Speaking as someone along the lines of an excitable AI maximalist, I think he never asked one about the "the bits vs atoms barrier". Robots and similar, duh.
This feels to me like someone in 1905 saying ok the Wright brothers managed to fly but does that change my commute? This flight thing is over hyped by crazies. Boring.
Mice seem to have quite a good representation of the 3d environment around them and motor skills. I had one in my flat run off an jump through an approx 1 x 2 inch hole 6 inches off the ground and about 10 inches from where it jumped from. Humans would probably have a job with that and I've not seen a lizard say seem to have similar ability to know its way around.
I daresay I don't think animals actually need some number or neurons. There's probably just a trade off between more giving better results versus being heavier and more energy consuming.
You just define "advanced" as not "affordable" and your statement can be true forever!
Except of course, that's nonsense. mRNA vaccines are super advanced and available for a majority of humans. And tech drops in price if it's popular enough.
You do if what you are implementing requires it. Beyond this, if you don't understand the code the AI agent outputted, you shouldn't let other people run it in production.
The AIs seem to be getting better faster than the training on it's own code thing becomes a problem. Dunno about the juniors. Maybe they'll become 'prompt engineers'?
We used to keep similar axolotls as pets. I believe the abandoned pet thing - they are fun for a while but then you wonder what to do with them. We donated ours and the tank to a school. They'd probably survive a while in the wild in the summer but I'm not sure they'd like winter much.
As an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted.
On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive. Even food where normally you could walk in a shop and get something for not much, a basic sandwich started from $8 and when I came out some lady followed me and said could she have some she was hungry so I gave her half and really was hungry. I've never really had that in the other fifty countries I've visited including in Africa. In London you get Roma sitting around with 'hungry' signs but they are all fat and well fed and want cash. It's odd.
The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Area is the paradigmatic example of this. But when COVID hit, the main attractor of the Bay Area vanished overnight: you didn't have to live there to work those jobs. There was a mass exodus to cheaper places. Texas was at the top of the list of destinations. Austin, though decidedly not the rest of Texas, has a similar culture to SF and so was a natural and comfortable landing spot. So the pressure relief valve on SF is a source of pressure on Austin. But Austin was already suffering growing pains before COVID.
But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.
Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.
> More demand for a fixed set of land drives prices up.
This works because both you and GP specified "[free-standing] house". This is not true of homes, where multiple homes can occupy the same land - just 15 feet higher or lower
Perhaps someday more American cities will discover the third dimension, allowing for cheaper housing
Don't get me wrong, there is a place for units/apartments, especially in the face of homelessness. But no one dreams of owning an apartment as opposed to a free-standing house.
Gonna buy me a condo
Gonna buy me a Cuisinart
Get a wall-to-wall carpeting
Get a wallet full o' credit cards
I'm gonna buy me a condo, never have to mow the lawn
I'm gonna get me da T-shirt wit' the alligator on
Why would you want to live in a free-standing house instead of a nice apartment given the choice? There are pros and cons sure, but unless you can hire someone to do all the house things I don't see it being a clear win.
I think you're focusing on the wrong thing and missing the point. Housing supplies have not significantly increased with population growth (demand) in decades--thus the price equilibrium has moved up. I don't care if you build up or out and neither does the law of supply and demand. The left gets all hung up on 'the right kind of housing' and doesn't realize they're part of the problem--making it harder to build housing (of any kind) is pushing housing costs up.
Because the regulations, set by those with vested interest in real estate, make it difficult to build more housing. Otherwise anyone with any sense would undercut the existing housing stock and turn a 100k investment in concrete and timber into a million dollar home in Boulder, CO.
Not exactly rocket science - if there's money to be made and people aren't making it then something is stopping them.
It's a generational narrative here as well: while it gets applied to X, Y, or Z generations in turn and depending on the context - I think it started with X's - but the gist of it is that young generations couldn't afford the house they themselves grow up in. Even if their parents were basic blue collar families and the new generation are well educated. There's too much truth in that as people look back in the preceding decades.
This wasn't some kind of mansion. It was a 1300 square foot house. I guess I'm aiming too high then while making 4x his salary? And people have been whining about this same problem for decades so nothing to be done about it?
Supply and demand. Among many other changes, the demographics of the typical Boulder resident changed significantly - originally nature lovers and hippies for whom earning money was not a primary motivation - post-2000 shifted to educated, highly-compensated desk workers who can bid up prices. And lots more people in total seeking to live in a small area, which also lifts prices significantly.
