[HN Gopher] Accountability Sinks
___________________________________________________________________
Accountability Sinks
Author : msustrik
Score : 511 points
Date : 2025-05-03 06:45 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (250bpm.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (250bpm.substack.com)
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| 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
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| There's a HN discussion for that too (2 days ago), maybe
| you're referring to that :)?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853663
| divan wrote:
| Great post and discussion as well! I learned from that about
| two just cultures and their different views of what
| "accountability" even is.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| > _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._
| divan wrote:
| 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.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| 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?
| majke wrote:
| I didn't realize Martin is blogging again! Hurray!
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently
| ongoing?
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i
| feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate.
| pyrale wrote:
| 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| From the perspective of the victims, it was not special,
| indeed. My "research" focused on the other perspective to
| learn social patterns.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| 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?
| rollcat wrote:
| Look at what's happening in the US right now. People getting
| snatched off the streets. This is how it starts.
| 20after4 wrote:
| And a large part of the population are cheering it on.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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?
| osener wrote:
| 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.
| rini17 wrote:
| 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 "arizacia/aryanization" dispossessing of Jew
| property made it doubly clear they weren't going to return.
| bflesch wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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...
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| vemom wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| The logic is simple, we eat what's convenient to produce
| and we construct our morals around that.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Meat costs a lot to produce. We eat it because it tastes
| good, not because it's convenient.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| 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_Prenat
| al_...
|
| 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...
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| > _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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| By almost char I meant browning.
|
| Salt is cheating. Add salt to any fat and it's
| immediately tasty.
| barrucadu wrote:
| > 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".
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| vemom wrote:
| Rare steak is nice.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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?"
| rollcat wrote:
| 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.
| vemom wrote:
| There is no blame on holiday. Something will go wrong (how
| can it not?)
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| amos-burton wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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).
| CalRobert wrote:
| Interestingly if you're denied a credit card in Europe a subject
| access request can be very helpful for understanding why
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| >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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _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,
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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.
| bflesch wrote:
| 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.
| queuep wrote:
| 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.
| bflesch wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| 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)
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| 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
| bflesch wrote:
| 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.
| n_ary wrote:
| > 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.
| closewith wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| > 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| _> 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...
| nottorp wrote:
| That's a .jp site. Is it 24 kanji? That should be plenty of
| space :)
| rwmj wrote:
| Yup, 24 moji :-)
| satisfice wrote:
| 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.
| rollcat wrote:
| 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.)
| jldugger wrote:
| 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...
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| 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
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| "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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| sails wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| dendodge wrote:
| 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.
| dpb001 wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| lantry wrote:
| 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.
| goldfishgold wrote:
| 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
| deltaburnt wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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!
| op00to wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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.
| artimaeis wrote:
| 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.
| dendodge wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| 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.
| dsego wrote:
| > 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.
| lmz wrote:
| 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)
| dendodge wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Well this year supposedly they are finally going to be
| required at airports so it's really real :-)
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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
| dsego wrote:
| 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.
| oleggromov wrote:
| 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| 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).
| oleggromov wrote:
| 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| > 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.
| oleggromov wrote:
| > 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| 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 - Gyor may cost 3 times less
| than sending the same truck from Gyor to Berlin - even on
| the same exact date.
|
| Is this because shipping companies try to make money out of
| nothing, for you?
| xingped wrote:
| 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| If you are answering to my Berlin->Gyor 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).
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| A fair comparison would not be the return, but Berlin-
| Gyor being more expensive than Vilnius-Berlin-Gyor. Is
| that common in logistics, in your experience?
| Pamar wrote:
| 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.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| 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?
| oleggromov wrote:
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| Pamar wrote:
| 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.
| oleggromov wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| oleggromov wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. Sounds like not a lot of fun!
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| mucle6 wrote:
| 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"
| DangerousPie wrote:
| 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.
| MzxgckZtNqX5i wrote:
| 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.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > 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.
| lazide wrote:
| and enables the situation at the expense of your own health.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| At first yes, because they had control over the German Jews. It
| expanded of course as their control spread through conquering.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| 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
| franze wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| In any sufficiently large organization, these are the
| same thing.
| apercu wrote:
| >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.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I always thought that was a big reason for buying external
| consulting. Reminds me of that George Clooney Movie
| nkrisc wrote:
| Michael Clayton?
| belter wrote:
| Probably more _Up in the Air_
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yeah that probably makes more sense.
| belter wrote:
| > 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...
| cbsmith wrote:
| So basically, you're adding formal processes to ensure
| accountability. ;-)
| codeulike wrote:
| 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
| xg15 wrote:
| 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...
| euroderf wrote:
| Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer
| ?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Antonio Scalia name dropped Jack Bauer.
| euroderf wrote:
| That shows you the true depth of his legal thinking. Good
| riddance.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" comes to mind here.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| Convictions aren't convictions if you abandon them when it's
| hard. It's just cosplay
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Also, if you do something every day, it is not an exception.
| amos-burton wrote:
| i see similarity too, but you dont explain why those people
| feels the urge to act like they did. why both protagonists, be
| it terrorist or counter, has some truth in their words; yet
| here they are, acting out of their minds, yet the world never
| was at stake to justify to let go like they did... to say that
| this due to an "accountability sink" is an euphemism, a
| theoretical concept that does not engage the internal
| structures.
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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
| antennafirepla wrote:
| You're right, you plan them both together before the fact.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| patrakov wrote:
| 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.
| maest wrote:
| If they were good guys, we wouldn't be torturing them in the
| first place, obviously.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| jetrink wrote:
| 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
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| 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."
| finnh wrote:
| s/show/department/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| reneherse wrote:
| 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.
| hakfoo wrote:
| 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"
| zhivota wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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?
| dsego wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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?"
