Posted by walterbell 15 hours ago
Whereas if you take the extraordinarily difficult step of opening Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), you understand the real paradox. Jevons observed that when steam engines get more efficient and individually use less coal, we end up deploying many more steam engines in many new industries and use cases, increasing coal consumption overall.
This seems like a basic oversight, maybe this guy hasn’t heard of Wikipedia. On the other hand, I think he wants to push the narrative that AI is seeing enormous productivity gains. He does this by using price per token, which has fallen. Very similar to Jevons supposedly observing “coal production”. But the author is struggling to point to new industries and use cases that were opened up by AI, like when we deployed steam engines back in the 1860s. So he misstates Jevons paradox, removes the paradoxical part, and makes it seem like his thesis makes sense.
Jevons’ Paradox could still apply here! I’m not saying it doesn’t. But we just haven’t seen the examples quite yet. A good example would be an observed surge in demand custom built software as software engineers become more efficient. But lower token costs ain’t it.
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".
Open-source models are also constantly getting better, with new architectures and training processes that make 30b models perform like previous SOTA models, lowering the prices for many use-cases.
So I don't think the current level AI will get more expensive, I would expect it to stay at the same price or fall. But, I think the AI companies will continue pushing more higher-priced premium models that deliver better performance for higher prices and with more tokens consumed.
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.
[1] https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7623909?clickPR=plp:6:323
TV's are really absurdly cheap (and awful) on the low end, we're not talking about your 60" LG OLED with AI TV here, we're talking: a screen with maybe 720p and a viewing angle of: dead centre.
Hiring a handyman is, what, $100/h in most countries, then there's a minimum call-out fee and materials cost- worse "I don't have the part". You're looking at about $300~ easy.
But for $129 you can get this; https://a.co/d/7cdztf8
- My handyman changes $50/hour, but if you find a new person maybe they charge $75-$100/hour
- materials are cheap, probably like $50 total for mud and drywall, or a repair kit
- with two hours labor, the total should be somewhere from $150-$250.
- if the handyman won’t accept a job less than 4 hours, the range is $250-$450.
This also isn't true?
It costs almost nothing to patch drywall. You can also do this yourself. Unless the point they're making is "TVs are so cheap, you can mount a TV inside of the drywall for less money than it would cost to fix," which also isn't true.
I had to buy the sanding pole, the joint compound, the putty knife, and the paint the other day. A TV would definitely have been cheaper.
In America, all of that other than the paint is available at the dollar tree. You're looking at ~$7 to fix the hole (spackle, mesh tape, trowel, sandpaper, paintbrush) and $12 to buy a pint can of matched paint, as long as the hole is smaller than your fist.
Larger you would need to add in a $20 patch panel of sheetrock, a razor knife or other sheetrock saw (could probably use the bread knife in a pinch) and a hammer and nails, so closer to $50 all in.
https://www.amazon.com/toshiba-fire-tv-32-inch-class-v35-ser... is $75 right now. On Prime Day I saw a similar one for $35.
I can buy a flat screen TV from Walmart for $74. A handyman to come to my house is a minimum of $150.
So the parent comment is true, buying a TV is cheaper than hiring a handyman to fix the drywall.
VESA mounts and installation are not cheap
it's really an apples and or ciders comparison
that said, now I realized I have a door with two pictures screwed to it, because we punched a hole through it more than a decade ago during a house party, and that specific door is out of production, and it's the door to the storage room so it was (and still is) the perfect solution :)
This does not follow. Being a wealthy and high-profile investor does not meant that Horowitz understands the technology.
It certainly does not mean that there are no valid criticisms of the technology.
The key part is the "demand more than eclipsed the cost savings" bit.
The cotton gin is another well known example, labor per unit down, labor for the whole industry up.
they did the same in the crypto days - probably most of their narratives were taken down.
then when they finally dumb their investments on the stock market - the market within a year or 2 sees the ruse and stock goes tumbling down. they would've cashed out.
Was thoroughly confused which article this comment belonged to for a second.
And your basic supply and demand curve indicates that, at least until the supply is diminished in kind which isn't going to happen immediately given the all the constraints at play, using less coal leads to coal becoming cheaper and more readily available.
> This seems like a basic oversight
Not really. Improvements to the steam engine being why we got "cheaper and faster at producing coal" is immaterial. The added detail you've given is an interesting aside, I suppose, but doesn't change anything about the original premise. The only oversight is you not realizing this, perhaps?
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 other explanation is that people have an outsize demand for a resource, and are actively making efforts to make it cheaper so they can use more of it, then when it gets cheaper, they use more of it.
Transistors got cheaper and we are using more of them! Jevons Paradox!
What difference do you see in this paragraph compared to the one before? Steam engines get more coal-efficient and that means there are more of them burning more coal. This is two observations:
- The cost of steam engines goes down, and the quantity sold goes up.
- The value of coal goes up (it produces more energy per ton), and the quantity sold goes up.
Those results are just as basic as "the cost of coal goes down, and the quantity sold goes up", which is the statement you open by criticizing. I agree there's nothing surprising about it. But there's nothing surprising about the other statements either. The paragraph two statements are both demand increases†, while paragraph 1 is a supply increase, but they all happen on the same X-shaped graph from economics 101. (Or rather, two of them happen on an X-shaped graph measuring supply and demand for coal, and one of them happens on an X-shaped graph measuring supply and demand for engines.)
† "The cost of steam engines goes down" might sound like a supply increase, but the cost that's dropping here is the operating cost and not the manufacturing cost, meaning that, at a given price, more people are willing to buy a steam engine than previously.
This misses the key part that actually makes it Jevons Paradox: the reduced cost of operating the machine opened up new industries and applications that massively grew which made overall usage increase.
Something could get more efficient and still have the same number of units in the end. Washing machines have gotten more efficient over time and yet it's not like we have tons more washing machines in the US.
> Washing machines have gotten more efficient over time and yet it's not like we have tons more washing machines in the US.
Do you have any numbers for this?
Strange you'd really push back on this part. Do you now own multiple washing machines at home because they're more efficient? Seems like a pretty obvious take to me but ok let's go.
Looking at census statistics of durable goods it was in the 80s over 25 years ago.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/well-being/tables/1...
Nearly 20 years later it was still in the 80s.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-census-bureau-da...
Doesn't seem like there's much room to go up from here unless people are going to start owning multiple for some reason.
Meanwhile they became a lot more energy and water efficient.
> In 2000, 87% of all clothes washers consumed at least 600 kWh/yr. By 2019, 85.4% consumed fewer than 200 kWh/yr.
> The average annual unit energy consumption (UEC) of clothes washers decreased 83.9% between 2000 and 2019
https://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/statistics/aham/2019/wa...
For many things the initial or operating costs aren't what's constraining the market for the product. Clothes washers could be cut in half in cost tomorrow but it's not like I'm now rushing out to go buy twice as many. They could go to only require 5 Whr's to run a load but I'm still going to have about as much laundry. We've pretty much tapped out that market in developed countries, the only really new thing was all in one units becoming more economical to a few percent more of the market that didn't have the plumbing or space availability before.
If we were all too stupid to think of new uses for the steam engine we wouldn't have massively increased their usage by making them cheaper to build and cheaper to operate. We'd have just saved more money and used a bit less coal to do the same things we were doing before. If there isn't a market for the things that steam engine enabled, it doesn't end up becoming Jevons Paradox.
Looking at the Jevons Paradox with spreadsheets and accounting, it wasn't just that the spreadsheet made accounting work so much faster and easier, it's that then the effective output per cost per hour for an accountant dropped massively enabling people to hire part time accountants en masse that increased the demand for accountants. If businesses that never would have bothered for accountants didn't come in and effectively revolutionize what it meant to be an accountant all it would have done was making it cheaper for the same firms to do the same work with fewer people.
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 policies that make it genuinely expensive to, say, be a HVAC repairman. Educational requirements, permits, licensing, business insurance, waste disposal, etc.
On my neighborhood Facebook group, every time someone asks for recommendations for menial, minimally-skilled backyard labor, they always insist the person needs to be licensed, bonded, and insured. And then, they're surprised that it costs $10,000 to paint a fence.
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 a valid argument, neither indentured servitude or slavery. Isn't the US supposed to be a free market economy where free Enterprise reigned?
Complaining about regulation, including waste disposal, is also dumbfounding. Being required to dispose of air filters in a landfill is not the reason why you can't afford a repair. This opinion is also comical as HVAC also covers air quality because otherwise you can be cool in a room but literally sick.
This sort of opinion sounds completely irrational and unsubstantiated, and extremely ideological.
The main factors driving repair cost are things like device longevity, unit price, speed and ease of repair, parts availability, etc. That's mainly it. When you call someone to your house to repair something, the price tag covers that person's cost of living for the fraction of the time it takes them to deal with your problems. On top of that, you need to pay whatever parts they need to buy to get your things back to work. That's where the money goes.
*https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Labor/NCSL_DOL_Report_05_...
Why has licensure increased in the past 60 years? What were the motivations?
And, if we remove some licensing, how can we be sure the motivation does not come back? What is the ROOT CAUSE?
It's entirely possible that we can get rid of the regulation, have a bunch of bad things happen, pay stupid amounts of money to fix those bad things, and then re-implement the regulation - thereby spending more money than if we just did nothing at all and kept things as they are.
It is for someone - the market price is pretty much always going to be around the point where a small increase causes a noticeable drop-off in customers (otherwise the only sensible thing for the seller to do is charge more). If something causes even a relatively small increase in price will mean someone can't afford the thing any more.
I don't think this is realistic within the topic of air conditioning. No one is going to go without HVAC because of an hypothetical small increase in hypothetical trash handling fees, and definitely not the people in this thread complaining about regulation.
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.
Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.
Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.
Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.
clarification: Of the things that make it expensive to run an HVAC repair company, consumer protection related expenses are super far down the list.
source: 2 decades (on/off) supporting a close friend's regional hvac biz, national geothermal interests.
I understand large installs at businesses are a different problem, and granted I've only ever installed a mini split, but that was hardly rocket science. And home installs are likely what most people are thinking of here.
In Japan you can get minisplit's installed for $1k a unit, here you regularly find quotes over $10k. Something's gone wrong somewhere.
I bought the 3.5KW unit online for $1080 including delivery (USD$702) so it was $1620 (US$1050) all up. I expect with the recent inflation it might cost more like $2000 (US$1300) installed for one that size and maybe $3500 (US$2275) for a bigger unit (8kW).
The splits themselves are mostly all Japanese brands that we have here (Mitsubishi Electric, Daiken, Panasonic, etc.) as well as some Korean (LG, Samsung), but Chinese ones are starting to appear in the market too. But they all seem very cheap compared to buying one in the US, before the installation there which just seems astronomically expensive to us.
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) 2k requirements get satisfied are thru a HS VoTech (my son) or 18-24mos doing paid tech work toward the official certification (electrician techs do this).
I can't find a state that requires anything a like a 4yr college degree, where life is put on hold to focus on that. And then 4yrs of living and school expenses are investments that need to be earned back. Not for any trade tech.
Its not excessive if the purpose is job protection.
See also any career that involves interning (law, accounting, …)
How much does the unit cost? What work does it take to install it? How large does it need to be to support your home?
What are the energy needs of your typical home in Japan vs your home town?
Those are the key factors, not how many years someone spends in tradeschool.
Fujitsu and Mitsubishi both have popular units that are basically the same the whole world over, with minor regional changes. There really isn't that much variation though. There are obvious differences, a mini-split in a hot part of the world is going to be working harder than a mini-split in a cooler part of the world. Humidity will differ as well.
