Here's a fun story from today about housing costs: in addition to finding out that I need a seismic engineer to build a small detached secondary suite, as well as the energy efficiency engineer who has to be paid to sign off on the plans as well... apparently I also need to get water treatment both for the existing building on my mother's lot AND the new building, including chlorination! Have we ever had a problem with the water in the hundred years my extended family has lived around here? No, of course not, but why not inflate already absurd building costs by taking on another 5 figures?
It's this stuff that drives me nuts. Someone in a government role somewhere talked to someone in industry who stands to make a bunch of money off of this being a requirement, and now it's a requirement. Gee, I wonder why housing costs are so high! It's not just market forces.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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