Dear Bureaucrat, my job wants me to lie - <AUTHOR> https://www.federaltimes.com/your-career/the-bureaucrat/2019/03/07/dear-bureaucrat-my-job-wants-me-to-lie/ <comment><USER2> I was recently at a medical office (this is in the US), and they had replaced their system, so I had to re-sign the variety of forms that they make you sign, HIPAA disclosure, etc.

They gave me an electronic signature pad and asked me to sign. I pointed out that I did not have a document in front of me, and they said that they would give me a copy of the signed form after I signed it. I once again attempted to point out that I was being asked to sign a form that I couldn't read, and they said, "oh, it's just a privacy disclosure".

A superviser (who was overseeing the migration to the new system) came by and asked what the issue was, and I said I was being asked to sign a form without seeing what I was signing. They very patiently explained to me that it was a HIPAA disclosure, and I said that if I could sign their description, I would be happy to, but I'm not going to sign a more formal document having only been given a summary of it. They further explained that if I wanted, they could print out a copy of the form after I signed it for my records.

Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. I overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I haven't seen", so I know that I wasn't crazy. Eventually I convinced the person I was working with to turn their monitor around so that I could read the documents before signing them.

The thing is that everyone knows that these forms are completely meaningless anyway. I probably would have been better off just signing the forms so that if they ever came up in a court case I could just honestly say that I had never seen the form before.

<comment><USER3> This is actually a violation of HIPAA law. My wife regularly schools hospital and doctors office employees all the time on their consent practices (she has a degree in public health). She will even call the hospital's IRB to file formal complaints. Things we've heard:

"We will have you sign the consent form after the procedure when it's more convenient for you"

"The first page doesn't apply to you (when it clearly does)"

"Sign here to acknowledge receipt of our privacy policy (which we haven't given you)"

<comment><USER4> The IRB would not be the correct office for a HIPAA violation, unless it was an informed consent form for a research study.

Most hospitals have a compliance office where this type of issue would be handled.

<comment><USER5> For a specific definition of "handled".

<comment><USER6> Hospitals take compliance issues very seriously; the incentives are skewed highly in one direction.

Consider it an extension of "HR is there to protect the company, not you." Compliance is there to protect the hospital, not the individual employee that may have erred.

As long as they make a good faith effort to act on the complaint, they themselves are protected from liability. Whereas if they don't act, they open themselves up to enormous liability, on behalf of a replaceable peon - I mean, on behalf of a highly respected staff member.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _they found commanders were required to certify their troops completed 297 > days of mandatory training, when only 256 days were available for training._

I think we often underestimate just how bad this sort of thing is. It's not just a question of personal integrity, or of whether the real value is a viable one.

First, these practices create miscommunication. If some clever analyst realizes training can be done in 256 days rather than 297, they might write a report recommending 30 days be shaved off training time. And unless someone who knows about the discrepancy gets involved, it's possible that "cut 30 days" will get implemented formally against the lower _real_ timeframe. (This sort of thing happens all the time with budgets, where extra money that's been informally redirected to a different expense is formally cut as bloat.)

Second, they weaken the integrity of the _system_. No matter how upstanding the individuals, certifying nonsense disrupts a Schelling point of "printed and signed claims are accurate", and so it becomes harder to react to actual problems like the people cheating on nuclear missile readiness training. It's the print equivalent of unimportant elements in a safety routine; changing the routine is fine, but getting sloppy endangers the parts that do matter.

<comment><USER8> Here's a podcast where one of the authors of that study goes into more detail, especially on your second point:

[http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and- ethics-i...](http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-in- the-military/)

<comment><USER9> The OP links to Wong's paper, but the URL is bad:

correct URL: [https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf](https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf)

bad URL in OP: [http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB12...](http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf)

<comment><USER10> A lot of that report had me going "yeah this is not good" but it wasn't until

"I falsified the [traumatic brain injury] report that changed a distance from the IED strike [to where] one person was standing. So that way someone didn't come back down and stick a finger in my CO's chest and say, "You need to evac that lieutenant right now!" Because in the middle of [a] RIP, that's not going to happen. If I do that, I'm going to put my boys in bags because they don't have any leadership. That ain't happening. I owe the parents of this country more than that."

That I really had to stop and stare and re-read the paragraph to make sure I understood what had happened.

That is horrifying but the worst bit is I can sort of see the reasoning behind it, but bloody hell...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The advice to "cross out" the offending lines has been interesting to me as of late. I bought my first house recently and with that comes a thousand signatures for all kinds of things. I ran into a few interesting cases.

1\. Nobody seems to notice or care.

I did this to a bunch of minutiae, misspellings, wrong addresses, etc. They do make it into the scanned copy and as far as I'm concerned, the record. But nobody seems to notice or care that it got changed.

2\. "Let's talk about it but I still want your business."

I crossed out some things about data sharing that I disagreed with on some insurance forms. I got a call days later that someone noticed this. It sounded like they had a protocol for handling it. This felt like a, "there's an option to decline but we won't show it to you; you have to ask for it" kind of thing.

3\. "You just ruined this 30 page document."

Okay so she didn't say that, but she did have to make an effort not to sound irritated that I crossed out some stuff. The resolution was a polite, "this is non-negotiable by the lender. If you don't agree, then we won't be confirming the mortgage today and you won't be closing today, leading to an expensive breach in the contract with the home seller." She then re-printed the sheet I "ruined" and I initialed it.

<comment><USER12> I think in the case of most documents you sign when buying a home, a) you don't have a choice (except don't buy a home) b) there are way too many documents to read (are you seriously going to pay the notary to sit there for 6 hours?) and c) it's all highly regulated and formulaic. Have you ever heard an anecdote to the contrary, ie someone who was bitten by a hidden clause when buying a home?

<comment><USER13> Honestly, the best way to do this is to just pay an attorney who specializes in it. They will just tell you what you're agreeing to, and you can actually believe them since they are your attorney. It's not cheap, but not too expensive on the scale of a real estate transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Terry Pratchett nailed the expectations of commerce pretty well. Lies are ingrained in our business dealings and openly enforced by management.

> _" Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed > about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable > titles, like 'diplomat' or 'public relations officer.' They feel they are > poking fun of the whole thing."_

<comment><USER15> In Star Trek you have the Ferengi, a species known for lying. I like them because you know what you can expect. Of course I've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-)

<comment><USER14> > _Of course I 've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say > this... ;-)_

You may be dealing with them more than you know. - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All. The. Time. Legal paperwork is "it's just standard required legal blahblahblah, just sign it" right up until there's a dispute, and then it might as well have been signed in blood.

A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet. The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link caused 500 Internal Server Errors.

I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a statement that I've read this thing.

All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature _up front_ before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)

<comment><USER17> > All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would > require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of > course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)

I'd be interested in what would happen if you pushed hard on this point. Giving people surprise contracts after they have quit their previous job, moved their family and acquired a new house should not be acceptable.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, pushing hard (as in, "I will not sign this since it was not given to me pre-employment") might actually get you booted. Companies routinely update policies and a refusal to comply with those, even created post-hiring, may be sufficient for termination.

If what you mean is "this policy sounds reasonable, but I cannot sign anything sight unseen" any reasonable HR will just print (scan / email) you a copy of anything they want you to sign. My 2c.

<comment><USER19> The first part is totally reasonable. If the company wants to change policies and you don't agree to those policies (and are in no way able to change them), why should they let you stay? Why should you let yourself stay? If a new policy is that egregious that you would rather possibly lose your job than sign in agreement, why would you even want to stay there? At that point, it's in everyone's best interests to part ways before it becomes a real issue.

If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to it.

<comment><USER20> What if you're starting out or otherwise don't have the leverage?

<comment><USER19> If you just started, that's the perfect time to jump ship to something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This Dear Bureaucrat letter seems interesting as well. In response to the query, "How do I deal with this inadequate computer system?", the response is to use Shadow IT. I have strong feelings against Shadow IT, but I have equally strong feelings about government IT systems being garbage. I'm torn.

[https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear- bureau...](https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureaucrat- how-can-i-work-with-and-around-my-agencys-useless-computer-system/)

<comment><USER22> Goodness, that reply is awesome in the detail and savoir faire! Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> [Running sarcasm detector.] Thanks!

<comment><USER22> Honest, I'm impressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Last defcon someone did a really interesting presentation on how to investigate the government or government officials. Talked about how to get a FOIA request responded to, where to look for information.

What really stuck with me though was a slide they offered towards the beginning. I don't have it memorized, but it was demonstrating a sort of "pyramid of public outrage" for certain actions. Sex with children was at the top as most likely to generate outrage, hypocrisy was at the bottom, and somewhere near the bottom was misappropriation of government funds.

