[HN Gopher] Shitty Software Kills People
___________________________________________________________________
Shitty Software Kills People
Author : ingve
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-03-27 09:09 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (val.demar.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (val.demar.in)
| [deleted]
| aaron695 wrote:
| Shitty Software Saves Lives
|
| They even make this case
|
| Not software - "you have to download a bloody pdf. Then you have
| to print it. You fill it up with a pen...."
|
| BBC - "Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results
| to be lost"
|
| But it worked. Excel is brilliant software with decades of work,
| it was the (Shitty) scripts that 'failed' ignoring BBC Excel
| headlines.
|
| Except they got the scripts running, made a mistake, fixed it and
| moved on pretty quick.
| Veen wrote:
| I recently read the biography of Jeremy Heywood, who was the
| UK's Cabinet Secretary--essentially the leader of the civil
| service and the person in charge of making sure the government
| functions. Excel got several mentions, and the book gives the
| impression that our government, including the Treasury, more or
| less runs on spreadsheets.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is true of most if not all of the business world. It
| runs on spreadsheets, apps that imitate spreadsheets, or
| hand-built spreadsheet equivalents.
| ghaff wrote:
| The other thing that happens with Excel is it starts out really
| being the right MVP for some task. But that task grows and
| grows over time and Excel keeps right on being used well past
| the point a database should have been implemented instead.
| ectopod wrote:
| I was really impressed with the UK vaccine booking system. A text
| message from the doctor directed me to an online booking form.
| This was an incredibly simple html form-based thing. The first
| screen asks for your DOB (to check you're the right person). The
| second has a short list with about five appointments to choose
| from (a couple of different days, a few different times). Select
| one, click OK, done. A text message confirmed the appointment. It
| was simple and functional. It didn't even require javascript.
| ghaff wrote:
| You can't make a general statement about the system in the US,
| because many (all?) states have their own systems for mass
| vaccination sites, the big pharmacy chains have their systems,
| and presumably hospitals have their own systems.
|
| The Massachusetts system seems pretty good with easy pre-
| registration and choice of ways to be contacted when you're up
| for an appointment. Problem with some of the other systems is
| you pretty much have to keep checking. I've been tempted to
| write some code.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Worse - you may not know the software has this power over you.
|
| I remember a specially egregious case that one of the rental
| companies was guilty of: automated criminality
|
| The software in question automated the reporting of grand theft
| auto to authorities. The rental company used it to streamline
| reporting of rentals to police.
|
| The problem: false positives. The software would report drivers
| as criminals, when in fact cars had been exchanged midrental due
| to car failures etc, and the original car hadnt been returned
| under the normal workflow, which the software failed to account
| for.
|
| Then that police report would chase innocent people for literal
| years, coming up to unsuspecting customers during routine
| speeding stops.
|
| I always wonder whether contributor names to closed sourced
| software should always be transparent.
|
| Excellent engineers should be able to take credit on their work
| and there would be more skin in the game. Particularly for
| employers that get suspect resources from to solve for budget
| constrains artificially imposed by business managers with no
| stake in the product functionality, to critical software
| processes like SREs etc
| bengale wrote:
| Makes me think of this scandal in the UK:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(IT_system)
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Geebus. That's a terrifying read and a 15 year nightmare! I
| take it post office is a private entity in UK?
|
| The last paragraph where the institution disband the
| oversight and destroys results day before report is due is
| infuriating :O
| mmglr wrote:
| > I always wonder whether contributor names to closed sourced
| software should always be transparent.
|
| Are you implying that the developers that created this back
| office tool should be liable for the false police reports?
|
| If so then then counterpoint based on having made back office
| apps: the individual contributor (i.e. developer) may either
| (1) have little to no say in what the app is doing as they are
| simply implementing the requirements as provided and/or (2)
| have no knowledge of how it might fail (e.g. when the app is
| integrated as part of larger business processes)
| HenryBemis wrote:
| The developer's actions are 'best effort'. Didn't the company
| run extensive tests to cover all possible scenarios?
|
| If you build a system that orders coffee capsules, you want
| to make sure you don't order x100. But when you report
| 'thieves' to the authorities you open yourself up for plenty
| of lawsuits.. imagine the poor people being harassed by the
| authorities for some crime they didn't do, and will take
| plenty of time/money/effort to clean-up, all because company
| XYZ does not have a thorough UAT..
| hedora wrote:
| The false positive in this case is filing a false police
| report. That's illegal in the US, and probably exposes the
| rental car company to civil liabilities (generally, contracts
| that allow one party to commit crimes are unenforceable, so I'd
| hope that extends to eliminating the binding arbitration
| clause, though I am not a lawyer).
|
| The police should pursue it cases like this, and arrest the
| decision maker in the organization that caused this to happen.
| If it's been happening repeatedly, the person's sentence should
| be increased accordingly.
| spockz wrote:
| Be that as it may, it will do you very little good when you
| get pulled over for something routine and then you get
| arrested or worse for something you don't even have the
| faintest idea about.
|
| Which is why bad software can hurt people a lot.
| m463 wrote:
| I would imagine that normal people don't have as much legal
| experience or representation as a large corporation (that has
| experience in exactly this).
|
| I had a friend - who happened to be pretty well-versed AND
| interested in legal matters - who was sued by someone for
| some car accident. The thing was, the identification came
| from a license plate, and he lived hundreds of miles away and
| drove a completely different car.
|
| He finally got in touch with the attorney - who didn't care -
| and made him care. Took time and effort. Would have cost a
| normal person a pretty penny.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| haha, police pursuing white collar crime! too busy choking
| unlicensed street vendors to death
| skybrian wrote:
| Open source projects disclaim all warranties because the
| authors have no control over how the software might be used. It
| seems like there are similar issues for code written for a
| business? It would be foolish to take liability when you can't
| stop the business from continuing to use the software and
| causing more damage.
| novok wrote:
| In that case although, you don't know which system or team is
| responsible for the 'cop reporting' part. I could be making a
| very innocent rental state tracking system, and then someone
| else just accesses the same table without my knowledge and
| makes a criminal reporting system after the fact.
|
| After a certain point, we recognize as a society that just
| because you make chairs, your not at fault if someone then
| takes a chair you made and then bashes someone on the head with
| a chair. It's the basher's fault, not yours.
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >you don't know which system or team is responsible for the
| 'cop reporting' part.
|
| you also don't know if they have any information given
| regarding possible workflow deviations, or if it was made
| when they had one workflow and workflow was changed without
| paying for changing the system. If that were the case it
| would be an example of shitty management gets people harassed
| by the police and potentially killed because getting harassed
| by the police at the wrong moment, or looking like the wrong
| person, in the wrong country can get you killed.
| qrbLPHiKpiux wrote:
| The title should be People KILL People because people write code.
| c-cube wrote:
| Sounds like "guns don't kill people"
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's really a distributed phenomenon. Crappy engineering
| managers kill people through their crappy managing. And same
| with moral-less CEOs. To some extent, the engineers have the
| blame because they agree to write the code. But ultimately the
| problem exists with.. the managers? the board? the CEO? the
| customers who enable them all? It's all of the above. This is
| why it's on all of us to have a moral system and enforce it.
| darkerside wrote:
| It's actually incredible how quickly effective software has
| become an expected function of a proper government. States,
| cities, and counties are now handling vehicle registration,
| education, utilities and more over the internet. The paperless
| future (at least in urban and suburban US) is truly here.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| What scares me is the obsession with supporting old desktop
| browsers and ignoring the majority of people who are using
| phones and might not have access to a desktop.
| 127 wrote:
| Some inertia is probably good considering how much Google
| tries to turn the Internet into the Googlenet.
| young_unixer wrote:
| I'm scared about the opposite: governments releasing only
| Android and iOS apps and no web version for their services.
|
| At least the web is an open standard.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It's not just governments: one of the (major) banks I deal
| with supports many types of account -- such as mortgages --
| only via their apps, not on the web. I think that's
| appalling.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| Similar thing happened to me with Itau in Brazil in that
| their website was barely functional (with the last month
| I was a customer I couldn't even login in) and had to do
| everything over the cellphone app. Super annoying as I
| wasn't a native speaker of the language and desperately
| wanted to use my computer for ease of use with
| translation software.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a danger here - the edges and the unserved. Charities
| have sprung up to help people apply for jobs now that they're
| all online - can't apply online if you don't even have a phone
| let alone internet access.
