| I agree over-regulation sucks but let me give you a counter example. A friend of mine who was very poor (single mother of 3, blah blah blah, lots of bad choices mixed in there). She took her broken car to a local "good guy" who ran a repair shop out of his house. He was a veteran, single father which he traded on heavily-- but he had no idea what he was doing. He broke every law there was, from waste disposal to licensing to code/zoning to required practices for mechanics (such as written estimates). So my friend hasn't had her car for months and this person can't fix it, and he is running advertisements on craigslist to sell it. I call him up and say, "You've failed to fix the car, whats your time worth on this one?" He hems and haws, saying he's put thousands into it (and hasn't fixed the problem). I tell him "not my concern, I'll fix the car myself, what do you want?" He then threatened me mentioning that he was an ex-marine. I told him I didn't care, that I would be presenting all of this to the police in the morning and having him arrested for conversion if at all possible. His tune suddenly changed, and $80 would be acceptable for services. He immediately called my friend who owned the car and tried to extort her for a few hundred dollars. I eventually got the car, I recognized the symptoms immediately-- bad crank shaft sensor-- keep in mind, I'm a software engineer. I took it to a trusted shop and the whole thing was resolved or $250 and in 4 hours. He'd been trying to diagnose it for 3 months. Replacing parts in the car because he didn't know wtf he was doing, and then trying to charge the customer for his ignorance, and trying to extort them, and trying to defraud them. I turned him in to every agency in California that enforces these things, and he was forced to at least obey the law, which meant getting a shop. I'd love to say this all ended up well, but the antagonist in the story abruptly died. The poor SOB had a heart attack and that was that. I send a few hundred bucks a year to his kids. The real victims in all of this. Stories like this are why we have regulations. |