8 ms·

"At that rate, the 10 employees would have to work non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week to produce the 55,000 pages a month (and would still fall a bit sh

"At that rate, the 10 employees would have to work non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week to produce the 55,000 pages a month (and would still fall a bit short)." So 50 people on a normal (40 hour work week) could do this in a month. The FDA has 18 000 employees. I think the answer is clear.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lesuorac 5y ago
If they want their documents faster they should just pay for it. Requesting 300k+ pages is not a normal request, there is no way all of those pages will be of interest. Pay for it by paying a fee equal to the cost of hiring / training additional personal (https://www.foia.gov/faq.html https://www.foia.gov/faq.html).
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  So pay for transparency that is already expected? Should you have to pay to get your medical record?
  - mike00632 5y ago
    It's asinine to think you have a right to see every document the government has including PII and trade secrets, even worse to base an anti-vaxx effort on such ideas.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      It's crazy to me the amount of people that people would blindly trust the same government that did illegal experimentation in the past and gave unsuspecting populations syphilis. Or the same companies that paid billions for lying in the past.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  Only the rich should get FOIA?
  - Arainach 5y ago
    The FOIA should not allow anyone to launch a denial of service attack on the government. The requester can specify the scope or the timeline. Not both. If my employer asked me to review this much content I would also give a timeline on the order of years. Saying "too bad, it has to be faster" doesn't change my estimate.
    - tagoregrtst 5y ago
      DOS attacks were pioneered by progressives in the 60s. We’ve had 60 years to make the system robust to DOD attacks
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      I have no problem with that, but if the paperwork isn’t produced, the FDA can’t enforce or use any of the process for any reason because its not transparent. Take as long as you want, just lose any legal power those documents give you so that you aren’t unjustly using them if there is evidence of some kind of fraud or other issues. Take 100 years, but for those 100 years the paperwork can’t be used with any legal authority because its not transparent. Problem solved.
      - Arainach 5y ago
        That is once again absurd and amounts to a denial of service attack. Reviewing documents for public disclosure, removing PII, etc. is a totally different process from reviewing their accuracy for medical purposes. It takes at least as long, probably longer.
      - jcranmer 5y ago
        Or maybe, if you think the FDA did something wrong, you should have enough of an idea of what it did wrong that you could confirm it by asking for something less than literally everything Pfizer ever submitted to the FDA? If you're asking for that much information, that suggests that you're undertaking a fishing expedition rather than actually substantively accusing the FDA of something wrong.
viro 5y ago
That's not how labor works. Adding more people often times increases the time a task takes.
- laluser 5y ago
  Well, this task is highly parallelizable. Is it not? Why would there be a central bottleneck that you could not scale out?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  There are literally legal firms that employ hundreds of paralegals who do nothing but bulk redaction. They literally have systems to split up huge document bundles and do redaction in parallel.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  That adage is meant for tasks that require a large amount of coordination, e.g. large software projects. This is no such task. It's like saying you've got a large wall that needs to be scrubbed clean, and having 10 people do it at once would be slower than having one person do it. That is obviously not going to be the case.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  You're roughly talking about the trusts popularized as Amdahl's Law [0]. Which, to summarize the nuances in this context, says "It depends on the nature of the task." [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
balefrost 5y ago
From earlier in the article, the total number of requested pages is 450,000. At 8 minutes per page, it's 60k man-hours, or 30 man-years, of work.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lesuorac 5y ago

If they want their documents faster they should just pay for it. Requesting 300k+ pages is not a normal request, there is no way all of those pages will be of interest. Pay for it by paying a fee equal to the cost of hiring / training additional personal (https://www.foia.gov/faq.html https://www.foia.gov/faq.html).

encryptluks2 5y ago
So pay for transparency that is already expected? Should you have to pay to get your medical record?
- mike00632 5y ago
  It's asinine to think you have a right to see every document the government has including PII and trade secrets, even worse to base an anti-vaxx effort on such ideas.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    It's crazy to me the amount of people that people would blindly trust the same government that did illegal experimentation in the past and gave unsuspecting populations syphilis. Or the same companies that paid billions for lying in the past.
LegitShady 5y ago
Only the rich should get FOIA?
- Arainach 5y ago
  The FOIA should not allow anyone to launch a denial of service attack on the government. The requester can specify the scope or the timeline. Not both. If my employer asked me to review this much content I would also give a timeline on the order of years. Saying "too bad, it has to be faster" doesn't change my estimate.
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    DOS attacks were pioneered by progressives in the 60s. We’ve had 60 years to make the system robust to DOD attacks
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I have no problem with that, but if the paperwork isn’t produced, the FDA can’t enforce or use any of the process for any reason because its not transparent. Take as long as you want, just lose any legal power those documents give you so that you aren’t unjustly using them if there is evidence of some kind of fraud or other issues. Take 100 years, but for those 100 years the paperwork can’t be used with any legal authority because its not transparent. Problem solved.
    - Arainach 5y ago
      That is once again absurd and amounts to a denial of service attack. Reviewing documents for public disclosure, removing PII, etc. is a totally different process from reviewing their accuracy for medical purposes. It takes at least as long, probably longer.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      Or maybe, if you think the FDA did something wrong, you should have enough of an idea of what it did wrong that you could confirm it by asking for something less than literally everything Pfizer ever submitted to the FDA? If you're asking for that much information, that suggests that you're undertaking a fishing expedition rather than actually substantively accusing the FDA of something wrong.

viro 5y ago

That's not how labor works. Adding more people often times increases the time a task takes.

laluser 5y ago
Well, this task is highly parallelizable. Is it not? Why would there be a central bottleneck that you could not scale out?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vorpalhex 5y ago
There are literally legal firms that employ hundreds of paralegals who do nothing but bulk redaction. They literally have systems to split up huge document bundles and do redaction in parallel.
jaywalk 5y ago
That adage is meant for tasks that require a large amount of coordination, e.g. large software projects. This is no such task. It's like saying you've got a large wall that needs to be scrubbed clean, and having 10 people do it at once would be slower than having one person do it. That is obviously not going to be the case.
ethbr0 5y ago
You're roughly talking about the trusts popularized as Amdahl's Law [0]. Which, to summarize the nuances in this context, says "It depends on the nature of the task." [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

balefrost 5y ago

From earlier in the article, the total number of requested pages is 450,000. At 8 minutes per page, it's 60k man-hours, or 30 man-years, of work.