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Comment by x86_64Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the same as it is in IT. Risk management and disaster prevention requires money, which people rarely want to spend. Boards for condos are elected, and they try to keep costs low. No one is going to elect someone who says the building should spend millions to prevent a collapse that they feel is theoretical.

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This is exactly what happened with Champlain Towers. After that assessment, they got a repair estimate and then the board and residents argued with each other about the price of fixing it for 3 years... all the way up to the moment it collapsed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/majority-of-fl...

Without opening story...why would residents have anything to do with paying for maintaining the building they're a customer of?

They're probably owners, not renters.

A typical condo ownership involves fractional ownership of the building with occupancy rights to a specific unit. The costs for general repair come out of a common pool of dues paid by each owner.

As another person mentioned, because the condo owners are all collectively responsible for the maintenance. I currently serve as the president of an HOA.

We've needed new roofs for years. We got bids, but by the time that the HOA could meet, the bids already were too old. We voted to charge everyone based off the cost of the bids + 10%. We had owners that didn't pay or owners that paid too late. Our bids expired again and then we had some safety issues that we had to handle. So now we didn't have enough money for the roofs again, but likewise people wanted other stuff done.

It took nearly 5 years for us to finally get new roofs. Covid happened and prices went up again, but thankfully we had enough to cover stuff. Actually, only some of the roofs are currently done. 6 buildings: 3 done/3 not. <50 units total. I cannot imagine how much more complicated it would be with a bunch of units.

And in healthcare. Doctors always shoo me away when I show warning signs. They're not interested in getting to the bottom of warning signs. They'd rather wait until shit happens before they're interested in taking my money and solving it.

Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.

The problem with paying for gym memberships is that the marginal gym member won’t actually attend.

I would be interested in that question. Would free gym actually change the amount of exercise being done? I suspect not.

My bet is that it would decrease the amount done.

If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not

Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out

Hah, nowadays there are mask mandates (more in Europe rather than in the Land of the Free). Makes me wonder what the world would be like with gym attendance mandates, or 10000 steps-a-day mandates.

Gotta love people downvoting a hypothetical/"what-if" because they think I'm advocating for a nanny state...

Even worse, they’re just elected from the pool of residents, right? They’re likely to not know anything about actually managing a building, are doing it as a side job, and they have limited ability to enforce things.

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