> You keep talking about cost-benefit, but the whole reason we have laws like the ADA is because people will not make accommodations, because the math does not work out.

There are actually two pieces of this. One is that some people wouldn't make the accommodations even though it would make economic sense simply because they never considered it. But this could be addressed by, for example, requiring builders to explicitly offer to build the accommodations even if the owner is allowed to decline.

But you want to talk about the case where it doesn't make economic sense. The business is going to spend $1000 in order for customers to buy $50 worth of merchandise. This should be clearly crazy to you. The customer is not receiving $950 worth of value from this arrangement. If you asked the customer whether they would rather have the accommodation in that one shop or the $950, they're going to pick the money.

> And of course a mom-and-pop isn't held to the same standard as Wal-Mart... that is already the case.

Sometimes. And only because cost/benefit has prevailed in those cases. It's a clear case of people asking for something irrational and then clawing it back when the destructive force is actually brought to bear.

> What? No. I can barely parse the other things you're trying to say about efficiency. The world does not work that way. If it did, we wouldn't have this discussion, because everyone would do the "right thing" and allocate surplus resources towards "improving peoples' lives". They don't.

Of course they do, they just improve the lives of different people. They use it to pay for their employees' health insurance and send their own kids to college and make a donation to a local shelter. They buy themselves a sandwich. The money goes somewhere. It's not like they're setting it on fire, which is what building accommodations that are never used is equivalent to.

Realize that you're combining two pieces. The first is that money should be taken from businesses and used to help the disabled, and the second is that the money should be spent on specific accommodations. Since the things are combined it looks like the options are "spend the money on poor cost/benefit accommodations" or "the businesses keep the money". Which are two options, but there are two more: We could build the accommodations but get the money from somewhere else, or we could tax businesses in order to help the disabled but help them in some other way.

The first of those makes a good thought experiment. Imagine the money to build the accommodations came directly from those who need them. Would they still want the same accommodations as are currently required, if they each personally had to pay their proportion of the cost? Clearly not. The ones with poor cost/benefit ratios would be objected to, and there would be no one to oppose the objection because the beneficiaries would be the ones objecting.

That doesn't work if the idea was to be charitable, but I think it makes a certain point that leads directly into the last option. Suppose we've already decided we're going to take money from businesses and use it to help such people. We clearly shouldn't spend it on something that they themselves would not have spent it on if it had been their own money, because we know that those cases benefit them less than would just giving them the money as cold hard cash.

> Read everything I wrote again. You're not spending any resources (in software) except a few extra keystrokes. This stuff is not hard. This is what it sounds like to me: you're trying to justify being a lazy, inconsiderate jerk.

You can't have it both ways. Being lazy implies reduced effort. If you're a small business with so few customers that approximately none of them need special accommodations then you're spending your very limited resources to help no one.

You've made the argument that you're going to have to spend more later when you have to do it over. But it's more likely that you fail before that ever happens. And in the less likely event you do succeed, then you're successful and can easily afford that cost.

There is a common wrongthink among people who believe they're helping some people that if you don't want to help them in exactly the same way, even if that way is demonstrably less effective than helping in other ways, then you're some kind of inconsiderate bastard who deserves to be shot. Try not to be that guy.