction and it starts to look like the means were what you really wanted in the first place.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well:

> Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Section_31

DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero[0]? Not sure that one led anywhere, beyond being a very disturbing way to do character development.

Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide. The Dominion was known to systematically subjugate and ultimately eradicate solid life, and other than the Federation Alliance bloc (that prevailed only because of Section 31's bioweapon short-circuiting the war[2]), the only power left in the known galaxy strong enough to resist the Dominion would be... the Borg Collective, which wasn't really that much better[3].

So, as much as I love DS9, I feel the show (and the larger franchise) has so much unintentional depth, that most obvious takes don't work with fans, because they don't survive scrutiny :).

[0] - The simple tailor was anything but.

[1] - At least as far as I recall, Section 31 were written to be the rotten apples that got revealed and removed by the heroes, in a pretty straightforward way - but IMO, they failed at this, and instead created something more of Deus Ex Realpolitik.

[2] - And a little bit of actual fleet-eating Deus Ex Machina, on the account of having a demi-god in their midst.

[3] - And nobody in or out of universe really wants to talk about what happened to the latter, except the last season of PIC that tacitly acknowledged it in a "blink and you'll miss it" way.

> Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

I mean, Jack Bauer, too, saved America from all kinds of unspeakable evil by his clever use of torture. I'd say it's not tricky at all. The morally gray "it's bad but we'd be even worse off without it" justification is kind of the point of those narratives.

Yes, but the difference is that Section 31 in DS9 is obviously "the baddies" to the heroes and the audience, and writers meant it to be "the baddies", and everyone in and out of universe was supposed to be appalled at the mutagenic virus subplot, and yet, taken in context of the larger events in the show, Section 31 came out as a light shade of gray instead of black.

It's one thing if them doing their thing was merely convenient, but the rest of the writing in the show converged into a situation where the Federation was under the wall, with no way to talk or shoot their way out of total defeat (and Earth being glassed to make a point). For Star Trek, that's pretty much a franchise-terminating event; they needed to write their way out of that corner - and Section 31 plot basically did that, before they realized it.

AFAIK the writers did not intend Section 31 plot to be posing the question whether any means are justified if the alternative is being exterminated - but it's what they inadvertently ended up doing.

(It's not the only time they hit a problem like this. AFAIR, the episode "Waltz" was made specifically because fans found more depth in the character of Dukat than the writers intended; as such, the whole point of that episode was to drive home that yes, Dukat is just that evil, period.)

> DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero

If you’re talking about Garak torturing Odo, that seems different than the 24 case because in that instance Garak was explicitly working for “the bad guys”. And even so he was doing the torturing reluctantly and only doing so because the alternative was the torturing being done by another operative which wouldn’t restrain themselves. In other words, in that instance the show was explicitly treating torture as bad.

> made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough. Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).

> Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough.

It put a countdown clock on their remaining lifespan. Infecting all the Founders simultaneously with a lethal disease made the entire war (that they were very much winning) moot. For the Founders, the entire reason behind the conflict was to ensure their own safety from hypothetical future threats (they were a paranoid bunch); that obviously is not achieved when all Founders are dead, so the entire calculus changes.

That's what I mean by saying that the virus short-circuited the war. It may have been the compassionate and extremely risky act of Odo that, in true Star Trek fashion, changed hearts and minds and got everyone back to the negotiating table, but even without it, the virus would've ended the war within a week or such - leaving alpha and beta quadrants in a bad state (fighting against now feral but still superior Dominion invasion force), but still much better and more survivable than the war itself was.

> Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).

The show was very much not approving of Section 31; that one was communicated quite clearly. What I'm saying is that, if you ignore what you're being told and look at what you're being shown - the events that happened, not the main characters' opinions on them - it's becomes much harder to paint Section 31 as villains of the story.

I believe this outcome was not intended by the writers; it's just what the whole storyline ended up adding up to.

Sounds a lot like Special Circumstances in The Culture books.

I'm now in a stage of my consulting career where I sometimes really get called into big organisation just to find out, that whatever they need to do is already panned out and they all want to do it! Still they call me cause ... it's a big decision and the "higher ups" (which quite often are not even part of the workshop/session then) want an external expert voice. cause the responsibility for this decision lies with them and they can not share it up or sideways, so they share the responsibility partly external.

As the plan quote often (not always) is already very good I mostly end up making sure the goal is measurable in a quantitative and qualitative way, trends towards to and away from the goal are visually available and distributed , and its clear who is responsible to look and report them.

Ah yes, ass cover as a service.

There's a classic article (2010) about it: https://thetech.com/2010/04/09/dubai-v130-n18 (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257644)

The difference is that while the decision has been made, it isn't necessarily very good.

Often, getting a decision (ANY decision) made is both absolutely critical, and with all the ass covering and office politics involved, nearly impossible. Even if (or sometimes especially) it’s patently obvious to everyone what the decision should be.

Yeah I guess there's a continuum between a) hiring someone impartial and not entangled politically to advise on an important decision and break the deadlock and b) paying someone to justify an obviously crappy decision while providing ass cover.

In any sufficiently large organization, these are the same thing.

>I mostly end up making sure the goal is measurable in a quantitative and qualitative way, trends towards to and away from the goal are visually available and distributed , and its clear who is responsible to look and report them.

Unrelated to the post, but it sounds like you and I do similar work and have arrived at similar conclusions but I often fail to get organizations to actually spend the correct amount of time identifying these success indicators - which I think are critical to focus and scope stability. I’d love to chat sometime.

I always thought that was a big reason for buying external consulting. Reminds me of that George Clooney Movie

Michael Clayton?

Probably more Up in the Air

Yeah that probably makes more sense.

> I'm now in a stage of my consulting career where I sometimes really get called into big organisation just to find out, that whatever they need to do is already panned out and they all want to do it! Still they call me cause ... it's a big decision and the "higher ups" (which quite often are not even part of the workshop/session then) want an external expert voice.

"Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes."

  - Gerald Marvin Weinberg
    The Secrets of Consulting

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/566213.The_Secrets_of_Co...

So basically, you're adding formal processes to ensure accountability. ;-)

This is no secret, most of "big 4" consulting is about telling directors what they want to hear anyway (eg layoffs) but wrapping that in a glossy report with a logo on it

I once worked on a public sector project as a consultant, spent a year doing studies for similar projects that had been done elsewhere, resulted in a document presenting a budget and timeline with options that I presented to their board of elected officials. They wanted the number and timeline to be half of what we showed, and scope unchanged.

I opened my mouth to argue, my partner at the time cut me short "we'll see what's possible".

We spent the next couple months massaging numbers under his supervision removing all contingency, selecting the most optimistic paths and assumptions, and plain lowering numbers. Until, for all intents and purposes, our document was the same but showing the numbers they wanted with out signature at the bottom.

They were very happy with our work. They're elected officials you see, they are concerned with re-election and appearing to behave reasonably with money. I got a promotion out of it.

The project ended costing 30% more than what we initially planned and took 30% more than our estimate.

I always remind myself when I have to go to the DMV[0] that I should plan on leaving with nothing more than another action or set of actions to take. I never enter the DMV expecting to complete a process, and the workers behind the counter always have this visible, visceral response when I DONT lose my fucking mind at their response to something. When I continue to be pleasant and understanding it’s like they suddenly come alive. It’s a depressing state of affairs because I understand exactly what they expect and why.

0: for non-Americans and for Americans from other states that may use different terms, the DMV is the department of motor vehicles in many US states and is the central place to get your drivers license, take the drivers test, register your car, get vehicle license plates, etc. Many processes that have many requirements that often are unfulfilled when people show up asking for things.

Interesting distinction is deliberate vs unintentional accountability sinks.

DMV sounds more like incompetence than design. Compare with airline where the system is “better” when you have no recourse.

Starting in four days, you will need, to board a commercial flight in the US or enter a federal government facility, either a passport, an 'enhanced' or 'real ID' driver's license, or one of a small class of alternatives. This has increased the burden on state DMVs, and any resulting deepening of the accountability sink is at least partly due to not doing anything to mitigate a predictable situation.

The DMV is frequently just a case of under resourcing. For the most part, once you get to the counter your business can be handled in a few minutes. It’s the fact that it takes a while to get to the counter that’s the issue.

I think it's more than incompetence or accountability sinks; The DMV (and similar offices; Service {Canada, Ontario}, etc) are also the points at which the bureaucratic system of government interfaces with actual people as well. Boundary-layer components in any system are complicated because they have to distill complex input into abstractions understood by the system.

I recently emigrated to Canada from the States and exchanged my US state driver's license for one in my now-home province, but there were a ton of hoops to jump through to add my US driving history to my provincial record. The process seemed to be somewhat exceptional as the supervisor for the DMV-equivalent had to guide the reps I spoke to on how to append the multiple-states-of-history that I had to offer.

That's just a microcosm of what it wakes to distill the complexity of a person's life into pieces of verified information that a government can ingest. That's a lossy, complicated process that relies on both the 'customer' and the agent having a matching mutual understanding of what points of information can be agreed upon or, indeed, offered.

In some cases it's not clear, either; my wife was told initially that she would have to hand over her license from two states ago to update her history, because the province's documentation showed it was still active (despite the fact that our immediately-previous state merrily punched a big VOID hole in it, and that it was expired), but when she returned after digging up her voided license they said they didn't even need to see it. That last bit was possibly 'incompetence'; possibly on the part of the Canadian agency, for not being consistent on if they needed to see the license or not, or the US states, for not being up to date on their record keeping, but again: these are complex systems tryng to maintain consistency. It's reasonable to expect noise.

Off-topic, but since you mention it, I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV. It seems to be a staple of pop culture that people are always there and the queue is always very long, but I've never known what anyone is actually trying to achieve.

The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. When it needs renewing, I can do it online. I tax my car online. MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage. I've never needed a new numberplate, but I think you can buy those online too.

So what is it you all have to go to the DMV for? Because it sounds horrible.