<comment><USER24> > hypocrisy was at the bottom

That surprises me given the furore around the likes of Michael Gove admitting to taking drugs[1].

Seems like a politician can lie, steal and manipulate without much complaint, but hypocrisy is a major sin.

(Although it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between genuine public outrage and the newspapers whipping it up.)

[1]:[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/08/michael- gov...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/08/michael-gove-branded- hypocrite-after-admitting-using-cocaine)

<comment><USER25> Hypocrisy is only a sin when the other side does it.

Like when democrats push gun control and complain about systemic racism in the same breath or when republicans blindly advocate for whatever law enforcement wants while saying they care about individual liberty. Those things only ever get called out by the other side.

<comment><USER26> Off topic but I'll bite. What's the hypocrisy with gun control + systemic racism complaints?

<comment><USER27> I'll give you a Canadian example. Our gun control system has three tiers: non- restricted (basic rifles/"long guns", shotguns), restricted (pistols, AR-type rifles, an arbitrary list established by the RCMP), and prohibited (machine guns, some pistols, some crazy stuff). Each tier has more restrictive licensing.

For non-restricted, you do a ~$200 course over a weekend, send $60 to the RCMP, and if you don't have any concerning criminal behaviour in your past, you're free to buy as many rifles as you want.

For restricted, you do another weekend course, pay another fee to the RCMP, and go through a more thorough background check. Per my understanding, this check used to only cover the last 5 years, but recent legislation has, I believe, extended that to your lifetime. So you pass the background check, get your license, and now you're good to go? No. When you go to buy a handgun, you have to say what you're buying it for, and there are only two choices: target shooting or collector. If you ever plan on actually shooting it, you choose target practice. Now, before approving the transfer, the RCMP needs confirmation that you're a member of a shooting club with a range. Around here, that's another $150-$300/year.

So at this point, you've spent around $700, used up two weekends, and spent time on multiple phone calls (only open from 9am-5pm), and you're finally OK to buy your first handgun. All of that, and where's the systemic racism? Its not direct, but disadvantaged minorities are: less likely to pass the lifetime criminal record check (got in a fight when you were 19?), less likely to be able to take two weekends getting licensed, less likely to be able to afford the mandatory fees, and less likely to have a job where you can go and sit on hold for a while, waiting to get to the front of the queue.

While it's not explicitly racist, shooting (especially restricted) is definitely not a sport that is particularly accessible across socio-economic backgrounds.

<comment><USER28> I believe your mistake is using the term racism when you mean to say classism or elitist.

<comment><USER23> Systematic racism doesn't require a person somewhere saying "I hate black people" \- it merely requires that the system be unfair towards people, correlated with their skin color.

Systematic racism could affect someone because the history of oppression against their race has resulted in them being born to a family that constantly gets evicted from homes due to poverty, which exacerbates the poverty for them and their eventual offspring, which means that the history of oppression against their race continues indefinitely.

<comment><USER29> Correlation vs. causation. Just because an inequality exists, doesn't mean it's caused by systemic oppression.

<comment><USER23> Black people in America experience more poverty than white people because of systematic racism.

[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02...](https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic- inequality/)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ld6aYU...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ld6aYUf02jgJ:https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Racism/IWG/Session13/StatementJotakaEaddy.docx)

Even Ben and Jerry's knows this to be true: [https://www.benjerry.com/home/whats-new/2016/systemic- racism...](https://www.benjerry.com/home/whats-new/2016/systemic-racism-is- real)

Would you like to present your alternative theory for why black people in America experience more poverty than white people?

<comment><USER25> I think the bigger question is why does Ben and Jerry's have a page discussing systemic racism on their website. Isn't that a few astronomical units outside the scope of their business?

<comment><USER30> They are very active in progressive causes. Perhaps when they sold the company to Unilever they negotiated some deal that allows them to continue to use Ben and Jerry website for their activism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This normalization of deviance can burn you for playing along.

In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers.

As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large, blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go ahead it's how we do things."

Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting agency to overbill the company.

My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my "participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true.

In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak.

So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it, get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.

<comment><USER32> I used to work for a consulting/contracting company, with 6-10 reports at any given time. I was responsible for reviewing and approving their time sheets.

Except that, due to the nature of the business, I didn't see or even communicate with most of my reports on a daily or even weekly basis. They were working on different projects under different contracts for different customers in different locations. My manager responsibilities were an add-on to my own near-full-time billable work.

I raised my personal concerns to my own manager(s) that I did not feel that I could confidently and truthfully review and approve my reports' timesheets. Their response was effectively "just go with it, it's the way it works". Basically I was told to rubber stamp them with my name as the approver.

I don't necessarily believe that anyone was maliciously abusing the system, but I definitely believe that casual and hard-to-prove overbilling was a regular occurrence.

I don't work there anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These things happen because the executives originally charged with implementation of some external compliance requirement know that they have the _power_ to implement changes, but don't have the ground-level _information_ required to feed those changes. So these requirements get delegated down the org-chart, to people _with_ ground-level information but _without_ power; under the _presumption_ that a response will flow back _up_ the org-chart from said people, telling the higher-up what is needed-but-unavailable on the ground to actually implement the requirement.

In other words, the higher-up is trying to receive an error condition by installing an exception handler in their part of the system, and then expecting the ground-level routine to realize there's a problem and throw an exception, and for that exception to make its way back to them.

But, unlike in software, where you _usually_ feed everything as source through a single compiler at some point, and so you can force every component of the system to support exception-handling the same way; in organizational "systems", the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with "exceptional" reports that cross their desks. They haven't been informed that it's part of their job to keep raising these reports up a level until someone sees them who can handle them. And because they haven't been told that, they try to "handle" the exception themselves, in order to present a clean interface to their own boss—usually by just tossing the exception-report out, and chewing out their subordinate for giving it to them.

If you're a CEO, and you think you might ever need to use "exception handling" as a way to collect ground-level information, you've gotta ensure every layer of your management understands this in advance—understands that they won't be blamed for a "fault" happening below them, and in fact that this fault was _expected_ , even _encouraged_ by people above them; and that those higher-ups need to know when ground-level faults happen.

Sadly, even for organizations that that implement this policy perfectly... it only ends up "counting" for the _types_ of exception-reports they were looking for at the time that they set up the policy. So, for example, retail companies know to reraise security reports; companies that employ tradespeople know to reraise health-and-safety reports; etc. But these same companies, when it comes to _other_ types of exception-reports, are no better than anyone else. They learned a specific lesson, but not the general one.

<comment><USER34> > the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with "exceptional" > reports that cross their desks

Or they explicitly don't want to report them because it makes it look like they don't know what they are doing, or they are afraid that it would create more work for them and they are already overworked.

<comment><USER33> Right, that's what I meant by "a clean interface to their boss"—because they're unaware that rethrowing these exceptions is a (perhaps implicit) part of their job description, and they certainly don't think it's part of their _boss's_ job description, they think that 1. they'll be doing something they're not supposed to be doing by rethrowing the exception, and 2. it'll be their own boss's job to handle the exception, probably by throwing out the report and then trusting _them_ less to get stuff done on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting they say "suck it up, lie, or resist". The other way is to push the requirement further down: I don't understand this thing you're buying but you have represented to me that it is necessary.

That's the actual responsible way to do it.

<comment><USER36> I like this thought. What would it take to certify the form? 10 hours a month? 20? Can you redirect other people on your team to work on this?

When it is broken down to a cost (time) calculation then it might actually become reasonable to invest in a better system for accounting and analyzing expenditures.

<comment><USER37> Today I expensed a $10 BNC connector.

How long do you suppose it would take to confirm that it was a part we need, that we don't already have, and that I got a good price on it? And how many such claims do you think each person in the finance department sees each day?

<comment><USER38> You can deduce immediately that expensing is cheaper than the time it would take to investigate thoroughly

<comment><USER37> I agree, nobody in their right mind would audit every such expense.

But he isn't being asked to sign that expenses are "essential or too trivial to audit" he has to sign that _all_ expenses are essential.

<comment><USER39> >I agree, nobody in their right mind would audit every such expense.

I'll bite. Our money counters aren't in their right minds, because I submitted a small breakfast tab (at most $10) from work travel for reimbursement, only to learn it was unacceptable to not include a receipt. My other meals had receipts, but I had forgotten to ask for one this time. The accountant then said I had to call the cafe for a receipt. Luckily, the place had a website with contact info, and there was a helpful employee who emailed me the receipt.