|
| Online processes and APIs are great but we have to have backups
| and failsafes.
| fastball wrote:
| Not really though. Libraries have internet access and are
| free to use.
|
| The failsafe is "find ways to give everyone internet access",
| which I think we've already done.
|
| Libraries, public wifi APs, cheap 4G, dirt cheap internet
| capable devices, etc.
| aimor wrote:
| As a part of the pandemic libraries in my area are closed.
| This failsafe has also failed. I think you're right that
| there should be a variety of redundant options to better
| cover people.
| hedora wrote:
| Around here, libraries lend out 4g access points and
| chrome books, fwiw.
| bombcar wrote:
| Companies can get away with serving 90% of the market or
| less, but places like the DMV and other government
| divisions have to serve 100% of the people - including
| those who even when presented with a library computer are
| unable to utilize it effectively.
|
| Foisting support costs off to libraries is another example
| of the tragedy of the commons.
| fastball wrote:
| What about people who don't know how to read? Are they
| served by all government services?
|
| No idea how you think this is a tragedy of the commons
| situation. It is definitely better to digitize everything
| and serve the 0.1% (certainly not anywhere close to 10%)
| with additional support that helps them _use the digital
| service_ , rather than having non-digital fallbacks for
| _significantly_ more expense.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah I agree libraries are actually the perfect solution
| for this, not a tragedy. I'm impressed recently with the
| relevance of libraries doing things exactly like this --
| helping the masses access knowledge -- despite the shift
| away from print.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Does every remote rural hamlet have a library? How far is
| it reasonable to expect someone to travel in order to
| access this solution?
| fastball wrote:
| If you're so rural you can't access a library, how were
| you using a pre-internet service in the first place?
|
| Internet services becomes _more_ of a win if you 're
| remote, not less so, espescially with things like
| Starlink coming online.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Mail service and telephone service are effectively
| universal, so a job application via the mail or the phone
| is within reach of basically everyone. Having a handset
| and a phone line is also much cheaper than owning even a
| second-hand smartphone (at least a decent cellular plan
| with data isn't very expensive anymore). A deaf person
| could handle applying by phone via a relay service
| (though these days they probably can't because relay
| services are abused by malicious parties and everyone
| hangs up on them). Paper applications were probably very
| tough for blind people though, I'm not sure what the
| solution was... the internet is likely better there, if
| you're lucky and the job application website is actually
| accessible.
|
| I lived in a very rural area for about 50% of my
| childhood - we had no fire department, we relied on a
| well for water, our town's official population was in the
| hundreds, etc. If we wanted to get on the internet we had
| to do it at around 38400 and random packets would get
| corrupted because the lines were old and low-quality (I
| wrote my own parity tool in VB6 so that I could download
| a file 3-4 times and produce a not-corrupted version).
| Despite that, if I wanted to call someone up on the phone
| to speak with them or send a letter, that was just as
| easy and effective as it was when I lived in the suburbs.
|
| When we eventually managed to get slow DSL years later it
| was INCREDIBLY expensive because in rural areas if you're
| lucky enough to have service at all the monopolist who
| offers it knows they can charge as much as they want.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Where I live, at least, mailboxes are a lot more
| widespread than libraries. To send a form by mail, I just
| have to walk a couple hundred yards.
| darkerside wrote:
| A library is not a building. What if it's cheaper to make
| it so people can call and make an appointment with a
| librarian, who will come to your house and assist you
| with your government service needs?
| hansvm wrote:
| > if you don't even have a phone
|
| If you don't have a sufficiently expensive phone. In an
| effort to prevent easily creating cheap fake accounts
| (presumably -- I don't actually know), phone numbers
| associated with low-end android devices are routinely banned
| from social media platforms, online banks, and any number of
| other organizations.
| easton wrote:
| How can a phone number be associated with a certain type of
| device? AT&T doesn't seem to know what kind of phone I
| have.
| bombcar wrote:
| I know that republic wireless's "voip" number can't be
| texted by some services.
| hansvm wrote:
| I doubt it's directly associated with a certain type of
| device but rather a certain carrier or block of numbers
| associated with cheap devices (e.g., tracfones).
| Regardless of the mechanism, the effect is real.