It's a large home appliance. You need a pair of strong people to drive over to the customer's house, bring it in their house, locate the right place to install it, unbox it, support it, wire/pipe it up correctly, and then give it power. The Big Mac index gives the difference in price between Japan in the US to be $5.79 vs $3.11 in JP (in 2025), and meanwhile $1k vs $10 is, well, 10x.
There's something at work here, but it's not due to variations in the difficulty of unboxing a large metal thing, drilling holes, running some tubing and then powering it on.
One way to eliminate extreme poverty and increase skilled labour, is to ensure children have enough nutrition, health, schooling, and funds to pursue skilled worked in adult life, which usually involves making time outside of work, adequate health, some prerequisite education, and a sufficient financial buffer to actually upskill.
A second thing is Baumol's Cost Disease. If there are other industries that are more rewarding that require less effort, no-one is going to pursue those options. Why be a clever guy who makes a product (or becomes a HVAC repairer, electrician, etc.) when you can get a comfy job at a FAANG (or whatever the acronym is today). You could sub in benefits here, but I don't think people are thriving on benefits in the US. But I'm an outsider, so I wouldn't know.
But there's also a secret third thing that people don't often consider, which is the culture. If there's a culture that doesn't privilege working hard, or educational attainment, etc., people won't seek those things.
Clarification: In some places we absolutely do. In others we absolutely do not.
> so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money.
I think is is better reflective: There is huge surplus of employers have that set up systems that insure they do not hire qualified people. Job portals that auto-trash applications from unwanted applicants (1st time, most minimal of crim rec, wrong zip codes) are one massive example.
source: me+kids spent a decade in red state, hunger-level poverty. kids who got zero replies during months/years of entry level job apps.
How's what you wrote substantiated at all?
To me it seems you are suggesting we let people starve so that labour you characterize as "minimally-skilled backyard" is cheap.
You also seem to be suggesting that consumer protection policies need to go as well. I assume we are going to trust the end consumer to do due diligence cause "they know whats better for them?"
If they get a quote of 10k and they cannot get a better one, they might as well start writing that check.
Perhaps the question is why wages are not high enough to support these prices (globalization, productivity wage gap over the last fifty years, etc). This will change over time due to structural demographics [1] making labor much more scarce (pushing up wages), we’re still in the early days. Software is not going to eat the trades and HVAC repair.
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".
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 purely ideological and not supported by facts.
"This argument" is also theoretical, or a straw man. I'm not making that argument, the original comment on the thread isn't making that argument, the person I replied to created the idea of the argument whole cloth to argue against.
It's a big leap from "some regulations raise the price floors on some goods" to "businesses are being suffocated by no longer allowing near-slavery, thus near-slavery should be permitted."
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
I don't think you are holding an informed opinion. Ozone layer depletion was tied primarily with CFC emissions used in air conditioning units, and since the production of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals were banned in the late 1980s the ozone layer started to regenerate. In practical terms this means lower incidence of health issues such as skin cancer or cataracts. That sounds pretty neat.
But being able to use a 40+ year air conditioning unit is worth it?
Paint a fence? Pay the neighbor kid. Patch a roof? eh ... what could go wrong.
It turns out the technician was working for a shady company that didn’t have liability insurance, now what? Before responding, please read what your homeowners insurance policy says about hiring people to work on your home, then tell me if you’re covered. People always assume it’s lawyers when it’s actually insurance companies mandating risk management.
Millions of unskilled people work with and around propane on a daily basis. It's not even remotely a big deal if you have an IQ above room temperature.
Yeah it's CYA: the ass in question is yours. The guy who burns your house down without insurance will just file bankruptcy. You're the one left with the ashes.
> 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, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 percent higher than the average salary in 2015.
Simply put, radiologists do a lot more than merely read scans:
> Radiologists are useful for more than reading scans; a study that followed staff radiologists in three different hospitals in 2012 found that only 36 percent of their time was dedicated to direct image interpretation.
