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posted by mrpg on Wednesday February 28 2018, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the dont-care-I-work-in-a-vacuum dept.

There's a better way to use a standing desk

[...] some research suggests that even regular exercise—as much as 60 minutes per day—is not enough to offset the effects of sedentary workdays.

A standing desk, seems like a great way to combat this problem, since it's unlikely that computer use will decrease anytime soon. But turns out that when you do the opposite of sitting—standing for incredibly long periods of the day—well, that's bad for you, too. A highly-cited study out last year in the Journal of Epidemiology on 7,000 office workers found that, "Occupations involving predominantly standing were associated with an approximately 2-fold risk of heart disease compared with occupations involving predominantly sitting."

Alan Taylor, a physiology expert at Nottingham University, told the Chicago Tribune that the expansion and popularity of standing desks has been largely driven not by scientific evidence, but rather by popularity and profit.

Welcome to medical science.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Wednesday February 28 2018, @09:34AM (22 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Wednesday February 28 2018, @09:34AM (#645057) Journal

    As with any large organisation, the whole idea was to make sure nothing ruined the status quo. "Nothing" meant "nothing broken"

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday February 28 2018, @02:46PM (21 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @02:46PM (#645154) Journal

    Yes, I too noticed the similarity between corporate and public administration in regards with the bureaucracy.
    The way I see it, whoever thinks today** "the private sector is more efficient in resource allocation" is either delusional or haven't ever worked for a corporation.

    ---

    ** it may have happened in the past, when the small businesses and competition was the norm. Not today, no.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 28 2018, @04:08PM (13 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @04:08PM (#645208) Journal

      The way I see it, whoever thinks today** "the private sector is more efficient in resource allocation" is either delusional or haven't ever worked for a corporation.

      More likely, they've worked in both a corporation and a government agency. Key word is "worked".

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:21PM (12 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:21PM (#645260)

        That is some lame apologetics, but then again it is you so in golf terminology you get "par".

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:28PM (11 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:28PM (#645267) Journal
          What is there to defend? "I was a corporate slacker in a group of corporate slackers. Therefore, corporations are just as inefficient as governments even though I haven't actually bothered to compare the two on any sort of basis, rational or otherwise." The work ethic just shines through on these posts.
          • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:02PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:02PM (#645429)

            I was a corporate slacker in a group of corporate slackers.

            I have this great documentary for you to watch, it's called "office space".
            One of the main characters is a non-slacker who takes a lot of approaches, ethical or not, to find his place in life while still working for Initech.

            There's also the Dilbert periodical publication, I'm sure the PHB and Catbert are so recognized by many because they epitomize something they know from around.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:16PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:16PM (#645442) Journal
              That's so convincing. I steer you to the tome, "Atlas Shrugged" which in addition to being a great way to kill mutant cockroaches, documents the downfall of civilization that came when lazy people were in charge. It spins a different narrative.
          • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:10PM (8 children)

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:10PM (#645475) Journal

            "I was a corporate slacker in a group of corporate slackers

            As you seem to get personal, how do you explain your time wasting on S/N?
            Or is it a paid work for you?

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:27AM (7 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:27AM (#645574) Journal

              As you seem to get personal, how do you explain your time wasting on S/N?

              I'm entertaining myself on my own dime. So not wasting time from my point of view nor wasting someone else's resources.

              And your anecdote about working at a place where you didn't have to work is akin to the people claiming there isn't climate change because they see snow out their window. Local point of view is not a global point of view.

              • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:48AM (6 children)

                by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:48AM (#645595) Journal

                And your anecdote about working at a place where you didn't have to work

                My memory is perhaps failing me, I can't remember to have shared an anecdote saying this.
                Or was your interpretation capability that failed?

                --
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
                • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:10AM (5 children)

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:10AM (#645599) Journal

                  My memory is perhaps failing me, I can't remember to have shared an anecdote saying this.

                  How about here [soylentnews.org] where you brag about your arduous and numerous smoke breaks? Or your comments [soylentnews.org] about trolling poor, defenseless khallows on company time?

                  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:24AM (4 children)

                    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:24AM (#645602) Journal

                    How about here [soylentnews.org] where you brag about your arduous and numerous smoke breaks?

