Asterix - The Twelve Tasks of Asterix - #8: Find Permit A 38 in "The Place That Sends You Mad"

900t160 HN recommenders · 2017–2020
203K views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2009-04-24

A segment from the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, in which Asterix must get Permit A 38 from a maze-like building run by unhelpful bureaucrats. He wins by asking for a nonexistent permit.

HN commenters reference it as the famous satire of bureaucracy, including as the name for an SSH key management tool.

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3 comments from Hacker News

@yosamino2017 · in “Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism”

Original claim: > Ms Fox complained that her problem arose from the fact that she was chased by Centrelink for a debt actually owed by her former de facto partner. Centrelink rebuttal: > The agency says Ms Fox's debt [...] arose after she received more FTB than she was entitled to because she under-estimated her family income for that year. Counter-rebuttal: > As I outlined in my article, when your ex does not lodge his tax return for a year in which you received the Family Tax Benefit it seems your family income will be classified ‘under-estimated’. This is easily one of many possible scenarios that is not covered by standard procedures, of which I am sure there exist many every year, but which large bureaucracy are regularly unequipped to deal with, to the point that this behavior is a common trope in popular culture[0]. It's funny when it happens in a movie, but if you're actually on the receiving end of this sort of behavior where no-one listens to your most reasonable requests, takes the time to figure out that some sort of mistake has occurred and generally treats you with disrespect in addition to threaten the financial stability of you and your children, I'd put it to you that it's very human to get extremely frustrated and express that frustration. You provide an excellent example of this: > Secondly the only additional information released seems to be the actual date of when she seperated from her ex and failed to lodge the change of circumstance which lead to the o

@AdrianoKF2018 · in “Show HN: SSH Permit A38 – Central Managment and Deployment for SSH Keys”

Not sure if the ship was named after it as well, but Permit A38 references a scene from an Asterix and Obelix animated film ( [LINK] [VIDEO] ). The comic series by René Goscinni and animated films were very popular in Europe, probably not so much in the US. Permit A38 refers to a scene where the protagonists are referred multiple times within a overly beaurocratic Roman administrative office, so it has become sort of synonymous with a Sysiphean task in German language (at least in limited circles).

@bestboy2020 · in “HSBC moves from 65 relational databases into one global MongoDB database”

TBH I think so, too. I guess this is just a glorified global network drive to put all the different, country-specific documents like Excel sheets, Word docs, PDFs and some such. [VIDEO]