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _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.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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).
| zhivota wrote:
| Sounds a lot like Special Circumstances in The Culture books.
| paganel wrote:
| > airport staff threw all 440 squirrels into an industrial
| shredder.
|
| Damn, that explains a lot about the Dutch and about that part of
| the world, to be honest. Why can't have they more human traits?
| What's wrong of them?
| npteljes wrote:
| 1. Not specific to the Dutch at all. Worldwide practice.
|
| 2. These are also human traits! Maybe not so much _humane_
| traits.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
| paganel wrote:
| > Worldwide practice.
|
| For sure we don't do that sociopathic thing here in Romania.
| Ok, I get it, the regulations were set in stone, but after
| shredding (again, what the flying fuck?!?!) the first animal
| hasn't any of those Dutch employees just stopped and ask
| themselves: "What the hell are we doing here?". It certainly
| explains Anne Frank, after all she was violating the
| regulations that were in place back then in that desolate and
| sad country.
|
| > 2. These are also human traits! Maybe not so much humane
| traits.
|
| We're talking about mammals here. Not that what happens with
| chicks is the correct way to do it, and God knows we deserve
| everything that comes our way as a species for doing that,
| but there are degrees in all this madness.
| npteljes wrote:
| Dug around a little, found this map:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hbmivg/which_coun
| t...
|
| So at least in 2023, no bans were in place in Romania for
| this practice.
|
| I'm not entirely sure why it makes sense to distinguish
| between nations, with regards to questionable practices. A
| nation is large, with many different people in it. So,
| there will be many on each "degree of madness" as you call
| it. Over the course of a long history and a numerous
| population, you will every bad practice that you can think
| of, and then some.
|
| This has nothing to do with nation - people themselves are
| like this, everywhere. In fact, I think that it's very
| dangerous to put it like that, to distance oneself so much
| from the horrific acts. I believe that the capability to
| turn on the chick shredding machine exists between you and
| me just as much as they do in the people who currently
| operate these machines. Bad acts are way easier than they
| seem, and, depending on circumstances of course, it takes a
| lot of resolution and work to build a kind and wholesome
| life.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| +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.
| diognesofsinope wrote:
| > "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.
| finnh wrote:
| What's funny is that checklists in hospitals have been shown,
| empirically, to be massive life-saving devices.
|
| cyber perhaps not so much...
| __float wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Checklists are a good tool for making sure you don't forget
| something. They're a terrible replacement for actually
| thinking.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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"
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| > 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.
| Rhapso wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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).
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| lucianbr wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| > 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| werrett wrote:
| 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?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| dasil003 wrote:
| 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.
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| hakfoo wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| bostik wrote:
| 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.
| Meleagris wrote:
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| > 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.
| Thorrez wrote:
| > And it turns out that the German soldiers faced surprisingly
| mild consequences for disobeying unlawful orders.
|
| Huh. Franz Jagerstatter was executed for refusing to fight in the
| war.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Franz Jagerstatter was not a soldier.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| spoonsort wrote:
| 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.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| 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.
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| canterburry wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The TV series Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister have a lot to
| say about accountability in the governments.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| 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.
| apexalpha wrote:
| 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'.
| begueradj wrote:
| >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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| srameshc wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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?
| FabHK wrote:
| 2) The US is considered a common law jurisdiction.
| belter wrote:
| 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...
| jccodez wrote:
| i came to search for a word: advocate. void.
| t_luke wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| selfselfgo wrote:
| 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.
| teachrdan wrote:
| 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.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Small claims is unbelievably easy! You file a one-page
| form, pay $50, and then show up on your hearing date.
| brett-jackson wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _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.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| 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)."
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| "I'm going to prison and getting my affairs in order" is
| a good one too.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| 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
| rfrey wrote:
| 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."
| buran77 wrote:
| > 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Call in on a second line and ask when you will be taken off
| hold.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| ornornor wrote:
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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.
| Ocha wrote:
| 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
| ornornor wrote:
| 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 hotel 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| t_luke wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| 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.
| setr wrote:
| 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
| pixl97 wrote:
| 5 years from now
|
| "ChatGPT has detected you are being hostile to bots. A
| drone has been dispatched to your location"
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >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?
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Because they don't give a shit about _you,_ they just
| want to hold on to your money.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Well also phone numbers cost money & that kind of
| "customer excellence" is not incentivized by anyone at
| the company.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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
| hkon wrote:
| If you are helping, why would they be assholes?
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| hkon wrote:
| Having lived it seems to me that nice people never get
| anything.
| ryoshu wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| dividuum wrote:
| > [..] 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
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| antithesizer wrote:
| 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.
| t_luke wrote:
| 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.
| 1dom wrote:
| 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-...
| biimugan wrote:
| 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.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| 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).
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| 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.
| EZ-E wrote:
| > 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.
| titzer wrote:
| > 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.
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| 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
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| All the Republican Senators and Congressmen/Women .. I am looking
| at you.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Democrats too :)
| yusina wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| yusina wrote:
| 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.)
| zhivota wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 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.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| 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.
| aaviator42 wrote:
| The link you shared is to this thread
| zbentley wrote:
| Another terrific write up on this subject is Jen Pahlka (cited in
| the article)'s essay on the "cascade of rigidity".
| cckolon wrote:
| 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."
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| cbsmith wrote:
| 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.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| 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.
| dkbrk wrote:
| 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...
| bgnn wrote:
| 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?
| gavmor wrote:
| 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.
| bgnn wrote:
| 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.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| alganet wrote:
| 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.
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