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The "out-of-plumb" is their set-point then. No law of nature says buildings have to be straight up. If what I described didn't happen, they'd fall over, so therefore it must happen.


To whomever thought they needed to downmod that, I recommend a study (or review) of elementary static Newtonian physics. I'm hardly making stuff up, this is Physics 101. My comment was deliberately drawn in parallel to the discussion of normal force that everyone should get when they first forget to include normal force in their force diagram, but remember gravity; if that was true, the object would fall through the table (or whatever surface), therefore clearly there is a normal force. If the forces on a building didn't stabilize it, it would therefore fall over. It sounds simple when you say it, but it's not so simple the first ten times you hand in your force diagram and get a big red mark on it, until you learn.

(Looking at the downmod pattern, though, there's someone who isn't liking the idea that regulation may not be perfect, and expressing that with downmods. Interestingly, my real point is that it can't be perfect for mathematical reasons, which is actually a completely different argument from whether or not it can improve things. But you do need to set out from a policy perspective with the goal of improving, not perfecting, because plans based on perfecting things always cause more trouble when they go wrong. The plan has no slack left over.)




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