This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
At a county level, non-mandatory code compliance can once again become mandatory. My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin. Pulling permits for just about anything is a nightmare, since the city takes this as an opportunity to force homeowners to update their properties for modern code compliance. We've had deck jobs where the city-mandated updates to insulation, electrical, etc ended up costing more than the damn deck.
The city council loves bragging about how they have some of the strictest and most complex building codes in the nation, because in their minds, it means they're doing the most in the fight against climate dragons. It somehow goes unmentioned that a lot of these initiatives are counterproductive or dangerous (mandated over-building electrical infrastructure for any job that touches an electrical installation encourages people to get creative with their own wiring jobs). A lot of the other mandates are clearly back-scratching graft for a captured industry - the insulation requirements are so ridiculously overprovisioned that in many cases the only way to meet the county requirements is with special sealant foam along every wall joist, which costs like $3/ft and is sold by one company in the state. Note that this can also be an add-on requirement by the county for anything that opens an exterior wall for any reason (including maintenance and repair). This all has exactly the expected effect on willingness to perform maintenance by local landlords, and large swaths of the city have properties full of dozens of trivial issues that get swept under the rug to avoid incurring massive update costs unrelated to basic maintenance. And of course, the dilapidated ghetto-houses in this city are worth double or triple the value of the neighboring county's much-nicer modern homes, contributing another unironic brag by the city council.
During the pandemic, out of an "abundance of caution" the city council decided to shut down the building and planning department - offices closed, phones off, no one responded to emails - and moved all the permitting forms online. The online form was totally broken, of course, and auto-rejected all applications. For 18 months, you simply could not pull a permit in the county. Homeowners were understandably upset with this state of affairs, and eventually ignored the permits and moved ahead with their projects. As long as we follow code, and get engineering approval for anything that needs it, the only thing missing is the formality of a city stamp on your piece of paper, and they're not supposed to arbitrarily reject you if you're doing everything right, so... Of course, the instant the city comes back from their 18-month paid sabbatical, they immediately start suing every homeowner who did unpermitted work, starting, of course, with the people who live in viewing distance of the city council members! The city council got a reality check at the state court level, but not before wasting millions of dollars attempting to punish their own citizens for a problem they created.
Most of the city council secured re-election.
My dad has since left the state.
Newer is generally better form an efficiency perspective compared to older. So any standard that retards people from moving from older to newer is asinine. Thus, you shouldn’t require a person to update everything to code when trying to modernize X. That just makes incremental improvements more expensive.
We see this in other areas. Mandating the best while grandfathering the old leads to suboptimal outcomes.
The fiber I mentioned has been replaced with newer, higher-bandwidth stuff a couple times in the last 40 years. The key value proposition wasn't the fiber itself - it was laying a channel with enough access ports that anyone could run whatever they want through the run for the next hundred years. In this case, the power company paid for the fiber itself, then businesses paid for updates and replacements decades later, and it cost a fraction of what it would have to tear up all the streets and put in new channels everywhere. Like @FiveHourMarathon mentioned in the sibling post, leaving room for expansion and future updates is smart.
More options
Context Copy link
And how much capacity is there to enforce code requirements? The Gestapo isn't keeping track of all this, so you end up with people doing things without permits if doing them with permits costs too much money.
This is how you get anarcho-tyranny. People just end up ignoring the permits and regulations out of necessity, and then the government only goes after easy targets to fine and/or after people they dislike for some other reason.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is a special kind of Madness. I do almost all updates myself as you are allowed to do almost all your own work in my state and my town is also kind of wild about building codes. In my town it is residential sprinkler systems, even though we haven't had a deadly fire in 100 years. The fire chief's car even has 'residential sprinklers save lives' on the side of it, guess what the other half of his family does, you guessed it residential sprinkler systems. I would like to add another unit to my property but guess what that means, residential sprinkler system would have to be installed and inspected every single year from then on out and serviced every three. They are one more point of failure and horrific water damage, all for no real net increase in safety. The fire department is 99% ems calls .09% brush fires .009% parades and .001% structure fires already.
It NEVER stops, nothing ever comes off the books or gets easier to build. They just let everyone in town build an ADU if they want, no one has done it as it basically needs to be as expensive as your main residence due to code compliance. Same people that are "worried" about affordable housing are the ones driving up housing prices and creating cost disease. Rather have someone burn to death using a propane heater in a tent than not have r50 insulation in the roof of a new home.
To be fair, residential sprinkler systems have been mandatory in the IRC since year 2011, so your jurisdiction is not necessarily being corrupt here.
The NAHB also opposes this code provision, considering it a waste of money when three-quarters of house-fire deaths occur in houses that don't even have working smoke alarms.
In my town they didn't implement it until 2018 and it is not a state wide requirement. Most states don't require them and about half leave it up to the towns. Thanks for the link, it allowed me to find the list of states https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/advocacy/docs/top-priorities/codes/fire-sprinklers/fire-sprinkler-state-adoption-2019.pdf?rev=fb2e43a2c10249c79234ac4ef2405470&hash=93C19612CC1E730D343D25624862D0A8
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link