3 ms·

This is a very expensive change for not a lot of value. Truly nefarious folks will put in a fake handle to instill confidence during background checks. The only

by electic 10y ago

This is a very expensive change for not a lot of value. Truly nefarious folks will put in a fake handle to instill confidence during background checks. The only folks who'll pay are law abiding people via their loss of privacy....and well: > Form: Estimated Annual Cost to Public: $26,325,300. > Website: Estimated Annual Cost to the Public: $265,020,000. What a waste.

jonnybgood 10y ago
> The only folks who'll pay are law abiding citizens via their loss of privacy. This is not for citizens, only aliens.
- NhanH 10y ago
  The only folks who'll pay are law abiding human via their loss of privacy. Better for you?
  - jonnybgood 10y ago
    I'm only repeating what it states. The forms that this affects are not for US citizens. So, US citizens are not losing any privacy.
    - NhanH 10y ago
      And I'm not even mentioning "US" in my statement. It's merely one that describe an effect of the proposal. Do you agree or disagree with that statement? Edit: actually, yes it does affect US citizen. Do you know who is likely to have connections on social networks with US citizens? Non-US citizens coming or leaving the US. Kind of shocking to think about huh.
      - jonnybgood 10y ago
        The person I was replying to was referring to citizens. I wasn't making a judgment, only repeating the facts of the proposal.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- fit2rule 10y ago
  Aliens can be law-abiding citizens of other countries.
yladiz 10y ago
How are those costs so astronomically high? $265MM for a website!
- jsnell 10y ago
  It's not the cost for the website. It's the estimated cost of hundreds of millions of people each needing to take a few minutes to fill in this extra bit of data.
- disillusioned 10y ago
  $265MM in aggregate "burden" in additional time asked of the public, not $$ from the budget. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763
  - electic 10y ago
    To all the people that think this number is absurdly high, it isn't. Let's do some paper napkin thinking here: Form: - The forms will have to be redesigned and reprinted. Not cheap. Don't forget, the 94W is in a variety of languages. - Flight crew will have to be trained to answer this question. For 94W form. - Agent console will have to be updated. - Which means agents will have to be trained to handle this data. - Embassies will have to be trained as well. Website: - Updates to the website. Don't forget different languages. - Help documentation will have to be created for the web. Other: - Data will have to be aggregated from social site. Development costs. - New console will have to be created to look at a user's streams. - Staff will have to pull and review the data. - New infrastructure (servers, software, upkeep) will have to be put in place to handle this. Just thinking for a few minutes, it seems expensive. It is not just a field on a form or website, it is a whole staff, backend, ball of wax.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      But as the people responding to you have pointed out, the above is not what these cost estimates are referring to. They are referring to the estimated burden in terms of the time spent by the people filling in the forms.
disillusioned 10y ago
To be clear, these estimates are based on some calculation of "burden" as a function of how the public would value the time they're estimating this will waste. These numbers aren't dollar values for the implementation of the program.
- dkbrk 10y ago
  I'm actually really impressed by what they're doing there, I've never heard of a government agency doing anything quite like it before. All legislation, regulations and bureaucratic procedures have negative externalities just by virtue of existing. Each little piece makes it just that much harder for someone to find what they're looking for, or makes a process take a little bit more time, or makes it take a little bit more effort to learn the entire thing. Individually, the marginal cost of each little piece is small, and they're generally introduced for good reasons, but the end result of bloated legal codes, regulatory frameworks and "red tape" is undeniable. For example, "ignorance of the law is no defence", but how many people know the entire legal code? (Answer: nobody) But what they're doing here is attempting to quantify the externalities, and crucially: taking into account that a tiny cost spread among a large number of people can produce a substantial cost in absolute terms. People are bad at doing this intuitively due to scope insensitivity, and the only real solution is to estimate actual numbers for the number of people affected, the amount of time it costs, and the value of their time, and then multiply them together to come up with a hard number. And that's exactly what's been done here. You could perhaps quibble about the exact figures, and there are probably other more intangible and difficult to quantify externalities that haven't been taken into consideration, but other than that it's essentially a flawless application of utilitarian ethics. Frankly, I find that utterly astonishing. I am guessing that doing this sort of analysis is required by some sort of rules or regulation, and I would love to know when this was introduced, by whom it was introduced, and at what scope this requirement exists. Is this now a requirement for all changes to rules affecting the public by US Federal agencies?
  - jcrawfordor 10y ago
    Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 as amended in 1995. The PRA requires that all federal forms be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that they are not unnecessarily burdensome, it also requires that an estimate of the public burden of the paperwork be prepared and published. The key method here is to estimate the amount of time required to fill out the form and then multiply that by a standard hourly expense rate, so you will usually also see the estimated time required to complete a form. That estimate involves any research or calculations required, so on some forms it can be very long, e.g. the SF-86 at two and a half hours each. While the fact that the paperwork Reduction Act created this new bureaucratic step is amusing, it served to rectify the earlier situation where a lot of federal paperwork was unreasonably complicated just because it was nobody's job to make it otherwise.

by electic 10y ago

jonnybgood 10y ago

> The only folks who'll pay are law abiding citizens via their loss of privacy. This is not for citizens, only aliens.