But I spent at least an hour talking with the accountant and getting the receipt. The accountant spent probably 30 minutes with this problem. It was a net loss.

Obviously, I work in the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This bothers me as well. I've seen an employment contract that stated any hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or correcting it is at least partially defeated. Some other things I've tried:

\- Instead of signing, I write (quickly, to appear like I'm signing, but legibly enough that no one can later claim I wrote anything else) "unable to comply", "documentation not received", or something like that. I haven't tried this in situations where I knew someone would check, but when I have tried it no one has noticed. If they ever attempt to use it against me I imagine it won't get very far. As a side-note, I also write "Fake Name" when asked to sign credit card receipts and in 13+ years not one person ever noticed, which is how I know that it's useless for fraud prevention.

\- If I am asked to sign a very large complicated form, especially when it's something that should have been sent to me in advance (which I usually request), I will stand there and read it, making notes as I go through to help myself understand it. When they rush me, I then give them the lecture about how it either doesn't matter and I shouldn't have to sign it to proceed, or it does matter and they shouldn't ask me to sign it without reading it. They are welcome to get my money at a later date, or wait for me to read it. On one occasion I had to sign a massive agreement to buy a TV. I stood there reading it until a manager came over and, wanting to make the sale and let his rep get back to work, signed a copy of the agreement stating that the store would honor the warranty even though I hadn't signed.

<comment><USER41> The signature is used for follow up when a transaction is reported as fraudulent. It's never checked proactively.

<comment><USER40> What incentive do people have to sign their name correctly on legitimate transactions then? If I plan on reporting a transaction is fraudulent, I just sign my name weird and make sure they don't have cameras? I don't understand how this helps.

What I thought was _supposed_ to happen is you're supposed to have signed your name on the back of the card and they check that your receipt matches the card, and it's a weak form of 2FA.

<comment><USER42> It is not about being "correct" it is about being consistent. If you have 1,000 receipts with an X then it is good enough for the cc company. The signature matching the card one is only used when the value of the transaction is high and rare enough. i.e. not for daily groceries.

For more important manners a bank might check and tell you if your signature has drifted from the one you used before. On the other hand they might move all your savings to a different country because of a fraudulent badly written letter. Banks are banks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've rarely encountered situations where a superior wouldn't tell me on the record exactly what level of diligence is necessary, and the few exceptions turned out to be extremely toxic situations.

Which expenditures are "essential" can't always be objectively determined anyway. The purpose of the rule is not to ensure that inessential expenditures don't slip through the process but rather to ensure a chain of accountability that can be checked if some flagrant violation is discovered. In the letter- writer's position, it's probably only their job to be able to produce evidence of who assured them that an expenditure was essential, which means they need to put the right language on the form by which people request expenditures. As far as I understand it, procurement teams exist because a dedicated team of specialists can be more efficient and effective at procurement, not because spending decisions should be second-guessed by people who don't have the background to understand them.

</comment><comment><USER44> I once bought a house. It was advertised as sitting on "an acre plus".

When we started doing the paperwork we noticed it was written as .85 acres.

But the tax map was broken up into two parcels, one of which was clearly about 1/4 as large as the other. They were both marked as about 40% of an acre.

Everyone involved in the deal, including my spouse at the time, was upset when I said that we had to go walk the property and figure this out. Apparently nobody gave a crap about half an acre here or there, even though this represented about half of the property under discussion.

I finally got my way. The real estate broker took one of those DaVinci wheels and, in his fancy loafers, in the pouring rain, walked the wheel through tick infested woods until he had surveyed the entire property.

It was .51 acres

<comment><USER45> For the commission the guy got for doing the relative;ly simple job of selling a house it was frankly the least he could do.

<comment><USER44> Having been through the hell of buying property twice in my life, I say take the real estate brokers out before you even get to the lawyers and accountants. There's no rational way to account for them taking 5% or more off every transaction, especially with the price inflation of the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I got lots of dirty looks at my house closing when I re-read all the documents I was signing. I had read copies of them the night before, but I wanted to make sure they were the same.

<comment><USER47> did that same thing once, and discovered that they had swapped the numbers for the interest rate and the term, so it was specified as a 4 year mortgage at 30% interest. Ouch!

The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later. Which I flatly refused to do - no f'ing way I'm signing on for $20k/month payments and hoping they fix it real soon now, especially when the fix is printing off one corrected page.

<comment><USER48> I'm sure this was probably not a big deal. No bank would issue such a mortgage. The numbers would have been corrected whether you caught it or not. After all, your mortgage is a separate agreement between you and the bank, and not part of the purchase and sale agreement.

<comment><USER49> I agree that this would have been fine. But at the same time, it _also_ shouldn't be a big deal to get a contract that says what it's supposed to before you sign it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> One of the best examples of this is US Student Visa system.

US Consulates in India hold hundreds of events each year to entice Indian students to USA. They also actively tell students about their wonderful OPT and CPT programs and how they can convert to H1B later.

When an Indian student appears before the consulate officer the student must convince the officer that he/she will promptly return back to India after studies are completed. Even though it is perfectly legal to get a student visa, then work on OPT and get your H1B through lottery it is not something you can admit to the visa officer.

</comment><comment><USER51> This sounds somewhat familiar, though I approached what I saw a different way, with different outcome.

I'm getting out of independent technical consulting (just as soon as I find the right dotcom/startup employer), because the various business burdens, separate from the actual technical expertise I provide, kept increasing, and I could no longer cost-justify the burdens.

One kind of burden is regulatory compliances, and my favorite example is when a client needed me to be able to check a box in a compliance-tracking system Web form, attesting something like "I have an understanding of the FAR" document. I'm by-the-book about such things, so I put tech work on hold, dug in, and started reading. The FAR is actually not bad, pretty accessible, and I imagine a lot of serious straight-shooter accountant types put a lot of work into this, as part of making things run well, and I respect that immensely, and am glad they do that. But the current FAR PDF file is approx. 2,000 pages, and my expertise is in software. It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours.

(On some later burdens, I had learned from this, and talked with the clients. Some burdens the client could help with, and some not.)

I agree with the need for such regulations and processes, but these and other burdens seemed to keep increasing, one of the architecture projects that would've made up for the overhead didn't seem to be coming through, and the burdens no longer made financial/personal sense for my particular one-person business. So, when a last straw burden was added (though reasonable, from a regulatory perspective), amidst some reorg on the parent contracts, I had to terminate a couple contracts for very positive projects that I'd been proud to be working on.

</comment><comment><USER52> The CYA thing to do here is to create a paper trail of you asking your boss and HR what procedure you need to follow to determine if something is essential. They likely won't respond at all or in writing, send a follow-up in writing noting their lack of response.

<comment><USER53> Do you really send two or more emails for every piece of red tape that you go through? The overhead here is ridiculous, all for CYA from lawsuits that won't affect 99% of workers.

<comment><USER52> You only need to do this once. It establishes the procedure or lack thereof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> There is another alternative as well, require that anyone submitting a purchasing request sign a document with substantially similar if not identical wording and provide their case for why a purchase is needed. That way you build up your own paper trail if someone submitting requests is doing so nefariously.

</comment><comment><USER55> This type of thing goes beyond normalization of deviance to acculturation of deviance.

This article, rightly, focuses on the direct impact of individual acts of false certification. But this type of normalizing and even requiring it likely has broader impacts in how employees enegage with information and communication around their job in ways that affect authenticity and intention in hard to observe ways.

This is a scary thing to me...very scary.

</comment><comment><USER56> Has anyone every decided to just get terminated as a result of not signing something? How does that go when applying for your next job and you say you were terminated because you refused to sign something that wasn't true or was not in your favor?

<comment><USER57> I only tried refusing to sign something once. Nobody ever called me on it. I got nastygrams via email. I ignored them. One day, they stopped coming.

I cannot guarantee that will work in all situations, of course. You basically are calling their bluff, and it could backfire. But if they really are bluffing, all is well.

<comment><USER55> I think the problem here is that of 'who's bluff are you calling'.

Usually the people bothering me about these types of things aren't the one's doing the bluffing about it...they are in their own loop of compliance and nastygrams. They are trained to be compliant and don't have a mental framing that this stuff could be a bluff. That makes me a lot less confident of how they will react or their willingness to be rational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> When I signed up for life insurance, I was required to sign a form asserting that I have not "ever been instructed by a doctor to stop taking any prescription or non-prescription medication".