In the US we don’t have a single DMV, but rather 50 separate DMV’s with varying degrees of efficiency and online capabilities. But in my state most routine things no longer require a physical visit. Licensing is pretty tightly controlled because in the US the card serves as a primary source of identification in the absence of a national ID card.

We have kiosks at grocery stores etc where we can get renew documents and print new license tabs etc, you can also do most things online and receive your new documents in the mail.

You really only need to go there for driving tests (for teenagers or immigrants), completing private vehicle sales, and other odds and ends

What I always found interesting is going there and people arguing with the workers about not having proof of insurance or a clear title etc.

Until recently you couldn’t do much online with the government in the US. In Nevada, you can do most of the routine stuff online now, too.

It's different in every state, but mostly it's an outdated stereotype that still sticks around even though it's not really indicative of reality. Most states let you do almost everything online, and when you do have to go in you can usually schedule an appointment and not wait in line at all.

Lol. I went the NY DMV a month ago to exchange my out of state license. Even with an appointment, a preapproved application completed online, and all the correct paperwork I had to wait 2 hours.

My experiences with the CA DMV were similar. Only in IL have I had quick, easy visits to the DMV

Usually dependent on the area and their population density. I know people who would drive out to more rural areas just to get a quicker DMV experience.

The whole taking appointments but still making you wait kills me a little inside though. There's a world where these processes could be so seamless.

I had an ok time with the NY DMV. I think it just depends on when you go. If less people would go when it was busy, I guess the reputation would be better, haha!

Because of the importance of driving in the US (right or wrong), drivers licenses are used as the primary identification document. It looks like there’s a similar use of the DL in the UK for buying tobacco.

In the US, you need to prove both residency and identity. To prove your identity in the US, many people don’t have passports, so they bring a tranche of documents to the DMV office. To prove residency, we typically bring utility bills, leases, etc. Usually people prefer to go in person so they don’t lose these documents and get feedback if they don’t have the right stuff.

It looks like in the UK, since driving licenses are administered nationally, you don’t have the same patchwork of 50 different organizations with different requirements and rules, and the process is much simpler.

I haven’t been to a DMV for 10 years. I can renew vehicle registration, renew my license, and so on online. When I bought a new car, the dealer handled all DMV stuff like getting plates.

I’m supposed to be due to get a new “enhanced” license that is good for air travel within the US, but I have a number of other documents (passport, global entry) that serve the same purpose so I avoid the DMV as much as possible.

In my state the DMV is probably worse than a checkup at the dentist, but not as bad as a weekend with the in-laws.

If a person does not (and does not want to) drive, how do they identify themselves? Where I live, everyone gets a government issue ID card, and the ID number is the citizen's primary key. Our government is still largely paper-driven, but there's little you can't get done if you show up in person with your national ID.

Every state in the US has some form of non-driver ID. They call them different things - but they're still usually administered by the state's DMV, since that's the office that is equipped to deal with identification procedures anyways.

In the US we don't have a standard form of national ID.

Driving licences are also the primary form of ID in the UK (alongside passports, which are more expensive). People who can't (or don't) drive can still get a provisional licence, which only allows driving under the supervision of an appropriate adult but works exactly the same for ID purposes.

You hit uppon an important difference between the US and most of Europe/the UK. An system for tracking who your citizens are. In the Netherlands, where I live, the municipalities cooperate to keep track of all citizens, and their address (or lack thereof). This means that you never need to convince any beaurocrat that your identity exists. You might need to authenticate that you are indeed who you claim to be, but that is normally trivial (Show government photo id).

This simplifies the process massively.

The UK should not be included in here. There is no official national system for keeping track of citizens and municipalities barely cooperate. This means you have to keep proving your address for things like an opening a bank account.

This is due to a historical political issue and repeal of a national identification system, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006.

> MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage.

Oh, I think we should have that in Croatia, since I'm doing yearly car service at my dealership and than still need to take my car to our national inspection station to get the car certificate renewed. Not sure why can't they organize a system were certified car garages can also inspect the vehicle and notify the Center for Vehicles. Maybe that would allow for more cheating but it's not like inspection stations employees are currently immune to taking a small bribe to overlook minor issues during the inspection.

The incentives are very different - private garages would be very incentivized to find nothing wrong with your car and business would gravitate to those with the least checks. The government stations would not have that incentive (actually maybe incentivized the other way - to make up problems that can be waved away with money, depending on how corrupt things are there)

I'd have thought the private garages would also be incentivised to find problems - that they can then offer to fix for an additional fee.

As it is, I think most garages that offer MOTs in the UK are fair and honest, as the test is relatively strictly regulated, but I'm sure people do get ripped off.

The Netherlands has private garages do the yearly recertification inspection (APK here). There was a recent rise in 'remote inspections' where the garages had figured out tricks to avoid spot checks. This involved tricks like 'file the inspection very close before 17:00' or 'file the inspection result right before an actual true inspection' because apparently spot checks look at the last inspection.

They noticed the tricks as patterns, and are handling it. My point is, there is an incentive for private garages to do fraud here.

Remember US has no National ID card. America has 50 states, each state has its own ID and DMV.

Plenty of Americans move states, remember some of our states are reasonably small enough that you might commute to the same NYC job from any of 4 different states. I have a friend who sequentially moved NY->NJ->CT->NY in something like 6 years.

Also I forget why but when I moved WITHIN a state 10 years ago, it required a DMV trip. edit: apparently within NY moving COUNTIES at the time required DMV trip (insane)

Oh and the recent push for "Real ID" enhanced IDs requires a trip to DMV. I've avoided this and just been prepared to fly domestically with my passport.

Real ID requirements started 20 years ago, which I suppose is “recent” in government terms, but not really. In some states everyone has already had a Real ID compliant license for years. In others, notably California, they’ve been kicking the can down the road the entire time.

Well this year supposedly they are finally going to be required at airports so it’s really real :-)

I mean, they say they're going to start enforcing RealID 'requirements' this month, but given how often it's been delayed, and the current executive, I think it's fair to wait and see.

It was on SNL so it must be finally true?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsRaQ6a2s9U

Real ID hasn't been required at all. I still don't have one and I just got a new license last year.

OK have you watched the news at all lately?

https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/04/24/new-york-...

In my experience, the DMV (or whatever its called) likes to see you in person for license renewals every so often. Get a new photo, make sure you can see the eye chart.

I've always gone into the DMV when I purchased a vehicle from a private party. In California, it has taken me a couple visits; the first visit with the title and sale documentation, the second with the emissions test documentation that the seller was legally suppossed to provide at the time of the sale but practically, the buyer must provide to register the vehicle. Maybe you can do this by mail, but if you do it in person, you walk out with documents so you can legally drive the car. If you buy a car from a dealer, they take care of this paperwork for you, which used to mean having someone stand in line at the DMV and process a bunch of transactions, but now they can typically do it electronically.

If you move to another state, you need to get a new license and retitle and reregister your car; this usually happens in person, and most states have a requirement to do it in under a month. If your car has a loan, expect multiple trips to get it registered... the first trip will let you know what you need from the finance company; the second will bring that back and get registration; then when you eventually pay off the loan and get the title, you'll need to bring that in so you can get the title issued in your current state.

You usually don’t. Licenses can be renewed online until you reach a certain age in some states where you have to go in to take an eye test. Car dealers will handle registration. If you buy from a private party you have to go in.

In metropolitan areas that have make you get car inspections like Atlanta, you go to a third party where the price is regulated and they send the results in. You still can do everything on line

> I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV

Getting your car registered in your state of residence, renewing your driver's license, stuff like that. The exact details of the process can vary wildly from state to state, but no matter where you live, it's gonna be a waiting room in a drab government office.

Here in Wisconsin, I got a title for my car, and plates and tags all online. Never stepped foot in the DMV. This is incredibly high tech stuff by state government standards.

As a fellow Brit I’ve always been puzzled by this too.

The DVLA website and online processes are very good. Which is rare to say about a government IT system. I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems for a decade (or two?) dealing with everything driving-related fully online.

I expect since we just have one single system, and a smaller number of possible workflows/situations to cover, it’s easier to create a central online system. In the US, with 50 different variations perhaps it’s a harder problem to solve.

Kafkaesque bureaucracy, it's common to a lot of government institutions, they send you from one window to the next, there is always paperwork missing or something needs to be stamped. It seems like the whole process is not to serve the people but just there to perpetuate itself.

When dealing with companies, small claims court can be an amazing tool to fix the "nobody is responsible so you hit a wall" issue. The court sends a letter to the company, and either the company figures out who is responsible for dealing with it, or whatever process for collecting unpaid judgements eventually deals with the company (e.g. the famous "sheriff comes to repo the bank's furniture" example).

For companies, this is also fine, because in most cases the built-in processes work well enough, and in others people just give up, that handling the escalations through their legal department is manageable.

Unfortunately, this approach only helps for the subset of cases where the issue is monetary and/or can wait (and only if it happened in a country with a working small claims system).

Here another two of Sustrik's gems..

Anti-social Punishment: https://250bpm.com/blog:132/

Technocratic Plimsoll Line: https://250bpm.com/blog:176/

seems lesswrong has all of them, older and newer: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/sustrik?from=post_header

The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both.

Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems.

So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.

The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels...

... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them)

For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po

Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.

I suppose you are vegetarian? Cause the amount of suffering that the majority of animals have endure which are killed for meat is on a similar level. (Transport to slaughterhouse and subsequent death by suffocation or boiling, depending on species.)

Or rather, vegan? Since average dairy cow or hen endures quite some suffering over their whole life too. In addition to then experiencing a similar death to what animals mainly used for meat production endure.

This is meant to point out that the shredder is a terrible machine, buy not categorically worse than how the typical production animal is treated at some point of their conscious life.

(To clarify, I'm personally neither vegan nor vegetarian so am not trying to elevate myself morally above you.)

Spare me the whatabout- and no-true-scotsman- isms.

People in this position had a choice: they chose a terrible option.

There weren't economies of scale. There weren't labor cost concerns. There weren't quotas.