                    Yeap, failure on your interpretation capabilities.
                    How about the contrast between walking a mile to smoke 8 cigs in between within the context of "active life"?

                    Even more:

                    • where's any statement of the total time I'm dedicating per day to work in that "anecdote?
                    • 200m walk for 5 minutes is strolling pace - so a total of 40 minutes break per day? Do you find it excessive?
                    • You know what a work break is? That period between two session of work? With 8 breaks, it makes 9 sessions of work, right? Take a wild guess about the duration of each, multiply by 9 and see if I brag about slacking
                    --
                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @09:54AM (1 child)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @09:54AM (#645698)

                      And what's so wrong with taking breaks?

                      You're doing it wrong if your country requires many people to work many hours without slacking, who are barely making it and no significant reserves - savings, healthcare, unemployment insurance.

                      That's not much progress over wild animals living without reserves and backup plans - at least they don't have to work as many hours to live. Maybe our toys are cooler but still pointless if you don't have much time or energy left to play with them.

                      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:16AM

                        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:16AM (#645703) Journal

                        And what's so wrong with taking breaks?

                        I actually find them beneficial [soylentnews.org] and aparently so do my managers.

                        Some others seems to interpret them as low work ethics [soylentnews.org]. I prefer to think that's their problem and it's theirs to deal with.

                        --
                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:45PM (1 child)

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:45PM (#645840) Journal
                      I still see "slacker" here with your lazy arguments.

                      We now have your story about a big fight [soylentnews.org] to get reimbursement for a $200+ purchase. Sounds like more slacker thinking. I'm going to waste a massive amount of my employer's resources just so I can get a little bit of money back.

                      Now let's consider the post [soylentnews.org] that set me off in the first place. It takes a certain type of personality to lazily extrapolate from a very shallow life experience to the entire private sector (remember you're claiming in that post that a non-delusional person can figure the private sector is just as wasteful as the public sector by working at a single private company!). Well, I've worked for private sector too and I just haven't had those sort of experiences. I've worked for for a few hundred million dollar failed project too that was part of a major company (Hewlett Packard BTW) with a lot of bureaucracy. It lasted only four years before they pulled the plug. So yes, I've seen that kind of waste before and I've also seen it get cleaned up because they couldn't afford to run it any more.

                      So yes, there's some waste in the private sector - but let's go see some real waste.

                      The US government had for the period 1949 to 2015, a National Raisin Reserve [wikipedia.org], which was established after the Second World War to support prices for raisins in a time of glut. Here's a typical story [reason.com] about a lawsuit by raisin farmers, Marvin and Laura Horne which made it to the US Supreme Court and which ended the program.

                      Which brings us back to California raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne. In 1949, the Department of Agriculture issued a "Marketing Order Regulating the Handling of Raisins Produced from Grapes Grown in California." The order required raisin handlers to surrender a certain percentage of each year's crop to the federal authorities. Those surrendered raisins would be known as the "reserve" and they would become the property of the Raisin Administrative Committee, an arm of the USDA staffed by bureaucrats and handlers selected by the secretary of agriculture.

                      The bottom line was the same as before [article gave similar examples that had been implemented in earlier years]: Create an "orderly" market by controlling the production and sale of goods. Except this time the farmers weren't told how much to grow; instead, the handlers were told how much of the crop they were required to give to the government. Once the government had title, the RAC was authorized to use the raisin reserve for various purposes of its own. For example, it could give the raisins away for free to school lunch programs. Or it could sell the raisins to exporters for resale in foreign markets and use the proceeds to fund its own operations. If any proceeds remained after that, the handlers would get a pro rata cut.

                      Here's a concrete example. In 2003–04, the RAC demanded 30 percent of the crop, which amounted to more than 89,000 tons of raisins. It gave away 2,312 tons to school lunch and other government programs and it sold 86,732 tons for export. The RAC pocketed $111,242,849 from that sale, or $1,249.30 per ton. It then spent all of the proceeds on its own operations. In return, raisin growers got nothing.

