The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.

Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.

Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.

> …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.

Where is this not banned?

And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.

No, the ban is because an architect thinks they're icky, sent in a request to ban it, and the building code people take any suggestion to ban anything that anyone sends them. Safety regulations are written in blood, you know!

https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3n...

The ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants.

The GP's point is that levelheaded cost-benefit analyses on things like that seem to escape regulators, and everything is greatly skewed towards "it's worth it if it saves even one life".

Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?

We can economically build buildings with windows on all the bedrooms. That has virtually zero impact on the final price to residents so complaining about it is a total red herring. The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes.

You can easily build them without windowless bedrooms, yes.

The problem is you can't easily convert office buildings to housing without these, because the floor plates are too different.

That's only one of many problems with converting office building to residential. While a few conversions have succeeded, usually it's cheaper to just demolish the building and start from scratch. Allowing windowless bedrooms won't change that.