How Entire Industries Become Unethical

As soon as there's a law about how to calculate square footage there will either be an agency to do the calculate the square footage, an agency to enforce it, or both. Oh, and some sort of tax/fee levied against commercial land-lords and the possibility of lawsuits all around. And that's assuming that the law doesn't require auditing and/or some sort of compliance documentation. I don't think you're really allowing for how onerous even "simple" regulation can be when lawyers and bureaucrats get ahold of it.

One little thing like this isn't a huge barrier to entry, but a hundred little things like this make a whopper of a barrier to entry.

You are reading it backwards. What I wrote is (rearranged for those with weak comprehension):

"Most barriers to entry are created by government regulation."

I did not say:

"Most government regulation creates barriers to entry."

Turning universities completely into vocational schools seems like it'd have a number of downsides though. The idea that students should be well-rounded and that it's good for society for educated people to have some basic core knowledge isn't only a "liberal arts fantasy", but also a "science fantasy". If you're training people strictly vocationally, not only humanities cores, but also science cores should go, or at least both should be greatly cut down to only those students who specifically need a particular class for their future careers (e.g. maybe CE students will still take intro physics as a prereq for semiconductor physics, but CS students would no longer take Physics 101, or Bio 101, or Chem 101, or any math classes not strictly needed for their CS training, etc.). If you wanted to be really hardcore about it, you could even assess classes based on their predictive earnings power, so if Physics 101 doesn't produce measurable gains in its graduates' earning power within 10 years, axe it.

I think there's truth in both these points. That is, some of the vast difference in unemployment between college graduates and those without right now is just due to hiring managers (who are largely college graduates) being more comfortable with the sort of person who has gone to college. Part is due to the more advanced skills required in the modern American economy.

Regardless, this bad recession has dramatically underscored the value of college experience as an important thing for someone who places even a mild value on lifestyle security. Or to put it another way, it is a huge risk to bet that in the future, college experience will stop being seen as important. You might be right. But if you aren't, and you experience misfortune, your expectations are going to be much better with a college degree to wave around than without.

I don't disagree with you; in fact, it's the hiring manager's misunderstanding as much as the prospective student's.

The Bachelors is required simply because it's an easy screening mechanism; the colleges have already whittled the list down to a more manageable size for the manager to go through. It used to mean that a person had an interest in learning beyond what was required, which was nice for jobs. Now it's just that their parents/friends/teachers have told them to go.

Really I'm saying simply that people are expecting and demanding the wrong things out of a liberal arts (traditional definition) degree. Most of the time what they'd really want is a vocational degree, or at least something more similar to what the English do with law school, where you enter directly out of high school.

Because rsf includes building common spaces, which tenants are in fact renting. This is not complicated.

Yes, it does appear plain that this "common spaces" business is a fig leaf that covers annual rent increases. And yes, that's dishonest. But it's of no practical import, since every tenant knows their rent is going up one way or another once their lease expires.

We're really making a big deal over whether "rent increase" is called "rent increase" or not.

Searching for offers, as explained in the article. The nonexistant square feet put the offer undeservingly high in the sqft/$ order which is what many tenants search by.

There are mechanisms by which a landlord can raise a rent inside the bounds of a lease. In my experience, multi-year leases have "elevator clauses" that either allow for pre-negotiated upwards adjustments in price based on property tax, CPI, or other measures.

What if I paid for 420 sq. feet and actually needed 420 sq. feet, not 400?

That's a reasonable suggestion if you're willing to wait a couple of generations (or potentially forever) for any improvement in the situation.

The first complication with this suggestion is that in cases of exploitation of information asymmetries like this, you don't know what you don't know. It's nice that this issue is getting a little public scrutiny here now, but one has to wonder how long it's been going on? And getting an issue like this more widely recognized, to a point where demand for transparency would be self-sustaining, is likely to require a lot of someone's time an effort to bootstrap. If a subset of buyer/leasers were to take this on openly, real estate owners would almost certainly seek to punish them directly, in addition to mounting their own counter-education campaign >>> politicization. Alternately, some third party might sense a commercial opportunity here, e.g., to provide public education and neutral measurement services -- but that's the same sort of business model that makes "trial lawyers" so popular...

It's unrealistic to assume that commercial renters are going to be broadly responsive to individual demands for transparency before the overwhelming majority of real estate seekers permanently embrace transparency as a make-or-break requirement for buy/lease decisions.