| bsaul wrote:
| covid crisis is really a wake up call for a lot of people in many
| countries regarding the efficiency of their administration in
| moments of crisis.
|
| I've very often told myself during the past months, witnessing
| (my) french government : we're really fortunate nobody is
| declaring war to us, because we would be run over in a few days,
| judging by the time it take for any administration to get things
| done properly.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I just spent 6 hours volunteering as an usher at a pharmacy doing
| about 1k vaccinations in a day. The number of people over 60 who
| didn't understand the difference between a text message and an
| email was around 30% (out of a sample size of 600 during my
| shift).
|
| About 10% of the people who showed didn't have smartphones or
| text, 4 people did everything only with phone calls. I wonder how
| many people who only did phone calls were NOT able to get vaccine
| slots?
|
| Working with my aging mother, modern UIs are very complicated.
| Ever changing gestures, hidden menus, differences between
| machines, passwords, multi-accounts, etc. Heck my mom can't
| figure out the volume buttons on her iphone so she holds face
| time to her ear to hear. Heck even the default apps are hard on
| her. iMessage keeps getting moved to the home page and SMS to the
| 2nd page. So she sees the blue bubble and uses that to message
| us, even tho we are sending SMS. She needs to use the green
| bubble from the second page.
|
| This is not to mention how bad all of these apps or websites are
| and the loss of a person to call to get clarification for
| anything not written on a website.
|
| 95% of my time yesterday was spent just answering nuances to the
| basic questions. For instance we were giving Moderna to the first
| dose people. Every time I announced that to the line, half of the
| 2nd dose people panicked and said "I need Pfizer".
|
| For me as a programmer, keeping it all in my head was easy, it's
| just a 8 branch 3 level deep if/else statement.
|
| For aging people with phones the information became inaccessible.
|
| Those with paper printouts of everything were able to just breeze
| through and paper doesn't reboot, loose battery, or forget, and
| you can easily hand paper to other people.
|
| The rate of vaccinations actually crushed the brand new system in
| place (which was there because the old system melted at 300
| people a day). So paper was great. They just did all the data in
| put at the end of the day.
|
| I'm actually quite worried with our current hodgepodge of low
| quality software we're greatly isolating older people, or people
| who are not using tech heavily every day.
|
| And this is not just for crappy government software. I saw as
| many people unable to use their iphone and android basic
| software. With my mom, netflix, why does it even have a password
| she has to remember? Device authorization between her roku and a
| laptop is confounding, they're 2 totally different devices. It's
| basically impossible.
| paultopia wrote:
| _Working with my aging mother, modern UIs are very complicated.
| Ever changing gestures, hidden menus, differences between
| machines, passwords, multi-accounts, etc._
|
| I'm 41, and, you know, the sort of person who reads HN, i.e.,
| can find my way around a command line, sling enough code to get
| out of a paper bag, etc. And I can't make sense out of many
| modern UIs.
|
| Half of them are just forests of unlabeled icons. Like, ok,
| what is the thing that looks like a squirrel making out with a
| lawnmower supposed to do?
|
| The other half are menus inside menus inside menus inside menus
| where finding the functionality you want is damn near
| impossible.
|
| No government or corporate webform gives you all the
| information you need up front---no company discloses the full
| price until you're about to put the credit card in, no
| government tells you what documents you need until you're ten
| pages into the application.
|
| And don't even get me started on fashionable startups. I just
| joined an organization that used (past tense, I helped kill it)
| Basecamp to organize communications, and that thing has a
| totally different arbitrary nonlinear ontology from every other
| preexisting human communication technology. What the hell is a
| campfire and why can't I find my pings and what were the
| designers _thinking_ to just randomly drop all of this extra
| cognitive load on people 's heads like a pigeon with diarrhea?
| UI designers, please, just stop!
| midasuni wrote:
| I know some companies won't tell you the full price until the
| end, but if I walk into a shop and it costs 9.99 on the
| shelf, that's how much it costs at the checkout. Same with
| prices on the menu at a restaurant or on a day out.
|
| The number of transactions where the full price is shown
| upfront vastly outweighs the number of hidden extra
| transactions
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| I'm 30 odd and I struggle with all this!