Uh, what? Apparently, what's _meant_ is a doctor never told you to stop _abuse_ of a drug. But that's not what it said, and I ended up having to go the 'subversive' route and submit the forms on paper, with this line crossed out, and an explanation attached.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's frightening that this arises in the procurement context. I fear for the good USG people in these situations. The Boeing tanker fraud wasn't all that long ago, the folks fallen from the highest levels to federal prison. [https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never- go-...](https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-away/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Breaucracy hacking. I guess I'm a subversive type, because my first instinct was to 'sign' the forms with the word 'unverifiable' in long hand

<comment><USER61> That would still likely count as your signature. Same reason an 'X' works.

<comment><USER62> My preference is to annotate exceptions to what I am signing in legible block print, and then initial and date at the end of each annotation.

When I sign, I include my full name and the date in block print as well as "with exceptions."

Bureaucrat/legal types usually understand that asking me to sign a fresh copy without those annotations is explicitly asking me to lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A friend had these problems frequently and said that if it was a legal/contractual requirement, he would adhere to it to the letter. But if it was some out-of-touch boss's boss's boss that made an unrealistic demand, his inclination was to go with "how it was done".

</comment><comment><USER63> Seems this is common with a lot of processes that require review by others. On the surface this sounds great and thorough but the reviewers actually need the qualifications and time to review things properly. I have done plenty of code and spec reviews where I really didn't understand what's going on and certainly didn't have time to get up to speed. So you nitpick a few little things or just approve and move on with your real work.

<comment><USER64> Looks like every "four eye approval" process I know. In the end just everything is confirmed out of pressure to have a clean queue. And let's be honest, just by looking at individual requests a _person_ can never have the necessary context. Needless to mention that four eye approval of that kind isn't even a legal requirement under SOX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> My first salaried job had an employment agreement that said I would pay the company to work there instead of getting paid. I had it fixed before signing, but I was employee #5.......

</comment><comment><USER66> The author is not nearly subversive enough.

The really subversive action is to start a paper trail reporting every instance of your co-workers falsly certifying in cases where they had insufficient knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER67> Reading the article and the comments prompted me to wonder what would happen if//when I say something to the order of "may I read it first?". As I age, I feel myself becoming more cautious than I was [perhaps as cautious as I should have been in the first place a la "everyone agrees to the EULA"].

</comment><comment><USER68> There has to be a process around defining what 'essential obligations and expenditures' means for the purposes of signing off on procurement - even if it the definition is 'because my boss says so'.

If not, this is the typical disconnect between defining processes (and laws and regulations and heck, even software requirements) and the practical aspects of actually implementing it. I'm sure it sounded good to whoever put this process together that only 'essential obligations' are procured because defining processes is easy and fun! Abiding by them is hard work.

</comment><comment><USER69> Shouldn't this be something that should be delegated down the hierarchy? Presumably - for each purchase - somebody knows whether the purchase is needed. If the person in question has insufficient information to make that decision, all he should do is check that people down the hierarchy made that decision and can be held accountable for it.

</comment><comment><USER70> All the stories in this thread about people having to sign stuff without reading it. I guess this just makes them all unenforceable in reality if anyone actually challenged them.

Perhaps this is why anything actually serious I've ever signed requires witnesses.

</comment><comment><USER71> I have to deal with OSHA and other local regulatory agencies on a regular basis. Having to deal with a bunch of unimaginative (or simply stupid) people who force you to conform to poorly written regulatory requirements is just soul sucking.

<comment><USER72> They should force you to conform to the requirements regardless of their opinion of how poorly or well the regulation is written. If those aren't two separate issues then the whole system breaks down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Complying with payment card industry (PCI DSS) requirements is an absolutely insane process, even if you're vaguely technically literate.

Obviously not saying payment processing isn't an incredibly important area to enforce good security practice. But it's a lonely place to be when you're attesting to hundreds of ridiculous requirements relating to your overpriced, off-the-shelf POS system and anything/anyone that touches it.

"Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely, yes." Cross fingers. Repeat annually.

<comment><USER74> Also has lovely requirements like having antivirus installed on your Linux servers.

<comment><USER75> Is that wrong? Malware does exist for Linux, and that way you can also detect malware designed for other systems if it ends up on the machine.

<comment><USER76> It depends on the AV.

Either the AV ties into the kernel with a module, in which case it can also be an avenue for an increased permissions exploit, or it doesn't have any special kernel level capabilities, in which case it will never find rootkits that include kernel modules to hide themselves.

Personally, I would be happy with an open source community based disk scanner looking for weirdly named files and folders (there are common variants used in hacks) and a locked down selinux config. Bonus points if you compile a kernel that doesn't allow modules (but IIRC that doesn't preclude kernel level shenanigans).

Interestingly, it looks like since the PCI requirement for AV is for "all systems commonly affected by malicious software" they don't actually require it of all Linux systems in all cases.[1]

1: [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to- pa...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pass-pci- dss-2-0-anti-virus-requirement-5-1-on-linux)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> These fall into the white lies bucket. Largely inconsequential, rarely checked on, and when things do go south deniable to a degree large enough for the person to not lose their job.

</comment><comment><USER78> Would it be possible to require similar signed forms from those below you, until the bottom? If an unwarranted expense was made, the whole chain will be responsible, and the discussion can then finally focus on how to _actually_ specify sane rules and requirements (i.e. normal volumes of low expenses get ignored, larger expenses need to be vetted by multiple people _on the same level_ etc...)

</comment><comment><USER79> They call it "shadow IT" but I like to call it "the cuff system".

Putting a fun antiquated name on things like designing one off, and potentially dangerous IT infrastructure because you can't get anyone to fix what is wrong is itself wrong. It's part of the problem. It's a growing cause of personal information leaks and people shouldn't celebrate encouraging it.

</comment><comment><USER15> How about signing under protest? So you sign, but at the same time you signal that you're not OK with the situation. In the Netherlands this is often used if you don't agree with the amount you have to pay for something. When you sign under protest, you admit that you got the products or service you requested, but you are not satisfied with the quality or the price.

</comment><comment><USER80> so this is why (sometimes) my hopes for the future depend on mediocrity and corruption, when the system is this stupid medocrity and corruption (which are terrible) can save the day!

does this mean that the system is even worse? (the answer depends on how well "it has treated" you).

</comment><comment><USER81> If you are between a rock and a hard place like in the article, it's best to keep a copy of the email where you object to the language, and store a copy at home. It shows you made a reasonable attempt to remedy the problem if it ever turns into a big case against you.

</comment><comment><USER48> That's okay. Bureaucrats are also forced to lie as part of their job. They pretend not to understand (it's their job to pretend) but they really do.

</comment><comment><USER82> This isn't limited to public service, the private sector is rife with this as well.

</comment><comment><USER83> There are two distinct types of lying mentioned in the article, and each should be handled differently:

1\. The non-issue "lie" that was the subject of the original question. Sometimes I get a little annoyed at people that take a form completely literally and then raise a stink about it. Every form like this has an implied "to the best of my knowledge" inserted in it. You cannot know for 100% certainty that every purchase was completely necessary. Did every piece of paper that was printed from that ream you ordered get used in a necessary function, or did maybe one or two sheets get used for someone to print their baseball tickets out at the office? Could some of those papers have been stored digitally instead of printed? Of course that ream of paper wasn't used for 100% necessary business purposes. But by signing the form you are saying, "it doesn't look like there are any employees in my branch that are stealing tons of office supplies, and that our waste seems reasonable." What you are saying is that "I'm not personally aware of any fraud going on with the supply order, and I've done some due diligence to check." What you are NOT saying is "I personally tracked every piece of paper and staple in the office to make sure nobody was cheating." That is not the expectation with these certifications, and any federal employee fired for that level of expectation can go to arbitration and would certainly win. Luckily federal employees have probably the strongest employment protections of anybody in the USA.

2\. The second type of lie, mentioned in the anecdote about the Army officers, is a problem but easily fixed in a way that you don't sacrifice your integrity. This is the case in which adding the implied "to the best of my knowledge" doesn't fix the issue. To fix this, you must line out the "297 days" portion and write in (a different colored ink) the correct number of days that you trained. Then you sign in ink, and return a scanned copy to wherever it needs to go. You probably cannot change the form in Adobe Reader because most government forms are protected against changes, so you must alter the form with pen. If the people that you returned the form to raise a stink (usually they want a digital signature), you simply explain that you cannot comply because to do so would be perjury. If they still won't accept your corrected version of the form you can stall, but let your boss/commander know that you cannot sign the form as-is because to do so would be a violation of federal law- and you can't be fired for not breaking the law. Most of the time, it falls out on your side. If not, you would have your defense counsel salivating to take this one past arbitration to make some real money.

