[borkt]

Litigation is the enemy here. I’ve been in this from top to bottom and it’s always legal precedents that fuck everything up. Governing bodies, be they local or regulatory, are forced to broadly interpret legal precedent established in high profile situations, or small, specific legal settlements which have occurred at a local level. Lawyers then take this case law and work with bureaucrats to craft regulations and ordinances which have zero possibility of running afoul the case law, and these can become so odd and counterintuitive when broadly applied that they have wildly negative effects on the whole. A high dollar project can spend the money the develop legal justifications for getting a code variance and ignoring the precedent set by case law, but the 95% of the rest of us are forced to design, construct, and accept the baked in laws to gain the privledge from the city to operate under their purview (which ultimately puts them on the hook for any lawsuit in their jurisdiction - as they always come after cities before individuals, and the cost of fighting these always exceeds the cost of settling them). So contractors are left constructing shit they know won’t work, engineers are signing off on shit they know won’t work, and cities are authorizing construction on shit they know won’t work, all to avoid taking on the responsibility doing your job right, and to avoid the horrendous consequences that would result from the people willing to go along with this system being in the position of making actual design decisions themselves, with no legal safety nets when they fuck up. It is the very definition of a broken, unsustainable system, and there are even more levels of red tape around environmental reviews I didn’t come close to getting into. It’s a lawyers dream, the most profitable contractor in your local jurisdiction is so solely because they are the best at exploiting loopholes in the system to overbill clients, it drives away anyone who has the skill or desire to fix it, and its and civilizations worst enemy.

Edit: Pardon the typos, I’ve got gig to go do as I was stupid enough to try to address a small part of this on behalf of a city’s residents, and boy have I suffered.

[testfoobar]

Maybe Shakespeare was right.