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OK, DC Metro riders and tourists: you are in downtown DC, say the Archives stop, and you have to get to National Airport. Hint: it's in Virginia. As you come down the escalator, you see a train on the Fort Totten track. Do you run for it?

Of course, the answer is no. You need the Huntington line, because Huntington is a small township in Virginia (pop 8,300), several kilometers South of the airport. Fort Totten was a Civil War-era border fort; its location on today's map would be in DC but near Maryland. So you need Huntington.

Figure One: The yellow line in two directions. Can you tell which you need to go from your current stop in DC to get to Virginia?

Nobody cares about the terminus of a train line. OK, sometimes they do, like when a subway line ends at an airport or a train line ends at Chicago. But a healthy city train line crosses a city so thoroughly that its ends are out in the suburbs or country, where few people really know what's there. The center is the well-known and focal part, and yet subway lines are identified by the outskirts at either end. Even if the line ends at Wonderland, people still can't necessarily find that on a map.

The problem is endemic to virtually every subway line out there. Perhaps it's an effort to pretend that the subway line is really a full-blown train: when jumping cities, I don't take the Southbound train, I take the Penn Line to Washington from Perryville. I'd have no idea where Perryville is, but that I once screwed up and took the Penn Line from Washington to Perryville by mistake. It's really beautiful up there.

Here are things that people do care about: Northbound. Southeast. Via downtown. Transfer to the Green line. If you're a Londonder, then you know the only line out there that doesn't name directions by the endpoints: the circle line, which has no choice but to go clockwise and counterclockwise. One eve, bored and entirely lacking any money, I just rode the circle line most of the night. I read a textbook on UNIX and eventually fell asleep, which led to my eventually winding up out at a suburban terminus, when the train switched lines and I didn't know. And that's why I'm a computer geek today.

¿Is it because the terminus is unchanging, while directions like via downtown change depending on location? No, because the terminus can change too. Some trains consistently have a spur for the especially far-flung stations, so every other train in one direction on one tack has a different name. The DC Red line is Shady Grove / Grovesvenor on one end to Silver Spring / Glenmont on the other. So if your mnemonic is by first initials, you're as badly off as can be.

About an hour ago as I write this, I was in Metro Center, looking at the board listing the arrivals of trains, checking to see which train I should take, and up came Fr Heights, arriving in 1 minute. DC residents can take me up on this quick geography test: there are three lines that go through Metro Center, none of which have a have a terminus at Fr Heights, so ¿which train is arriving in 1 minute? ¿How quickly can you scan the 86 stations on the full Metro map to find out?

Graphics

Meanwhile, the metro map is the informal logo of the transit system, and is displayed ten times at every station and on every train. Every tourist starts his or her trip by giving it an eyeing for a minute or two, and the basic shape of the odd lines like the Red or Blue take little study to quickly recognize.

Figure Two: An hour ago, I was at Metro Center, and needed the next train East.

So let me kibbitz. Let's say that the Washington Metro doesn't want to use terms like Northbound, Southbound, or via Downtown DC to describe the directions of the Red Line, which it evidently doesn't. Figure Two offers another means of representing the same information, recognizable in half a second from a moving train. If you have even a tenth of a clue, having a diagram like Figures One or Two on a pylon would immediately tell you if you're going the right way.

I like the graphics approach partly because routes like the Red Line do not have a true Northbound or Southbound, but its twistiness is exactly what makes the graphic in Figure Two immediately recognizable.

If you have a long enough line, then it ends in the suburbs or an edge-of-nowhere rural area. That's healthy and good. But it's just plain fiction to assume that everybody involved, including tourists here for the day, are familiar with the geography of such far-flung locations. Please, Metro planners: use descriptors that are descriptive, like simple graphics, compass directions, or at the least hint as to whether a train is going North or South. But neither commuters nor tourists know what it means that a train is heading toward Branch Avenue or Franconia-Springfield. Terminus names are useless.

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When the revolution comes, you won't be able to depend on others for amusing chocolates, so you'll have to start off on your own.

First a distinction in definitions, which I have cut and pasted from this must-read exposé on a high-priced chocolatier:

A chocolate maker starts with cacao beans and transforms them into what we know as chocolate. [...] Cacao pods are harvested and fermented, after which the beans are dried. The beans are ...roasted, then cracked and winnowed, leaving cacao nibs. The nibs are milled to produce thick, pasty cacao liquor (or cacao mass). In fine chocolate operations, the cacao liquor is usually combined with additional ingredients (e.g., extra cocoa butter, sugar, milk solids, vanilla, and/or emulsifiers) and further milled to produce a smoother paste. [...] The paste is transferred to a device called a conche where it is refined ...to obtain a silky smooth texture. The chocolate is then tempered to produce a proper crystalline structure (resulting in a glossy finish and crisp snap to the finished product) and molded (into bars, blocks, or individual pieces).

Chocolatiers, on the other hand, typically have no involvement in the actual making of chocolate. They purchase finished chocolate, usually in blocks or chips (aka couverture) such as those you may have seen on display locally at Whole Foods or Central Market.... The chocolate is then melted, molded, used for ganaches, for enrobing truffles, etc.

If you want to be a chocolate maker, you'll need a lot more help than I can give you, but much of the fun in cocolate comes in the confectionary step, of producing fun new flavors and novel structures out of the chocolate you've grown entirely used to.

Me, I begin with Trader Joe's half-kilo of dark chocolate (sold under the alliterative `pound plus'), usually trying a quarter kilo at a time.

Then, melt. Find the absolute lowest setting your stove can put out, drop in your chocolate, and chill out. It takes about ten to fifteen for the chocolate to melt (and I'm just doing a quarter kilo at a time); if you rush it in any way, you run risk of burning it, which creates an almost crunchy and not (in my opinion) very pleasant paste.

Figure One: Melting chocolate, adding sesame seeds. Hand model: Ms BCOH of Baltimore, MD.

Once the chocolate is melted, add whatever comes to mind. Some things we've tried:

• Ginger, powdered or crystallized (or just sliced roots?)
• Nutmeg
• Vanilla extract
• Toasted sesame seeds, which give a touch of roasted taste and a crunch similar to those crisped-rice chocolate bars.
• Red chili powder, chipotle or generic
• Cinnamon, which always goes well whenever chili is present
• Curry powder
• Dried fruit
• If you are in the USA, almonds; if in Europe or a Cadbury-controlled former British-colony, Hazelnuts.

How much? In my experience, a little bit more than you'd expect, because chocolate is a strong taste and most things will be shouted out at low levels (especially for sesame, but maybe hold back the reins on the chili powder).

You can see that many of the additives lean toward adult chocolate--not in the sense that it's more useful for porn, but in the sense that kids would hate it. If you're used to the Hershey's/Cadbury kind of chocolate, do try the other options: chocolate with chili and/or curry is its own food which stands on its own in its greatness. These formulations often have a pointless premium added because adding curry powder is less common than adding almonds, so making them on the stove is especially attractive.

Finally, there is the molding process. I'm not one to stand on ceremony, so I typically just use the lids of tupperware containers, but there are many much funner shapes to be had, like those silicone ice cube trays that make little hearts. But if you expect the consumer to break off segments, make sure that the chocolate is only one or at most two millimeters thick, either all along or at breakpoints, lest things get messy or people are just forced to eat the entire quarter kilo at once.

I typically speed the last step of the process by putting the melted chocolate in the freezer/fridge, where it will return to solid, edible, delightful form in maybe ten or twenty minutes.

There was no magic to any of the above, which I suppose is the point of this post. Going from standard, store-bought chocolate to exciting and interesting chocolate is not something that requires gourmand execution, just the stove's lowest setting and some creative spices.

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We'll start with the statistics, taken from this table on incidence and this table on mortality, both from the National Cancer Institute (which is one of the NIH).

In both cases, you're looking at the age-adjusted rate per 100,000, for all races/all genders, 2002-2006, USA only. Click through the above links for footnotes and details. This here is just a quick manual merge of two tables; you'll see that their reported categories don't mesh perfectly.

The table is ordered by incidence, but if we ordered by mortality, the big winner would be lung cancer. Fortunately, there is a known means of preventing `most all lung cancer: stop smoking. We have no idea how to truly cure any of these cancers, so if your goal is to bring down that mortality rate in the top of the last column, then public health campaigns entreating people to stop smoking is a clear and obvious first step.

