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Comment by thedufer | Hacker News Reader

You definitely don't care when you're dead. In that split second before the disaster, maybe the point of silly regulations like not collapsing at the first hint of an earthquake or not going up in flames in seconds will become clear.

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Choose your level of risk. I am sure if you want all those features, you can make the determination yourself. If you want to live dangerously, then live dangerously. I personally support this outlook. Better have cheap housing with risk than rent.

You're choosing your neighbour's level of risk too, though. Even a house built to regs has a hard time staying not on fire when the one right beside it is going up like a pile of tinder.

If you build for low long-term cost, you're not using wood anyway because of fungus and termites. You're using cementboard, concrete blocks, stucco, and similar. That won't burn. The roof can be corrugated metal.

If you are arguing from the perspective of low income people, most of whom rent, they aren't looking in detail at how the building was built, just the price.

In other words, in this future poor neighbourhoods would collapse like 3rd world countries while rich neighbourhoods would get hairline cracks in the drywall.

They had this problem in cases of activists going after slumlords that weren't maintaining their buildings. The problem was, in order to get tenants to rent a building in that state, the slumlords had to discount the rent by pretty much exactly the cost of the repairs not made. Paying for the repairs would have required (and allowed) rents to be increased to more than the existing tenants were able to pay.

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.

That's interesting. You have a link for that?

So you'll be perfectly understanding when, having adopted your preferred level of risk, people don't send in crews to help you. That we'll just bring in bulldozers and start over.

Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?

> 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.

(writing this from vacation in Hawaii): I have the sense that the rest of the world will help out if you Kiwi's get into trouble. Ditto if the Pacific Northwest takes a hit.

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.

Please keep your beliefs in your world, where your decisions apparently don't have consequences for others. Around here, I like to think that society benefits every time a building that's up to code fails to fall on a passersby, or fails to set a neighboring building on fire because it burns slowly and coolly enough to be put out first.

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