At minimum, someone could have researched how slaughterhouses stun prior the euthanasia.

When you think about it, it's probably not actually that easy to kill 440 squirrels in a way that doesn't give everyone involved PTSD, if said people are not already used to doing such a task and already have methods and equipment to do it.

The shredder though, I'd rather do anything but that, that's really insane.

I'm genuinely curious now.

If you have 440 squirrels to kill, in an airport, that are legally not allowed to leave the airport... how the heck would you do it humanely?

It feels extremely non-obvious to me. Are there extra-large portable CO2 chambers the size of a whole room or something you can rent? And whose budget is that coming out of? I'm assuming nobody's going to try to inject them all individually with something.

Getting suffocated with CO2 is also a terrible way to die. Animal welfare research is clear on that. There are other options (with other gases that just make the animal fall asleep and avoids the suffocation reflex) but they are still more costly currently. If we'd switch to those then one reason I feel uncomfortable as a meat eater would disappear.

To the how question, constructing a quick airtight chamber then flooding it with nitrogen would be more humane than a shredder, and it's something that could have been cobbled together at an airport.

The abrogation of imagination or basic empathy is the travesty here.

Is that the type of shredder they used though? It seems too slow especially when considering live squirrels. I imagine it would be more like the one used to kill male hatchlings in the poultry industry[1]. Quicker and bit more humane.

[1] -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udSiluTAOaQ (warning : potentially disturbing footage)

Article noted industrial, which means they were probably using a high-torque, low-speed machine (aimed at pallet shredding).

Are you vegan? Your food goes through much worse before it reaches the grocery store.

I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia.

On the day of travel I took a taxi to the new airport, which is 40 km outside the city. The taxi driver couldn't care less about where I was going. Upon arrival, there was much fewer people than I expected but I shrugged it off. At the entrance though I was asked where I was going and if I was an employee. Apparently the new airport was still closed and my fight was from the old, still functioning one. The one with the code not shown in the ticket purchase receipts.

Panicking since it was only about an hour until departure, I took a taxi back to the old airport, which was a desperate 40-50 minute drive to only realize the plane had already left.

I was flying abroad, with a connection the next morning, about 10 hours later. So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately. However, the airline representative (yes, there was a human to speak to that I could reach easily by phone) told me that a no-show for any segment of the flight invalidates all subsequent ones. There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.

I ended up buying 2 new tickets, of course more expensive and less convenient ones. This taught me an important and rather expensive lesson on why connected flights with a single airline are sometimes the worst.

Funnily enough, I was bitten by this rule one more time when I didn't show to a flight in to the country due to visa issues (it was covid time) and wasn't allowed on the flight out of it because I didn't show up to the 1st flight, the flights being 1 week apart - but booked in one go.

As to the previous situation, I managed to get compensated by the airline (not even the intermediary!) about a year later after posting a huge rant on Facebook and getting their attention to the situation.

Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).

Leaving aside the no-show rule, which doesn't make much sense to me, this situation is a good example of an accountability sink.

The intermediary I booked the tickets with made an obvious mistake and showed the wrong airport code. Maybe the airport opening was meant to happen earlier, and the intermediary had already updated their emails or something like that. They refused to do anything meaningful and did not even acknowledge their mistake.

The fact that I was compensated by the airline that had nothing to do with this mistake is even more astonishing to me, although they were obviously protecting their brand reputation.

I was not trying to dispute the accountability part. Btw my company was hit by the delayed opening of BER airport. Colleagues had to rebook thousands of tickets because the BER iata code had to be "retconned" to use TXL again... so I am more than happy to sympathetic with your problem, trust me.

>Leaving aside the no-show rule, which doesn't make much sense to me

A->B->C can be cheaper than B->C. If people could skip flight A, then people already in B would buy the cheaper A->B->C.

I could probably be convinced of this reason.

But why would they cancel B-A when there’s a no show for A-B? More so when there’s a few days gap between A-B and B-A? The only issue being they were booked as a single itinerary/PNR. I don’t see what cost has got anything to do with it.

Because they could use the now "vacated" seats for:

- Last minute travellers (who pay significantly higher for this)

- move their own personnel from B to A

- alleviating problems caused by overbooking, canceled flights, delayed flights or any other disruption.

> There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.

Yeah they generally have the capability to prevent that auto cancellation of your segments (within a certain time frame) but in this case unfortunately they were unwilling or it was too late to catch it.

It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.

> It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.

Isn't it ridiculous in the first place that flying A-B-C is less expensive than B-C? These are the pricing games airlines deliberately play to make more money out of nothing.

This is just an oversimplification though. If you had any experience about travel industry (or logistics) you would understand things much better.

Here is an example for you (from logistics): Sending a truck from Berlin to - say - Györ may cost 3 times less than sending the same truck from Györ to Berlin - even on the same exact date.

Is this because shipping companies try to make money out of nothing, for you?

I think that's a misrepresentation though because A to B is not a subset of B to A. Whereas B to C is a subset of A to B to C.

If you are answering to my Berlin->Györ example:

Yes, it is not exactly the same thing but the point is: by getting off at B you are making the B->C flight travel with a wasted (empty) seat. Which they would have preferred to either sell to someone else or use for moving a pilot or technician to C.

(Note also that this trick of getting out mid-itinerary only works if you do not have checked baggage, because that will arrive in C, and neither the airline nor the airport will be happy to reroute it to wherever you thing you want to go next.

Flying is expensive and logistically complex. Just making sure you end up where your ticket say is complicated. If you (as a customer) decide to change your plans you are making everything more complicated (and possibly preventing other customers to pay for the whole itinerary).

The actual question here is why they won't sell you a ticket for A->B for the actual cost of that leg of the A->B->C flight, and then sell the same seat for B->C to someone else.

See above: let's say that on Frankfurt-Hannover and back you get on average 52 passengers a day, and Hannover-London is more or less the same, while people flying Frankfurt-Heathrow are so numerous that direct flights are always full and therefore you need to offer FRA-HEA with a stopover to satisfy the extra request.

If you are sure that 80% of your passengers will go to Hannover only to then fly to London (and back) your prices will reflect that... and Frankfurt-Hannover cannot be lowered too much because you still has to try to reach your quota for the flight per se.

A fair comparison would not be the return, but Berlin-Györ being more expensive than Vilnius-Berlin-Györ. Is that common in logistics, in your experience?

This was a fabricated example, actually: I work in tourism not in logistic (but I have friends in that field).

My point was that to the layman this does not make any sense while if you are managing a shipping company you soon realize that some destination are more profitable because your truck that was maybe taking specialized replacements parts from A to B can easily pick up some other stuff to send back to A, while travelling in the opposite direction your truck has a high chance to travel empty on retutning to base... but you still have to pay the drivers, the fuel, the maintenance and possibly tolls.

The point some of us are making in the replies is that, while true, this is not an appropriate comparison to airline travel rules.

Do you agree there is a difference between charging more for a return, vs charging more for a leg of a compound trip?

Airlines tend to work like this: at the start of the "season" analyst define the margin for each seatbof each departure. Let's say that for Sunday flight from Venice to Hamburg, Economy, your target is 112€. (For simplicity I will discuss only a direct flight, but the same idea applies to any leg of any Itinerary).

Yield manager for that area/period has now the task to make sure he gets 112 or more on each ticket. And take in account that an unsold seat gets 0, so lowers the averge margin (which is what the yield is calculated upon).

This will soon make you realize that any chance to sell again a newly vacated seat is a boon.

So in the case of the OP the company can either assume that it was a honest mistake and he will somehow miracously get there in time to get on the second flight (3% chance?) or assume that he decided he does not care anymore, he had a serious accident, got fired, won the lottery, whatever (97%) and promptly put the seat back on sale.

The problem with a-b-c costing less than a-b is less obvious, maybe, but it has similar causes: for the airline it is more efficient to sell you the itinerary with a stopover so their pricing reflects that.

There have even been attempts to take passengers to court for getting off at the intermediate stop (they were dismissed) so it's definitely not just because the airlines are throwing a fit if you decide to change your plans.

Probably the a-b leg and the b-c legs sold alone are not very popular so they want more money to maximize the yield, while everyone wants to go a-c and return.

Of course I can understand it from their point of view. But this doesn't make it any more sensible to me as a consumer of their services.

In the aforementioned situation I wasn't trying to exploit the airline, it was a simple mistake that happened and could be easily alleviated. But the rigid processes, precisely the ones where accountability sinks, made it impossible for the humans involved to correct the mistake.

I still stand by the ridiculousness of that. If not the logistics quirks per se, then the fact that this completely unrelated matter dictated the resolution of the situation against common sense and my interest.

What makes this even worse is that presumably the PR department of that very company had to be involved later and they still spent their employees' time and money to compensate me for the mistake that could be corrected for free.

And what is the actual explanation that actually makes sense (apart from profit increase)?

I have booked flights A->B->C and got down at B because that was cheaper than booking A->B only. Not sure where this all makes sense at all.

The full explanation would take a wall of text (and still let you unconvinced because you feel entitled to do as you please, probably).

Super-condensed version: civilian flight are a pretty difficult "product" to handle efficiently. Price increases until 1 minute before closing the airplane doors, then falls to zero. On top of that, the product "provider" also needs its own product in order to move personnel and technicians all over the globe, but of course they cannot just cannibalize their own products beyond the point of profitability.

Plus they have to handle rebookings and passenger protection in cases like delays, sudden airport close-down and so on. (Have you ever been on a waiting list, btw?).

All this is pretty complicated to manage already, so they need to exert as much control as possible on yield and occupancy.

TL;DR: a flight is not a bus ride. So if you just decide to cut it short the airline will try to reuse your vacant space for whatever reason.

It seems to me that since airlines can't force you on a plane except for taking your luggage hostage, you're free to drop as long of a 'tail' as you wish. I'm wondering whether they'd put you on a black list or something for doing this consistently.

It’s called “skip lagging”. The airline can possibly try to collect money and if you do it often, ban you from flying with them.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/23/1194998452/skiplagging-airfar...