In fact, it's so obvious that I'll be leaving lung cancer out of the rest of this. That brings us to prostate and breast cancer, which top the incidence list, and happen to be the two cancers that are gendered.¹

Paying for research

For my next table, I looked at the two largest non-profits focusing on breast cancer and prostate cancer: the Susan G Komen for the Cure foundation, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Let's have a look at their 2008 assets and contributions, from their annual returns (linked from the pages above):

This snippet from the balance sheets retains a neat ratio: for every dollar the prostate cancer foundation has or is given, the breast cancer foundation gets about ten.

This is partly a demonstration of the effective marketing power of the Komen folks, and we could have put a lot of different foundations on the right-hand side of the table to demonstrate Komen's fundraising acumen. But I'm talking prostate cancer because it is as close to analogous to breast cancer as it gets, yet the contributions are not at all symmetric.

Going back to the first table, the incidence of prostate cancer is a little larger, and the mortality rate from breast cancer is noticeably larger, by about 40%. That's significant, and is one hint as to why breast cancer is a salient problem that deserves attention and funding. But does it justify ten times the funding?

If you answered yes to that question, then let me show you another quirk in the mortality tables, broken down by race, pointed out to me by my personal epidemiologist Master BCOH of Baltimore, MD. The prostate cancer rate among white men is 9.0 per 1,000; among black men it is 20.0 per 1,000. So prostate cancer is primarily about black men, who die from it at a 44% higher rate than women of all races die of breast cancer.²

We can enumerate the similarities and differences between breast and prostate cancer all day long. But I can't come up with any way of looking at it to say that non-profit donations for one of these cancers should be ten times larger than for others.

So, why the disparity?

Yes, I know what you're thinking, because every person with whom I discussed this said the same thing: boobs sell. In any context, people would rather talk about boobs than colons and rectums. Nobody is walking around with a brown ribbon pinned to their lapel.

And back to the primarily African-American prostate problem, if an advertiser is choosing between associating a product with a black man or women's breasts--well, walk through the market and see how many cans of soup are pledging money toward research on prostate cancer.

The unified breast cancer campaign (of which Komen is a primary member) has chosen Pantone 237 CVC, aka pink, for its campaign color. Yeah, that same color that is avoided by the gender-conscious everywhere else because it is a blatant label and reminder of girlhood, even in situations where personhood is more important. The campaign managers know this, and chose to play up girlhood, thus distinguishing this type of cancer from those others which affect personhood.

Thanks, Pantone 237, for pressing how people with breast cancer are not just people with breasts, but are girls. Thanks also to the many makers of painfully girly and/or kitschy girl toys decorated with a pink ribbon.

Women's issues still count as special-interest, even though women are the majority in most places, and special-interest sells. We want to have an image of whom we're helping, and the more specific the issue, the better the image. You probably have some image of a typical-in-your-mind breast cancer sufferer, but probably don't have much image of the typical person with cancer of the urinary bladder. Appeals to tribalism extend throughout the charitable world, which is filled with African-American, Jewish, women's or Philadelphians' charities doing things for their group even though the problems faced may cut across all such divides.

It's not necessarily efficient to break up charitable giving into a million fiefdoms. The Komen foundation is to some extent getting people who would otherwise just spend their money on booze to give to cancer research, but they are also to some extent convincing people to give them money instead of giving it to the American Cancer Society.³ The first sort of influence is productive, the second is just rent-seeking. The two are inextricable, and we can't have more organizations pushing you to give without having organizations exert time and effort pushing you to give to them in particular. I'm not just saying this because of the amount of time I've wasted filling in grant applications.

¿Is this the optimal allocation?

The Komen foundation is half an inspiration to me, because it's managed to get people and corporations to overcome the collective action problem and give 0.3 billion dollars last year to help those who are suffering one specific type of problem. But it's half a disappointment, because the immense success of the breast cancer campaign shows us how readily people throw out the premise that all people are equal and of equal value. There is no Platonically perfect means of operationalizing any of the heuristics above, let alone just picking one, so the current system of charitable contribution goes back to the free market: contributors use the same rough and emotional decisionmaking tools that consumers of soup have, and the end result is that funding goes not to the greatest need, however measured, but to the causes with the most saleable associations and the best marketing flair.

Footnotes

... gendered.¹

Several people have pointed out that men can get breast cancer too. This is technically true, but only a few thousand men/year get it, out of the 150e6 odd men in the USA. The NCI tables above don't even bother to list breast cancer on the male break-out table.

