Insanely wealthy when your comparison includes tin pot dictatorships, theocracies, and ex-soviet countries that still haven't gotten their shit together. Weird how that unimaginable wealth doesn't translate into financial security, access to high quality healthcare, or the ability to own a home.
After a particularly shitty day on the helpdesk there was nothing quite like loading up Facing Worlds, jimmying team balancing so it was 8v1 and then holding off the ensuing rush of bots for a half hour with a sniper rifle.
Lol what. Analyzing disclosures? What information of use could it possibly synthesize from a three column table with checkmarks in [no disclosure]? For your sake I sincerely hope you aren't using ChatGPT when you should be getting inspections.
Inspections are fairly worthless if you are remotely handy and competent at basic stuff. I don’t need someone to go through and catalog the make and models of all the appliances, and I can visually inspect my own water heater and furnace pretty trivially.
You can get “real” inspections done but they cost thousands of dollars and take a full or more day to do with multiple subject matter experts. Almost no one does this.
Waiving inspection other than for major material defect is what I’ve done for all my real estate transactions. I’m not putting in an offer to nickel and dime someone over trivial bullshit like a busted GFCI circuit. My offer simply accounts for the trivial odds and ends I’ll have to take care of. Plus I’d much rather get the work done myself since I don’t trust a seller to do anything but the bare minimum.
Every one of my friends who have had five figures or more of surprise repair work on homes they purchased all had an inspection done. None of those could have found the various hidden damages for those buildings short of destructive stuff like pulling drywall out or lifting up shingles from a roof. Don’t worry though, the inspectors found stuff like a bathroom faucet with a crack in the knob.
Liability for what? The only real liability in my state is for outright misrepresentation or fraud via failing to disclose. The disclosure form covers anything material I'd care about. Even then - good luck actually proving anything short of exceptional circumstances.
If you look at the standard offer document for waiving inspection it's pretty easy to walk it back. You're simply waiving a contingency - you can typically still inspect the property itself. I'm sure if you get way off the beaten path you are correct, but almost no one is engaging in totally non-standard contracts where I'm at.
I'm curious what liability you think would apply for an inspection that misses whatever it may be that ends up in dispute after the transaction closes - since the whole point in the inspection is finding that beforehand? If I find a material defect in the foundation after I close - it won't matter if I had an inspection or not. Unless I can prove the seller knew about it and failed to disclose.
And if I ever sell any properties - I will be pretty loath to sell to anyone demanding an inspection contingency. They are almost always used for nickel and dime BS that I really don't have time for. If you walk the place, get your inspector to do so too, and come up with a punch list and still want to make an offer, discount it appropriately and fix it yourself after you close. It's nearly always either pointless or used as a negotiation tool after the fact due to the fact buyers can expect a seller to not want to walk away from the middle of a transaction (sunk cost/time). I'd much rather take an offer at 5% less up-front than deal with someone wasting 30-45 days on the market and my time dealing with trivial items.
"There's not a single silver bullet that will fix everything" idk, it seems like eliminating the profit motive from healthcare would resolve all kinds of problems.
Suppose you want to remove the profit motive from healthcare.
If doctors would still get paid above-median wages, you would still have a profit motive. Their lobbyists would want to limit the supply of doctors or simply lobby to have the government pay them high wages, to require that things be done by a doctor instead of a nurse, etc. Likewise the drug companies would lobby for the government to pay them more for their drugs, and when the government is captured then that's what happens. The same problems we have now; you haven't solved anything.
If doctors would get paid a lower wage but still have to attend 8 years of medical school, there wouldn't be a profit motive, but then there would be a shortage of people willing to become doctors, patients would have to wait a long time to get an appointment as they do in places like France, etc.
The profit motive isn't the problem, that's the thing that causes anyone to want to (and be able to) provide healthcare. The problem is the corruption. You have to stop limiting the number of medical residency slots and allowing drug companies to patent trivial changes to preexisting things etc.
.com implosion, tech jobs of all kinds went from "we'll hire anyone who knows how to use a mouse" to the tech jobs section of the classifieds was omitted entirely for 20 months. There have been other bumps in the road since then but that was a real eye-opener.
well same like covid right??? digital/tech company overhiring because everyone is home and at the same time the rise of AI reduce the number of headcount
covid overhiring + AI usage = massive layoff we ever see in decades
It was nothing like covid. The dot com crash lasted years where tech was a dead sector. Equity valuations kept declining year after year. People couldn't find jobs in tech at all.
There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be.
The key point is that the going is still exceptionally good. The posts talking about experienced programmers having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an exaggeration.
After the first Internet bubble popped, service levels in Silicon Valley restaurants suddenly got a lot better. Restaurants that had struggled to hire competent, reliable employees suddenly had their pick of applicants.
History always repeats itself in the tech industry. The hype cycle for LLMs will probably peak within the next few years. (LLMs are legitimately useful for many things but some of the company valuations and employee compensation packages are totally irrational.)
"Less regulation is a good target" is only true under regimes where good faith outcomes can be expected without regulation. Given the frequency with which financial incentives align with undesirable outcomes there's no evidence to support this idea.
Say someone silly makes a rule that your need X hours of training annually to be an interior decorator. Now besides the training, you also have to know that that's required, you have to maintain records to prove you've had the training, the government needs a process for verifying that you've had the training, ...
If correct/moral/societally beneficial behavior was the most profitable then no regulation would be needed.
Lacking regulation also has a cost, it's just not to the unregulated. Dumping waste into a river is cheap for the business doing the dumping, but has environmental impacts on everyone downstream. It's more expensive to properly dispose of or recycle waste material, that's why a regulation that you must do that is needed.
The market simply does not hold bad actors accountable in any meaningful way. As a result, it pays to be a bad actor.
It's simply not a black and white issue. There are bad regulations to be sure. But it's not nearly as simple as saying that less regulation is better or that more regulation is better. The right amount is good and the wrong amount is bad. What that amount is is up for debate.
This applies also to enacting monstrously stupid regulations. Or even ones that were introduced entirely as revenge or to create opportunity for corruption.
That all sounds good, we just need to make sure "X" is reasonable. Having reassurance that any licensed decorator had an amount of training/testing is good for the customer.
Unfortunately your silly rule is something that exists (not for interior decorators of course) but for countless other trade jobs (barber, plumber, etc). Whether that's good or bad I can't say
I personally see it as good. Why wouldn't I want someone I trust with my hair or pipes to not have something to vouch for them?
It's only a downside if you see cost as the most important thing about all else. The clear consequence is that a trained barber/plumber will require higher compensation to make up for the training, and due to less supply since not everyone will be able to get a license.
It's unambiguously good, and that's coming from the perspective of someone who is routinely frustrated by regulations around residential plumbing and electrical work. It would be utterly insane to remove minimum credential and testing requirements from trades where fucking up results in catastrophic damage to a structure, fires, etc.
Note that I am not saying that "throw away regulation, always less regulation is better".
That would be asking to drop all regulations.
I am saying that regulations have cost so you should have as little as regulation as possible to achieve wanted effect.
And wanted effect often should not be literally zero of accidents or bribery or corruption. As it may be either impossible to achieve or extra side effects not worth it past certain point.
In other words minimisation of how much regulations you have should be one of targets.
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