What I've seen is that most people in the West end up thinking that that $95k difference is worth it.
Let me start with a true story of what happened to me the first time I represented myself in court back around 2005. Someone had moved my motorbike to make a bit more room to park their stupid oversized Hummer. My bike was now just past the legal line so I got a $45 ticket. Outraged I vowed to bring this to court. In the pre-meeting with the prosecutor the cop didn't even remember the location of the motorcycle, let alone what was around, whereas I had drawings and the license plate number of the Hummer owner.
The prosecutor said that if I plead guilty with an explanation that they would drop the charges. So that is what we did. Right afterwards I got a $40 "courtroom fee" because I'd plead guilty. That's when I learned the adage "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client".
5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings. Our building code stops that oversight. 5000 years ago houses collapsed during hurricanes. Our building codes severely reduced that. I could go on and on.
The main issue isn't the building code. The issue is that it is difficult in modern cities to get the local population to agree to expanding the housing stock with taller buildings. It ruins views, it's noisy, excess supply collapses housing prices. It changes the city's charm and culture. So they elect people that slow it down.
I think there's a quite different lesson in these codes. What's the difference between software developers that don't have a Code and electricians or plumbers who do? Not all that much. Except that we get to spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of doing stuff using reason and logic. People who got the job they did instead of your job because they weren't quite so good at reason and logic.
Pull the sort of things we deal with every day on an electrician? Fuck you, I'm not doing that, it's not to code. Now cough up the time and materials to do it right, or we're done here. Don't like it? The next guy you call is going to tell you the exact same thing. Have a nice day.
"you might think all those tests are a waste of everyone's time and your money, but that's the Code so we gotta do them"
There'd be less programs written, and those programs would be more expensive. But we might finally start making a dent in the "80% of software projects fail" statistic that hasn't changed since the 60's.
But I do understand and partially agree with your primary point.
Of course there are lots of old temples and shrines but even those have often had every single piece replaced. I was really surprised a couple of years ago when one of the local shrines tore down their building completely and rebuilt it exactly the same!
Whether this has to do with earthquakes or not, I'm not entirely sure. My wife and I have been thinking of buying a house and I keep having to remind myself that I will lose money if I ultimately sell. Our current plan is to wait until we're a bit older and then buy a not-too-old used house at a discount ;-)
It was known that older houses were dangerous in earthquakes (I believe the safer building code dates from the 80s), but no one was really worried about it until the Kobe earthquake where most damage was borne by older buildings.
Where you see charm some of us see waste. Grass is ugly and so are single detached family homes. Row houses look nice, so do skyscrapers. Inventing a simulacrum for the country estate and calling it a "dream" is a bad joke I'd like everyone to start laughing at.
This is it. This is the mother of all bad policies in the USA! From keeping African Americans out of our neighborhoods via red lining, to increased police presence, to one generation's artificial chokehold on the housing stock. Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes. People defend these things as lifestyle choices, and almost never live into the carrying capacity of the asset they buy. It is one lifestyle choice I feel comfortable judging.
Just so no one thinks I don't have any skin in the game I do have a child.
I live in the UK where they are common, they're a nightmare to live in, you can hear people arguing or babies screaming 4 houses down.
A lot of houses are detached but very close to each other or semi-detached (linked to one other house). Both are far more pleasant to live in than row houses or sky scrapers.
Is all that normal for the big cities with dense, multi-story housing?
In your opinion.
Some people think driving cars are bad. Some people think eating meat is bad. Some people think space heating is a waste of electricity.
Everybody seems to think their particular way of living is perfect and everybody else is either too wasteful or doesn't know how to live.
Your argument really is just "this is my subjective opinion of how to live and people who disagree are wrong".
I would far rather have a home that has 'risky banister railings' if that meant I could actually afford it.
Mental health is as important as physical health, if not moreso - what's worse, risk of eviction, or having to pay attention near the stairwell? I get that this is an isolated example, but I'd take worse insulation, no solar, worse security, everything, if it meant I could get a home and slowly improve it myself with time.
