Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

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>but knowing that the business model coupled with a beurocratic approach to saftey through chemicals and "certification" is the reason for these vile situations and there is nothing I can do about that

Regulatory capture at work.

Inspector visits the "dirty" bigCo factory and they have an expensive binder for him showing him why everything they do he could possibly take issue is "compliant", citing relevant law, guidelines, specs, etc, etc.

Inspector visits the squeaky clean small time factory and proceeds to write out thousands of dollars of fines for petty things that could have been compliant had the owners had the money to pay to produce all the paperwork showing why their stuff is GTG.

And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.

Just about every industry has this going on to a large enough it's a problem degree. It's a pretty f-ed up state of affairs but it won't change because there's so many careers and even entire industries built around it.

>Inspector visits the "dirty" bigCo factory and they have an expensive binder for him showing him why everything they do he could possibly take issue is "compliant", citing relevant law, guidelines, specs, etc, etc. Inspector visits the squeaky clean small time factory and proceeds to write out thousands of dollars of fines for petty things that could have been compliant had the owners had the money to pay to produce all the paperwork showing why their stuff is GTG.

>And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.

I've been through dozens of FDA facility inspections (and dozens more from non-governmental inspection agencies that are regularly used in the food industry, some of which I might say are more strict than the FDA). Nothing you've said matches my experience in any way.

I'm being dramatic here but we both know it's basically how things work at the margin.

When there's a question of a gray area and "compliance by letter but not spirit" type things the BigCo solution that has been engineered and/or gone over by lawyers, etc, etc. almost always wins out even if their hired people have to go a few rounds with the regulator and make some minor tweak to make it happen. A lot of times this is fine and it's common sense progress that the regulator was preventing because of institutional inertia but sometimes it's sketchy slapdash stuff.

My food industry experience is on the "manufacturing the stuff in the factory" side and I assure you nobody who arrives in any of the nondescript white trucks with numbers on them regards the regulatory process as highly as you do.

>...I assure you nobody who arrives in any of the nondescript white trucks with numbers on them regards the regulatory process as highly as you do.

I said nothing of how I regard the regulatory process. Don't be presumptuous; doing so disregards the site guidelines.

>Converse curiously

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Regulatory capture at work.

Regulatory capture here on HN is turning into a meaningless phrase. Whenever a business does something wrong, rather than actually say what's wrong someone just claims it's regulatory capture. It's turned into it's own thought terminating cliche.

Say what the issue is, don't just blame an assumed regulatory capture. In this case state that it's insufficient regulation of the meat processing industry, infrequent inspections of processing plants, or understaffed agencies.

Say what the issues were, not a nebulous "regulatory capture" claim.

Businesses lobby to get FDA regulations weakened - state that's the problem, not a vague "regulatory capture" phase.

I think I articulated the problem pretty well. Incentives are structured such that there is no concept or serious consideration of what the ideal state is, just a bunch of stupid (though they may have been created with a grand plan in mind at one point) requirements that things must meet and it devolves into a box checking exercise that loses sight of the end goal and divides responsibility up so thinly that it basically evaporates. But the regulator, the trade group, the compliance certification orgs, etc, etc. get to trot out some number that shows good thing up and bad thing down and the racket goes on, and they have every financial incentive to do so.

The conditions in TFA don't show up overnight. People were blindly doing checklists for years with no shits given about the big picture. "Hurr durr the rules don't say condensation can't be running down the moldy-ass ceiling so it's fine" and all that. Eventually people got sick, then the regulator had to cover ass so they took a reasonable big picture look at the operation and the results were so bad a Congressional committee said WTF.

Regulating minutia consistently creates these stupid exercises where the forest is lost for the trees. But we won't stop regulating minutia because there are too many jobs and careers and whatnot tied up in it and it's easy to sell to the public.

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