... cancer.²

What about breast cancer by race? There's a disparity there too, but not as great. Here are the white/black figures for incidence: 127.8/117.8, and for mortality: 23.9/33.0. I.e. black women die from breast cancer 38% more often than white women [(33-23.9)/23.9, for those of you playing along at home.], but white women find themselves with the disease more often. A lot goes into such a racial disparity: inequitable treatment, personal habits, genetics, and a hearty dose of et cetera; disentangling it all is left as an exercise to the reader.

For comparison with the ladies, the white/black ratio for prostate cancer incidence is 153.0/239.8, so the story here is simpler: black men are 57% more likely to get the disease and then more than twice as likely to die from it.

... Society.³

From their annual report: 2008 assets= 2,317,471 thousand; 2008 donations=1,008,462 thousand. So the Komen foundation scored about a third as many donations for its specific type of cancer as the ACS did for its work in all types. The difference in asset base is probably more about the ACS's longer history.

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Without further comment, here's a list of suspicious packages found around Washington, and what they turned out to be.

diapers (and I love the photo on this page)

a can

a pillow

a flower pot

a shoe over a fence

a bear costume

“box, with Amtrak markings”, spotted on train tracks

a broken lamppost

Oh, and this story made news because an empty briefcase didn't cause delays.

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Last time, I wrote about various situations where agents are unclear on the rules they are expected to enforce. Such situations are inevitable: there are few situations where all the rules are so clear that a single person can correctly work them out every time. [In economist-speak: there's no such thing as a complete contract.] I gave the example of being thrown off two Amtrak trains for bringing aboard a folding bike, which the conductors insisted is against the rules, though Amtrak's written policy is clear that folding bikes are A-OK.

This time, I'll focus on the cultural implications. By this, I both mean low-grade cultural differences, like how I don't drive and so use a folding bike, and what we normally consider cultural issues, like wearing a turban or bringing equipment for prayer or ritual onto public transportation See the Schneier link below. There are many little details in how a bureaucracy can support or stifle diversity of appearance, belief, and behavior. As per last time, I'm going to consider the rules per se in a limited capacity, and will focus on how they are disseminated.

Figure One: Amtrak police. Probably unaware of the policy on folding bikes. [Source]

One more detail for the case of Amtrak. Like the Library of Congress, Amtrak is one of the odd organizations that has its own police force. This opens the door for CSI: Library of Congress. Words can not express how much I want that program to be produced.

Police as bureaucrats have different problems from the sort of bureaucrats sitting at a bureau all day, because they are in situations where stopping to flip through the manual is not a practical possibility. Everything from last time regarding misapprehensions in subtleties in policy is simply exacerbated.

Also, they carry firearms, which are a shorthand form for `whatever I think the policy says, is right.' Which exacerbates things still further.

Oh, and risk aversion: what to do in the case when you're not sure of what the rules are, but something seems askew. Police are expected to make very quick and very decisive decisions--to overreact and shut down whoever is breaking things. That is, a risk averse officer, given uncertain rules, will be quick to make something up to fill in the gaps, and that will tend toward stopping anything unexpected or unusual. More on this below.

Ex post review (a digression)

But I don't want to talk too much about the question of ex post review, for two reasons. First as a consumer/citizen, I don't put much credence in review of bureaucratic mishaps, because the cases are rare when it really makes the person who was mistreated whole again. I missed my train, our photographers from last time missed their in-the-moment shot, and somebody mis-arrested would serve a night's prison term (common for protesters). Second, it's a digression from the key question here, which is what happens when the bureaucrat is unsure of the rules they are supposed to implement. If they know the rules and choose to go against them anyway, that's another matter entirely.

Amtrak's ex post review? If you do get thrown off the train, I was told, you're welcome to file a complaint, though Amtrak policy is to not tell customers what happens to their complaints after they're filed, since that would be to reveal how policy is disseminated and enforced. After my first round of policy questions, a bureaucrat offered to file a complaint on my behalf; two weeks later, I couldn't get confirmation that a complaint was actually filed.

Before I cut out of this digression, let me note that having too much review can also be a disaster. In the end, sometimes the customer really is wrong, and it's an inefficient waste to let the customer appeal ad nauseum. An example of this with which I am too familiar: the U.S. patent system. Being a legally-enthralled bureaucracy, examiners have a rulebook by their side, and a rejection of a patent application can literally be appealed on up to the Supreme Court.

