Exactly. Answer: How universities of yore have “prepared” founders thus far. The premise of PG’s otherwise insightful prose is on shaky ground - or at the very least - debatable.

(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)

I’d expect (which I grant is selfish/entitled) someone with 12k+ well-earned karma points to set a high bar for tone and constructive discourse. This feels unreasonably antagonistic.

I think you may have missed the point. Law enforcement isn’t some 100% effective panacea. And getting to the point of a class action = a lot endured. Which is OP’s point.

Step one is never a panacea. But don’t show with a giant list of problems without trying anything. The perception given anyway.

You don’t know that they didn’t try anything, it’s a bad faith assumption to try to downplay their points.

As they say on stack overflow, don’t show up with only a question, show what you tried.

Also, I understand bad luck happens but that is not a normal list, a dozen things went wrong and not a single word about how they tried to improve their situation. All of them are not the fault of “construction” of new homes, which can be, and often is accomplished with less disruption.

If this were the typical reality we’d have to shut down home-building for good as too disruptive.

And so begins the enshittification.

I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.

Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!

Heartbreaking. Sorry for your loss.

You’re self-questioning and self-reflective. Totally not worried for you or by you. Keep it up.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.

I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.

And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.

Waymo solved San Francisco. Non-trivial, imo. Is London more complex?

This is an evolved view. Let’s put achievements on currency, not humans. Of course, this is no panacea - “achievement” is ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation, and therefore political capture. But it’s a step forward.