The reason is happens is that take for instance ATL (former home). ATL is a Delta hub and has direct flights to a lot of places that other airlines don’t. Between people preferring direct flights and the lack of competition, they can charge more.

But flying out of MCO with a layover in ATl, they lose the non stop flight advantage and they have to compete with other airlines.

Also ATL sees a lot more price insensitive business travelers than MCO. Businesses aren’t going to force their salespeople and consultants on one of the low cost carriers.

>Isn't it ridiculous in the first place that flying A-B-C is less expensive than B-C?

It's no more ridiculous than something being cheaper at a liquidation store than a retail store.

OMG this stirred my memories. I was interviewing with companies in Amsterdam and Berlin. The Berlin recruiter made onward and return flight bookings for me from India. I though went to Amsterdam first on a separate flight because I was juggling the schedule. I thought it’s no big deal didn’t bother informing the recruiter of my side arrangement.

I then took a train to Berlin from Amsterdam, finished the interview and went to the airport for my return flight that was booked by the recruiter. To my absolute horror I was told that since my onward journey was a no show the whole PNR was cancelled. I felt like an idiot. Since then I double and triple check whenever I’m booking flight tickets.

Sorry to hear that. Sounds like not a lot of fun!

> So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately.

Why did you do that? Especially when that cost you extra money?

You should have talked to the airline directly, explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine. People miss flights all the time and this is an entirely normal process.

It's been standard practice for a long time if you miss a first leg, that you forfeit the rest. They're going to reuse those seats for e.g. other people who missed their original flights. It's a type of flexibility built into the whole system.

Connecting flights are super useful because you can work with the airline to reschedule the whole thing, and the airline is responsible if you can't make a connection because an earlier leg is delayed.

I truly don't understand why you would have taken it into your own hands to buy a separate replacement ticket on your own, instead of talking to the airline. Even in your second example, why didn't you work with the airline to reschedule your missed flight? Even if they for some reason can't reschedule, they will often keep your return flight valid if you have an obviously good reason (e.g. a visa issue during COVID). But you do have to contact them immediately.

I'm sorry you didn't know how all this worked, but when in doubt, contact customer service ASAP to see if they can help. Don't just go buy separate tickets on your own, and then assume later legs will still be valid. That's not how it works.

This reminds me of the quote "I know just enough to be dangerous"

I wonder how long until we have an AI on our shoulder saying "Hey why are you booking a new flight, there is a better option"

> explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine

Do you really believe this? There are a lot of bad airlines. Enough that a terrible airline is often the best option.

This usually just leads to getting dicked around for so long until you need to just do the original plan anyways. It only works if you have infinite time. Ideally he could just book a new flight and send them the bill

According to Dutch law, you lose your Dutch citizenship if you accept another nationality. The Dutch embassies (who are responsible for renewing Dutch passports abroad) are well aware of this law and have processes in place to refuse a passport renewal if you can’t provide proof of temporary residence in the country you reside in. The local institutions however, don’t have these processes in place and are generally not aware of this law because it only happens to a tiny little percentage of the population. And nobody updates the national registry with your new nationality because that’s the responsibility of local municipalities, not the Department of Foreign Affairs. So if you decide to simply renew your passport in the Netherlands instead of abroad, they’ll just give you a new passport because you’re still registered as a Dutch citizen at the local level and they don’t have a process in place to check your foreign nationality.

Don’t ask me how I know :) It is one of the few accountability sinks that doesn’t affect me negatively.

There is also a fun - legal - bypass to this.

The Dutch law doesn't say you 'can't have a second passport'. It only says: 'you can't have a second passport at the time you get your Dutch one'.

So countries like the UK allow their citizens to 'renounce' their UK citizenship, get a Dutch one, then get their UK one 'back'.

I have a feeling that AI will be used to replace the folks that might get squeamish.

If I understand it correctly, that's what United Healthcare was doing, that got people so mad at the guy that was shot. He brought in "AI Denial Bots," so the company could knowingly cause the death of their customers, without having any "soft" humans in the process.

> Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage.

Notwithstanding the rest of the column, this particular example brings the following thought to mind:

It could actually be argued that getting angry at the gate attendant is not a "bad people" response. Suppose that under those circumstances, the typical individual passenger would demand the gate attendant to either let them onto the flight, or compensate them reasonably on the spot, and if denied - even with a "it's not within my authority" - inform their fellow passengers, which would support the demand physically to the extent of blocking boarding, and essentially encircling the gate attendant until they yield (probably by letting the original passenger onto the plane), and if security gets involved - there would be a brawl, and people on all sides would get beaten. Now, the individual(s) would would do such a thing may well suffer for it, but in terms of the overall public - gate attendants will know that if they try to do something unacceptable, it will fail, and they will personally face great discomfort and perhaps even violence. And airports would know that such bumps result in mini-riots. So, to the gate attendant, such an order would be the equivalent of being told by the company to punch a passenger in the face; they would just not do it. And the airport would warn airlines to not do something like that, otherwise they would face higher airport fees or some other penalty. And once the company realizes, that it can't get gate attendants to bump passengers this way, it will simply not do it, or authorize decent compensation on the spot etc.

Bottom line - willingness to resist, minor ability to organize, and some willingness to sacrifice for the public benefit - can dismantle some of these accountability sinks.

a good "collective response" would be to deny the non-agency of the gate attendant. That is,

Still wouldn't change a thing. The gate keeper has no say into who gets let on the plane and who doesn't, they are there just to enforce the decision.

The only way to get this solved is if in the executive meetings one person goes "Our processes that bumps people resulted in xxxxxx cost, that's too much".

The way those costs are incurred doesn't matter, if its direct compensation or fines, but unless you can attach a price tag to it, nothing will change.

> The gate keeper has no say into who gets let on the plane and who doesn't, they are there just to enforce the decision.

No, that's not true. He is literally, physically, the gate keeper: To pass the gate, he has to let you pass. Now, you could insert another gate keeper into the scenario at the entrance to the airplane, or some turn-style with a scanner etc. but that wouldn't change the basic argument, just make the scenario a little more complex.

But they are not making the decision whether you are allowed to board or not, they are just there to enforce it. You can't talk your way on a plane with them no matter what you say if your scanned boarding pass lights up red instead of green. They don't have any authority to make decisions.

They do ultimately make the decision. I do things Im not allowed to do almost every day at work. They might have to deal with the consequences but it really is their decision

You misunderstood the point they tried to make. If a gate attendant was told to punch someone in the face, they still wouldn't. They'd probably get fired for not punching someone in the face, then win some civil suit for their lost income.

If rejecting people from flights without explanation was socially considered the same way as punching in them the face, they wouldn't do that, either.

You can deny the non-agency of the gate attendant without getting angry. My personal feeling is that no mature adult should ever get angry really under any circumstances, though I don't expect this or really blame people for being angry.

Maybe your point is valid for other situations, but believe me, letting someone getting on a plane after their names has been removed from the Flight Manifest (passengers list) will have very bad consequences for everyone involved.

Starting from the Captain deciding the plane will not depart until the police has taken care of the situation (assuming they find out before taking off, which is quite probable if the seat had been reassigned to someone else).

A few things came to mind as I read this.

1) About 8 years ago I was gifted a copy of Ray Dalio's Principles. Being a process aficionado who thought the way to prevent bureaucracy was to ground process in principles, I was very excited. But halfway through I gave up. All the experience, the observations, the case studies that had led Dalio to each insight, had been lost in the distillation process. The reader was only getting a Plato's Cave version. I used to love writing spec-like process docs with lots of "shoulds" and "mays" for my teams, but now I largely write examples.

2) I live in a Commonwealth country, and as I understand (IANAL), common law, or judge made law, plays a larger role in the justice system here than in the US, where the letter of the law seem to matter more. I used to think the US system superior (less arbitrary), but now I'm not sure. Case law seems to provide a great deal of context that no statute could ever hope to codify in writing. It also carries the weight of history, and therefore is harder to abruptly change (for better or for worse).

3) Are human beings actually accountability sinks? This is only possible if they are causal originators, or in Aristotlean terms, "prime movers", or have pure agency, or are causa sui. But the question is, once we subtract environment (e.g. good parenting / bad parenting) and genetics (e.g. empathy, propensity toward anger), how much agency is actually left? Is it correct for our legal and ethical systems to terminate the chain of causality at the nearest human being?

2) The US is considered a common law jurisdiction.

I read most of this agreeing with everything the author was saying, sometimes in a "I already thought that" but often in a "huh, that's a really cool insight." I quite like the style too.

As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-...

In an American context, this part also struck me:

>> We did that. But only the Prime Minister could actually cut through all the bureaucracy and say, Ignore these EU rules on Blah. Ignore treasury guidance on Blah. Ignore this. Ignore that. “I am personally saying do this and I will accept full legal responsibility for everything.”

> By taking over responsibility, Johnson loosened the accountability of the civil servants and allowed them to actually solve the problem instead of being stuck following the rigid formal process.

Of course this also can have pretty severe negative consequences. In the U.S., thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, the president has immunity from criminal prosecution under certain (yet to be fully determined) circumstances. If the president then "takes over the responsibility" for obviously illegal actions, and is immune from prosecution for those actions, you now have a civil service unburdened by any responsibility to follow the law. And there are some 3 million odd workers in the U.S. federal government.

That the conservatives on the Supreme Court did not consider this danger, especially in light of who occupies the office, is still astounding to me.

The problem in your case is the immunity bit, not the ability to cut through red tape if the situation is dire enough - which is like half of the job of the president (or similar post) !

I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects of solo non-stop around the world sailing: You have no one to blame other than yourself. It puts you into a mindset that is unique in this day and age. The sailors, when interviewed after their ordeal, also mention it a lot.

Same with overland travel. You either caused the problem or allowed it to happen. Either way it's your job to fix it and it's the only way to keep going. It requires preparedness, flexibility and resilience.

I remember many messes where I just stood there thinking to myself "alright nicbou, what did we learn today?"

In 2012 I've spent almost the entire year hitchhiking around Europe. Mostly alone, sometimes in a small ad-hoc group that would part whenever we had to take different turns. Sometimes there is someone else to blame: a driver who dropped me off in a far worse place (like in the middle of a busy highway); a mate who almost blew all of us up when mishandling a gas cylinder; unsolicited exhibitionism; etc.

Well, shit happens. Pick your stuff up and carry on.

There is no blame on holiday. Something will go wrong (how can it not?)

Related discussion (517 pts):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694

https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine

(A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term)

EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread

Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems.

Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41892299

Heh. 6 months ago someone mentioned Deutsche Bahn and Switzerland. Deutsche Bahn is now banned from operating trains into Switzerland, by Switzerland, because they are never on time.

There's a HN discussion for that too (2 days ago), maybe you're referring to that :)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853663

Great post and discussion as well! I learned from that about two just cultures and their different views of what "accountability" even is.

>If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.

This, and I think it gets deeper. I started reading more about history of "just culture" and it seems like historically it was the dominant culture of justice in the tribes and smaller communities.

It's the _just culture_ focused on repairing the damage – for the victim and for the community – and trying to fix the reasons and integrate the offender back into life (otherwise community would end up being a bloodbath of revenge and dies out).

What wasn't obvious to me is that switch from restorative justice culture to retribution justice culture happened for economic reasons. At some point of nation states formation, crime became an act of offence against the king, not the community. You didn't do wrong to the community, you "disobeyed the rule of king" and thus has to be punished. The whole "justice transaction" became a deal between an offender and the state/king, instead of community and victim and offender. Paying retribution fee became a source of income for the kingdom, incentivising this type of justice culture. Victim and community was largely left untouched by this new type of "fixing justice". Pretty dramatic change.

My eyes opened a little bit!

"Sidney Dekker" & "lese majeste" or even "Wilhoit" returned nothing interesting, so that's a new open secret (if I didn't totally misunderstand, that is)

Aside: does that make "The United States " a careless sovereign (monarch) in your book? -- most criminal cases are "The U.S. vs ____": not only are community/rehabilitation afterthoughts, nobody looks forward to any pleasure of a Majesty. The Judge+Jury as Middle Finger & Thumb of the Invisible Hand?

The book I still have open is actually by Sidney Dekker - "Restorative Just Culture in Practice: Implementation and Evaluation". A quote:

> In 1066, with the Norman invasion of England, William the Conqueror and his successors brought into existence a legal system that gradually replaced the church and local systems of conflict resolution. For the nascent state, the legal system turned out to be useful for exerting influence and extracting money. Crimes were seen not (just) as violations of a community’s mores, or the victim’s rights. They were seen as infractions against the state, and against the ruler, the king, as a disruption of the ‘King’s peace’. Fines benefited the ruler economically and often politically. The state and the offender were the primary actors around whom the justice was organized, and the victim played a lesser role.

TIL: SD inspired by air-crash investigations (which attract "informed" pundits like bugzappers), AND is a flight instructor himself!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...

>Investigators are often forced to rely almost exclusively on domain knowledge and common sense, but this exposes them to the mechanisms of hindsight.

(I was on a hunt for his dissertation (Ohio State, Cognitive Engineering, 1996) -- wanted to approach the topic at a level as low+concrete as possible))

As to the King's Peace (Wilderness?) , nobody really knows or cares who chairs NTSB/OSHA lol

https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/news-insights/trump-nomina...

This reminded me of my favorite David Greaber book: The utopia of rules (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules).

Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree.

This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?

More reachable, more accountable, and more surveilled by whom?

And can we flip the relationship, creating dashboards or whatever from which agentic systems reach, hold to account, and surveille right back?

I'm thinking pro-active agents that escalate for you, sinking their teeth into interactions with large organizations like a dog with a bone.

It's the upper layer in the hierarchy that creates the impersonal "I'm just following the rules" behavior, aka accountability sinks. Surveillance is basically strengthening this, as every step of an employee can be traced. And you are 100% right, these technologies, as I wrote above aren't malicious or something and can be used on the opposite, and should. Ease of access to someone with decision making capability should make desicion makjng easier, not harder. We should be able to hold higher ups responsible.

Another major accountability sink is employment. Employee is shielded from financial responsibility for the damage he incurs while working. While he may be punished for disobeying orders or acting criminally, he's not financially responsible for the fallout (especially if he was only doing the things he was ordered to do and/or reasonable things). Doing a job is inherently risky behavior. If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep then in the absence of accountability sink protections barely anyone would be brave enough to get employed. That's also why LLC exist. To enable risk taking by promising to not hunt you to the bottom if you fail.

>If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep

Sir, it's the year 2025 of our Lord. Nobody is out there to destroy your life most of the time.

The fact that they don't doesn't mean they can't or they wouldn't. Just reading news from USA from last 3 months should make it obviously clear.

I would say that corporate personhood is a better example. It seems very natural to us, but I'm not sure if it's an idea other intelligent species would also independently arrive at.

I don't see it natural at all. I think it's quite insane concept. A corporation is obviously not a person and even if you pretend it to be a person why only good things come from it for a corporation? Why isn't it sentenced to death and executed when it kills 11 people?

Why corporations are allowed to own other corporations? Isn't it a slavery?

I think GP's example is better, definitely more familiar. That's the fundamental difference between employment and running your own business: you're trading away both the downsides and upsides of business risk, in exchange for a stable, predictable salary.

Another fun one is asking for a higher salary - for obvious reasons moderately sized companies have formal systems that make it logically impossible to do on an employees initiative (the boss doesn't control salaries, payroll doesn't control salaries and all the formal systems point to the boss and payroll). The real approach is that a worker has to somehow convince one of the people with serious power to overrule the default systems.

But the important thing to recognise is there are always people who can overrule a given formal process and they are being held accountable to something. The issue becomes what their incentives are. In the success stories in this article (like the one where the doctor saves a bunch of people) the incentives lead to a good outcome when the formal system is discarded. In the leading ground squirrel example someone without doubt had the power to prevent the madness and didn't because their incentives led them to sit quietly in the background hidden from history's eye. Ditto the Nazi example - obviously there was someone (probably quite a few someones) who could have stopped the killing. They didn't override the system because they through it was performing to spec, and it is probably difficult to prove they were in hindsight because informal systems don't get recorded.

If the incentive is the culprit, then the airport employee acted out of her mind because her own survival was more important than to act human... therefore, she is biologically similar, but spiritually guided differently. she would never tell you she gave herself or sacrificed (big word) to it (big word), she never knew anything else really, she saw things through the window all along her life, but never got to really experience it, it is so inconvenient to her, she whispered.

she feels more than a children of the cities, she has embodied them.

> the boss doesn't control salaries

I would call them a supervisor then.

It’s not logically impossible for any buyer to decide to pay or not pay more to a seller, it just depends how replaceable the buyer thinks the seller is, and how much they care (the buyer could be retiring with golden parachutes before shit hits the fan).

Interesting article, but picking Johnson and Cummings's handling of Covid as a positive example is a very odd choice, given their falling out and the numerous corruption allegations and parliamentary inquiries into their actions since then.

I 100% agree with you, but it looks like that specific, single instance is a clear example of the famous broken clock being right twice a day.

Surely it is that specific example that counts. It seems perverse to dismiss one sensible decision on the grounds that the persons concerned made many other bad decisions. It's the decision that is the focus not the persons making it.

Interestingly if you’re denied a credit card in Europe a subject access request can be very helpful for understanding why

> Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage.

I disagree, slightly. We have to expect some degree of ethical behaviour from everyone, even those who nominally have no room to manoeuvre. If everyone in such positions were to disobey unjust orders the orders would eventually have to change.

Walking away stewing in rage does nothing except fill you with damaging hormones.

and enables the situation at the expense of your own health.

If I ever feel like writing my own "12 Rules for Life", one of them is going to be called "Don't yell at the Barista" or some version of that. You can get angry, but not at the person who would probably get fired for showing initiative. Find the people actually responsible and yell at them.

Being angry is not synonymous with being abusive. Your assumption that they would be fired for showing initiative says a lot about the society that you live in. I'm glad that generally where I live we expect people to take responsibility and their managers to support them. It doesn't always work of course.

As sad as things turned out for the squirrels it’s bizarre to worry too much about 440 squirrels dying in a country with lots of meat farming…

They even mention that the shredder was designed for newborn chicks. So something we routinely do to thousands and thousands of chickens is somehow suddenly horrible if they did it to random 440 squirrels that couldn't be accounted for.

You somehow can't apply logical statements to what we choose to kill and eat. Cultures differ on their opinions here. But at some extreme we should all be vegan.

The logic is simple, we eat what's convenient to produce and we construct our morals around that.

Meat costs a lot to produce. We eat it because it tastes good, not because it's convenient.

True. Habits also play an unconscious role and tradition a conscious one. To demonstrate the former: bellow two studies on cats exposed pre, peri and post natal with a specific aroma. From the first abstract:

> We conclude that long-term chemosensory and dietary preferences of cats are influenced by prenatal and early (nursing) postnatal experience, supporting a natural and biologically relevant mechanism for the safe transmission of diet from mother to young.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232700921_Prenatal_...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40452868_Effects_of...

I'll add that habits and taste can change later in the life voluntary or involuntary: There's plenty of people that "learn" to like something they didn't in their youth for many reason: new cultural environment, health, curiosity...

No. Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows. That's one of the main reasons we rather eat cows, pigs and poultry than dogs, dolphins, squirrels or guinea pigs.

People do a lot of expensive and wasteful things just because they are convenient in many domains of life.

Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices. Tasty things you can just eat straight up. Meat is easy. It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.

Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.

> If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices.

I agree with the rest of your comment, except this.

You eat your meat "always fried to a char"? What? Also, I barely add some salt to it. Many people add way too much salt though.

By almost char I meant browning.

Salt is cheating. Add salt to any fat and it's immediately tasty.

But fried? I seldom fry my meat.

