Almost anyone will accept a 50% quality decrease for a 99% cost decrease. The only reasons I'm not living in a stack of cardboard boxes for $1 rent are that it's illegal, and the police won't protect it from break-ins.

> The only reasons I'm not living in a stack of cardboard boxes for $1 rent are that it's illegal

My initial reaction to reading this is not "oh great analogy", it's "please have higher standards for your quality of living"

With the money you wouldn't be paying in rent, you could build a heck of a lot of stuff. Cardboard box is a metaphorical starting point. You could build some kind of little wooden box vehicle and travel the country. If you stayed in town you could have takeout for every meal too and still have money left over. The point was not paying rent to the corrupt system, the point wasn't the exact living specifications.

You can go and live in cardboard boxes right now for free. Why aren't you? Being technically legal or not is besides the point - there are places where it is tolerated.

>You can go and live in cardboard boxes right now for free. Why aren't you?

this is why i try to avoid analogies whenever i can. we've cycled through like 3 different iterations of the analogy in 5 comments, just to land on this question.

It's not tolerated anywhere I've been. I'd go to prison.

You're thinking with your engineering brain.

For corporations, sales, probability and feature release cycles take priority over maintainability or code quality. AI is allowing businesses to build features faster than ever, so management is happy.

By the time maintainability issues hit, they've either pivoted, raised more capital or can throw money at the problem.

It's a good thing structural and civil engineers don't design infrastructure this way.