|
| _Shiny and new_ is not necessarily better than _easy and
| works_.
|
| UI designers are mad, mad I tell you!
| analog31 wrote:
| Quite agreed.
|
| >>>> The number of people over 60 who didn't understand the
| difference between a text message and an email was around 30%
| (out of a sample size of 600 during my shift).
|
| What is the difference, in plain terms?
|
| It's easy to understand the technical difference if you
| remember that it's based on a historical quirk of cell phone
| technology and economics from 20+ years ago, that is probably
| not fundamental or useful today.
|
| But try explaining it to a non techie: It's a different app,
| and happens to be more or less responsive depending on where
| you are located relative to the antenna towers, so the best
| explanation is just that you have to check for messages in two
| different ways on your phone, and not trust to receive a
| message immediately after it was sent.
|
| Actually understanding the difference is as important as
| knowing why dialing a phone is called "dialing." For the rest
| of us, just make it work already.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that's if you're in the US. If you're in some (many?)
| other countries, you may not use SMS--also for historical
| reasons--and instead use an app.
|
| Also why are some messages green and some blue? Well, one in
| the phone company's native service and the other is iMessage.
| What's the difference? Well, green may cost you more
| depending on your phone plan. Why? ...
| grogenaut wrote:
| So we were doing 2 sets of people. Those over 60 who were on
| their second shot (because they were over 60), and under 60
| essential and ag workers. The over 60 folks were all early
| AM. So over 60 was in this case a known separator.
|
| The over 60 folks didn't care why text or email, they wanted
| to do what they needed to do to get their shots. The system
| we were using was setup for text. It was a tech choice. To
| them tho, it's a phone number, and they never text, that's
| what email is for. Why should they have emails and texts and
| phone calls and because it's hippa, an in web app email
| system to keep their data secure.
|
| For my mom I'm referring to apple's pushing of iMessage over
| SMS... she doesn't comprehend the difference and apple's push
| to get people into their ecosystem is making it impossible to
| communicate with my mom without carrying around an iphone all
| day just to respond to her.
| Sevii wrote:
| It is insane to me the amount of pain email not being
| secure by default causes across the economy.
|
| All these apps implementing in-webapp messaging systems
| that suck, then sending me an email with no information
| other than that I got a message in a system I look at maybe
| once per year.
| hedora wrote:
| Her iphone is probably misconfigured. She probably has two
| contacts for you, one email-only, and one telephone only.
| If you merge the contacts, it should start defaulting to
| sms.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Do you think these people are also surprised that you can buy
| groceries in five different places, none of which are called
| "groceries"?
|
| Tech people overstating "tech quirks" rarely elicits anything
| worthwhile.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's a tale as old as time - and it's not just "old people"
| either. The number of young brilliant people who seem to have a
| mental block around computers is larger than you might think.
| I've had people call and ask why they can't login and when they
| share screen the webpage has a huge graphic telling them to
| approve the notification on their phone (TFA). They don't even
| read it.
|
| And it's not their fault! People have only a limited capacity
| for things. Imagine if your car changed how it worked every
| week or so when you sat down to drive - driving would be nearly
| impossible.
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12
| mietek wrote:
| _> Heck even the default apps are hard on her. iMessage keeps
| getting moved to the home page and SMS to the 2nd page. So she
| sees the blue bubble and uses that to message us, even tho we
| are sending SMS. She needs to use the green bubble from the
| second page._
|
| I agree with your overall point, but I am puzzled by this
| detail. There is no separate app for sending SMS on iOS. The
| Messages app handles both the iMessage protocol and SMS, has a
| green bubble icon, and by default, appears in the four-item
| dock at the bottom of every page of the home screen. Also, app
| icons don't move between pages on their own.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I am also puzzled. Apple's iMessage/SMS app (there is only
| one app that does both as you say) will only send iMessage
| messages to numbers that have iMessage enabled (I know there
| are some edge cases but these are typically only for those
| who have recently migrated away from Apple). iMessage will
| always default to SMS (and is usually the only option) for
| numbers that have no iMessage enabled. Not an Apple fanboy
| but how they have set up iMessage/SMS actually is pretty
| good.
| hedora wrote:
| It sounds like she's using signal and iMessage/sms maybe?
| Signal has a blue bubble app icon, and iMessage has a green
| one.
