Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

sightlessscribbles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 510 posts

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#221

Post by philipallstar »

ryandrake wrote: post #208
Etherlord87 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree. You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended. I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [tra…

> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure. Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing. These huge businesses and huge governments are t…

> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.

It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#222

Post by jaggederest »

RobotToaster wrote: post #151
raincole wrote: post #126

> It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?" It... doesn't sound like an absurd practice at all. There are curable disabilities. And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. It sounds about right to review the situation every a few years.

> There are curable disabilities. True, but it should be obvious in 99% of cases if a condition is lifelong. >And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. Very rarely tbh. I can't think of a single lifelong condition that was cured in the last decade. Even then it should be trivial to only review cases when a cure is available, by searching the database for people with that condition.

Hepatitis C has effectively been cured. Obesity, sickle cell, and cystic fibrosis have all heard their death knell though not a complete cure.

Hep C regimens are getting closer and closer to "take a pill for a couple months" - no more interferon injections or multiple rounds of multiple drugs.

Trikafta is a functional cure for 90% of CF patients, I believe - not easy or cheap but normalizes what you care about bar the administration of the treatment itself.

Sickle cell has CRISPR treatments that are incredibly invasive and awful but do functionally cure the disease more or less permanently for a cool "couple million"

And everyone knows about GLP-1 drugs for obesity. The latest batch are as good or better than bariatric surgery without, you know, the surgery part.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#223

Post by chaseadam17 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #33

Karen woke up this morning in her run down, rented flat. She briefly looks at the collections letter that showed up yesterday due to an unaffordable repair she had to pay for on her credit card. Another letter from her ex-partner's lawyer. As she rushes out the door (she spilled coffee on her one nice sweater, her favorite) her mom flashes through her mind... "What about mum?". She arrives at the office. It is an opp…

Great point. I was originally in favor of the fax barrage because I've also been frustrated navigating bureaucracy but you made me reconsider.

These types of problems usually persist because it's hard to know who is responsible. It's not just the customer support person or the president/governor - I assume the invisible senior leaders in-between hold a lot of power.

I'd happily support an investigative journalist who exposed exactly why these problems exist and which individual humans are responsible.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#224

Post by ocimbote »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #213

Plot twist: Karen's fax machine turns the incoming fax into a PDF, which is saved on the network, and an AI processes it, sending her a summary of 300 words or less. No government workers were harmed.

Minus the AI part, I agree. I'm 100% convinced many fax machines nowadays exist just for bureaucracy and are actually fax-to-pdf.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#225

Post by lbarrow »

raincole wrote: post #126

> It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?" It... doesn't sound like an absurd practice at all. There are curable disabilities. And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. It sounds about right to review the situation every a few years.

Yea, this sounds like a completely reasonable process to me. They should obviously update their system to accept the electronic submission of evidence, but the process itself is fine.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#227

Post by password4321 »

Synthetic7346 wrote: post #199
kerblang wrote: post #164

Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules. Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office th…

Is this an outdated requirement? What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? Unless they ban phones at the office, someone could just take a photo of the documents the patient faxed or mailed them

> What's the attack surface of an email vs fax?

I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#228

Post by squigz »

tokai wrote: post #177
0x3f wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's presumably what the word 'fully' is being employed for.

Sure, but its meaningless as you don't need to be fully blind to be legally blind. Its easy to delimitate things if can just change the units to fit your scheme and do away with the ambiguities.

I'm legally blind. This seems needlessly pedantic. What GP was highlighting was a valid distinction between disabilities that are likely or not to change, and how the lack of that distinction leads to the situations like TFA.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#229

Post by mattkrause »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #123
Permit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs. The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?

Cogs receiving abuse (which in this case is a scary word for "feedback from the public who is paying you and is unhappy with your process") _do_ cause the system to change. It's really not that much different from writing angry letters to Congressmen: One letter "doesn't do anything", but a surprisingly small number of letters does. And the one Congressmen "can't do anything", but usually a small number of Congressme…

In fact, writing to your Congressional rep is probably the way to solve this.

They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to be on a senator's bad side.

Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

#230

Post by [deleted] »

mattkrause wrote: post #229
rogerrogerr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cogs receiving abuse (which in this case is a scary word for "feedback from the public who is paying you and is unhappy with your process") _do_ cause the system to change. It's really not that much different from writing angry letters to Congressmen: One letter "doesn't do anything", but a surprisingly small number of letters does. And the one Congressmen "can't do anything", but usually a small number of Congressme…

In fact, writing to your Congressional rep is probably the way to solve this. They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to b…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN