  While ubiquitous in supersymmetric and string theory models, inflationary
scenarios near an inflection point in the scalar potential generically require
a severe fine-tuning of a priori unrelated supersymmetry breaking effects. We
show that this can be significantly alleviated by the inclusion of dissipative
effects that damp the inflaton's motion and produce a nearly-thermal radiation
bath. We focus on the case where the slow-rolling inflaton directly excites
heavy virtual modes that then decay into light degrees of freedom, although our
main qualitative results should apply in other regimes. Furthermore, our
analysis shows that the minimum amount of dissipation required to keep the
temperature of the radiation bath above the Hubble rate during inflation is
largely independent of the degree of flatness of the potential, although it
depends on the field value at the inflection point. We then discuss the
relevance of this result to warm inflation model building.