Whether this is appropriate from a legal or ethical perspective is a question for several more essays which, do not worry, I won't be writing. But from a bureaucratic perspective, it is a disaster, and everybody knows it. Because a rejection is never certain until the Supreme Court says no, we don't know which patents do or don't exist. When a customer gets a patent, s/he goes away; when a customer is rejected, it's a federal case. This asymmetry by itself loads the deck toward granting more patents than should be--and I haven't even mentioned the actual rules for patentability.

Oh, and here's one more effect of having the manual on hand at all times: the rules can be arbitrarily detailed. It's no problem having exceptions within exceptions for patent law, because examiners have the cookbook right there to follow along. Meanwhile, Amtrak has its flying-without-a-manual culture, which means that it is impossible for its policy to have more detail than a conductor can immediately recall. Want to say no to most bikes, but that folding bikes are OK; that “electronic equipment” is prohibited, but you can carry on “laptop computers and handheld devices”; or that dogs are out but seeing-eye dogs are OK? As I've found, this can be too much for our no-manual conductors, which means that the policy as implemented reduces to the simplest, least-detailed version. So access to the manual actually affects what policy can be written, and whether policy can be accurate or just the sort of one-size-fits-all scheme that really merits the name bureaucracy.

Exiting from this digression, we can take this bland exceptions-are-hard concept further.

The war on the unexpected

If I was flying to visit a pal, and had a a gift for him or her, I used to carry it in a cardboard box, so I could chuck the box in the recycling bin instead of carrying back an empty suitcase. I'd get stopped and checked over for explosives every time. Are there really higher odds that a box would be a bomb than a suitcase? Do not be ridiculous, but using a cardboard box instead of a suitcase is unusual, which is sufficient to mark it for scrutiny.

For any system, we are more familiar with the common rules which get recited every day than with the odd ones for the special cases. That means that the bureaucrat will be more likely to ineffectively apply policy in the case of the unusual. The risk-averse bureaucrat, who knows that it's safer to mistakenly bar the door than to mistakenly let someone pass, will therefore be enforcing his or her concept of normal on the people on the other side of the counter.

Another amusing anecdote about life as a non-driver: either (1) foreign nationals may not enter federal facilities or (2) everybody needs a state/nationally-issued ID to enter federal facilities. I've heard both stated as fact by people in uniforms, though I increasingly think they're both false. Anyway, I show up to a facility with a U.S. passport card, which is the only ID I can think of that actually fulfills both standards #1 and #2 and fits in your wallet. The guard looks at it, passes it on to the other guard, who inspects it like it's a brainteaser written in Cantonese there is not actually any Cantonese on the US passport card, and starts making phone calls. `Hello? Is your guest a a foreign national? Because he's presenting proof of US citizenship instead of a driver's license.'

So the war on the unexpected isn't necessarily due to explicit orders from on high (though it may be), but simply how a person at the gate deals with ambiguity in his or her knowledge of the rules. Broadly, the agent knows that there are rules that he or she doesn't know, and rightfully assumes that they'll be in regards to special cases. OK, I know what to do with a driver's license, but am I sure there isn't some other step I need to do for passport cards? Being risk averse, the agent is therefore most likely to bar the door for special cases.

It'd be great to have a bureaucracy that celebrated diversity--¿have you seen the latest batch of TSA advertisements at your local airport? But risk and ambiguity (in the mind of the agent enforcing the rules) is a solid force toward enforcing cultural uniformity. With rules that have clear and logical exceptions, easy means of checking the manual, and some accountability when the agent makes things up both to be too permissive and to be too restrictive, a system can minimize the tendency to punish those who are different from the agent's idea of the norm.

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I've been thrown off the train twice for having a folding bike.

The second time was the best, because I had a copy of the Amtrak policy regarding folding bikes in hand. For those of you who found this page via search engine, here it is for you (as of this writing):

Folding bicycles may be brought aboard certain passenger cars as carry-on baggage. Only true folding bicycles (bicycles specifically designed to fold up into a compact assembly) are acceptable. Generally, these bikes have frame latches allowing the frame to be collapsed, and small wheels. Regular bikes of any size, with or without wheels, are not considered folding bikes, and may not be stored as folding bikes aboard trains.

You must fold up your folding bicycle before boarding the train. You may store the bike only in luggage storage areas at the end of the car (or, in Superliners, on the lower level). You may not store bikes in overhead racks.

Discussion with Amtrak's people indicate that it's even more clear-cut than the above, and by `certain passenger cars,' they mean all of them.