NhanH 10y ago
The only folks who'll pay are law abiding human via their loss of privacy. Better for you?
- jonnybgood 10y ago
  I'm only repeating what it states. The forms that this affects are not for US citizens. So, US citizens are not losing any privacy.
  - NhanH 10y ago
    And I'm not even mentioning "US" in my statement. It's merely one that describe an effect of the proposal. Do you agree or disagree with that statement? Edit: actually, yes it does affect US citizen. Do you know who is likely to have connections on social networks with US citizens? Non-US citizens coming or leaving the US. Kind of shocking to think about huh.
    - jonnybgood 10y ago
      The person I was replying to was referring to citizens. I wasn't making a judgment, only repeating the facts of the proposal.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
fit2rule 10y ago
Aliens can be law-abiding citizens of other countries.

yladiz 10y ago

How are those costs so astronomically high? $265MM for a website!

jsnell 10y ago
It's not the cost for the website. It's the estimated cost of hundreds of millions of people each needing to take a few minutes to fill in this extra bit of data.
disillusioned 10y ago
$265MM in aggregate "burden" in additional time asked of the public, not $$ from the budget. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763
- electic 10y ago
  To all the people that think this number is absurdly high, it isn't. Let's do some paper napkin thinking here: Form: - The forms will have to be redesigned and reprinted. Not cheap. Don't forget, the 94W is in a variety of languages. - Flight crew will have to be trained to answer this question. For 94W form. - Agent console will have to be updated. - Which means agents will have to be trained to handle this data. - Embassies will have to be trained as well. Website: - Updates to the website. Don't forget different languages. - Help documentation will have to be created for the web. Other: - Data will have to be aggregated from social site. Development costs. - New console will have to be created to look at a user's streams. - Staff will have to pull and review the data. - New infrastructure (servers, software, upkeep) will have to be put in place to handle this. Just thinking for a few minutes, it seems expensive. It is not just a field on a form or website, it is a whole staff, backend, ball of wax.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    But as the people responding to you have pointed out, the above is not what these cost estimates are referring to. They are referring to the estimated burden in terms of the time spent by the people filling in the forms.

disillusioned 10y ago

To be clear, these estimates are based on some calculation of "burden" as a function of how the public would value the time they're estimating this will waste. These numbers aren't dollar values for the implementation of the program.

dkbrk 10y ago
I'm actually really impressed by what they're doing there, I've never heard of a government agency doing anything quite like it before. All legislation, regulations and bureaucratic procedures have negative externalities just by virtue of existing. Each little piece makes it just that much harder for someone to find what they're looking for, or makes a process take a little bit more time, or makes it take a little bit more effort to learn the entire thing. Individually, the marginal cost of each little piece is small, and they're generally introduced for good reasons, but the end result of bloated legal codes, regulatory frameworks and "red tape" is undeniable. For example, "ignorance of the law is no defence", but how many people know the entire legal code? (Answer: nobody) But what they're doing here is attempting to quantify the externalities, and crucially: taking into account that a tiny cost spread among a large number of people can produce a substantial cost in absolute terms. People are bad at doing this intuitively due to scope insensitivity, and the only real solution is to estimate actual numbers for the number of people affected, the amount of time it costs, and the value of their time, and then multiply them together to come up with a hard number. And that's exactly what's been done here. You could perhaps quibble about the exact figures, and there are probably other more intangible and difficult to quantify externalities that haven't been taken into consideration, but other than that it's essentially a flawless application of utilitarian ethics. Frankly, I find that utterly astonishing. I am guessing that doing this sort of analysis is required by some sort of rules or regulation, and I would love to know when this was introduced, by whom it was introduced, and at what scope this requirement exists. Is this now a requirement for all changes to rules affecting the public by US Federal agencies?
- jcrawfordor 10y ago
  Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 as amended in 1995. The PRA requires that all federal forms be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that they are not unnecessarily burdensome, it also requires that an estimate of the public burden of the paperwork be prepared and published. The key method here is to estimate the amount of time required to fill out the form and then multiply that by a standard hourly expense rate, so you will usually also see the estimated time required to complete a form. That estimate involves any research or calculations required, so on some forms it can be very long, e.g. the SF-86 at two and a half hours each. While the fact that the paperwork Reduction Act created this new bureaucratic step is amusing, it served to rectify the earlier situation where a lot of federal paperwork was unreasonably complicated just because it was nobody's job to make it otherwise.