America is new. Even in the 90s boulder was largely empty, competition for land was low, so land was cheap. As people spread to newer cities and gained wealth they bid up the price on land.
>It always felt about as dense to me as it did back then.
This is why its so expensive. Demand for housing has increased but supply has not. The government refusing to allow densification in the face of increased demand means prices skyrocket
Still plenty of cheap land in CO, but they made drilling a well a nightmare in many cases. So people wanting to use cheap land either have to haul water or do some kind of low-key wildcat drilling.
I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my favorite examples. There used to be many of these but many people didn't realize they were all (or mostly) subsidized capital ventures. Many of them are closing now that the subsidy has ended. So, is that county land cheap? Yes, but when you have an incident where time matters your likelihood of being cooked goes up precipitously.
> But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.
I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.
You still don't expect people to go hungry in a first world developed country. Nor did people go hungry or homeless at this scale before in recent American, British or even broadly Western history. Yet here we are, and the UK is no exception either.
At least you can be guaranteed for certain you won't be going hungry in Istanbul, Warsaw or Amman.
I disagree with the claim that a greater proportion of people go hungry, and more are homeless, today than at any point in recent western history. These have broadly been on a downwards trend over the last century.
Of course many do struggle, and that should not be dismissed by pointing to the past. But it nonetheless strikes me as naive to believe that people today are hungrier than at any point in recent history - the obesity crisis, and its lack of discrimination between social classes, should at least in part demonstrate this.
In my opinion, such exaggerations mostly serve to discredit and distract from legitimate complaints about the cost of living today.
Recent Western history, 70s to early 00s. I doubt many people were going hungry in the US and UK back then, as much as they are now.
The obesity crisis is in part because of the unavailability of nutritious food and the proliferation of cheap junk masquerading as food. But even that is getting expensive these days. Actual food prices have been going on an uptick since the 00s.
I will make my stand on the fact that more people lived better during the 90s in the West than now.
In constant dollars cars are actually pretty much the same as they were 40+ years ago when you compare similar types and trim levels. A new Honda Civic for example costs about the same when you take into account inflation as the Civic I bought in 1989.
The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger percentage of buyers nowadays are buying bigger and/or more luxurious cars.
It's quite remarkable when you take into account how much more technology and safety features are in new cars. My '89 Civic didn't even have cruise control.
You've got the cause and effect backwards here. The average purchase price of a car in constant dollars is about double now because those are the only cars to purchase and the only group that can afford those cars are those who are affluent. In general the people who purchase new vehicles ironically are not the ones who own them. They consistently purchase new vehicles at a regular cadence.
The existence of some base model Honda Civic or similar doesn't imply you or anyone can actually buy one.
I wasn't talking about just base trims of the cheapest models.
For example in 1989 the Honda Accord ranged from $11.5-18.2k depending on trim. Converted to today's dollars using CPI that is $31-50k. Converted using the Social Security indexing factors [1] it is $38-60. The SSA indexing factors are probably better for comparing car affordability of infrequently purchased big tickets items.
The range of new Accord prices right now is $28-39k. They are all readily available. Honda lists 11, 20, 24, 12, 11, and 21 available nearby for the LX, SE, Sport Hybrid, EX-L Hybrid, Sport-L Hybrid, and Touring Hybrid trims.
The 1998 CR-V was $18.4-$21.1k. Converted using CPI that is $31-43k, and converted using SSA indexing it is $44-50k.
New CR-Vs today are $27-42k. (I'm omitting the $50k plug-in hydrogen fuel-cell model which is not readily available). They are all readily available, with Honda listing 15, 50, 48, 118, 49, 96, and 84 of the LX, EX, Sport Hybrid, EX-L, TrailSport Hybrid, Sport-L Hybrid, and Sport Touring Hybrid nearby.
[1] These are what the Social Security Administration uses for normalizing across years when computing total contribution amounts. This is based on the mean annual salary.
>The existence of some base model Honda Civic or similar doesn't imply you or anyone can actually buy one.
There's a regulatory required number (it's not many) of those supper stripped down below the base model cars they have to make to advertise the "starting at price" so you can find them if you really try.
I know this because I know an old lady who (close to 20yr ago now) sought out the super base model of the.... wait for it.... first year of the CVT Nissan Altima! It didn't even have a radio.
It proved to be really reliable because it was well cared for and not driven hard, she gave it away to a nephew a year or so ago.
A 1999 Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, assuming serviced regularly (and competently) could easily be on the road today.
I genuinely do not believe a 2025 car will usable on the road in 2035 (a mere 9 years), yet known 15 or 20 years from now. They are all too hamstrung by technology and whilst some of the technology is an improvement, a vast majority if malicious.
You can buy current cars that do not require any subscription services. For example on my 2025 Hyundai here is what would stop working without a Bluelink subscription.
• Anything you do through the Bluelink app.
• Automatic calling for help after a collision, enhanced roadside assistance (sends GPS coordinates to help center so you don't have to know where you are to get help), and features to track and immobilize stolen vehicles.
• The navigation system loses access to live traffic data and live routing (routing the frequently checks with a server to update routes based on live and historical traffic patterns). Local search also degrades or maybe goes away.
• OTA updates for the navigation system. If you want to update its maps and databases you can download the update from their site to a thumb drive, and then install it via that.
What keeps working:
• All the driver assist and driving safety features like adaptive cruise control, lane finding/keeping, cross traffic warnings, and similar.
• CarPlay and Android Auto.
• The radio in the infotainment system. You can connect your phone via Bluetooth or USB (without using CarPlay or Android Auto) to stream music and handle phone calls.
The reason Toyota prices are still so high is because they're one of the only vehicles that are still so reliable (Mazda and Honda are actually great too). I think a 2025 Lexus GX 550 will almost certainly be on the road in 2035. Anything electric I am less certain of because they depreciate way faster and the build quality sucks.
The latest Lexus models including the one you cited are getting in huge trouble for quality problems right now. Anything without a 2JZ is suspect from Lexus right now.
Same experience as a Canadian visiting NY and SF in recent years. Yes I know I went to the most expensive cities in the country but still it was hard to eat a basic meal that wasn't US$30, and in tourist contexts (like the hotel restaurant) it was even more still.
Even shopping for a few basic groceries felt like I was paying dollar amounts more than I would expect to see at home but in a currency that's worth 1.3x+.
Services are expensive because they compete for labor with other things.
I think US grocery prices are higher because there's not really a goal of keeping them lower. Subsidies could be structured to ensure that they help the consumer, but they aren't. And so on.
Grocery stores don't make any money though. That's why its practically a huge monopoly, and even still they hardly make money. Food in general is an awful business to be in.
Food is expensive and no one is getting rich from it. It's a strong sign you are in an advanced economy, and will be having it hard if you aren't part of that "advanced".
Austin prices absolutely exploded from about 2010 to 2022. A huge part of that was housing, and then just before the pandemic Austin became sort of a weird "meme stock" ("Elon Musk is moving there!", "Joe Rogan is moving there") where its popular vision far outstripped its actual reality. I remember travelling around 2018 or so and telling people I was from Austin, and nearly every time I got a "Oh cool, I've heard that's such an awesome city" in response, which was far different a response I'd get in like 2005 or so. I mean, I like Austin, but we also had 2 months straight of 105+ degree weather a few years ago...
Like the article states, when housing goes up everywhere, it means that even the lowest wage workers need to be paid a lot more to survive, so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.
The other issue you saw, homelessness, is especially concentrated in Austin. Austin is perhaps the most liberal city in deep red Texas, so homeless people flock to Austin because it has good services and a generally sympathetic populace, and some rural conservative locales have even been giving homeless people one way bus tickets to Austin.
I guess the good news is that Austin built a shit ton of housing since 2021-2022, so housing prices (including rentals) are falling faster in Austin than anywhere else in the US.
Meh, property tax rates are so high in Texas because there is no state income tax. And I disagree that prices aren't much lower in other towns. Whenever I drive to Houston I always comment when I stop for food (which usually ends up being at some "fast casual" type place) that prices are much more reasonable than in Austin, like ~20-25% less.
I’m Canadian, but frequently travel in the US. Over the past year I am also shocked at US prices.
It used to be that everything in the US was about 25% cheaper (makes sense as their dollar is worth more).
Lately I’ve noticed that everything is priced the same. And I mean exactly the same.
On work trips over the past year I’ve had to buy tools at Home Depot, supplies at IKEA and Walmart, groceries, hotel, etc. I was in both large and small cities on the east and West coast … and the pricing is the same.
The drill I bought for $279 USD is $279 CAD. The IKEA cabinet I got for $199USD is $199CAD, etc..
Note sure what is going on with US prices, but Canadian making $17/hr minimum wage are struggling. I can’t imagine how Americans do it..
The houses got expensive because homeowners wanted housing to be an investment, so they voted for laws that make it harder to build or densify housing.
Cars are expensive because the government puts tariffs on perfectly good imports to protect the American car companies. The American car companies produce garbage, and even the electric car companies like Tesla and Rivian are producing super-high-tech luxury land yachts. The government incentives are also captured to produce huge trucks, and many states don't have regular inspections, so lifted trucks are common. The companies don't want to build and sell small cars because the perception is that a small car is going to get pancaked in a crash with a bigger, heavier car. Gas prices don't matter because the government artificially suppresses them, sometimes with war.
Corn and dairy are cheap because the government subsidizes them at the behest of the corn and dairy lobbies, which use small good ol' boy farmers who don't even exist as their marketing. A lot of the corn goes to ethanol for fuel, even though it's a crappy fuel and an acre of solar panels results in many more miles of EV driving than the same acre of corn ethanol. So you can also get a cheap soda and a cheap cheese pizza, but a lot of the food pipeline is captured by seed monopolies and middle-men. Somehow milk became a bit of a right-wing meme, and it's basically a naturally-occurring dessert, so people love milk even though it's not good for you and not a good way to get nutrients.
> Even food where normally you could walk in a shop
You aren't supposed to walk in America. You're supposed to drive. Don't get me started lol
Houses got expensive because of usury (loans made for unproductive purposes). It destroys civilizations over time. That is why it was encoded into ancient religious traditions.
Housing, education, and cars, all typically financed via loans, all exorbitantly expensive.
It’s not about the interest rate. It’s the availability of loans for unproductive purposes on a societal level. It raises the price even if you choose not to partake in said loans.
When the money being lended is digital and not backed by anything it’s even worse.
You said "usury", which is a word that describes loaning money at an exorbitant interest rate. So it's no surprise GP thought you were talking about interest rates.
(Yes, I know "usury" has had other meanings, but this is the current, common definition, and if you're going to use a word in a way that's uncommon, you should be prepared for confusion.)
So in the USA in 2026, any interest rates or fees that are not illegal, are not exorbitant? And any loan or credit that is not illegal is not usury? That is obviously not the working definition for other commenters here.
If illegal loans have financed our cars, education, and homes, then where are all the criminal prosecutions? Where are the lawsuits to recover the exorbitant rates? Was it consumers taking these illegal loans? Or was it the established banks, negotiating illegal and exorbitant rates with criminals? Is that why banks fail, or are "too big to fail", because we are reluctant to expose their criminal activity?
We heard of people "walking away" from their home loans during the 2008 recession; it's difficult to walk with broken kneecaps! We heard that their loans were "underwater", but we didn't realize they were "sleeping with the fishes"!
> That is obviously not the working definition for other commenters here.
If you've read the other comments I don't understand why you're still confused.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882360 pointed the finger at the general practice of moneylending, known for most of history as "usury", for high housing prices. This is broadly true - lower interest rates equal high prices.
Others thought they meant modern usury, which is lending money at higher than the legal maximum interest rate.
US interest rates have been historically some of the lowest anywhere. And there's nations with very high interest rates that don't have the same housing cost problems...
That's the modern definition. The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880310 was about bans on usury since ancient times, when that term referred to the general practice of moneylending.
"In many historical societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies, usury meant the charging of interest of any kind, and was considered wrong, or was made illegal."
Payday loans are not illegal. By your definition, and Wikipedia's modern definitions, a payday or car-title loan is not exorbitant, and it is not usury. The payday loan shops around here are licensed, legitimate businesses working with regulated financial instruments.
> Low interest rates (i.e. freer moneylending aka more usury) increases house prices.
You just contradicted yourself. What is usury again? Low interest rates, freer moneylending, is "more usury"? You write in the present tense that freer moneylending and low interest rates are more usury than usury? Are the rates exorbitantly low? Is there an exorbitant number of customers?
More loans are approved and/or borrowers are approved for bigger loans in low interest rate environments. This leads to high house prices. Hence, the "more usury" comment that I wrote. In that one sentence I had the same ancient definition of usury in mind.