                      From the feds' point of view, this might make sense. Raisins are kept off the domestic market, prices are tightly controlled, and a government agency makes a few bucks along the way. But there's a major problem with the government's approach. According to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government must pay just compensation when it takes private property for a public use. And as far as Marvin and Laura Horne were concerned, the raisin marketing order was nothing less than an uncompensated taking of their valuable property. "It was a theft," Marvin Horne told Reason TV in July 2013. "The reserve was nothing but highway robbery."

                      So beginning in 2002, the Hornes fought back. First, they reorganized their business in order to take advantage of what they believed to be a legal loophole. Under the 1949 raisin marketing order, handlers are the ones required to surrender the yearly reserve. To avoid this requirement, the Hornes stopped doing business with traditional handlers and instead purchased new equipment that allowed them to sort and package all of their raisins on their own. Newly reorganized as farmer-handlers, the Hornes maintained that they were now exempt from the law and therefore refused to set aside any reserve raisins in 2002–03, and again refused to set aside any reserve in 2003–04. They sold all of their crops on the open market during those years.

                      The federal government was not pleased. The USDA demanded the reserve raisins or their cash equivalent and in 2004 initiated legal proceedings against the Hornes. As a legal defense, the Hornes argued that the government's entire program was unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

                      A series of preliminary victories for the government followed. The Hornes lost first in 2006 before an administrative law judge, who ruled that they counted as handlers and were therefore bound by the marketing order. The Hornes next lost in 2009 before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, which rejected their constitutional defense. In 2012, they lost twice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. First a three-judge panel rejected their Takings Clause arguments. Then, when the Hornes petitioned to have the case reheard by a full panel of 9th Circuit judges, the court switched gears and decided that it had no jurisdiction to rule on their Takings Clause claims in the first place. "We find no constitutional infirmity in either the Raisin Marketing Order or the Secretary's application of it to the Hornes," the 9th Circuit ruled, "and indeed lack jurisdiction to find such an infirmity on takings grounds."

                      That dual loss at the 9th Circuit set the stage for the Hornes' ultimate triumph before the U.S. Supreme Court [in 2015].

                      So we have a government-mandated organization that takes raisins from farmers (30% of the crop in the example above), does whatever it wants with them (including selling them in competition with the farmers), and then sucks up over a hundred million dollars for operation expenses. And this bureaucratic machinery of 64 years was all set up to address a temporary market imbalance in 1949. Notice how it took over a decade for the farmers whose crops were being stolen by this bureaucracy to finally get it stopped and they had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to make that happen.

                      So why did raisin farmers go with this for so long? Because it created a cartel that allowed them to sell raisins that they kept at prices above what they could in a normal market. This is the degree of public sector bureaucracy that you have to deal with. A program created to address a temporary problem back in 1949 was still sucking air and costing the US government and its citizens a lot of money over 60 years later. Any private business with those kinds of losses would be long dead. Similarly, any private business with that kind of cartel power would have been broken up long ago by anti-trust regulators.

                      Private businesses can't afford to create a large resource inefficiency like the Raisin Administrative Committee and keep it running for 60+ years (it would still be running strong today, if it weren't for that lawsuit!). That is how the degree of bureaucracy matters (which is a thing you claimed was irrelevant).

                      Nor is this program somehow unique. The laws which created the RAC also created numerous other agricultural abominations, many which still exist today. Nor is this sort of thing unique to the US. The entire developed world has stuff like this in agriculture, construction, aerospace, transportation, and many other sectors.

                      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @05:10PM

                        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @05:10PM (#645851) Journal

                        We now have your story about a big fight [soylentnews.org] to get reimbursement for a $200+ purchase. Sounds like more slacker thinking. I'm going to waste a massive amount of my employer's resources just so I can get a little bit of money back.

                        There was never a big fight, it was a question that received a negative answer and that was the end of it. Wasn't going to waste my lazy slacker time for an amount I'm smoking in a week. As slacker as I might be, I had enough working ethics to deliver what was needed by the product without causing my team spit blood for the lack of a horseshoe nail.
                        I however consider outside working ethics for a multinational corporation to expect me, their employee, to put my money down to do a job they benefit from the results of.

                        I still see "slacker" here with your lazy arguments...
                        t takes a certain type of personality to lazily extrapolate from a very shallow life experience...

