Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

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If you can't afford (in terms of time as well as money) to put up with it you can screw right off. The city doesn't need or want your low buck development.

Making the process inefficient raises the floor of the minimum viable business. And, more importantly, it raises the floor for who can start one so that you don't get people closing up shop and being bankrupt when something bad happens.

The institutions designing these processes are chock f-ing full of people of questionable intentions. You hear "affordable prices" they hear "trashy clientele". You hear "thin margins" and they hear "can't afford to be taxed more than they currently are". You hear "small family owned business" and they hear "people who have no other assets we can threaten to lien in the case of a dispute". And just to be clear, these people aren't evil (well their actions are, but they're done with good intentions). It's just that the regulatory agencies they work for are set up in such a way that the 2nd and 3rd order "nice to push for but not technically within the scope of what we do here" opinions of all the people involved seep through. At its root this is a diversity problem. There aren't enough Ron Swansons and people who've been f-ed by government bureaucracies working for government bureaucracies so you get bureaucracies doing things that are completely and totally tone deaf.

Edit: And before anyone puts any more words in my mouth, they have no intention of making the process onerous and exclusionary. They have just settled into that equilibrium over the centuries because that is the local maximum their crude "did our last round of changes do what we wanted or not" hill climbing algorithm has found.

I agree it's entirely possible that some bureaucracy is intended as a trial by fire. That said I think that is a tiny minority of the time. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

The people implementing these regulations don't have the time, resources, or expertise to create holistically efficient systems. Instead they can have meetings, write rules, have more meetings, vote on the rules, and then add another step to a process that assumes you go to an office and fill out a form because that's how it was done the first time someone had to come up with the permitting process.

If I approach a rule maker and say "you're trying to over regulate!" then I'm challenging their raison d'etre without demonstrating understanding of their limited toolset. If, on the other hand, I say, "let me reduce your costs, save you time, and help you collect money faster" then (I believe) I'm going to have a better time. It's for that reason that I feel the "everyone vs inefficiency" argument is more likely to succeed.

> ”can't afford to be taxes (sic) more than they currently are”

This is such a weird take. You get taxed on profits. If you don’t turn a profit you pay zero tax.

Oh, and payroll is not profit.

It's obvious you've never worked or had a business.

In California, an LLC pays $800/year taxes even on zero profit; you must pay for a business license tax, and you pay "property taxes" on the equipment and fixtures in your facility. (See: https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/property-information/b... )

You also must pay for certain professional licenses, and pay for certain inspections. Just one example, I have to pay about $150/year for a "water backflow valve" inspection, even though our computer consulting office has no equipment that connects to the water supply.

I have a 20 year career of which 5 as a solo business :)

But you’re right, running a business in the US sounds _terrible_. Condolences. My assumptions were based on institutions not being hostile.

Let me guess, white collar business, fairly large gross margin, no process equipment or physical inputs/outputs except from the office printer. Was I close?

None of that carries over to the blue collar world.

California is not uniquely terrible, but in most of the country little or none of that applies.

Licensing fees, requirements for X or Y be implemented, etc, etc, that kind of stuff. At the small business level that's the stuff that's really onerous. If it were just taxes on profits far fewer people would be complaining. It's all the shit that kicks you when you're down that really hurts.

In that case the business idea wasn’t good enough. If you can’t afford the cost of doing business it’s not a viable business idea.

In the same category: “I can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage”

Every time some politician gets on a high horse about "we're gonna make errybody who's doing X also do Y" that's a cost.

A bike rack out front. A change in the ratio of hand washing stations per employee. It's all "cheap", and most of it's good stuff that's easy to justify. But it adds up in a big way. And you let this stuff run for awhile and this is how that "authentic" taco stand or used book store you loved gets pushed out of business.

This is nonresponsive to the point being made. The costs under discussion are imposed mostly by the government, they are not a thing that merely exists like the weather. Reasonable people can disagree on the amount of bureaucracy required to just sell things.

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