
When Picking Apples on a Farm with 5,000 Rules, Watch Out for the Ladders - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/picking-apples-on-a-farm-with-5000-rules-watch-out-for-the-ladders.html
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quasse
I like how "vehicle registrations, insurance documents and time sheets" is
painted as an onerous and undue burden of proof for the farm.

How dare they require legally registered vehicles and insurance at a business.
And they'll fine you if you have rats in the food prep areas!

A lot of these super specific rules also seem to be a product of the
regulatory culture in the US where you don't regulate things until someone has
fucked up really bad. Then you get these super specific rules that cover that
one case, but nothing else because people will scream about "unfair over-
regulation".

~~~
DrScump
Unless NY is exceptional, vehicle registration _isn 't even required_ for
farming vehicles that don't leave the farm or other private property and only
cross public roads at right angles.

~~~
ouid
>Only cross public roads at right angles.

What if the public road is differentiable nowhere?

~~~
LolWolf
Then you can only cross at extrema.

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mcguire
_“All I’m trying to do is grow so that my grandchild can pick an apple off a
tree and take a bite out of it and be O.K. That’s where I want to be.”_

Well, congratulations. Your competitors are trying to grow as many saleable
apples as possible, as cheaply as possible, grandchildren be damned. Most of
those regulations come over someone's dead body.

~~~
Y_Y
It's almost as is if things just tend towards crappiness as "fitness"
outcompetes "goodness" [0].

[0] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

~~~
QAPereo
Life is just another thermodynamic process following a gradient, and all
things tend to entropy.

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ryanmarsh
“Audit” (sorry I can’t think of a better word) compliance for visits by
government agencies (regulators, what have you) are STILL in 2017 a great
place to start a software business. The first product I made and sold on the
side was for small trucking companies to do safety compliance in a specific
niche. It was such a crappy app built on MS Access but it helped my customers
sail through DOT audits. The DOT auditors had seen nothing like it. Customers
loved it. A friend went on to turn the product into a sizable business.

Small businesses face more regulation each year. This isn’t a value judgement
about regulation, just take a look at the Federal Register. It’s just a fact
of life. Agencies and congress are hard at work adding to the CFR.

This is perfect work for the solo developer who wants to own a little niche.

Steps to get started.

1\. Befriend small business owner or compliance person in small-medium sized
business.

2\. Ask how much time they spend on compliance, and how much it costs when
they fuck up. Establish a unit cost.

3\. Sketch up a paper prototype and iterate with the initial customer.

4\. Build basic demo, show to your first customer’s colleagues. Get feedback.

5\. Get group of potential customers to commit to buying at a specific price
(discounted for them taking a chance on you) and to write you a check up
front. Promise a delivery date of what you’ve agreed to deliver. (You can
promise full refund if necessary but get a check to get through sales
objections).

6\. Hold checks. Don’t cash.

7\. Build the damn thing

8\. Deliver

9\. Fix initial complaints because you’re a bozo not a wizard harry.

10\. Sell to other people in your niche.

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seibelj
Tech people have been spoiled for so long they have forgotten what regulation
in business is even like. Start a multi billion dollar tech company? You’ll
deal with some regulation when selling into certain industries, or if you
decide to roll your own credit card processing, but overall it’s minimal,
unless your tech is specifically to streamline a regulated industry.

Try to start a restaurant, raise cattle, farm food, or any other business that
non-tech people can understand? I hope you have a lot of capital for
regulatory compliance staff and government pleasing!

~~~
QAPereo
Once you kill a few people with your tech, they’ll demand the same
regulations. It’s just that much consumer tech is crap that frankly couldn’t
do the intended job, never mind hurt someone. You can compromise then
identities of millions of people, but it’s just a PR thing for now.

Try that same hacker ethos with an automated vehicle, or a medical device
though. In time, as tech starts to live up to its promise, you’ll find your
red tape. Sure, there are some bad regulations, but a lot are the result of
someone dying or nearly dying. When the equivalent of a countrywide E. Coli
outbreak is a techie problem, the rest will rapidly follow.

~~~
nucleardog
See, for example, IEC 62304 and the EU and US regulations that require
compliance with it.

That standard is generally considered to have arisen out of the deaths caused
by the Therac-25 device and its faulty software and design.

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strictnein
The quotes from the FDA, et al in the article are all about how they just want
to help and are wanting to work with farmers, etc etc. But when did the
regulators show up? Friday, the start of the weekend, during a apple orchard's
peak season.

Not Tuesday morning in August to discuss worker safety for peak harvesting.
Not Wednesday afternoon in November to review incidents. Peak season, start of
the weekend.

~~~
mcguire
I don't know. Showing up when they're not doing anything doesn't sound like a
good way to check that they are following proper procedures when they're
actually working.

And assuming their workers are working normal hours, Friday would be the least
intrusive.

~~~
strictnein
A lot of apple orchards, this one included, are very busy on the weekends
because people come out to visit them. As stated in the article:

> "The farm sells homemade apple pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts.
> Schoolchildren arrive by the bus load to learn about growing apples. And as
> customers pick fruit from trees, workers fill bins with apples, destined for
> the farm’s shop and grocery stores."

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philipkglass
My father did environmental, health, and safety compliance for a manufacturing
operation for 21 years. Simple guidelines would work fine for a lot of things
if you could trust that the rules were just to advise thoughtful and non-
malicious people. But there's always somebody too stupid or amoral to infer
that "don't let this stuff get in workers' eyes" also implies "don't let
workers apply this stuff without protective eyewear," so every detail has to
be explicit. Sometimes the people trying to get away with something are in the
executive suite; sometimes they're just forklift operators. For most rules in
the rulebook, you can bet that somebody once did the dumb thing the book is
now explicitly telling you not to do. That's usually why it got added as a
rule.

I'm sure it is a burden to have such large accumulations of rules,
particularly if 4 out of 5 are just telling you to do things that any
reasonably careful person would already be doing. I don't see how to reduce
that burden while also not introducing exploitable loopholes for bad actors.

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Pica_soO
The trick with inspectors is to feed them- they have to report something, so
their bosses know they did there job- so you have to leave a easy to find -
not to expensive flaw. After that one is found and fixed, you get the cross in
the checkbox and the caravan moves on.

Also - all in all it sounds a lot like farming in europe.

~~~
wvenable
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)

And one of my favorite stories:

This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was
well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to
project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The
assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't
adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this
tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for
the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the
queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations,
had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that
it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the
queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were
done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get
rid of the duck."

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YuriNiyazov
> when they asked to have 22 types of records available.

Meh. I am sending my kid to pre-school, and the amount of paperwork we need to
submit is around that amount - waivers of responsibility, medical history,
acknowledgement of procedures, etc., etc., etc.

There's an expression - "well, that's just the cost of doing business."

Paperwork is just "the cost of life."

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org3432
> “I’m not necessarily in favor of rolling back a lot of federal regulations,”
> said Ms. Ten Eyck, a Democrat who serves on her local town board. “I’m in
> favor of applying them intelligently.”

So the apple farmer makes sense, why not do that?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>why not do that?

Because "applying intelligently" obviously means "applying them selectively at
the discretion of whoever's doing the enforcing".

~~~
org3432
> Mr. Ten Eyck says the requirement was “ridiculous” in practice — the
> equivalent of finding an earring in the orchard — so Indian Farms came up
> with an alternative to scouring the orchard every morning. “We have trained
> the guys only to grab the rails of the ladder,” he said.

My interpretation is getting to the same result more efficiently, not
selectively applying based on that quote.

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rbcgerard
What’s almost worse is that if you want to say start an apple orchard, good
luck trying to figure out what the applicable rules and regulations even are!

~~~
mikeash
Can’t you just hire a lawyer who specializes in this stuff to collate it for
you?

It would be nice if an average person could do it themselves, but I don’t know
that it’s reasonable to expect that they should, any more than we should
expect an average person to be able to design a building rather than hiring a
professional.

~~~
rbcgerard
Of course you can, what's it going to cost? $20K? $50k? This creates a pretty
significant barrier to entry! and that is just to learn what the rules are,
let alone comply with them!

The end result is keeping small operations out of the market and protecting
larger commercial operations that have the scale to deal with the regulatory
burden.

~~~
mikeash
How much does an apple farm cost? There are a lot of costs associated with a
business like this. I need a lot more than a (relatively low) number to
believe that this is unfair or unjustified.