Pretty much every federal employee that cares about their integrity has already discovered the answers to these situations, and I suspect that this question is more of a straw man so that the author can talk about the pervasive culture of dishonesty that exists in the workplace. He's right in that a culture of dishonesty does exist, but he's missing the mark on where it's a problem. It's not in the resource management office that signs off on the paper/staples/toner orders or the Army officer that signs a training certification form that has the wrong number of days on it (as long as he feels his troops are mission ready). The culture of dishonesty is where a person awards a contract with a particular company so that they can get a cushy job in the private sector, or with people that accept a free trip to Disneyland to overlook an issue. Those are the dishonest incidents that matter, and they do not arise from some imagined "slippery slope" after certifying an office supply order.

</comment><comment> awinter-py diane vaughan talks about this stuff in the challenger book -- she found claims of fact by SMEs that were vetoed by nasa managers, and thinks that this is one mechanism for groups to leak risk.

</comment><comment><USER84> oh dear lord does this ring true. Yours, someone that works in banking

</comment><comment><USER85> This is a good thing to talk about but let's not pretend that this is just a government thing.

<comment><USER86> It's probably even more common in the private sector (especially in relatively informal business arrangements where contracts consist of boilerplate).

<comment><USER85> It can only happen where there is real entrenched power and companies do not have to be competitive.

Most 'private companies' are not at the scale where they have that.

I would imagine that 'Healthcare' is rife with this kind of thing, they are cash flush, and the outcomes are intangible but existential (like defence).

I can't imagine people playing solitaire at any kind of Health insurer etc. but I can certainly imagine them spending gazillions on boondoggles.

I have a family member who does 'BD' for Health Care, I'm certain from years of chats with her that she does nothing. Meets, plans, talks about possible future plans with other corps, they never work out. Looks into 'strategic initiatives' that are secondary and irrelevant. She's paid handsomely. And she's pretty smart, great communicator, certainly not a 'solitaire player' ... but about as efficient. And FYI I'm aware of how even 'good' BD works, and that it's mostly 'misses'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Liar and Lawyer, sound the pretty much the same to me.

</comment><comment><USER88> > I can't know whether each item we purchase is essential. Many of them are > highly technical.

> The subversive way is to circumvent the requirement to lie. Can you cross > out the offending sentence on the form each month before you sign it? ... I > have used this method.

This seems like terrible advice. It pretty much guarantees that no one is accountable and the problem will only get worse. Don't sign anything until the necessary evidence is provided and be prepared to reject purchases that lack justification. Inaction and delegation are powerful tools in the hands of a bureaucrat, use them.</comment>


How the West Stole Coffee from the East: A Caffeinated Theft - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-the-west-stole-coffee-from-the-east-9651c79bcb1e <comment><USER2> Not just coffee.

Britain also stole Rubber and Quinine from the Amazon in South America and Australia's Merino sheep from Spain.

The Kew Gardens are not just a pretty place to visit.</comment>


Ask HN: What would be the fastest way to grep Common Crawl? - <AUTHOR> Most recent Common Crawl includes 80TB WET (extracted text) files from the latest web crawl.
Assuming you have the files locally what would be the fastest way to "fgrep" (string search) through them?
Testing with ripgrep on my 10 core iMac Pro I get about 6 seconds to grep through 20GB file. That means about 5 minutes per TB or almost 7 hours for common crawl. What setup would I need to do it in <100ms? :) <comment><USER2> ripgrep author here.

When you want to search TBs of data, then you have to ask: what do you need to do? If you only need to search the data set once for a single query, then ripgrep (or similar) is probably your shortest path in terms of end-to-end time to get your results.

If you however want to run many queries against an unchanging or growing data set at this scale, then I think you probably want to find some way to index it before hand. Tools like SOLR or Elasticsearch are fairly standard and shouldn't cost you too much in terms of learning how to use them. You can perhaps go faster than Elasticsearch/SOLR/Lucene if there is something special about your problem that permits you to design a custom indexing strategy. But that requires knowing more about your search goals and also costs more to develop (probably).

Otherwise, if you're willing to pay, then spin up a bunch of machines with lots of RAM and partition the data set such that each partition fits in memory of a single machine. Then parallelize your search. (This is probably a middle ground between grepping the whole thing on a single machine and using something like fulltext indexing.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. This is mostly a thought experiment in can you 'grep the web' (without indexing etc).

If you split 24TB across ~128 servers ( so filling up 256 GB RAM per server) you would have to search 256 GB of RAM in 100ms, or ~2.5TB/sec. Unfrotunately most RAM will give you only 20GB/s (DDR4 3200:25.6 GB/s) . Multi-core setups do not help much as they share memory channels (for example AMD's latest 64 core 'monster' has only 4 shared memmory channels). So it seems you would need insane number of servers (15,000 with ~2GB RAM) to do a 'grep of the web' in 100ms. Missing something?

<comment><USER2> I don't think you're missing anything. As I said, it's a middle ground. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for jumping in! What do you use to alert you?

<comment><USER2> Nothing. I just search HN from time to time and check the threads I'm participating in. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: splitting files to 100M chunks increases search speed by 4x. So it's 1.5 sec to grep through 20GB. Smaller file sizes do not yield improvement.

<comment><USER3> Your machine's RAM bandwidth is about 20GB/second, right?

It looks like you're close to that limit.

The only way to go faster is to not search everything. Which means pre- computing, or otherwise knowing more about the structure of what you plan to search.</comment></comment>


Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs - <AUTHOR> http://www.foodtechconnect.com/foodtechconnect/2015/08/10/why-53m-wasnt-enough-to-scale-good-eggs/ <comment><USER2> "Scaling Food Distribution Is Really, Really Hard"

No, it isn't. It is fairly straightforward and thousands of companies have scaled across the world.

Scaling a two-sided network focusing on providing a niche seasonal product to a niche audience is really, really hard. It wasn't the food distribution that wasn't scalable, it was the business model.

"We were motivated by enthusiasm for our mission and eagerness to bring Good Eggs to more people. But the best of intentions were not enough to overcome the complexity."

No, you were motivated by aggressive expansion targets to provide returns for the dozens of millions of dollars you took as investment and to make a lot of money.

<comment><USER3> As blunt as this is, it's right.

C&S Grocer does $22 Billion per year in revenue, and is profitable, doing just food distribution.

[http://www.cswg.com/](http://www.cswg.com/) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%26S_Wholesale_Grocers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%26S_Wholesale_Grocers)

Every one of us in the USA probably ate C&S distributed food today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" The single biggest mistake we made was growing too quickly, to multiple cities, before fully figuring out the challenges of building an entirely new food supply chain."_

This is a repeat of Webvan. Webvan had a good idea, but tried to "scale" fast. They had about 3% market share in 30 cities, and needed 30% market share in 3 cities.

<comment><USER5> The downside of venture capital, entrepreneurs need to remember that investors prefer trying for billions and failing, and consider trying for millions and succeeding a failure.

I've read a few bitter stories about people with ramen-profitable businesses who got a late-stage investment into their bootstrapped company. Basically you spend years slowly kindling a small fire, and the VC comes over a dumps a truckload of lumber on it. Might get the bonfire they're looking for, but they don't really care if they just smother your campfire instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live in Good Eggs central - san francisco, and I foresee problems that are still ahead for this startup. Don't get me wrong: I really want Good Eggs to succeed, but they have quality control issues that need to be addressed and scale _very_ poorly.

Specifically, I've been a customer of theirs for years, and in the past two years in particular, I've seen prices go up pretty dramatically and quality in some cases go down.

It used to be the case that Good Eggs produce and meats were farmers-market quality at really good prices, delivered. Now it's the case that the produce feels like farmers-market seconds (the produce I get from them regularly has only a few more days of freshness left and are decidedly _not_ the fruits or veggies I would pick if I went to the store on my own), and the meat and fish prices have gone well beyond the cost of the same meat from other sources (say a trip to a regular market). Top this all off with persistent packaging and logistics errors - my last order contained someone else's frozen lunch pies, didn't contain any of the cheese I ordered, and was delivered an hour before the actual delivery window I requested (and contained fish, so if I hadn't already been home, this would have been a problem).

Good Eggs is really good at fixing these problems - I email their customer service and they credit me for stuff I don't have and throw in a $5 off coupon for next time or whatever. If inconsistent quality or mispacks were rare, this'd be perfect. The problem is, it is not rare at all. I have definitely fallen off in my use of their service - if I'm paying the same price, I might as well just go to Andronico's, Whole Foods, or the Ferry Building (or Gus's or Rainbow, or Berkeley Bowl ... there's a lot of great grocery stores in the SF region) so I can pick out what I want, and sometimes (especially at Berkeley Bowl) get a way better price.

