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0 pointscs7029y ago0 comments

Thank you for posting here.

The same logic applies to all those regulations that seem bonkers.

If you think of all those regulations as a type of source code (which dictates what government employees and citizens can and cannot do, when, and under what conditions), it's clear that a lot of regulatory code needs major refactoring.

To use your example with travel regulations, those 1400 pages designed to prevent fraud likely consist primarily of thousands upon thousands of assertions and if-then statements. I wonder if it would be possible to reduce them to, say, a few dozen pages -- by refactoring all that 'regulatory code' to use different, higher-level abstractions.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

tonysdg9y ago· 3 in thread

My guess is that most of those 1400 pages consist of the corner cases - things that will 95% of the time never pop up, but when they do will wreak havoc unless properly dealt with. Granted, I'm not sure travel fraud can wreak that much havoc, but I'm sure someone somewhere gets annoyed over it.

My (admittedly limited) experience in coding/engineering has taught me that it's unwise to look at technical problems and people problems in the same light; the former can be solved much easier than the latter. The trick is to figure out where you can solve the former to avoid the latter!

sliverstorm9y ago

Not in government, but I understand the biggest problem with travel to be the expense account, which has a history of being abused to disgusting proportions.

Bartweiss9y ago

Frankly, my take is that this is what happens when you try to beat human intent with formal rulings. Explicitly banning every possible form of travel fraud is almost unimaginable - certainly it can't be done without banning a huge amount of legitimate travel also. Rigorous safety around people problems is nigh-impossible, which is why most safe software systems take the approach of "do it our way or go to hell".

At a certain point you can only solve the people problems with oversight and good intentions. You could get one random employee to certify any given travel plan or reciept as "not obviously fraudulent" and recreate the benefit of ~700 pages of regulations, just by showing the thing to someone who doesn't benefit from fraud.

But of course, incremental change produces these kind of awful local minima. If you are punished for fraud, aren't punished for overhead, and can't change the whole system, what else would you do? You ban one known misbehavior, go on with your day, and everything gets a little bit worse.

niels_olson9y ago

They're referring to the JFTR, now JTR. And it's actually 1602 pages

https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/Docs/perdiem/JTR.pdf

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