| incrudible wrote:
| Bureaucracy kills people. Software can only do so much when some
| regulation mandates that a document needs to be printed, signed
| and brought on premise.
| bombcar wrote:
| Multiple options are the answer - not some modern web app.
|
| I'm sure we can find people who have died simply because they
| can't navigate a webpage or an app.
|
| As techies we assume having an app for something is the way to
| go - but there are many who do not have access and being able
| to fill out a printed form and submit it by hand is a better
| solution for them.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Agree strongly with multiple options. Especially because if
| Web Form becomes the only option, it'll still be the only
| option in 25 years when everything else is via brain
| interface.
| madsbuch wrote:
| This is very dependent on jurisdiction.
|
| I haven't had a piece of governmental paper in my hands in my
| adult life (just over a decade). However, in Denmark we are
| very dependent on a working public IT infrastructure. After
| all, we are one of the countries that registers the most about
| their citizens.
| gumby wrote:
| > Bureaucracy kills people.
|
| Well, sure. But bureaucracy saves people too, and probably the
| balance is overwhelmingly to the second. It's just hard to see
| things when they work like road safety regulations, food safety
| regulations, building codes and the like.
|
| And when things work, few people complain about them; those who
| do may be ones who suffer a local inconvenience or lose cost-
| free access to a negative externality.
| periheli0n wrote:
| If it's any consolation--the situation is not much better in
| Germany.
| raverbashing wrote:
| If it's a downloadable PDF and then you have to go to a queue I
| assume they'll have the forms on the location to fill it manually
|
| Yes it is stupid, but not everybody can download a PDF
|
| Remember when the NY state comptroller complained about how the
| process was complex?
|
| If there's one thing that GDPR should have put into people's head
| is not bothering with data you don't need. But nooo, everybody
| prefers to keep collecting the same data (either a form or
| advertisement data) then add another tick box. People's love for
| bureaucracy is something
|
| (And I also might add, people's love for complaining sometimes
| it's bigger than their want of solving the problems)
| superjan wrote:
| I honestly don't see why a paper form is necessarily wrong. Paper
| records have worked for ages. You can make people e-sign
| something, but would a 70 year old understand that he did
| something equivalent to signing? Prefilling would have been nice
| to have, sure, but not doing that is not killing people.
| xnyan wrote:
| >I honestly don't see why a paper form is necessarily wrong
|
| Agree, but I also think the point the author is trying to make
| is correct but maybe unclear - The main goal is to get people
| the vaccine, period. Everything else that is being done is
| being done in support of that goal. Not everyone has direct
| access to a printer, should that be a reason someone should not
| get vaccinated?
|
| Paper ballots are great for elections, but there's no good
| reason paper is required to get someone Moderna/Pfizer/AZ/J&J
| et al.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| The title is at variance with the body, which describes how
| paperwork is worse than shitty software.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Is this a software problem?
|
| > Then you have to print it.
|
| > You fill it up with a pen, trying to remember, find or recover
| information which you might or might not have access to (but that
| you know for a fact that it's stored in multiple databases behind
| some firewall). Then go to a physical location with your little
| printed form, queue up, and hope for the best.
|
| Sounds more to me like an organizational inflexibility problem.
| Someone somewhere refused to change the definition of 'signed'
| and mandated that people print something. Someone decided that
| they couldn't autofill the form. Someone decided that submissions
| will only be accepted as physical forms.
|
| This is sort of my hobby horse since I worked at a company that
| interfaced with healthcare providers that insisted that we accept
| faxed documents.
| musicale wrote:
| I think the "software" in question might actually be the
| operating procedures and policies of the bureaucracy.
|
| Bureaucratic operating procedures are often essentially
| malicious software that de-prioritizes the needs of ordinary
| citizens far below the priorities of the organization. An
| organization may pay some lip service to a mission of service
| to citizens, but usually the organization's actual, absolute
| top priorities are self-preservation and expanding its budget,
| staff, power, and influence. A secondary priority may be
| reducing fraud and punishing cheaters, even at the expense of
| honest citizens.
|
| Though sometimes (e.g. California unemployment insurance) you
| get perverse outcomes where fraudsters are richly rewarded at
| the expense of honest citizens.
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