6 ms·

When Picking Apples on a Farm with 5,000 Rules, Watch Out for the Ladders

47 points by tysone 9y ago

Pica_soO 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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."
quasse 9y ago
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".
- strictnein 9y ago
  Nice job cutting off the actual number of things requested, to make it seem like it was much smaller than it actually was: > when they asked to have 22 types of records available.
  - codemac 9y ago
    22 types of records isn't that much when you're running a business with employees.
- klbdsvkhl 9y ago
  The number of things that one needs to do right approaches infinity, so a trust system is ultimately the only way that accomplishes anything. That doesn't mean that the most onerous and dangerous things can't be checked, but in general systems that run on trust run more efficiently.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Wasn't there an article here last week about how consumers in China were really looking forward to blockchain technology to ensure the safety of the products they buy? Trust is indeed very efficient, but it has certain...limits.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- DrScump 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    >Only cross public roads at right angles. What if the public road is differentiable nowhere?
ryanmarsh 9y ago
“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.
org3432 9y ago
> “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 9y ago
  >why not do that? Because "applying intelligently" obviously means "applying them selectively at the discretion of whoever's doing the enforcing".
  - org3432 9y ago
    > 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.
seibelj 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- Gys 9y ago
  That is only because tech is still new with new concepts: privacy, data safety, net-neutrality. All other industries are old. Regulation takes time and will at some point catch up. Then startups will face the same problems as small business everywhere: to start a new company is almost impossible. Unless you are already big. Regulation is a very effective barrier for new entries. It helps the market leaders because they can spend time to research, bend, adapt to the law.
strictnein 9y ago
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.
- analog31 9y ago
  I'll bet the chances are good that the FDA is understaffed to the point where they have no choice but to work on an awkward schedule just to get a reasonable amount of stuff done.
  - wrycoder 9y ago
    15,000 employees and a budget of four billion dollars.
    - glhaynes 9y ago
      I feel like you’re saying that’s plenty but I’d need a lot more context to know how reasonable that is for a country/economy the size of the USA.
      - analog31 9y ago
        According to all-knowing "do a google search and trust the first number that comes up" methodology, there are about 2 million farms in the US. And I wonder how many of those 15000 employees are actually engaged in auditing farms. I know that in my own state (Wisconsin), the government has been cutting the number of people doing any kind of regulatory enforcement, year after year. That includes agriculture, environmental, etc.
- mcguire 9y ago
  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.
mcguire 9y ago
“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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Life is just another thermodynamic process following a gradient, and all things tend to entropy.
rbcgerard 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
- objectivetruth 9y ago
  The SBA, SCORE, many state/regional/local biz dev agencies, chambers of commerce, certain industry groups, etc., all provide consulting services along these lines. It's not really reasonable to demand an "all in one" brochure covering every legal requirement for every type of business at the local, county, state, and federal levels.
YuriNiyazov 9y ago
> 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."
philipkglass 9y ago
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.

47 points by tysone 9y ago

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 9y ago
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."

quasse 9y ago

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".

strictnein 9y ago
Nice job cutting off the actual number of things requested, to make it seem like it was much smaller than it actually was: > when they asked to have 22 types of records available.
- codemac 9y ago
  22 types of records isn't that much when you're running a business with employees.
klbdsvkhl 9y ago
The number of things that one needs to do right approaches infinity, so a trust system is ultimately the only way that accomplishes anything. That doesn't mean that the most onerous and dangerous things can't be checked, but in general systems that run on trust run more efficiently.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Wasn't there an article here last week about how consumers in China were really looking forward to blockchain technology to ensure the safety of the products they buy? Trust is indeed very efficient, but it has certain...limits.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
DrScump 9y ago
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 9y ago
  >Only cross public roads at right angles. What if the public road is differentiable nowhere?

ryanmarsh 9y ago

“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.

org3432 9y ago

> “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 9y ago
>why not do that? Because "applying intelligently" obviously means "applying them selectively at the discretion of whoever's doing the enforcing".
- org3432 9y ago
  > 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.

seibelj 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
Gys 9y ago
That is only because tech is still new with new concepts: privacy, data safety, net-neutrality. All other industries are old. Regulation takes time and will at some point catch up. Then startups will face the same problems as small business everywhere: to start a new company is almost impossible. Unless you are already big. Regulation is a very effective barrier for new entries. It helps the market leaders because they can spend time to research, bend, adapt to the law.

strictnein 9y ago

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.

analog31 9y ago
I'll bet the chances are good that the FDA is understaffed to the point where they have no choice but to work on an awkward schedule just to get a reasonable amount of stuff done.
- wrycoder 9y ago
  15,000 employees and a budget of four billion dollars.
  - glhaynes 9y ago
    I feel like you’re saying that’s plenty but I’d need a lot more context to know how reasonable that is for a country/economy the size of the USA.
    - analog31 9y ago
      According to all-knowing "do a google search and trust the first number that comes up" methodology, there are about 2 million farms in the US. And I wonder how many of those 15000 employees are actually engaged in auditing farms. I know that in my own state (Wisconsin), the government has been cutting the number of people doing any kind of regulatory enforcement, year after year. That includes agriculture, environmental, etc.
mcguire 9y ago
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.

mcguire 9y ago

“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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Life is just another thermodynamic process following a gradient, and all things tend to entropy.

rbcgerard 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
objectivetruth 9y ago
The SBA, SCORE, many state/regional/local biz dev agencies, chambers of commerce, certain industry groups, etc., all provide consulting services along these lines. It's not really reasonable to demand an "all in one" brochure covering every legal requirement for every type of business at the local, county, state, and federal levels.

YuriNiyazov 9y ago

> 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."

philipkglass 9y ago

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.