Hacker News Reader

Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Which just leads to things like this

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...

Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.

One of the earliest known laws humans created (almost 4000 years ago) state that if a homeowner is killed by his house caving in, the builder must be put to death. We have known since forever that you can't just let people build shitty structures.

Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or neutral. It's literally never been how human society does things.

The Code of Hammurabi. https://archive.org/details/hiddenrichessour0000hays/page/13...

Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia: "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly treatise."

There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or just old?

The notion that the free market is natural means something. I suppose organic is the real idea there, and that makes it just another appeal for using local knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.

I think the point is to avoid roofs to fall at all: that's what anti-seismic regulations are for. They saved countless lives in places like Japan. They may not prevent all deaths, but can be an effective damage containment strategy. When an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila, the majority of the survived buildings were those following regulations. Many houses built in the Middle Ages are gone.

Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.

Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.

This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.

When the officials are nearly universally corrupt, the regulations de facto do not exist.

> the regulations de facto do not exist

But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and deterring prospective startups while completely failing to stop bad players.

They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the ruler.

Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones would not have - it wasn’t even that strong an earthquake.

FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com