                        You see what you want to see and that is that. I promised I'll defer to your vast experience doing the comparisons, not interested, thanks, I'm going to "slack off" in my good tradition.

                        --
                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:28PM (6 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:28PM (#645444) Journal

      The way I see it, whoever thinks today** "the private sector is more efficient in resource allocation" is either delusional or haven't ever worked for a corporation.

      I think there's another way to compare the moral equivalence going on here. In one sector, the private sector, spending millions on people who work inefficiently is the sort of waste that goes on. In the public world, it's spending $400 billion on a terrible fighter jet that's supposed to be a cornerstone of a US defense system.

      So sure, if a million dollars is little different than a trillion dollars to you, then the private versus public waste can seem much the same. Similarly, if losing a few percent of some company's profit seems much the same as losing a future major war. When you can't differentiate scale or consequences, then sure, these things can appear equally wasteful.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:04PM (5 children)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:04PM (#645473) Journal

        I'll defer moral equivalent comparisons of bureaucracy to your vaste experience.

        My observation is that large organisations will develop bureaucracy over time and, at equivalent time frames, those two will be indistinguishable in the manifested ways of behaviour. Sort of a qualitative observation.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:01AM (4 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:01AM (#645558) Journal

          My observation is that large organisations will develop bureaucracy over time and, at equivalent time frames, those two will be indistinguishable in the manifested ways of behaviour. Sort of a qualitative observation.

          There's not much point to observations that don't distinguish. Here, look at what you mentioned: "develop bureaucracy", "ways of behavior". First, "bureaucracy" is not a bit you set. A small business with some paper pushers on the payroll has a bureaucracy. So does the California DMV. They are not both equivalent in their degree, size, or complexity of bureaucracy just because they both have bureaucracy. Second, no one has claimed that private side bureaucrats behave differently. Rather the claim is that private-side bureaucracies can't afford to be as inefficient as their public counterparts - their employers run out of money and go bankrupt. A hotel can't afford to let its guests sit ignored for an hour while a typical government bureaucracy can - where else are they going to go? A business with a slim profit margin can't afford a $400 billion boondoggle like the US Air Force can.

          • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:06AM (3 children)

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:06AM (#645715) Journal

            A small business with some paper pushers on the payroll has a bureaucracy.

            That's bookkeeping, a healthy habit for a small business without too much fat to cushion hard falls.

            Rather the claim is that private-side bureaucracies can't afford to be as inefficient as their public counterparts - their employers run out of money and go bankrupt.

            And yet, they do exactly so. Because in the mind of a bureaucrat, they are doing nothing wrong - come hell or high water, they are just exercising the authority of the position they were higher into. After all, it's not his money, it's the business money they are playing with

            As you seem to like "anecdotes", here's one with the power of a typical "for the want of a nail" example.
            Some 10 years ago, before renting in the cloud was ubiquitous, we were running our own ESX Server as a host for the test bed machines.
            Functional/integration tests have higher time than unit-tests when it comes to the setup/tear down phases, so we relied on capturing VM snapshots with the system in the necessary preconditions, thus the "setup" was just "revert machine to snapshot X" and tear-down was "don't care" - with the price of one-off investment in capturing those VM snapshots, we were saving heaps of time from the testing of each build.

            Ah, yes, there was another price to pay: disk space. Which space was running shorter as the automated test coverage increased.
            Until one day, that space was starting to run out. 1TB HDD at the time was around $200-something.
            And we waited for the approval for that acquisition to bounce between 3 continents for 3 level of approvals - you see, the acquisition was falling in the CAPEX category. After a 1.5 month, the HDD space on the server ran out, and I took money from my pocket to buy those HDDes and throw them inside the server (against the internal regulation) to get the good work going - that's what a manager does, keeps the ball rolling, isn't it?
            The bureaucratic approval for the acquisition came after 4 months and, by God, the acquisition dept both them.

            This is bureaucracy - the exercise of the authority/power (as with the case of any -cracy) within the rules of "position responsibilities", in complete disregards to the context and the cost of following the rules. The paper-pushers in a small business don't qualify.

