Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

Or rather, subscribe to commercial providers who will log contents. Along with the other shopowner’s joys (mandatory yearly electricity inspection €200 even if you didn’t change anything; €140 aircon inspection; fire inspection; etc.)

View on HN

Of all the things to complain about, fire inspections should be near the bottom of the list. All of those regulations were written in blood. I'm sympathetic to the problem of established businesses lobbying governments for more regulations to impede the rise of competitors, but that's not the origin of all regulation. Many rules exist for damn good reasons.

Remember that guy that died over bootleg cigarettes?

Everyone loves to say their pet favorite law is lItErAlLy WrItTtEn In BlOoD but laws are enforced in blood too. If someone isn't dying for lack of a law (at scale) then someone is gonna die when the police go to enforce it (at scale). It's important to remember this when deciding what issues are important enough that we feel like forcing other people to behave how we want under threat of state violence.

The UK parliamentarian in me: “Hear, hear!!” bangs on table

Excellent point. 100% agree.

Neither of those prices you quoted seem particularly high for having someone turn up and do an inspection.

Given that you're operating a public area, and things like aircon and electrics can be deadly when failing or operated incorrectly it doesn't seem too onerous a requirement.

If you're a landlord in the UK (I'm not) you need a current gas safety certificate if you've got gas appliances (most houses do, eg heating) and plumbers cost a reasonable amount of money. It's just the cost of doing business.

It’s the aggregate cost of doing business that’s being criticized though, not the reasonable cost of one or two things in isolation. Like saying this new municipal bond will only cost homeowners the price of a latte a day. You can afford that, right? Yeah, but the thing is I don’t buy twenty lattes a day which may be what the current bond obligations add up to. Now you want to make it twenty-one. The aggregate cost is what’s crushing. It’s where we get the idiom of straws breaking camels’ backs.

I guess I don't see the scale of the issue. Yes, in aggregate the costs are higher than each individual charge, and that works out at some visible % of your revenue, but it seems like all the things we've mentioned so far are necessary (inspections and such, I don't know what a "municipal bond" is). I'd be genuiently interested in hearing people's ideas to lower those costs though, as I am sure many business owners might be.

However, it seems like lowering the costs by allowing businesses to skip certain currently required things (at least of the ones mentioned) isn't going to work, as I said before, unmaintained air conditioning is dangerous (I know of at least one case where it tragically killed most of a family in a hotel, and it can make you generally sick https://patch.com/california/saratoga/dangers-badly-maintain...) and it doesn't take much to imagine how badly maintained electrics could be a problem.

Given that we can't rely on some people to maintain these things (even if they are trying to do it right) without checking up on them, and because we don't know who those people are in advance means we need to check up on everyone. It seems to me that this is just the cost of doing business, and let's face it, lots of businesses are still going despite the costs involved.

If you've got some examples of unecessary or silly things costs that governments impose on shops/cafes/businesses then I'm all ears but so far I've not heard any.

I didn't appreciate the difficulties, complexities, and inanities until I became a business owner. I would suggest you don't see it because you're not in it.

I'm not saying it's simple, I'm saying that 1) Those prices don't seem particularly steep for the work and 2) it doesn't seem like it's a good idea to cut them, so complaining about those specifically seems pointless especially as it's probably a good idea to make sure premises aren't dangerous.

In a decade there will be threads wondering why only big chain restraints are left. And they'll blame capitalism and cry for more regulation never realizing how their regulations are what made it impossible for independent shop owners to compete.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com