zlacker

>>NaOH+(OP)
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.

I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.

Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.

I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...

It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.

And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.

>>radu_f+px
Personally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks.

To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.

With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.