They need a better process for vetting the product they get from distributors (and possibly a better contract when it comes to rejecting low-quality stuff) and a better process for getting people's stuff into their bags. That's not scaling, that's core competency. It may be the case that this _doesn 't_ scale, can they deliver food that's sufficiently high quality that I could say, 'If I went to the store, I'd have chosen that tomato' at a price that's competitive with the store? That's a difficult problem to solve and requires well-established relationships with vendors.

</comment><comment><USER7> _It takes a lot more than good code, talented engineers and passionate customers to scale food tech startups that deal with getting perishable food from local farms to people's doorsteps._

It feels like some kind of tech-myopia that anyone should think code was the key to a successful food company. The old "when you're holding a hammer..."

<comment><USER8> If they had used Haskell I think things would have gone differently.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, they could've hit Monad Transformer Hell, or they could've wasted all their time learning how to write practical applications in Haskell and end up bankrupt in a very lovely ivory tower.

I've heard this argument over and over again and it never is good advice. It ignores the context completely as well as whether the developers know Haskell or not.

You can screw things up in any language, especially if a large part of your business model involves stuff not related to code, like shipping perishable food.

<comment><USER7> (I think your parent was being satirical)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just two months ago, they announced expansion of delivery to Manhattan's downtown area: [http://blog.goodeggs.com/post/120709577938/good-eggs-is- comi...](http://blog.goodeggs.com/post/120709577938/good-eggs-is-coming-to- manhattan)

I'm guessing the logistical and financial troubles described in the OP were pretty clear 2 months ago...was expanding service to Manhattan a Hail Mary to attract additional investment?

<comment><USER11> When it's clear at the top that core strategy needs to change (as in this case), this usually doesn't impact the company in bits and pieces — it all comes at once. That's because making a major change at a large company requires coherent planning, and you don't get coherent planning by _only_ saying "we need to reduce opex across the board, we're running out of money". You get it by making a new top-down plan with entirely new goals and a new P&L.

As a result, 140 people got laid off all at once, rather than in waves. Had it been done in waves there would have been mass confusion, low morale, and an inability to buy into the new plan because there wouldn't have _been_ a new plan yet.

And for the same exact reason plans to roll out to Manhattan, which were surely started many months ago and enshrined in yearly and quarterly goals, were axed abruptly.

It's possible it was a cynical ploy for fundraising, but I really doubt that. It's very hard to pull off momentum games at GoodEgg's size — investment scrutiny is much higher, and decisions are based more on spreadsheets. Not that hype doesn't factor into it, but it's not going to float you if your core economics are busted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Part of their operation was driving a truck up to Fishkill, NY and filling it with goods from Hudson Valley producers, many of who are too small to be commercially distributed already. I bet someone could keep doing that and make good money. But probably not enough money to make VC's happy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Facepalms all around. Supply chains are hard, and the idea that you can just write software to "solve" them is a level of hubris that defies description. Supply chains aren't a problem you can solve with big data. They aren't a problem that be solved with machine learning. In fact, you could combine the worlds top researchers in Computer Science, Economics, Operations Research, Mathematics, and Statistics, put them in a room together for a decade, and still not "solve" even 1% of the problems that Supply Chains face. I know the ITA presentation on Air Travel Planning Complexity[1] has been circulated here many times, but it always blows peoples minds how complex that problem space is, and that type of problem is miniscule in comparison to end to end supply chain optimization. I work in a problem space that is the combination of 9 different NP-Complete/Hard problem spaces (I've counted) on a regular basis...we are barely scraping by with millions of lines of code and entire data centers of our servers running at peak utilization 24/7, and that is with state of the art heuristics solvers and hundreds of PhD-level researchers, and that is only a subset of the Supply Chain problems that my company faces. To say that Good Eggs bit off more than they can chew is a MASSIVE understatement.

Supply Chain Management is a field that is heuristic-driven because there isn't a solution. The heuristics that drive modern food distribution are the result of a real world genetic algorithm that is already thousands of generations deep...and miniscule incremental improvements have been the subject of PhD Theses for over a hundred years now. You don't optimize on top of that by writing a web service. Supply Chain Management _may not be technologically advanced_ in its usage of enterprise software, but that doesn't mean that their ideas and processes are stupid. At best, it means there are some annoying frictions in the industry in the way that they interact with other industries (and there are actually plenty of viable startup opportunities to fix this). The presumption of stupidity[2] regarding the existing state of logistics and supply chain management killed this company, just like how it killed Webvan, and is going to kill a whole host of startups in the distribution and delivery space within the next few years. [3]

[1] [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.itasoftware.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.itasoftware.com/en//pdf/ComplexityofArlineTravelPlanning_Carl_Sep-03.pdf)

[2] [http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of- stupitidy](http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of-stupitidy)

[3] PS: If you are in VC and have a stake in any startup that is doing last mile delivery, liquidate now. There isn't a single startup in the space, whether they are currently valued at $1 or $1B, that can sustainably provide their existing value proposition that they are promising to their customers. It _is_ possible to force scale some of them into something sustainable, but your valuations make me believe your cash flow neutrality projections are off by more than an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER14> > _The presumption of stupidity[2]_

That's an interesting post.

I notice the presumption of stupidity on Hacker News is very strong in the fields of auto manufacturing and banking.

<comment><USER15> Also see Chesterton's Fence: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes "do things that don't scale" is bad advice. It's great advice when starting out (because you should be focused on building an appealing product before you worry about scaling it), but you need to be using your scale-up to test ways of breaking out of doing the "things that don't scale". The idea is to turn it into a forcing function for the company: if you can't find a better way to scale, you're done.

Disruptive innovation is about ripping out the assumptions that incumbents made and operating under a new set of assumptions that may not have been possible when the incumbents started. But sometimes, the incumbents' assumptions/constraints are still valid, and new entrants don't have as much of an advantage (or the new entrants' advantage is easily copied).

<comment><USER17> I think it's basically a contraction for "do things that don't scale until you get $50MM or whatever and then stop doing that."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the sweet spot is going to be a Trader Joe's-like online brand. Good quality, organic options, low prices, curated selection. Instacart, GoodEggs and others are missing the mark.

</comment><comment><USER19> A couple more points here:

1\. A lot of people who care about organic and farm-to-table ethos already live in areas with significant market coverage. Those people will tend to have existing behaviors — GoodEggs sought to displace these. This can be hard if existing players do good-enough job.

2\. The paradox of some delivery services is that the people who need them most are sometimes the most economically unviable customers (because they are geographically spread out, because they are lacking in funds or both).

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the problem has to do with providing a desirable product? It's already pretty easy to get good food, good organic food and good organic locally grown food from a variety of vendors. With GoodEggs it seems you're getting a clunky ordering experience, inability to select produce, an extra shipping charge, moderate/high prices, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> Bummer - I was rooting for Good Eggs!

re: software and food. The truth is nuanced:

\- obviously, code won't overcome the challenges of immature, lower-scale logistics and business operations. Roll up your sleeves like everyone else!

\- no, it's not about "big data" as much as business process software.

\- but yes, code can help in some ways: \- analytics/BI/decision-support: smarter decisions, fewer meetings. \- running ops: fewer managers, automated monitoring and project followup. \- use code to help manage your supply chain.

\- but yes, "tech thinking" does help: \- faster, safer process change \- remote monitoring \- application of classic compsci algorithms vs reinventing wheels.

cheers! adam

Buyer's Best Friend leading provider of office snacks to silicon valley [http://bbf.io/snacks](http://bbf.io/snacks)

</comment><comment><USER21> Good luck to them. Hope they figure it out. Churn can really hurt your business and affect growth tremendously if you don't address it. I'm guessing that's the case here. It's like taking three steps forward and two step back. I'd rather take one step forward at a time.

</comment><comment><USER22> $200M Wouldn't be enough. They are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist for 95% of the country. Sure, there is a market for this, it's just not the size they are thinking.

As the article says, "Figure Out Your Model Before Scaling".

</comment><comment><USER23> The first time around it was called "The New Economy" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_economy)

</comment><comment><USER24> I really liked Good Eggs, and their customer support always seemed great. Unfortunately, my last order came an item short so they gave me a $5 credit on my next order. A day or two later, they close down in NY and now I won't be able to redeem the credit.

Not a big deal, but it was a bit annoying coming from a company I'd always used specifically for their great customer service.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wait, you're telling me a perishable luxury product is a tough market?

</comment><comment><USER18> What is the deal with those ridiculous social share bars that cover up so much of the page's content??

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a little ironic that goodeggs is considered a food technology firm, when it has nothing to do with technology, and in fact has a rejectionist approach to technology in the first place.