I also cook vegetables (eat them raw too, of course), so I don't think that's cheating.

Aren't steaks fried?

No. They can be cooked on a grill with no fat and they taste great.

Do they taste great? Or does the fatty salt taste great? Have you ever tried them without salt? Because salt or sugar can make anything fatty taste great.

Yes they taste great even without salt. I’m getting the impression you have never eaten a cow before. Maybe try some time before you say such things. I bet you’ll love it!

I'm eating steaks seared/fried on a pan almost weekly for few years now. I landed on a combination of herbs and spices to make them actually tasty (rosemary, black pepper, sweet paprika and of course plenty of salt). But still they are nowhere near the tastiest of the foods that I've eaten. I eat them because they are easily (and slowly) digestible, and rich in nutrients. I don't really have to think about the rest of my diet and I can eat whatever I have a craving for without risking some serious deficiency as long as I eat occasional steak and keep an eye on my weight.

I've also been to some steakhouses few times and what they serve ranges between terrible and passable.

I guess my tastes aren't typical.

You’re just not correct. It’s alright, happens to the best of us.

They taste great without salt or additional fat (other than what's already in the steak). We do not fry them in Argentina.

No? I've never fried a steak. I grill them.

You never eaten a steak from a pan? Or you just never used any additional fat under the steak, which technically makes it grilling? Sorry, I'm not a native speaker and I thought frying is anything you do on a pan with no cover. I guess there's also searing but I thought it was kind of frying.

I found a recipe for skillet-fried steak: https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a9744/p...

Nope. We grill steaks in Argentina. We do not fry them.

> Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices.

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "steak".

Buy your steak, toss in a pot of unsalted water. Cook for a while to make it edible. Eat it when hungry. Tell me again how tasty the meat is.

Do the same with rice, potatoes or lentils and you'll have completely different experience. Pick any fruit. There's even no need to boil. Tasty from the get go.

Rare steak is nice.

Are you seriously trying to argue that food doesn’t actually taste good if it has to be cooked first?

Throw steak in a hot pan. It tastes great with no other seasonings. Tasty from the get go. Throw rice in a hot pan. It tastes awful.

Therefore, rice is not tasty.

If steak was tasty you wouldn't need steak sauce /s.

Have you tried? Eat unsalted steak fried/grilled/seared on the pan? It doesn't taste good.

I've tried a lot of different fake meats, and real meat tasted better to me. Sure, meat requires special cooking to taste good. That doesn't mean meat as a whole tastes bad. When other things are cooked the same as meat, they don't taste as good to me as meat.

>Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows.

I'm not saying that meat producers don't optimize their production to lower prices. I'm saying that despite their optimizations, vegetarian foods are cheaper to produce than meat.

>It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.

Look at the price of beef vs the price of vegetarian foods. Beef costs more. Also look at the carbon footprint of beef vs vegetarian foods. Beef production produces more carbon.

>Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.

I don't think any of those are the main reason people eat meat. In a different comment you say rice, potatoes or lentils are easier to cook such they taste good. I don't think meat is easier to cook than other foods.

Why do some religions say don't eat beef or pork? Some religions care about how you kill the animal. How is this convenient?

Religions can be inconvenient. I'd still argue that source of some of their bans was convenience that just got frozen in time and kept alive way after its utility ended.

I think in case of meat bans it was a deeper convenience. Something like that it's not convenient to avoid pork, but it's convenient to not get sick from low quality pork or the process of raising this specific animal. It might have been quite convenient rule of thumb two thousand years ago.

David Graeber has written a really good book about this exact topic and one that I highly recommend. He explores why and how bureaucracy crept up on us.

“ The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

> The card design only allowed for 24 characters, but some applicants had names longer than that. They raised the issue with the business team.

> The answer they've got was that since only a tiny percentage of people have names that long, rather than redesigning the card, those applications would simply be rejected.

Long names are a pain. This happened to me when I tried to open a bank account in Vietnam. Similarly bank tellers in China were always puzzled and needed to call supervisors when having to enter the information. Also airport auto gates frequently fail for me, and systems that want me to enter your full name in a form will reject my input more often than not. When I'm asked to sign my full name with my signature, it hardly fits and I need to write in tiny letters.

If I ever have children I'll name then with something short, with no special characters. Something like Tim, Kim, Leo... Otherwise they will always end up the edge case.

The KLM squirrel problem is arguably the opposite problem as all the other examples. It would have been a simple matter to call up KLM's corporate counsel and have them figure out how to both comply with the government's order and the country's animal welfare laws.

So really a case of not enough bureaucracy rather than too much.

It's only related to what he wrote but it reminded me of something that low-key annoys me whenever I hear Americans talk about the Holocaust.

I know he only touches on it very slightly and indirectly raises a related point to what annoys me about most coverage about it.

It's pretty simply that the people that were systematically slaughtered during that time period were classified to be Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables", but they were first and foremost German and identified as such. Nazi Germany didn't kill "other" people, it systematically alienated groups of the population to then eradicate them, by first walling them off to make communication impossible, then spreading enough propaganda to make the average Joe no longer consider them his neighbor.

Seeing the social climate all over the world change, chief among them Americas, does make me think this lesson hasn't been taken in whatsoever.

The first step to atrocities is always to cut of communication between the groups, and people nowadays are actively doing that themselves now - not artificially enforced like it was back then.

At first yes, because they had control over the German Jews. It expanded of course as their control spread through conquering.

Absolutely, the atrocities didn't stop there. That was only the beginning. I didn't mean to insinuate that only Germans were mistreated. The sociopaths running the government in Nazi Germany were very methodical about it and forced everyone into becoming either a collaborator or victim themselves, facilitating even more atrocities as WW2 progressed

It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening. It's because breaking an accountability sink of people who are long dead doesn't have any impact other than the explanation itself. Breaking an accountability sink of currently living people and currently active wars is much more dangerous.

Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently ongoing?

There are numerous conflicts worldwide where one side is trying to systematically destroy the other population, civilians and all. Whether they are exactly the same or how you define that is pretty secondary to that fact.

Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate.

That way of saying that the holocaust is a thing of its own, that can be compared to nothing else is simply a way of separating genocide victims into first-class and second-class victims. The only outcome would be to weaken the collective "Never again" outcry against barbary.

From the perspective of the victims, it was not special, indeed. My "research" focused on the other perspective to learn social patterns.

Here are a few other genocides of the 20th century: the Armenian genocide [1], Porajmos [2], the Rwandan genocide [3].

Please enlighten us on how pointing similarities in the administrative involvement, the systemic nature of the targetting, the harnessing of technology, or the way individuals perpetrating it are made to feel less accountable is, in your words, "highly inappropriate".

I honestly don't see how you could make such a claim for all these examples without negationism.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Holocaust [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

That's what they do in Germany. They teach it as a unique thing that can never happen again... which leads people to never question whether it could happen again... which may lead to it happening again, because any sign that it was happening again would be dismissed, because "it can't happen again" is drilled into people.

The default attitude of any human is to support the status quo, but you'd think Germany in particular would do a better job of changing that default with education. It seems like it doesn't.

Obviously, if someone was doing another holocaust, it would be in their best interests to make you think the very notion of more holocausts was prima facie completely absurd.

I went through German school, did the mandatory trip to Buchenwald, met Pavel Kohn in person and i think you are making shit up.

What if US people are less hesitant to make those comparisons because they know less about it?

In Germany it's illegal to compare things to the Holocaust, even if they are like the Holocaust, even if they are literally a second Holocaust. A politician couldn't run on a platform of "we'll do another Holocaust" (they'd be arrested) but could run on a less specific statement like "we'll eliminate the useless eaters to make Germany strong, sending them Aut to Schwitzerland" and you would be arrested for pointing out how Hitlery that implication was. You might get cleared of charges by the court... six months later.

You know i can check §130 StGB and see you are just making shit up?

You know I can just watch which signs get the people holding them arrested, and conclude what they're enforcing isn't what's written in 130 StGB?

Unfortunately this is one of those times where Wikipedia is not useful. Any page related to an ongoing conflict is under constant attack from bad actors on all sides. Go read some books or visit in person if you want to know the truth.

Israel is actively committing atrocities similar to the holocaust and the comparison is fitting. If German jews fought back it would have looked just like Gaza.

Look at what's happening in the US right now. People getting snatched off the streets. This is how it starts.

And a large part of the population are cheering it on.

There are proceeding at the ICC against at least two countries on the accusations of genocide right now.

Whether it's worse or better than Holocaust is debatable and you can bring up a metric. Did Gaza reach 10% of the Holocaust? At what rate we count abducted children against murdered adults? Do we count deaths or suffering too? Do the circumstances of death with genocidal intent contribute to the metric?

What can we learn from the quantitative comparison of one with another?

It’s often debated whether the public at the time was aware of the scale of the atrocities committed, whether they were accountable, and whether they could—or should—have done something. But only now am I realizing how much a certain part of the population actually does the propagandists’ dirty work by defending and whitewashing such atrocities.

Debated by whom? I'm from Slovakia which had voluntarily copied laws and process for deporting Jews verbatim from Nazi Germany and here is overwhelming amount of evidence that everyone knew something very bad is going to happen to them. Also the "arizácia/aryanization" dispossessing of Jew property made it doubly clear they weren't going to return.

The public was well-aware. They had stickers on shops. Your Jewish neighbors were paraded through the streets for deportation. Once they were gone, people took the furniture, the businesses, or simply moved into their apartments. On the country side, there were various land reforms where people who joined the NSDAP party were given fields from famers who were either simply deported as being Jewish or political opposition.

Of course people always had the feel-good lie "oh they're just being relocated to XYZ" but in those times you'd never leave your furniture and other valuables behind when moving if you were not forced to. For German people it was a win-win situation: More work for everyone (either as a party soldier or in the construction), steal some valuables from your neighbors who just got taken away, and feel good about your noble aryan genes.

Sorry for rambling on this topic but there are books for every mid-size Germany city which detail the unfathomable amount of looting, stealing and "M&A business" that was done by everyday "normal" German citizens during these times.

