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Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

a16z.substack.com

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Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#121

Post by [deleted] »

ryao wrote: post #74
matwood wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a non-obvious leak it's pretty normal to recommend a new system at that age. The reason is that a tech's time is expensive, and finding a leak can take a lot of time. Then once it's found, if the leak is in the exchange you're looking at a fairly large replacement part cost. At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes. https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/us-ac-companie…

If you need R410A refrigerant, the high costs are due to government regulations causing the shortage. I very much hope that the heat pump I had installed 2 years ago does not leak. Theoretically, if the leak occurs under warranty, it should be covered. The central A/C unit I replaced with the heat pump had developed a leak right before the warranty expired, which resulted in a costly repair being covered. Unfortunate…

[deleted]

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#122

Post by water9 »

ta20240528 wrote: post #101
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A quick Google says it takes 4 years to get a license to be an HVAC technician in my state. A flat time mandate for HVAC tech certification seems really out of place. And a 4 year path of any sort seems excessive for a technician. I couldn't find anything like that. Most results I found were in the 6-12 mos range - which is often spent employed. WV was an outlier with a 2000hr requirement. How I have seen (non-hvac…

"And a 4 year path of any sort seems excessive for a technician" Its not excessive if the purpose is job protection. See also any career that involves interning (law, accounting, …)

It’s a air-conditioning system. It’s dead simple you could learn it in an afternoon watching YouTube videos.

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#123

Post by water9 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #67
margalabargala wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see anything in their comment where they added "and therefore we ought return to rampant extreme poverty", did I miss it? They don't appear to be suggesting anything you say they are, just describing the effects of what exist. It can be true that consumer protection laws raise the price floor for certain goods and services without "and therefore consumer protection laws are bad".

> I didn't see anything in their comment where they added "and therefore we ought return to rampant extreme poverty", did I miss it? The US is already experiencing rampant extreme poverty. There are people in the US holding multiple jobs and still can't afford to eat, let alone healthcare. Again, this argument that things are expensive because the poor can't work and regulation somehow is suffocating businesses is pu…

Yes, because if you get a leak in your air conditioner, instead of just patching the hole and refilling it with coolant, you have to replace your entire system in places like California because they require a more green, less gas, in the name of science, and still completely ignoring the simple fact that it doesn’t make a damn difference because we all live in the same globe.

The amount of waste that is generated is 1000 times that of just refilling the coolant. When will people realize that you can use an existential threat that you can’t prove to justify anything? What could be more important than our existence?

If the same scientist came out with a study that said if you don’t pay me $1 million by tomorrow, we are gonna get hit by an asteroid. Would you believe them and pay me? Or has this become a political issue we’re no longer thinking rationally

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#124

Post by ema »

torginus wrote: post #110
testdelacc1 wrote: post #52

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…

Honestly I feel like Jevons Paradox is a distinctly unhelpful way of phrasing phenomena, designed to create a feeling of novelty where there's none. It's completely obvious that if you need energy, and you have energy source A and B (lets say natural gas and oil), people will use the one that is cheaper. Oil became cheaper because a new supplier entered the market, and people started using more of it! Jevons Paradox!…

The paradox isn't that as a good becomes cheaper we're using more of it. The paradox is that as a good becomes cheaper we're spending more on it.

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#125

Post by KumaBear »

absurd1st wrote: post #120

> if you automate 99% of a job, that last 1% the human has to do is incredibly valuable because it’s bottlenecking everything else. The author is being (intentionally) naive here. History and current research suggest that when technology automates the vast majority of a complex job, it can lead to the "deskilling" of the human worker. This Lancet article (published Oct 2025) discovered that doctors were found to be l…

Yet prices of these tests will not go down. AI and the companies that perform the test will see the rewards of eliminating these skilled jobs. The consumer will not see the savings.

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#126

Post by maccard »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #105
dig1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a16z is heavily long on AI, so this article sounds very biased. 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 i…

Also the initial claim is just false — “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“. I can tell you that this isn’t true in San Diego. Unless they’re using flatscreen tvs that cost less than $300? Or perhaps making extremely difficult-to-patch h…

I live in the UK, and it’s basically £100 to get a tradesperson to show up to my front door regardless of what I want them to do. I can buy a flat screen TV from £100 new from one of the UK high street retailers [1] , or £85 [2] if I go on Amazon

[1] https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7623909?clickPR=plp:6:323

[2] https://amzn.eu/d/bVCBLv3

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#127

Post by bigiain »

otikik wrote: post #112
testdelacc1 wrote: post #52

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…

> price per token, which has fallen. I think that statement is incomplete. It's cheaper because the AI providers are subsidizing the queries by burning cash in order to gain market share. So it's not a price , it's a subsidized and temporary price. Which will likely go up once burnable money runs out / the providers switch from "market acquisition" to "let's try to make this thing profitable at all".

Also, I'm sure I read something here in the last few weeks documenting that while every specific model shows falling price-per-token, "frontier models" which are the ones everybody wants to use - maintain steady prices (and are often significantly more expensive to use because they consume way more tokens than older models responding to prompt-fashion-de-jour).

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#128

Post by bob1029 »

It's cheaper to fix the hole, even if you screw up color matching on the paint a few times.

I've seen a lot of people blow a lot of money on really basic stuff like this (myself included). The lack of basic awareness around hvac, landscaping, drainage, drywall, plumbing, electrical, et. al. has me wondering if I'm still in the right business. ChatGPT can't carry a bag of sand up a hill or dig a ditch. It can tell you about these things and make you feel like a hypothetical god over them, but it can never do the actual work on site. I don't feel like there's a lot of competition around being in Texas crawl spaces during the summer.

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#129

Post by dctoedt »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #97
AngryData wrote: post #50

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…

It's rules and legislation. The job of banging together reasonably serviceable form of shelter isn't that expensive. It's only expensive if you have to jump through a lot of hoops to use certified designs, materials, etc. deal with inspections, use expensive people for that have had training for wiring things together, etc. Any slum in developing nations features lots of housing that people bang together out of trash…

> The job of banging together reasonably serviceable form of shelter isn't that expensive. It's only expensive if you have to jump through a lot of hoops to use certified designs, materials, etc. deal with inspections, use expensive people for that have had training for wiring things together, etc.

"Reasonably serviceable" — ay, there's the rub!

The U.S. Navy's nuclear propulsion program has a saying: You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect. Certifications, inspections, etc., are meant to try to keep lazy-, sloppy-, and/or dishonest providers from passing off shoddy (or even unacceptable) work product.

In many areas, most customers don't have — and shouldn't have to have — the expertise or the time needed to inspect and assess providers' work product. By requiring knowledgeable inspections in critical areas, we increase the cost a bit, but we improve safety for everyone — which lets us non-experts spend our time more usefully. (It's a form of division of labor.)

To be sure: Certifications, etc., can be captured by industry groups and used to limit competition and increase prices. That's a separate issue, one that can be dealt with in other ways.

Quality — and quality assurance — aren't free.

Re: Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

#130

Post by ttoinou »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #52

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…

You’re right it’s not a real paradox. It simply states that movements of a/b (efficiency of steam engines input coal / output work, price of coal per kilo of coal etc.) doesnt tell us anything about a and b. Easy maths. But for humans economics usually it means demand increasing so a and b increasing. It’s only a paradox for humans who focus on numbers too much
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