So the conductor tells me I can't have folding bikes on his train, I show him a copy of the policy, and he is nonplussed and kicks me off the train anyway. The great majority of Amtrak conductors I've met here in the mid-Atlantic reacted similarly to the folding bike on their trains, though only two went so far as to throw me off.

Security has consistently taken issue with people taking photographs inside Washington Union Station, even for the official Amtrak amateur photo contest. Same story: official policy says photography is OK, but the security on the ground has developed its own ideas. Fox News interviewed an Amtrak executive, on location at Union Station, and just as the executive was explaining that official Amtrak policy is to allow cameras in the building, a security guard stopped them and told them they'd have to turn off the cameras and halt the interview.

I've blogged about all this before in an entirely different context, West Coast versus East Coast law. In that case, we had a computer programmed to carry out the law as written by policymakers, but the programmers threw in all sorts of other rules for their own convenience, and ignored those laws that they found hard to code. It's the same story of policy as written and policy as enforced being entirely disjoint, and even directly contradictory.

Once an organization has more people than can comfortably fit around a table, such inconsistencies are inevitable. The question (the only one I'm discussing here) is how one goes about dealing with the glitches.

I want to focus on the policy issues, and don't want this to be a rant about how I got bad customer service. But because I tried to get a response from Amtrak about the widespread failure of implementers to know the rules they're implementing, it's appropriate for me to tell you Amtrak's handling of the matter. Feel free to skip this as a digression.

I wrote to Amtrak the day I was last thrown off for having a folding bike, and received a reply three (3) months later. The reply I got (can't give you a link--they go out of their way to leave nothing in writing) explained that official Amtrak policy is to not discuss the formation or implementation of official Amtrak policy with customers. The best I could get from the person I spoke to, in fact, was the following entirely true statement regarding what will happen if I ride with a within-the-rules folding bike: “I can't guarantee you that you won't be thrown off the train.”

Can't RTFM if there isn't one

So the derogatory tone is sometimes misplaced, and we often want people to be bureaucrats and enforce the darn rules instead of making things up. The question of this essay is what happens when the agent doesn't know the rule at hand. In a perfect world, it's easy: they check the manual or ask somebody who does know. On the Amtrak platform, this never happens, because the train needs to leave now, you're not at a desk with a convenient drawer for the manual, radioing the station manager's desk and asking about this stuff is avoided, and conductors seem to cultivate an air of infallible authority which reading the manual would undermine.

Remember the blog post from 2004, where a brown-skinned U.S. citizen was detained by a passport checker who just didn't like the look of her passport? In a similar manner, before flying, you have to show the airline a valid ticket and a visa or other evidence that you won't get turned away at the other border, because if you do get turned away, the airline has to carry you back for free. U.S. immigration law is thus primarily enforced by people at the check-in counters of airlines the world over.

So, you're a ticket agent in, I dunno, Mauritius, and a person comes to your counter with a piece of paper that says they have a valid asylum claim from the USA. The paper is not very clear to you, because you learned all your English from Fleetwood Mac songs. You've never heard of US Code Title 8 §1158 (Asylum), and even if you had, you certainly wouldn't be able to read it, interpret its subtleties, and apply it to the piece of paper before you.

This is the epitome of the bureaucratic breakdown, and the poor agent at the ticket counter and his/her managers have really no choice at all but to make something up. Without referring to volume upon volume of carefully developed U.S. asylum law, they look over this piece of paper, eyeball the person holding it, and make a decision. Because the airline suffers a cost if they incorrectly say OK, but likely pays no costs if they turn the person away, there will be pressure to resolve uncertainty with a no.

The purpose of this essay, which I'll continue next time, is to consider the stupid little question of what happens when agents are unsure of the rules that they are expected to implement. And as simple as that question is, there are even simpler sub-questions, like whether agents have the ability to look up the rules when uncertain. Next time I'll throw out some thoughts about the questions of incentives, risk, &c. But with regards to that simple first step of looking up the rules if need be, we see that Amtrak's policy mechanism is, for whatever reason, already something of a failure, and immigration law is a big fat flaming failure, because it includes provisions that deputize untrained agents in distant countries to do the work of fully trained US immigration agents.

In both cases, we are left with the worst of all worlds: a massive bureaucratic apparatus with a rule for everything, and agents who arbitrarily enforce whatever seems OK to them, simply because looking up the correct rule is too difficult.

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