Monsanto and Cargill are food technology firms. Advances in food technology are what allow us to feed 9 billion people with a fixed resource (arable land). There are serious innovations in food production and distribution that have saved millions of lives in the last half century (Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution).

An online seller of local produce is not "food tech". It is simply using the web to sell food. Add to that their dislike of synthetic pesticide/fertilizer and other real advances in food technology (advances that in the developing world mean a real reduction in deadly diseases that spread through the use of animal manure [natural fertilizer]), and it makes them just another anti-tech firm that happens to peddle goods on the Internet.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure if you just have a problem with organic food, or if this is just another reiteration of the tired old "if you're not trying to solve world hunger..." argument that gets used to criticize business ideas, but none of your points are really relevant to a company whose goal is to conveniently supply food to some of the richest cities in the world.

<comment><USER26> Organic food is fine. But it is, fundamentally, an anti-technology approach to growing food. You should be free to eat it if you want.

The point is simply that firms that reject technology should not be described as "tech" companies simply because they use the Internet in some way.

I'm not suggesting in any way that companies should not exist if they don't solve planet-scale problems.

<comment><USER27> I think folks underestimate how much agricultural science and technology there is that doesn't fall under the very narrow categories of genetic engineering and chemical pesticides.

Modern society is built on top of the massive productivity improvements in agriculture that occurred before those were introduced, and there is plenty of room to innovate without using those methods.

GMO crops are limited[1] in Europe, yet they continue to be a leader in agricultural innovation.

[1] edited, see dragonwriter's correction

<comment><USER28> > GMO crops are banned in Europe

No, they aren't.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modified_organisms_in_the_European_Union)

<comment><USER29> They are 'effectively' banned in Europe though. As you can see from this infographic[1] approval of a GMO requires a political vote in the European Commission. This takes place after a very expensive risk assessment, and you can't get that money back. It's a tough business case to spend a ton of money on the risk assessment and then be at the whim of politicians who are publicly against the technology and know they win votes by being against it. My company makes GMO plants and until the situation changes there's no way we'd considered trying to get approval.

I conjecture they setup this system because an outright ban, which would be unscientific, would violate international trade treaties, instead they just use this process.

[1] [http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/docs/decision_making_process....](http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/docs/decision_making_process.pdf)

<comment><USER28> > They are 'effectively' banned in Europe though.

There quite a number specifically approved, which is inconsistent with an "effective" ban.

> My company makes GMO plants and until the situation changes there's no way > we'd considered trying to get approval.

Demonstrably -- that is, from the list of products that are approved -- that's not true of the major players in the industry (e.g., Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, Syngenta) and even some smaller players.

Your company not having the resources to compete in a given market doesn't mean that that market has banned GMOs.

<comment><USER29> Even Monsanto is giving up: [http://www.euronews.com/2013/07/18/monsanto-re- thinks-its-gm...](http://www.euronews.com/2013/07/18/monsanto-re-thinks-its- gmo-strategy-in-europe/)

[http://www.gmeducation.org/government-and- corporations/p2134...](http://www.gmeducation.org/government-and- corporations/p213451-monsanto-s-gm-retreat-from-europe:-don-t-believe-a- word.html)

<comment><USER28> Those 2013 articles are outdated, Monsanto had a number of permitted approved this year. They either never withdrew their pending applications as those articles stated they intended to, or they got new applications approved in less than two years start to finish.

[http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-15-4843_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-15-4843_en.htm)

<comment><USER29> These aren't approvals to grow the crops in the EU, which is the core issue, they are approvals to import products grown elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I first heard of this company I thought it was some kind of joke. Turns out I should really learn how to bamboozle investors into handing me $53M for shitty ideas that don't make even basic logic sense.</comment>


Amazon Is Listing the 4th Edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - sa-mao https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-A-Modern-Approach/dp/0134610997/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1566827900&refinements=p_27%3AStuart+Russell&s=books&sr=1-3&text=Stuart+Russell <comment><AUTHOR> >$183.75

I'm good, thanks.</comment>


The Day Israel Attacked America - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5v27ZEp3EM

<comment><USER2> Can someone tl;dw this for me?</comment>


Due to popular demand we are live streaming again - <AUTHOR> http://kondoot.com/marknel

<comment><USER2> Due to popular demand, or due to an easy way to make publicity for your website?

<comment><AUTHOR> We had a ton of people watching over the past few days so we though we would share it again to see if people are still interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Making them do chairspins and chair races was funny :p</comment>


Where to buy an online business? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to find small online businesses to purchase, but can't find many websites devoted to this purpose.  Does HN have any ideas?  The only one I could find was flippingenterprises.com. <comment><USER2> Flippa <https://flippa.com/>

<comment><USER3> I've been watching flippa for months and I just haven't seen anything really compelling.

I'd actually love to buy a SaaS business (since I have zero ideas of my own)

<comment><USER4> You could find a business you like and approach the owners and make an offer. Businesses listed for sale on some brokerage generally aren't worth buying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends on what you are looking for, I may something for you. Send me an email info(at)quadrantb.net

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a t-shirt site, w/ inventory, I'd be willing to part with, firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you consider small? Generating less than 100k a year or more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, actually less than 30k a year. My budget won't allow for anything more. In a rare case, a higher revenue business may be of interest. Please email me if you have anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Send me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER9> Shoot me an email.

</comment><comment><USER10> shoot me an email.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hit me up manglav: email@example.com</comment>


I thought I understood Open Source. I was wrong - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Kelset/i-thought-i-understood-open-source-i-was-wrong-cf54999c097b <comment><USER2> While I like the message generally speaking, I can sympathize with developers who just don't have the time or the will to contribute code.

If you don't mind I'd like to propose an alternative but imo equally valid option for those people, which is contributing financially.</comment>


The Burden of the Nondiversifiable Risk of Entrepreneurship [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/~rehall/HallWoodward6.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Published: Robert E. Hall & Susan E. Woodward, 2010. "The Burden of the Nondiversifiable Risk of Entrepreneurship," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(3), pages 1163-94, June.

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is risky. We study the risk facing a well- documented and important class of entrepreneurs, those backed by venture capital. Using a dynamic program, we calculate the certainty-equivalent of the differences between the cash rewards that entrepreneurs actually received over the past 20 years and the cash that entrepreneurs would have received from a risk-free salaried job. The payoff to a venture-backed entrepreneur comprises a below-market salary and a share of the equity value of the company when it goes public or is acquired. We fi nd that the typical venture-backed entrepreneur received an average of $5.8 million in exit cash. Almost three- quarters of entrepreneurs receive nothing at exit and a few receive over a billion dollars. Because of the extreme dispersion of payo ffs, an entrepreneur with a coecient of relative risk aversion of two places a certainty-equivalent value only slightly greater than zero on the distribution of outcomes she faces at the time of her company's launch.</comment>


Microsoft ai demos call like Google - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/2018/05/22/microsoft-ai-demo-xiaoice/#aULohXZhVgqw <comment><AUTHOR> So, is there a race to see who can creep us out more?</comment>


The Teen Who Invented Bras Lived in a Castle, Published Hemingway, Much More - <AUTHOR> http://www.racked.com/2016/2/26/11100734/caresse-crosby-bra-inventor <comment><USER2> This is one of the best things I've ever read...deserves more attention. What a life.</comment>


Django EAV 2 – Entity-Attribute-Value Storage for Django - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/makimo/django-eav2 <comment><USER2> Or just use JSONField, because that's exactly the reason why it exists.

<comment><USER3> JSONField is not always available and is not equivalent to EAV.

<comment><USER4> In what situation is JSONField not available but other third-party modules are?

<comment><USER3> JSONField is specific to PostgreSQL [1]. If you're working in Django and are bound to some other vendor, RDMS-agnostic solution is handy.

[1] [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/postgres/f...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/postgres/fields/#)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an example of the Inner-platform effect.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner- platform_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect)

<comment><USER3> That's an overgeneralisation. EAV is used in certain situations to solve one specific problem. It's not general-purpose and should not be used as one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody explain a usecase for this?

<comment><USER7> I had to resort to Wikipedia before this even made sense[1].

Apparently it's a technique for efficiently storing small subsets of potentially enormous/variable/unknown attributes on objects.

Instead of a SQL table with 500 columns for all potential attributes (most of them NULL for most rows), you have a SQL table with three columns: the object in question, the attribute in question, and the attribute value. The first two columns are pointers to two other tables: a table of objects (PKs and other basic data), and a table of all the allowable attributes.