Source: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-...
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.
No AI replacement is going to be doing that anytime soon.
I'm not arguing with the GP's point that radiologists don't do many other things that the AI maybe can't do, but it feels like your example is the opposite of that.
And not only that, your example demonstrates a failing of the human's limited amount of time to get all their work done.
Think of it like 'commoditize your complements'.
I can't tell if that's the worst AI boosting analogy I ever heard or the most unwittingly accurate.
First of all, flat screen TV and plasterboard hole repair are in no way substitutable goods.
"Why is there a new TV behind the front door dear? The handle was bashing the drywall and it was cheaper than a handyman."
But okay, let's assume you accidentally but conveniently punched a hole right where you would want a TV. And you don't already have a TV there.
Who is going to wall mount this new TV in a home that can't do basic drywall repair?
"Isn't the handle going to bash the TV now?"
"It's ok, dear; replacement TVs are cheaper than hiring a handyman"
The shop recommended replacing it, as just the refrigerant is half the price of a new one if most has to be replaced, due to environmental taxes.
Basically a repair is guaranteed to be at least 50% of new price of NOK 23k ($2.3k) installed and can quickly approach 80+% if the guy has to spend time on it.
That made me wonder how on earth they make money on selling these things. And how effective that tax was, given it's pushing us to replace a unit that's probably fine for many more years with just a bit of TLC.
edit: fixed pricing brain fart
Please get a second opinion, especially if you can find a non-shop to give you one.
I am inclined to agree. The rear 2½T unit in our rental blew a line last year. Two companies quoted my landlord $10k for a new 2½T condenser and air handler (1 was another renter of his). Even that seemed high to me but I could be out of date
In the end, I had a friend come out and look it over. Leak was near the compressor and he charged well under $1k for the fix, mostly for refrigerant.
That is because it's wrong. Sorry, just woke up. I'm in Norway, and it's 23k NOK, or $2300.
The shop said filling my system back up with refrigerant if it was empty would be around $1.3k, and based on what I've heard I don't think that's off by much.
23k didn’t sound too far off what an American installer would try charge for a new system in a high cost of living area, so this wasn’t too unbelievable.
> 23k didn’t sound too far off what an American installer would try charge for a new system in a high cost of living area
I've heard these insane prices. I think 2.3k is pricey enough, you can get cheaper units here but SO wants the pretty indoor unit so pretty indoor unit she gets.
At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.
https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/us-ac-companies-move-...
The leaky A/C unit had been made by Lennox while the new heat pump was made by Fujitsu. I very much hope that Fujitsu engineered its heat pump to last. The heat pump had also replaced an oil heating system that was around 25 years old and still could have been used for many more years. Expecting similar or better longevity out of a heat pump does not seem unreasonable.
Yeah labor costs also make a lot of repairs uneconomical. There's been talk here about removing the 25% VAT on repairs to make the value proposition a bit better, but doesn't seem to have much traction currently.
> At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.
The guy said it was due to taxes, specifically that they had gone up so much in recent years. Seems it's because the tax is tied to CO2 tax[1], which has been going up since they introduced it in 2020. Not sure what refrigerant they use in my minisplit, but even if it's one of the cheaper one the tax is about $90 per kg, so adds up quick.
edit: mine uses R-32, so yeah about $90/kg.
I know the US and Vietnamese economies are very different, but something doesn't add up there.
In my home, I recently had a heat pump unit replace my central A/C with some minisplits that connected to the exterior unit installed in the basement. The entire setup cost as much as it originally cost to install the central A/C, despite parts of the central A/C being reused.
Note that in the US, what we call air conditioners only support cooling and not heating. When they support both, we call them heat pumps despite that being the scientific name which applies to the cooling only units too.
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 individually (that would've been fine with me, personally, but it's a drawback for lots of people).
On top of that, many (if not most) mini split units are also somewhat aesthetically displeasing.
