To Joel Laseter, I couldn't agree more. I do as Joel does and have yet to have a problem.
To John Robison, you have hit the nail on the head. Here are the stats:
1,400,000 Licensed Attorneys in the US
1,000,000 Licensed Doctors of Medicine in the US
665,000 CPA's in the US
110,000 Licensed Architects in the US
With 50% of all licensed Architects belonging to the AIA (55,000) and National Dues set at $271 for 2018, that means National AIA collected $14.9M. That is not much money to operate the national trade association for what is certainly a venerable and respected professional group.
By contrast, Mother Jones magazine reliably places NRA paid membership at 3.1 million (based on their offer of free magazine subscriptions, which, unlike the unreported NRA membership, is actually reported in order to justify ad rates) out of 75 million gun owners, with an annual membership rate of $40/YR and less if you join for multiple years at one time.
So in other words, the most feared lobby in America buys its Congressional power for $124M/YR (or less). Would you suppose that the AIA is 1/8th as powerful in Congress as the NRA? I wouldn't.
And just to compare with Architectural employment at 185,000, there are 263,223
full-time jobs related to the firearm industry - 1.5 times the number of Architectural employees and 8 times the financial support for the agenda of their constituency. But forget the NRA. What about compared to doctors,attorneys or CPA's who all out number us by roughly 10:1, or 20:1 if you only count AIA members?
But the real killer is, over the years we have paid a fortune for attorneys to align our documents with each other, and keep them aligned, all the better to protect us from contradictory or spurious language that exposes us to claims and losses and exploitation. So when we hit a software snag, our solution is to abandon millions of dollars of legal effort in order to revert to a contractual version that is
MAYBE more user-friendly and
MAYBE still coordinated with whatever the engineers and contractors are deploying.
Let's quit kidding ourselves, there are simply too few of us to financially support the kind of benefits to which we imagine we are entitled.
Sorry.
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Phil Scott AIA
Principal/CFO
GSC Architects
Austin TX
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-21-2018 12:46
From: David Sassano
Subject: On Line contract software
Am I the only one whose blood pressure raises significantly every time I log on to the AIA on-line contract software?
I called today because several projects that I am trying to prepare G704s are no longer appearing. I was cut off from phone tech support twice.
The web page, aia.org/documents, which is suppose to be the on-lineknowledge page they ask you to try, returns a page not found error.
Does anyone else struggle with the basic functionality of on-line contracts: drop downs not working, buggy editing, contacts not populating, hard to read text boxes, project files being removed with no notice (!!!!) ?
I have sent several emails which have gone un-responded to.
Who is behind this software, and how can we improve it?
Or is it just me?
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David Sassano AIA
Owner
Herring & Trowbridge Architects
Leesburg VA
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