I can see how it's useful, in certain circumstances.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model)

<comment><USER7> Come to think of it, several years ago I had to migrate a website from Wordpress (I think it was Wordpress) to Django. The Wordpress database schema was nothing _but_ EAV tables: Every damn thing had all of its attributes listed in a separate table, and object retrieval traversed several tables each time.

I suppose this was necessary or at least useful for a general-use web framework like Wordpress, where no one knows what kinds of attributes various users will want to create, and therefore table _columns_ are stored as table _data_, and no one ever has to do any migration.

But it was dog-slow. The switch to Django halved the number of tables in the site, and the whole thing went about three times as fast (plenty of other reasons for that, though).

Granted, now I have to do Django migrations rather than Wordpress web-console manipulation, but as someone said in a different post, Django migrations aren't that hard these days.

<comment><USER8> Or at least necessary to evolve a relational schema from a simple blogging engine to a CMS that can do the things it can now (including the plugins). Advance Custom Fields, WooCommerce, LearnDash and the like are examples.

If it can't be shoehorned into the post table, you've got postmeta as a KV store for each post.

The code base looks like it was built the same way. I noted one developer saying "this is crazy... Its like one bootstrap file that bootstraps the next bootstrap file".

Using profiling tools, you're looking at tens to maybe over a hundred queries. It's a nightmare.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


StreamGear – Python API to easily generate DASH content with vidgear - <AUTHOR> https://abhitronix.github.io/vidgear/gears/streamgear/overview/ <comment><AUTHOR> You can get started with vidgear python library here: [https://abhitronix.github.io/vidgear/#getting- started](https://abhitronix.github.io/vidgear/#getting-started)</comment>


AI research needs an ethical watchdog - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ai-research-is-in-desperate-need-of-an-ethical-watchdog/ <comment><AUTHOR> It is too easy to do these things. If academia in the US is prohibited then it will happen behind closed doors in industry or overseas.</comment>


The React digest – A hand-picked weekly selection of the best React JavaScript resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.getrevue.co/profile/the-react-digest <comment><USER2> The sign-up page is largely worthless -- here is their first issue (from today):

[https://www.getrevue.co/profile/the-react- digest/archive/540...](https://www.getrevue.co/profile/the-react- digest/archive/5400)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is also React.js Newsletter [http://reactjsnewsletter.com](http://reactjsnewsletter.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone fill me in - is React now the accepted awesome way to build front ends for single-page apps?

<comment><USER5> Not quite - looking forward to when more people start exploring Angular 2 and seeing the things done wrong in React in comparison, it is looking like a juggernaut of a library in many aspects.

React is the best relatively stable library/framework we have now though. I would definitely recommend people to look into using it seriously if they had a chance to start fresh, and have recommended it to people learning development, as well as mentored some new developers in using it. Other than some wonky API design in some areas, it is relatively simple to pick up and use. The complexity gets shifted to app architecture, which is always difficult for many developers to wrestle with.

<comment><USER6> > seeing the things done wrong in React in comparison

Like...?

<comment><USER7> We can't know what's wrong yet. We'll see once people start using and exploring alternative frameworks. It's arrogant to think that React did _everything_ correct. Even in React itself we've seen some evolution (React.createClass -> ES6 classes -> ?pure functions?).

<comment><USER6> But that's not what the post said - it said wrong _in comparison_.

Also your class creation example is just talking about language semantics. It'll never be a pure function (can't be - has to hold state) but it IS a pure object under the hood.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Contractual basis - <AUTHOR> http://www.subtraction.com/2010/08/24/contractual-basis <comment><USER2> I have the same scanner, and feel the same issue all the time...

I just wonder if the counter parties of electronic signatures get that it's the same thing legally as a analog signatures. I'm not sure they do always.</comment>


Which is faster: CSS3 transitions or JQuery animations? - <AUTHOR> http://css3.bradshawenterprises.com/blog/jquery-vs-css3-transitions/

<comment><USER2> In my experience the browsers that don't support these kinds of transitions are usually better left unanimated in java script; they usually run on older and slower computers.

Also another reason why CSS transitions might be faster is because the browser could (or does?) use the GPU to render it.</comment>


WebP2P - New Peer to Peer Technology on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/webp2p-new-peer-to-peer-technology-on-the-web/

<comment><USER2> > _There is a new mailing list for peer to peer hackers_

Well, there is an old mailing list too - <http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers> \- which is still the place to go for all p2p questions. Pretty much anyone and everyone notable in p2p domain is on it, and the discussion quality tends to be similar to that of early HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, who keeps submitting my articles to HN? >=)

This one jumped the gun a bit.. I just got control of the WebP2P.org domain name and this evening I was going to put up a real website with actually useful information rather than that crappy blog post.. oh well, internet moves too fast for me!

Seriously, you should join the list if you're interested! Please introduce yourself if you do! There's tons of great people on there already and things are starting to heat up.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's frustrating to see so many disparate efforts.

For example, there's the Peer to Peer Streaming Protocol[1] work occurring in the IETF. Really fantastic stuff! (they basically took Bittorrent, stripped the cruft, and used a Merkle Tree to enable streaming.)

[1] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ppsp/>

<comment><USER5> Don't forget RELOAD, DECADE, and ALTO. The IETF is somewhat broken right now because they let people who frankly don't matter create working groups, and so those WGs turn out to be pointless. But to their credit, PPSP (swarming overlay multicast) is fairly orthogonal to WebRTC (low-latency point-to-point A/V chat). There are probably some aspects of the protocols that could be similar; I don't know if they're trying to converge those parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't the hardest aspect always going to be getting browser support for NAT PMP?

<comment><USER7> Well, there are a lot of folks from companies like Ericsson and Cisco working on IETF's RTCWeb¹, so I guess they'll figure it out. And BitTorrent clients manage to do it, too.

¹ <http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not a big fan of the list archives. It makes reading long threads tough. And its awful when a reply is not quoted properly...

</comment><comment><USER9> The best part is, if you're willing to enable a couple Chrome flags, you can have all of this. Right now. JSEP, ROAP, ROAP-over-JSEP, WebRTC, even a fairly function multipeer Skype clone in a weekend (if the Chrome team would enable multiple PC objects)

<comment><USER10> Oh? Care to elaborate with a simple HOWTO?</comment></comment>


Stonehenge was accompanied by 17 neighboring shrines, 3D laser scans find - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29126854 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8295817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8295817) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8209351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8209351) are related.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think people who haven't visited southern england may not realize this, but stonehenge is just one of many rock-circle formations of various types. When we were there a couple years ago, nearby we visited one that encompassed an entire town and seemed to be 2-3 miles across. It was more impressive than stonehenge (in terms of effort) though in rougher shape than stonehenge. The unique thing about stonehenge is the rocks placed on top of other rocks.

But rock circles are not unusual in that area.

It reminded me a lot of the Yucatan in Mexico where there are a variety of pyramids of similar architecture at various sites (from Cozumel to Palenque to Tikal in Honduras) in a region. Or the mounds in the Louisiana area (also ancient constructions.)

<comment><USER4> At the other end of the country there is the wonderful "Heart of Neolithic Orkney" \- which has stone circles, enormous tombs and an entire stone-build village that still has stone furniture in place, like something from the Flintstones, after 4,500 years:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Neolithic_Orkney](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Neolithic_Orkney)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Headline is slightly inaccurate. They also used a magnetometer and ground penetrating radar (GPR).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm very curious to know what they mean when they say the gaps in one of the structures are oriented toward "dusk" and "dawn", as the direction of sun- rise/set varies about about 90 degrees over the course of the year at that latitude (51N).

Given the well-documented astronomical aspects of Stonehenge it wouldn't be a shock if the layout of associated structures also had astronomical significance, but the way it's reported here is more than a little weird.

<comment><USER7> These ancient structures typically have alignments towards sunrise and sunset at the equinox or solstice. It's not an every-day alignment; it's an indicator of the changing seasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cannot help myself to share this: [http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/forum/topics/photo- evidence...](http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/forum/topics/photo-evidence- shows-stonehenge-was-built-in-1954-what)

I am not that fascinated with Stonehenge anymore after seeing those photos.

<comment><USER9> Uh, right, the "Ashtar Command Community" says stonehenge was built from the ground up in 1954, totally credible. Stonehenge is not fascinating anymore at all.

10 seconds on google shows photos and pictures of stonehenge long before 1954 and reveals the monuments were restored several times including once in 1958. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge)

<comment><USER10> Hey what do you have against a bunch of cranks dedicated to "Uniting Lightworkers, starseeds, crystals, indigos and healers in a New Age"? Hater.</comment></comment></comment>