In my new home (on a different continent), I have mini splits. I'm somewhat satisfied with them, at best. I'd still prefer central air but it's not a thing for residential homes here.
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 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.
The refrigerant is often expensive, poisonous and flamable. We don't replace the refrigerant, we reclaim it and dispose of it properly. Its not without risks. Our building codes are pretty rigid as well, its a big pain point.
New HVAC install is gonna need an electrician, the lines pass through walls allowing the possibility of condensation to produce deadly mold. Every installation needs individual consideration. If it isnt %100 perfect, the customer will be riding the installer's ass.
The US has is a Safety Above All mindset on some things. We improve safety far beyond economic rationality because we don't want to systematically kill each other in this way, however few that is.
Unrelated example: a national EMT outfit operating here made all their techs wear plate carriers and ballistic plates. There is nearly no gun violence here. All the techs stopped carrying the plates after a few months because its dumb, and wont stop a baseball bat or a knife, but this is a national outfit, surely they did a cost benefit analysis. Someone signed the check and wrote a policy to make them wear em every day. Plates expire, also.
That said, we can definitely do better, and the cost is too high. Installers are in demand, and we tariff the imports to the tune of %15-%30.
... Why does someone in Norway need a split AC unit? I don't think they're very efficient for heating.
EDIT: I researched this and it seems the type designed for heating in negative zero temperatures are much more expensive. So maybe that explains it?
Or making those things.
I think it could make sense if that $2.3k mostly only accounted for Western labor involved rather than representing entirety of "real" costs. Like - just entirely making up - 1k to ship it from middle of the Pacific to nearby ports to you, 0.5k from the port to location of installation, another 0.5k to install, 0.3k for documents preparations and extra wood screws, 2.3k total. And $25k worth of man-hours in CNY to manufacture, which effect is isolated and contained within their own economic bubble.
I can't just believe in the "them subsidization" theory anymore, international prices just don't seem like compensating for anything. It feels like paying for energy costs of delivery systems rather than the product. It just doesn't make sense.
Robotics will reduce back injury rates and so reduce Nurse shortages, for example. Misdiagnosis rates cause increases in compensation claims so improvement in diagnostics reduce risk so insurance premiums(for hospitals) should go down or at least not rise as quickly compared to inflation.
Note that the cost of health is high even in the economies without the broken US health system, and we have the baby boom moving through which is a huge bubble of cost associated with age.
Not that there's no component of Jevons in this, but it doesn't explain everything.
A thing said to me in Argentina resonated: They pay doctors, nurses, pharmacists slightly more if they will do out-calls to elderly people in the community at large. The increase in staff cost to have home calls offsets the massive increase in care costs if these people cannot be cared for in their home and move into a managed care facility. It's partly an externality if you privatise healthcare: who cares if the state has to pick up the tab, right? But in a more integrated view of the costs here, its better to pay more for people to help keep the elderly in their own home as long as possible.
(elderly, intending to stay in my own home, not in the US health system)
And I'm not sure the AI/LLM focus sheds any light at all on the situation. Unfortunately, AI/LLMs aren't AGI and they're just a tool. They're just a better machine (assuming it all pans out) that radiologists all need to become experts in using. The way to analyze the situation isn't that the radiologists are the "bottleneck", the radiologists are the experts who are trained to use the tools.
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 struggle to do more than just survive in my little shack house built from scrap on an empty plot doing the same thing.
The only jobs that earn me a decent wage is for corporations or for people near or in the top 1% of wage earners.
If the average person made more money I would have more work and more money. But as it is a lot of residential work would be of negative value to me at the prices people can afford, and with less work to do and farther and farther travel distances for it my prices must keep rising to stay solvent.
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.
"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.
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 less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...
And the thing is, I think the above finding is pretty intuitive.
If AI performs 99% of a radiologist's diagnostic work, the human's role will very likely be reduced to a skill that is more routine, that requires less expertise, like a final check or something - and thus commands lower wages.