If that means I have to live rurally - so be it - but as far as I can tell that means living outside of the country I was born in (UK), which is quite sad.
who consented to the conditions of your house when entering. If he is not sure he ought to hire a civil engineer to inspect and verify the safety status of the house or ask the host to do it.
>your children,
who is your ward and is subjected to the decisions of its parent with regards to all of life choices
>the person that buys your house next,
ditto the guest situation except for buying
>the person that lives next door
this is the only legitimate case for regulation, to protect the public and/or third party.
>so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.
This is not a problem of housing but of manners. You can get rid of hot soup without infringing of other people's ability to walk around the public area and not be wet.
I think the solution is to move away from cities. I'm planning to do so. I'm just going to be sad if it means leaving my country because you don't want me anywhere near you, even if it means I'm on the horizon from your window.
In the UK if you want a house but are completely agnostic about where, there's Stoke-on-Trent; the council were selling houses for £1 on the condition that the new owner renovated them to code. Otherwise, rural living in Scotland is also quite cheap.
If this motivation was held by anyone other than random individuals and families, it would be regarded with scorn.
"Home is where the Cartel is"
Interestingly, the same thing happens in large software development shops. Somebody breaks production by doing X. So now there's a process in place never to do X (Even when it might make sense). Somebody forgets Y. So now everybody has to do Y. And so on.
Overall, over time it's much easier to take out the hammer and create one-size-fits-all answers to every catastrophe that occurs. Repeat and rinse this process over several years, and you've got a software shop that's running ten times slower than everybody else.
...and not killing anyone.
"People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software."
"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time — they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time."
"The most important things the shuttle group does — carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code — are not expensive. The process isn't even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering."
Actually, it's very difficult to get babies to crawl into empty space, or even onto a glass surface that looks like empty space.
However, for a isolated suburban house - it made little sense to put all that measures you are talking about. If we were living in a major city - it would make more sense to add some of those things.
4 walls and a roof should not make someone bankrupt.
In other words, in this future poor neighbourhoods would collapse like 3rd world countries while rich neighbourhoods would get hairline cracks in the drywall.
So every time the activists forced a slumlord to bring their building to code, fixing it allowed them to increase the rent and the people the activists were trying to help were forced to move out because they could no longer afford it.
But at least they made it less likely that the whole city would catch on fire.
Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?
Yeah, tell that to about half the population of New Zealand. Volcano or fault line, take your pick.
It wasn't a great point. We live where we live, for the most part. There are few places free of potential natural disasters. (The scope of the PNW quakes were only realized in the last 20 years or so...).
But it's colossally stupid to build substandard housing in such an area, to the point where it's a net win for society to enforce some minimum quality.
Fires, for instance, are not the Huge Fucking Deal they were a hundred years ago. We have better fire-fighting equipment, but that's kind of the booby prize. Better to make things fire-resistant, and to not cause fires to begin with.
http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?1587361-What-is-typi...
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ref7/apparatus/2003%20competitio...
EDIT: I'm not saying that one should do their own natural gas piping as in many places it's technically illegal unless you're a licensed plumber. But it's certainly not rocket science. The only reason it's "harder" than plumbing compressed air is that if compressed air leaks a tad, it's no big deal. You have to get rather tight on gas piping because of the consequences of a leak, not because it's so difficult to get it tight.
Also in the west you don't have to worry about having your home expropriated by "gangsters" - which happened to one of my coworkers family back home.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029648/Holiday-squa... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322246/Man-leaves-h...
Building a simple house is a 5000 year old technology.
I know that since we brought a small piece of land outside the city - brought the raw material and paid some local laborer to help us put our family home together.
It cost us a grand total of 10,000 dollars. The only difference was - we did it in india where there are no nonsense housing regulation.
Getting internet was supposed to be hard, but we were allowed to just use the telephone pole to get copper internet ( instead of fibre ).
From a business perspective - no wonder it temping to offshore - when putting a roof over your head eats so much into your income.