I hope you don't believe low interest rates = expensive houses is something I made up.
If you think I'm contradicting myself sure go on. I find it easy to hold two definitions of a word in my head and use the correct one in the right context. But I understand that not everyone can and some may find it confusing.
The definition of usury hasn't changed in 200 years.
From Webster's 1828 Edition:
U'SURY, noun s as z. [Latin usura, from utor, to use.]
1. Formerly, interest; or a premium paid or stipulated to be paid for the use of money.
[Usury formerly denoted any legal interest, but in this sense, the word is no longer in use.]
2. In present usage, illegal interest; a premium or compensation paid or stipulated to be paid for the use of money borrowed or retained, beyond the rate of interest established by law.
I'm not even sure where "houses got expensive" come from. Houses certainly did not increase in price (per unit of area) in last ~80 years, inflation adjusted - they tightly fluctuate around the same point. Housing affordability is in fact 4th best in the US among all countries in the world, and it got better in the last decades (although with fluctuations, and periods when it was getting cheaper were not pleasant as it meant millions of people going under).
Because this is vibes vs data. People are made to believe that houses are expensive and people are being squeezed, because it makes money to throw people into rage.
Housing price per square feet is flat over decades...
It's very true for LA, SF, NYC, DC, and other similar cities. It's far less true everywhere else. Here in Atlanta you can find homes <250k and condos <150k
That's not the academic consensus. It's a non-peer-reviewed working paper that contradicts the academic consensus.
The authors are clear about this:
"The standard view of housing markets holds that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply - shaped by factors like geography and regulation - explain differences in how house price and quantity growth respond to rising demand across U.S. cities... Our conclusions
challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets"
>On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive.
That's Austin & life in the 21st Century, friend.
I grew up ATX-style in the 90s, and cannot afford to live there anymore. But also chose not to years before then.
There're still a few regions where living hasn't gotten life-prohibitive, yet (my answer: anywhere there is a Cookout and/or Pal's fastfood restaurant).
Partially this is because of the strength of the dollar. I lived briefly in England in 2013ish and everything was expensive. I went back last year and it seemed cheaper, but only because the dollar has increased in value. Thus, if you've been visiting from England, you're probably seeing a huge increase in price due to the pound weakening.
Texas has gone nuts. I visited Dallas, Houston, Galveston from Oregon last year, looking to try out the cheap food that I hear about online because they dOn’T hAvE cOmMuNiSt tAxEs aNd rEgUlAtIoNs, and oh boy did I my hopes get crushed. Everything seemed as expensive, or more, than in my area with regulations, more reasonable worker protections and minimum wage…
That's going to depend heavily on where you live in Seattle or NYC. London has some of the most expensive real estate in the world and I can say from experience that you get much more of an apartment for your money in NYC or Seattle than in London (lived in all three).
Prices have gone skyhigh since lockdown. In fact, it's funny seeing the British media going on about "Cost of Living crisis" all the time, but failing to acknowledge one of the most obvious causes of it.
I predicted a massive price hike way back in the summer of 2020, because somehow we were going to have to pay for the lockdown, and many people didn't believe me. Now it's here, people are trying to tell me it was too long ago, even though economics can run in ten or twenty year cycles.
I wasn't really saying starving. Just hungry enough to come ask for food and eat it. I think the lady in question was likely drug addicted but even so usually even the addicts are fed.
We have a real problem of just letting people be homelss forever. If someone's a drug addict here they effectively can stay one forever. Any money they get can go to the drug and all other ammenities are used.
Oh boy, you're not paying attention or you're in a bubble. Not usually distended belly-famine starving, sure, but malnutrition is rife in many rural and impoverished counties in the country.
I distinctly remember seeing the mother and child in a dark stairwell mother thin as a rail sitting on dirt and trash the woman barely lucid baby wailing.
Or the old man begging on the corner with one arm clearly starving in nothing but a fabric cloth pants the bones sticking out like nothing I've seen before.
Malnutrition by western standards is bs you're either dying or you're not. Most of the world does not live on a balanced diet.
The question seems a bit silly like how much liquid is there in a glass. As much as you put into it I guess. You can tell roughly by how it makes you feel. The one I just had at Ronis Primrose Hill had a pretty good whack. Probably about 200mg comparing it to the Starbucks list. Or maybe 250.
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