            And, whaddaya know? It was indeed an "efficient use of resources" case, except they 'managed those resources out of my pocket'. Not that they took advantage of it, 'cause they made a now-unneeded acquisition anyway. Rules are rules and none of them permitted the disbursement of the sum that came from my pocket.

            Yeah, you are right - the organization is now dead. Along those $200+ from mine, it wasted some other hundred of millions from the shareholders pockets during the time it took the monster to die. Such a wonderful "efficient use of resources" example indeed.

            So please spare me of useless comparisons of "degrees of bureaucracy", it's hair-splitting.
            Bureaucracy is bureaucracy no matter where it happens and large organizations are prone to suffer from it.

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:47PM (2 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:47PM (#645811) Journal

              Yeah, you are right - the organization is now dead. Along those $200+ from mine, it wasted some other hundred of millions from the shareholders pockets during the time it took the monster to die. Such a wonderful "efficient use of resources" example indeed.

              And yet, I can point to numerous examples of government waste that are two or more orders of magnitude larger than that one. Further, why did you even bother with the bureaucracy? It's clearly not meant for reimbursing one-time $200 purchases. You had all the authority you needed to do what you did.

              I bet your local government squandered more of your money than your employers ever did by at least an order of magnitude.

              So please spare me of useless comparisons of "degrees of bureaucracy", it's hair-splitting. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy [...]

              Except that it's highly relevant when one makes, as you did, "qualitative" assertions about the bureaucracy. Again, bureaucracy is not a bit you set.

              • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:12PM (1 child)

                by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:12PM (#645821) Journal

                And yet, I can point to numerous examples of government waste that are two or more orders of magnitude larger than that one.

                And yet, I can point to two or more orders of magnitude number of enterprises doing the same, dying and wiping out a total value of the same order of magnitude as a single government.

                --
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
                • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @05:45PM

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 01 2018, @05:45PM (#645868) Journal

                  And yet, I can point to two or more orders of magnitude number of enterprises doing the same, dying and wiping out a total value of the same order of magnitude as a single government.

                  No, you can't. First, value is not a resource. It's a collective opinion. So stuff like the dotcom bubble collapse of 2000-2001 or the real estate crisis of 2007-2008 aren't waste of resources - the build up to them are as is the subsequent reshuffling of resources away from the former bubble markets. But that only takes up a portion of the valuation and the whole affair only lasts for a limited time. For example, Pets.com [wikipedia.org], a famous casualty of the dotcom burst, had at the time of its IPO in 2000 a net valuation of almost $300 million ($290 million with share price of $11, shortly rose to somewhere just around $400 million at a share at a share price of $14 and then fell like a rock), but it actually had investment of $121 million [businessinsider.com] and raised an additional $86 million in the IPO. It then died less than a year later with something like $23 million cash [cnet.com] on hand. It never had $400 million in resources to match its valuation and hence, never wasted $400 million. And of the money it did squander, some was recovered.

                  Second, dying and wiping out value in a quick flash is far less wasteful than creating a lingering economic inefficiency that lasts many decades which is a common government agency outcome. In the former case, we have a dispersal of resources followed by a massive shuffling of resources following the revaluation crash. That's inefficient, but often means that they quickly shift to somewhere else where they can be used more productively and even in the midst of the mess were redistributing resources to outside the problem area.

                  But public sector inefficiencies are more pernicious and persistent with effects that often stretch outside of the program itself. Consider my raisin cartel [soylentnews.org] example from the US. In addition to the direct costs of the program over a 66 year period, we have a legal market manipulation which drove up the cost of raisins for a lot of people and opportunity cost - the organization is a reactionary force inhibiting innovation in raisin growing and marketing and of course, employs people to break markets rather than do something productive. It cast a long shadow for a long time.

                  Finally, some of the waste associated with the private sector actually comes from the government. For example, following the real estate crisis, some repossessed real estate was kept off the market while the housing market recovered. The wastehere is in unused property and was encouraged by government accounting rules which allowed banks to keep real estate off of markets for up to seven years while valuing (for purposes of establishing the bank's reserve) the real estate at its pre-crisis price. And of course, much of the legal and bureaucratic burden of a business comes from conformity with poorly thought out government regulation and intervention.