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Comment by carodgers | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's more that he disregarded residential zoning and opened a school for 30 kids, with a full docket of “residential support staff” including “childcare, culinary, personal assistants, property management, and security" without any permits.

If your next door neighbor opened a 30+ person school or other large business next to your property without any permits and against what your neighborhood was zoned for you might not be happy.

Zoning on average is a blight.

Industrial / High Rise is the only thing that should need permitting.

Fourplex / Duplex / Single Family / Small Offices / Schools should not.

Schools, kindergartens and daycares cause a shitload of noise from the children playing and the traffic. Small offices also induce lots of traffic, and small merchants even more.

You do not want to have that outside of zoning control because that is how you end up with a road designed to handle the need of a dozen homes (i.e. 24-30 cars a day) suddenly dealing with ten times that load - not just because of noise, smell and traffic jams but especially because road surfacing quality is usually "the cheapest you can get away with for the expected load", the road will go bad way faster than expected.

Zoning is not your enemy, zoning is your friend. Particularly if you value peace and roads you can drive on.

Okay but if you came home and your house was surrounded by a fucking school and pick up and drop off is happening you'd be pissed.

Let's all just be for real for one second please.

Nobody made a school illegal. Schools have to meet certain standards, whether educational or planning.

Isn't that contradictory? If a school doesn't meet certain standards presumably it would be illegal?

The concept of a school wouldn't be illegal. The people running the school would be committing crimes or at least be in some level of legal trouble with the city council, state or federal law. They could either be fined or go to prison, or they could get the relevant paperwork sorted out.

> The concept of a school wouldn't be illegal.

Yes it is, you explicitly said it would be illegal if you didn't get permission from the government. What you meant to say was that "The concept of a government-approved school wouldn't be illegal." which is very different from the concept of any school being legal, and also redundant because by definition a government-approved school is a legal school, since governments hold a monopoly on the legal system.

If a hospital doesn't follow proper procedures and local law, the hospital isn't illegal. The actions of the people making decisions are the crimes.

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> What a load of BS.

You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Yes, correct, the only people opening schools should be governments or highly skilled private actors who proved they are highly skilled.

Otherwise we get children who grow up into neanderthals and the country goes to shit. I quite like living somewhere with a decent literacy rate. Let's keep it that way.

if you love freedom so much, you should move to Somalia! no government to tax and regulate your life!

Ah, yes, the false dichotomy.

Stop peddling government that sucks so much and people wouldn't hate it.

It's not even about the taxes and the regulation. It's about the de-facto inequality under the law masquerading as "regulation" that I can't stand.

Libertarians seem to hate freedom when it's offered to them.

This isn't a political spectrum problem. It is a people problem. You can live in a successful society with high touch government, or low touch government. They can both work, The problem with the former is that government power attracts people like you who have some end (keeping Zuck down or whatever) you want that people don't agree with (hence why you must co-opt existing institutions rather than build them) and so reasonable safety regulation turns into protectionism and industry handouts, etc, etc.

Letting industry police itself gives you Boeings falling out of the sky.

I'm not attracted to power myself thank you very much. It's too much effort trying to help society and having people like you wreck it. As you can probably not tell, I don't work well with idiots.

Imagine being so sure you can do whatever TF you want that you ignore the law and build a school where one is not allowed to be built.

How does this hurt you if your kids don't go there?

It doesn't hurt me personally but the article opens with the sentence "Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic. An unlicensed school named after the Zuckerbergs’ pet chicken tipped them over the edge."

Sounds like a lot of the problem was caused by cars, which shouldn't be necessary for a school, ideally.

The kids have to school and back home somehow, and ditto for the employees. Drive by a local school when it ends the day and marvel at the parents in line to collect their children.

Yeah I’m just grousing about how rotten design is when kids need to be driven to school, and if people don’t like traffic the solution is to forbid cars, not schools.

that's a culture/car/public-transport problem, not a school problem. in a place where cars are the only way to get around you can't have any popular place without cars.

Some people have the capacity to think something is wrong even if they are not affected.

Good fences make good neighbors

Kids will slam car doors at dropoff/pickup. It's pretty annoying. I used to live around the corner from a school and parents would use our street for it. They can also cause unexpected heavy traffic if they have some special event.

Seriously? Beyond the unaccounted safety and traffic situation, you've obviously never lived next to a school. Kids are loud AF!

I lived right behind an elementary school (playgound was kitty-corner to my fence) two houses ago. During recess and lunch time, the kids were so loud I had to shout to hear people next to me inside my house.

...but forget all that: What you're advocating for is lawlessness. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it! Don't just violate it and screw over your neighbors in the mean time.

When billionaires break the law, we all suffer. I'll let you try to figure out why. you seem like a smart chap.

Your complaint amounts to "the law is not popular enough to be easily enforced against someone who has the means to defend themselves out of principal"

Repeal the law. Then nobody is breaking it.

That's an odd conclusion to come to from the premise. It's actually an argument against billionaires.

Weird take; Mark is literally a ruler, and the people are defending against his right to enforce his own rules??

I think when people think of the other side, they think of HOA's and their petty rules. So its how people feel about HOAs vs how people feel about the CEO of a social media company.

Now, the article claims MZ didn't file the proper permits. But this reads like a hit piece so take those claims about someone with a raft of lawyers not filing the proper permits with a grain of salt. What this isn't is some sort of political dispute that effects any of the rest of us. Its sort of rich people using PR as leverage in a dispute with someone who is really really rich. Nothing to see here, move along...

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