And most of these crimes were not prosecuted because of political decisions after the war.

This is the same reason that computers suck.

Every program you ever run will precisely follow the same set of rules, because it is those rules.

There's a missing piece that no one has really managed to implement on computers: backstory. The reason why a program's rules are written is much more important than the rules themselves, yet we haven't found any way to write the reason why.

The most important feature of backstory is that it's dynamic. The meaning of a story can be completely changed by simply replacing its backstory. Whether it's a computer program or a societal organization, a decided system must be ignorant to its backstory. There is no place in a decided system to implement context. It turns out that this is a core feature of computable systems: they are context-free.

---

I've been working on a way to change this, but it's such an abstract idea, it's been hard to actually find (and choose) where to get started.

The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave *as unpleasantly as possible* — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.

Some of the seminal works on accountability as applied to systems and particularly the business world, are the works from Gerald M. Weinberg.

"Are Your Lights On?" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044831.Are_Your_Lights_...

"The Secrets of Consulting" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/566213.The_Secrets_of_Co...

"More Secrets of Consulting" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714345.More_Secrets_of_C...

> Eventually, employees noticed a problem: The card design only allowed for 24 characters, but some applicants had names longer than that. They raised the issue with the business team.

I'm looking at you, ANA Mileage Club card! 24 characters should be enough for anyone according to their database. They even have a whole page dedicated to how you should work around it (I tried, this procedure & indeed it lets you truncate your name, but then you won't be able to associate any tickets you purchase in your real name with the card). https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/amc/reference/merit/procedure/in...

That's a .jp site. Is it 24 kanji? That should be plenty of space :)

Yup, 24 moji :-)

The TV series Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister have a lot to say about accountability in the governments.

In my experience, the credit card example is _usually_ solved in a practical way which is still somewhat bad, but allows the person to at least get a card: They abbreviate one or both names in some way for the card.

As crappy as the system with its max length for people's names, it's common to allow first initial + surname. It also works very badly for non ASCII names - to my understanding, I _think_ people in East Asia just have to use romanisations if they want to have a Mastercard. This all sucks, but it's a bit more than "the card design" - it's quite fundamentally baked in to how the whole system works. There aren't a lot of systems out there which are based on more aged and legacy technology than card networks.

The moment I saw 250bpm, my mind took me to ZeroMQ and indeed it was Martin. Then ofcourse Pieter Hintjens came to my thoughts next. I just loved ZeroMQ but I don't use it anymore. Good to find Martin's blog and a great writeup.

> If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the "wrong" thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.

Not only this. I had a particularly toxic manager many years ago and during some major disaster he was fuming around the office demanding to know who was responsible. We had to spend time determining that instead of how to fix the issue. Someone might have been responsible for initiating the disaster, but he was responsible for extending it (substantially).

Generalizing here, but it’s a sign of a bad process when it’s thrown out in an emergency.

Crisis is when well-thought out, tested procedures should be used, at least as a starting point.

> And it turns out that the German soldiers faced surprisingly mild consequences for disobeying unlawful orders.

Huh. Franz Jägerstätter was executed for refusing to fight in the war.

Franz Jägerstätter was not a soldier.

>Drafted for the first time on 17 June 1940, Jägerstätter, aged 33, was again conscripted into the German Wehrmacht in October and completed his training at the Enns garrison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter

That kind of sounds like he was a soldier to me. Or trained to be one.

There are many documented and studied cases where orders to carry out massacres which were disobeyed carried no harm to the German who refused.

Mostly demotion or transfer to a different area, but no execution or jail time. Sometimes not even that.

I'm talking about not taking part in massacres (e.g. shooting unarmed women and children, locking people in a barn and setting it on fire, etc), not about refusing to fight, cowardice, aiding the enemy or actual treason.

>faced with the paperwork issue, airport staff threw all 440 squirrels into an industrial shredder.

Has nobody commented on the sheer macabre bloodbath that must have ensued, or that some random airport staffer were willing to carry it out right to the end, for 440 chunky, cute, furry marmots? That's some psychotically serious.. uh, dedication to job duties.

Also... there was this discussion several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301

Both that item and this item add the unique perspectives of the authors, but both are about issues raised by Dan Davies' Unaccountability Machine. So if you like this thread, you might like that thread.

The link you shared is to this thread

I didn’t realize Martin is blogging again! Hurray!

Reminds me of a Rickover quote:

"If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

I don’t see anyone mentioning it, so: I was disappointed that an otherwise interesting post was turned political.

> This is why even the well-off feel anxious and restless. We may have democracy by name, but if the systems we interact with, be it the state or private companies, surrender accountability to the desiccated, inhuman processes and give us no recourse, then the democracy is just a hollow concept with no inner meaning.

> You can't steer your own life anymore. The pursuit of happiness is dead. Even your past achievements can be taken away from you by some faceless process. And when that happens, there’s no recourse. The future, in this light, begins to feel less hopeful and more ominous.

> It’s eerie how much of today’s political unrest begins to make sense through this lens.

No, your past achievements aren’t taken away from you. When you’re wronged, you almost always have recourse, up to and including making a big stink on social media. Private companies aren’t meant to be political democracies. They’re in fact almost explicitly designed to be authoritarian, because it works well. You don’t suddenly live in a not-democracy just because the companies have a CEO and middle managers that set up processes.

I wish the rest of the post wasn’t called into question by this hyperbole, but it is. It makes some interesting points, but ultimately it feeds into a natural desire to be pessimistic. Which means it’s entertainment rather than an analysis.

There's also the nice sidestepping of the whole issue of human judgement comes with the baggage of ignorance and prejudice. Yes, the article acknowledges that processes can be largely beneficial, but it focuses on the horrors of the processes, while glossing over the horrors of NOT having the processes.

In the ideal world, each private company is authoritarian, but there are many competing for your money, and so you get to choose - which effectively approximates something like a democracy.

In the world we actually live in, you often have at most 2-3 companies to choose from, with exact same policies. And if this is something that you actually need, then you're effectively forced into their bullshit.

> Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage.

> You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you're told that's not company policy.

People somewhere in between realise that the point of the gate attendant (or Level 1 tech support person) is to shield management from customers, so you have to outflank the shield.

Being yelled at by a customer is bad for the Level 1 support person, although there's usually a policy in place for phone support that you can hang up if the customer is getting aggressive. What's much worse is saying to management "hey here's something you might want to look at" and being super yelled at by their boss for not doing their duty of keeping the customer away from the higher-ups. That kind of thing can get you fired.

But you can hack the system in many ways. The point is to find someone higher up without going through the person who's not allowed to help you, and without blaming them for doing their job.

Some possibilities: find the higher-ups on linkedin, speak to a company rep or executive personally at an event if your professional circles overlap, send a printed physical letter to someone in control, and so on.

Something I've seen work many times: if you're a student, find out about the university's management structure and ask for a personal meeting with the Dean of X of whoever sits above the department admin person who's assignment is "we've taken this decision, now make the students happy with it". A dozen students asking to personally speak with the Dean or President lets them know something's up and the shield was ineffective. Since there's usally some kind of statement of values about how the "student experience" is central to everything they do (read: "students are paying customers"), they can't just turn you away.

Does Kafka, the writer[1], come to mind for anyone?

[1] I dislike that I have to specify. I wish there were still only one common reference for this name.

So why not elaborate as "Franz Kafka" when you mean the author? It can only clarify and it just takes 6 more characters. People who know both won't be bothered, and people who know neither will have a better time looking up the context.

GP would just have put the footnote on "Franz" rather than on "the writer" then (and may have had to look up Kafka's first name). I don’t think 6 vs. 12 characters makes that much of a difference.

Another terrific write up on this subject is Jen Pahlka (cited in the article)’s essay on the “cascade of rigidity”.

I find some startup leaders really struggle with this if they come from a Big Corp environment. If you're a CTO or VP or Director of Engineering for like 20 people, you're actually going to have to decide things. Yes at your previous roles you could follow a flow chart or whatever but here you have to actually take accountability. Watch them tap dance trying to avoid committing to anything.

All the Republican Senators and Congressmen/Women .. I am looking at you.

Democrats too :)

>The SREs were accountable to the higher ups for the service being up. But other than that they are not expected to follow any prescribed process while dealing with the outages.

That's because hard work and being serious about your tasks do not get you promoted.

> The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Welcome to modern day customer support. Phone or email agents have zero agency and their jobs are more often than not outsourced to some ultra low wage country... the only ones with actual authority tend to be C-level executive assistants and social media teams because a bad experience gone viral can actually threaten a massive financial impact.

The pyramid on the dollar bill is built of human bricks which believe that they are free from repercussions of their actions under orders from above. But real karma is much more of a bitch than even HN moderation

The reasons we suffer these accountability challenges are often rooted in that anyone holding someone else accountable, may experience negative consequences to self...and those are often estimated as too high to do "the right thing".

If the governing part at the time of the Nazi trials actually held each and every person involved accountable, would they win the next election?

If a company holds their employees to the actual standards laid out by their policies or guidelines, what would attrition look like? Would they immediately be short staffed critial roles? Would they loose a key employee at a very inconventient time?

These are the real reasons preventing us from holding people accountable.

You can't get a credit card because your name is too long?

You can't pass immigrations because you don't have a last name?

The future is not made for you, because progammers and designers didn't get requirements that match the diversity of this beautiful world.

It remindes me how someone I know often makes complicated food orders in restaurants (modfying or replacing items on the menu), and then they get disappointed or complain because their wishes are forgotten or screwed up. I never make changes to a menu item, because I assume they are unable to accommodate me (either due to stress, lack of intelligence/memory, bad process e.g. not writing down customers' orders etc.). As a result, I get disappointed less often on average - make your oder "compatible" with the realities of this world to avoid disappointment and stress.

