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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.

The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.

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> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.

Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.

Yeah, the GP's argument seems to be self disproving - the people doing this stuff on the shady side aren't able to make a living on it as they're barely scraping by.

Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.

And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.

"but that's an exception not the rule."

No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.

Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.

In rural areas where people know one another, people like yourself get sniffed out before they reach the ol boys network. If you're known as someone who seems like they would like codes, licensing, and inspections then these opportunities won't even appear to you, which works out well for both parties.

People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.

While I agree with the sentiment, population density tends to make regularization more important. In a smaller community, social proofs are highly effective. Less so as people become more commodified.

Go ahead and hire someone without a license, who cares, but if your livelihood depends on that trade, it’s probably a good idea to get a license, when the alternative is fines or worse.

Its trivial to hire unlicensed folks. Its even more trivial for any insurance company to void warranty case in case of ie electrical fire, flood from work by unlicensed plumbers etc. You do you, not everybody is living in the race-to-the-bottom mode.

Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.

This is why my house is uninsured and built totally without licenses or code inspection. Fuck paying out to some assholes just so they can void it as soon anything goes wrong.

I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.

Most people are incapable of assuming such responsibility as you described.

They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.

So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.

The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.

I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.

Lol $30k profit? On what? Good luck selling the place when it required inspections for the new owners to mortgage and insure it.

Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.

Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.

Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.

I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.

Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.

You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.

But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.

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