91–100 of 192 posts
It depends how you measure. The cost in goods or purchasing power goes up, but the cost in hours stays the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minisplit AC units are not very popular in the US. The US mainly uses either central air conditioning units or all in one AC units that are designed to be installed in a window. The window units are cheap, but inefficient. The central units are more efficient, but very expensive. Minisplit units are more expensive than window units (by probably a factor of 10), but are more efficient than either. I suspect most peopl…
I don't think it's just "most Americans don't know." When I installed AC in my former Bay Area home, I would have needed multiple mini split units to cover 1200sq ft, with questions about how many you could have on at once to still get the right performance. I went with a single central air unit instead. It also (at the time at least) didn't come with a centralized thermostat, which meant managing each room individua…
That said, I was replying to someone from Vietnam. Assuming that things in Vietnam are similar to China and Japan, people will only heat or cool the specific rooms that they are using, rather than heating or cooling everything like how many Americans do things. Those in the US who cannot afford to heat or cool everything, who are likely very underrepresented here, would be those using window units, since they are cheap upfront. A minisplit would be cheaper over the long term, but the high upfront cost dissuades people in thing market from even looking at them.
Finally, I had Fujitsu minisplit units installed in my basement two years ago. They are far more aesthetically pleasing than window A/C units.
The author makes an error while explaining Jevons’ Paradox. They say “the cheaper and faster we got at producing coal, the more coal we ended up using”. But that’s not paradoxical at all. That’s basic supply and demand curve from economics 101. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Whereas if you take the extraordinarily difficult step of opening Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ), you understand th…
From the article: If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.
Probably because the US has been focused on services for years rather than physical goods production. Everything else in US is focused on importing cheap(er) goods or materials.
> On the other hand, I think he wants to push the narrative that AI is seeing enormous productivity gains.
That is my impression as well. I would be thrilled to see this mythical 10x productivity. Even with 2x productivity, I would be highly pleased. This should mean developers (and everyone else) are producing 2x more quality, software (and general services) are 2x better? I see none of that, except 2x more junk. Did AWS, GCP, or anything else become 2x cheaper and 2x more stable? Maybe I'm living under a rock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's just "most Americans don't know." When I installed AC in my former Bay Area home, I would have needed multiple mini split units to cover 1200sq ft, with questions about how many you could have on at once to still get the right performance. I went with a single central air unit instead. It also (at the time at least) didn't come with a centralized thermostat, which meant managing each room individua…
If I were to ask most people I know offline, I suspect only a small number of them would know what a minisplit unit is. For most people, A/C is like plumbing. They do not think about it until it breaks. Learning that there are better options is just not something that people do. That said, I was replying to someone from Vietnam. Assuming that things in Vietnam are similar to China and Japan, people will only heat or…
The energy (gas+electric) bill for my whole home would've taken well over a decade to add up the amount the mini split installation alone would've cost, so even if it brought down my energy cost to zero (which it wouldn't), it would've taken a decade to pay for itself (including the cost of window units).
Edit: and yes, they're prettier than window units for sure, but as you've pointed out, they're not competing with window units. They're competing with ducted central air that has almost no visible impact.
I find the term “cost disease” very negative. It actually describes positive social progress.
Instead of a “disease,” it’s really a sign of a healthy, advanced economy.
The problem isn't tradework costing more, the problem is most people making less money thanks to wage stagnation and can't afford reasonable trade rates. Capital costs for the neccessary tools are also higher than ever. I can build a house 4x faster today than my father could back in the day, or alternatively with 4x less labor, and yet he could buy a house, 2 cars, and support 3 kids on his single wage. Meanwhile I…
Any slum in developing nations features lots of housing that people bang together out of trash. Very unsafe. But it works. We've been creating shelters for ourselves since prehistory. It's not that hard.
Millions of people live in slums. Upgrading that kind of housing to something slightly better isn't all that hard. Most people that a are a bit skilled can bang together a shed in their garden in no time at all. Putting a few solar panels on top isn't that hard either. And you can plug them into batteries easily. You can buy that kit on Amazon and run your power tools of that. All legal.
It's only when you want that in your house connected to the grid that cost suddenly balloons from a few thousand to many tens of thousands. Exact same technology. Maybe you'll use slightly more panels and a bit bigger battery. But now it's a lot of gate keeping by inspectors, electricians, certified equipment, etc. that come into play.
Same with houses. You can buy a recreational vehicle or caravan for a reasonable amount of money. Second hand these are very affordable. And some RVs can be quite nice to live in and even have AC. So, why are houses so expensive relative to RVs? Prefab housing has been a thing for decades. If you remove the wheels from an RV, it's basically a house. If you live in an RV, you are referred to as trailer trash. It has a stigma. But it's very cheap. Poor people do that. Because it's very affordable housing. That's why it's a popular option for people that would otherwise build slums.
That's a lot of economic theorizing, but to me, it doesn't seem to be substantiated all that well. You can just as well argue that labor is getting more expensive in the West because of two non-market pressures. First, we have a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money. Second, you have consumer protection polici…
> (...) a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, (...) consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive (...) I don't think this opinion holds a rational basis. Extreme poverty being a factor in low job demand is an argument for coercing people into performing certain tasks even though they are not economically viable just because it benefits you personally. This is not…
Regulation is often necessary, but it has a cost even though it's necessary.
If my country's regulations require nurseries to have one staff member for every three young children, there might be good safety reasons for that - but I'm going to have to spend a third of my salary to have one young child cared for.
The author makes an error while explaining Jevons’ Paradox. They say “the cheaper and faster we got at producing coal, the more coal we ended up using”. But that’s not paradoxical at all. That’s basic supply and demand curve from economics 101. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Whereas if you take the extraordinarily difficult step of opening Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ), you understand th…
Was thoroughly confused which article this comment belonged to for a second.
I'm not sure why everyone picks on radiology as the 'obvious' field that will get automated. So far it has been the opposite: > In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a four percent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country…
Nah, pre-LLM, I think the obvious fields to pick on were lawyers, middle-management, and "email jobs" generally. That was a big miscalculation, since most people (especially engineers) do not understand the politics of power. Those jobs tend to jealously protect the power that they have and systematically dismantle what accountability they might be subjected to. Engineers in general are much more likely to democratize (and thus threaten) power, by creating things like accountability via metrics, at the same time as they mostly refuse to unionize. Radiologists have some unions, medicine generally enjoys a moat of credentials and certification. Things that SWEs in particular rejected while they said "come on over, anyone can code". I doubt radiologists ever suggested themselves that they should be measured on throughput, but SWEs actually did push ideas of 10x engineers and metrics like lines-of-code for years to argue they are productive enough to deserve raises.