Civil engineering rules are mostly written in blood and costly and dangerous accidents. At least in my country. If somewhere else inspectors don't provide actual value, they should either get regulated or good riddance and AI might actually be better. I feel old, sigh...

▲

bigwheels a day ago | parent | next [-]

That's not what we're talking about. By all means, follow the structural engineer's specification. But if you've ever submitted plans to a city to build a home, there is endless nonsense full of red tape: Drainage plan, soil analysis, tree survey, topographical survey, environmental site assessment, wind analysis, noise assessment, and more.

Sometimes these things make sense, but a lot of the time the work was already recently completed 3 years ago and yet they'll make you do it again. Last month I paid $3,900.00 to get 3 tiny trees and one medium sized oak surveyed here in the Bay Area. It's really about politics and control- the city wants to make a bunch of fake jobs and collect very high fees along the way.

▲

teeray a day ago | parent | next [-]

Most of that stuff is important. That is, unless you like sewage pouring into the aquifers.

▲

projct a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nearly everything you listed is designed to prevent your decisions, or changes to your property that haven't been identified yet, from harming you or people around you.

Removing a requirement might just leave someone else paying a much higher price, potentially with their property, their clean water, or even their life.

	▲	bigwheels a day ago \| parent [-]
		To be clear, the utility of these processes can be good - but it also gets perverted into weaponization. Local municipalities frequently deploy these regulations arbitrarily as a feature, not a bug, creating systemic friction to artificially create "jobs", drive up development costs, and suppress development.

▲

mindslight a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The fundamental difficulty with regulations is that they've been written to apply the same to uncorrelated well-meaning individuals as to correlated constructively-malevolent corpos, based on some definition of "fairness" promulgated by the corpos. The things you've listed all seem pointless to you, because you're just trying to execute some small time project to make your own individual life better, not drive tens of millions of dollars of externality-producing economic activity through a loophole.

So the real answer is to reframe laws as applying to commercial operations, projects over a certain size, non-homeowners, etc. But of course the corpos cry foul over this, and would much rather you put your effort into working to repeal all regulations so they can operate without constraints.

Pragmatically, this is why I live in an area where if I wake up and decide I don't like a particular tree, it can be on the ground within a couple of hours. And most of that time is eating breakfast.

▲

Schiendelman a day ago | parent | prev [-]

In the US, local inspectors are kind of like taxi medallion holders. They technically get you where you're going, but the standards are splintered from International Building Code and the whole process makes buildings far less safe than prefab components would be.