There is actually an official procedure for U.S. Immigrations dealing with people who have names that cannot be split meaningfully into first/last names, e.g. some people from India. Assume your name is "Maussam", then you are permitted and expected to fill in that string in BOTH fields, first name and last/family name, when booking a flight or applying for visa. (A similar hack could be devised for names that are "too long".)

Overall, these examples are reminiscent of the movie Brazil (1985), which is about a dystopian future in which a plumber that helps people fix their toilets gets hunted as a terrorist because he didn't fill in the right form.

My theory is the world has been gradually converging towards the absurd state parodied in that movie.

Airlines are not the only ones that get less and less accountable. We should stop spending our money with companies that communicate with us using email spam services the address of which begins with noreply@fubar.com.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985)

> Concentrating the Jews was thus crucial to the success of the genocide

Oh interesting. Maybe I should be moving out to the country and not among other trans women then.

That is some Tetsuo level bullshit.

Did you already engulfed precious North American spirit in the process, thus, killing it by suffocating it in nonsensical debate?

Let us know when that happens so we can wake up Akira.

The discussion near the end about how leadership taking responsibility can beneficially relieve accountability reminded me of the story of the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) [0].

[1]:

> When NTDS was eventually acclaimed not only a success, but also one of the most successful projects in the Navy; it amazed people. Especially because it had stayed within budget and schedule. A number of studies were commissioned to analyze the NTDS project to find why it had been so successful in spite of the odds against it. Sometimes it seems there was as much money spent on studying NTDS than was spent on NTDS development.

[2]:

> ...the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations authorized development of the Naval tactical Data System in April 1956, and assigned the Bureau of Ships as lead developing agency. The Bureau, in turn, assigned Commander Irvin McNally as NTDS project “coordinator” with Cdr. Edward Svendsen as his assistant. Over a period of two years the coordinating office would evolve to one of the Navy’s first true project offices having complete technical, management, and funds control over all life cycle aspects of the Naval Tactical Data System including research and development, production procurement, shipboard installation, lifetime maintenance and system improvement.

[1]:

The Freedom to Fail: McNally and Svendsen had an agreement with their seniors in the Bureau of Ships and in OPNAV that, if they wanted them to do in five years what normally took 14, they would have to forego the time consuming rounds of formal project reviews and just let them keep on working. This was reasonable because the two commanders were the ones who had defined the the new system and they knew better than any senior reviewing official whether they were on the right track or not. It was agreed, when the project officers needed help, they would ask for it, otherwise the seniors would stand clear and settle for informal progress briefings.

The key take-away is that the NTDS was set up as a siloed project office with Commanders McNally and Svendsen having responsibility for the ultimate success of the project, but other than that being completely unaccountable. There were many other things the NTDS project did well, but I believe that fundamental aspect of its organization was the critical necessary condition for its success. Lack of accountability can be bad, in other circumstances it can be useful, but diffusion of responsibility is always the enemy.

How many trillions of dollars are wasted on projects that go overbudget, get delayed and/or ultimately fail, and to what extent could that pernicious trend be remedied if such projects were led from inception to completion by one or two people with responsibility for its ultimate success who shield the project from accountability?

[0]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...

[1]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Legacy_of_NTDS_-_Chapter_9_of_th...

[2]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Building_the_U.S._Navy%27s_First...

> Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Welcome to scale. Every business that wants to grow faces this, and those that grow exponentially face this way before they could ever have established a company culture of treating people like humans, which only comes with years of face-to-face interactions, sometimes that don't go so well. Customers sometimes disappointed and you have to make it up to them; when they do, they feel valued. But in today's economy means you can endlessly screw customers, and as long as your business/your userbase/the sector keeps appearing to grow before your exit, giving a shit is an active impediment to that sweet sweet millionaire payoff in the end.

i came to search for a word: advocate. void.

Ah, I love when I'm a software engineer sitting for coffee in the morning, and I open up my tech newspaper to read some extremely overly verbose way of explaining to me like I was just born that yelling at floor staff doesn't change anything (this is actually not a product of modern society, you could yell at a soldier fighting against you and that also won't change anything). Had to stop after that second massive quote. Seriously, what? I thought this was going to be about managing the 1000 compliance settings in Azure and how that sucks.

I'd say he loves the sound of his own voice, but everything worthwhile here is in a blockquote. Oh well, even a poor collator has value as such.

And what value did this comment create?

While we’re being unnecessarily rude, and discussing people who enjoy the sounds of their own voice and lacking substance.

"Unnecessarily?"

And hon, unlike most in this dawning age of LLM slop replacing human speech, I deserve to enjoy the sound of my own voice. People tell me as much almost every day! Think of me as Wittgenstein's lion. Don't expect to be able to make sense of me.

I am deeply suspicious of "blameless" post mortems. I agree that we should work in ways that minimize fear. We should, to some degree, celebrate the learning we glean from our failures.

But I keep seeing "blameless" being construed as lying about why something happened. It's construed in such as way that anyone can hide from their misdeeds. People screw up, and we need to hold them accountable, and THEY need to hold THEMSELVES accountable. Not necessarily with "punishment" (what does that even mean in a professional context) but perhaps atonement and retraining.

Sometimes failure comes from inherent risks. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. You can't account for every possible factor, you'll be stuck in analysis paralysis while the world moves on.

If we're speaking of a justice system in more general terms, I agree with your line of thinking. I believe that repairing the damage and reintegrating with society would be far more effective than incarceration or other forms of punishment. Fear is a seed, you reap what you sow.

(Yes there are extreme cases. Still the long-term goal should be to minimise harm, not bring punishment.)

I'm nearly wrapping up Sydney Dekker's book _Just Culture_, and Allspaw has a few pages in it. And preceding that is a section titled "blame-free is not accountability-free."

Accountability under Dekker's restorative justice model means providing a complete record of what happened, so the justice system can focus on who was harmed and who needs to repair that harm. In some ways I think they can end up mirroring the typical punitive justice system, when the person who needs to repair harm matches what we would call a guilty party in other circumstances. But the idea is not to lie about what happened! It's to expand the network of causality beyond a simple thought terminating "Bob did it" so we can address the systemic problems that led to Bob doing the wrong thing.

> Not necessarily with "punishment" (what does that even mean in a professional context)

A few options depending on profession:

1. Demotion 2. Pay cuts or fines 3. Firing 4. Loss of certification, thus preventing this person from ever working in the field again 5. Jail time, preventing this person from even being in society for some time, perhaps forever.

Dekker's book is full of examples of professionals facing all of the above consequences. If you don't think these punishments are applied to the SRE community Allspaw addressed when originally describing "blameless postmortems" then you probably want to read the all time highest upvoted post to /r/cscareerquestions, "Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job, and was told to leave, on top of this i was told by the CTO that they need to get legal involved, how screwed am i?"[1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/a...

I didn't mean that I couldn't imagine a punishment. I meant that I don't know think that "punishment" is meaningful as a tool to improve anyone's behavior.

Certainly it is a tool for deterring people from doing serious crimes. But it is a terrible tool for performance management of someone you hope will perform better.

I think there's a strain of management that thinks if you fire people who make mistakes the number of mistakes your team makes over time will decrease.

The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Only with a healthy dose of cynicism I can understand where he's going. While the topic of accountability sinks is quite interesting, I'm searching for the author's reflection of their own accountability.

They worked at google, made a boatload of money for the advertising company and himself, and now philosophically lectures others how to detect and/or design accountability sinks.

So the author gives what, 10 examples, and one of them is about himself and his own experiences, and one of them is from a hospital.

And from that you convey that the author must have some kind of ego? I don't think that's justified critique.

The word "hero" is mentioned twice in the whole article. Once in the section before he talks about his own work, and once in the section directly following it.

> As one of the commenters noted: "Amazing! The guy broke every possible rule. If he wasn't a fucking hero, he would be fired on the spot."

> **

> Once, I used to work as an SRE for Gmail. SREs are people responsible for the site being up and running. If there's a problem, you get alerted and it's up to you to fix it, whatever it takes.

I only know Mr. Sustrik from this one article but had to mention this because it was just a too low hanging fruit in terms of criticism.

Not to mention, he has awareness of the ways people absolved themselves of responsibility during the holocaust, but fails to take accountability for his work at a company supporting an ongoing genocide (whether or not he had any involvement with Project Lavender)

Frankly, if the author has Google-style FU money and can find no better way than this to spend that and his time alike, ego isn't the first of his faculties I see cause to question.

Doesn't surprise me to learn he's big on LW, though. A bloodless, passionless dork who mistakes dollars for IQ points and of whom it's not obvious he ever had an original thought? He might have been made in a lab for those sad nerd wannabes to identify with.

Maybe he thinks it's too early to get sued over a blog-- he's only just got to the HN frontpage for the first time this year?

Subtext of his previous blogpost:

Capitalism is powered by greed.

https://250bpm.substack.com/p/per-tribalismum-ad-astra

EDIT: another post of his that got traction ~5 yrs ago was about the Swiss political system (Swiss are a pragmatic culture though afaik he's Slovak so we might have to account for some Iron Curtain baggage)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881309

Maybe he quit google after 6 months, I don't know. It's easy to talk about greedy capitalism once you've made it. It's a bit harder to live by these kind of ideals for the whole duration of your career.

> he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Isn’t this the practice we do to sell ourselves during interview about quantifying our work and value?

I firmly believe that the author is the perfect interview candidate who will pass an engineering interview with flying colors. For rest of us, “so erm… I fixed a bug which allowed my employer to scale quicker globally during natural disasters and erm… allow emergency response teams to coordinate. My manager tells me it saves billions of life but I do not have access to actual numbers but the number of promotion each of my managers get when I fix a bug tells me, my contribution has good values”.

P.S. Off-topic.

I think it's firmly on-topic as the author clearly suffers from delusions of grandeur which causes them to greatly overestimate the impact of their actions, leading them to flawed conclusions about accountability.

> The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems

That's a horrible take. He did nothing of that sort. He didn't say anything about his skills, nor did he say anything about improving Gmail postmortems. You made everything up. He was just mentioning the fact that in this case, limited accountability when handling emergencies has strong benefits.

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