Not sure I buy the premise. Austin has a household $133k median income with a $435k median home price. It’s very affordable.
But, to make Austin more affordable still, you make it less expensive to build so that it’s profitable to build. Typical regulations that do this are:
- Lower minimum sizing requirements
- open zoning
- raise height limits
- make sure you don’t have unwarranted restricted fire codes (some places have elevator stairwell requirements that are insane)
- make permitting easier or not required at all for some cases
- no min parking requirements
Pretty sure as good as Austin is, they could easily reduce the costs by up to 30% (there are parts of the country with 50% the cost per sq ft for new construction).
It’s disturbing to see multiple comments that “capitalism” is to blame for the costs in healthcare. The US healthcare market is the least free market in the US. Capitalism (when there is true competition) brings down costs pretty universally. Those parts of the market that are market oriented tend to get better and cheaper over time (for example, generic over the counter meds, needles, and even health care panels, AI health advice) all getting better and cheaper. You can get pretty cheap panels of blood drawn, for $200 or less with tons of data. It’s only when you hit the regulatory wall and you exit the market do you see costs explode.
Our imperfect system pays for the worlds medical R&D, so I would actually love to see per capita spending remain similar BUT have the market opened up, with a nice safety net at reasonable cost, and money pouring into curing aging and all disease.
Agreed on the diagnosis: the inpatient hospital market does not function as a competitive market. Patients arriving by ambulance do not shop on price. Insurance insulates consumers from marginal cost. Regulatory and capital barriers prevent new entrants. The HCRIS FY2023 data for 3,193 hospitals shows what this produces: a 2.6x median markup to actual cost, with the highest-markup hospitals rarely losing patients to lower-cost alternatives nearby.
Your examples of what works are instructive. Generic OTC, needles, blood panels all share the same conditions: price-visible, consumer-controlled, no third-party payment insulation. The RAND hospital data shows the identical procedure (hip replacement) costing $29K commercially in the US versus $14.7K in Germany and $8.7K in Spain. Same implant, same surgeon training requirements. The patient's insurance status varies; the procedure does not.
Montana's commercial reference pricing is not deregulation, but it creates the price-visibility function you are describing: a known floor price that makes it possible for a purchaser to act on price information. Employers have adopted it nationally with documented savings.
We have crony capitalism in the US, healthcare is one of the easiest areas to see it.
Free-market is the illusive perfect sphere. Most markets are oval or amoeba shaped. Rarely can the US achieve a true free market in any industry, since money pours into politics and corrupts the laws and regulations.
I occasionally use wireless, but 90% of the time I prefer wired for this reason. Reliable, simple, harder to lose, no charging, easier to connect. I just done think the wires are a problem for me, sometimes a benefit, sometimes a mild inconvenience.
Having tried this a bit I do really like the single api call for all of it.
I also appreciate transparent pricing but I am not 100% sure the sense of scale of costs. It could be helpful to give some ballparks on things for each of the plans. I'm not sure exactly what i could get out of a plan. My guess, trying hard to figure it out, was if i had about 1,000 pages of new/updated content per month, I would pay $295/month for unlimited queries on top of it. Is that roughly correct?
Yes, we don't charge for queries. For $295, you're able to index up to 1000 pages of new content per month into a fully queryable pipeline.
Advanced and Basic do play a difference though. Advanced is for complex graphics or charts in the documents submitted. Basic is sufficient for most document workloads.
I think to the extent they are making a speed v quality tradeoff, I think they are making the right call. 10x speed over quality any day for me. Reminds me of:
"If brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough of it." - Isaac Arthur
Everyone is
making this tradeoff now. Surely nothing bad could come from it.
In the meantime I can’t even continue a Claude Code session I started on desktop on my phone. What’s the point of shipping a billion features of they are all half baked?
Everyone is NOT making that tradeoff. Maybe we will be forced into it someday, but my team is leveraging AI to increase the quality of code far beyond what we would have done without it. Some of us are using it to engineer better solutions.
Example: we are putting a lot of energy into removing technical debt, reorganizing the code to remove unneeded abstraction and complexity, and creating missing tests and automation. We're not just burping out new untested and poorly reviewed functionality.
It’s a phase, for sure things will turn around in the future once the hype of “oh we can now ship fast” is gone.
fwiw I’ve had this open source browser ui that sits on top of your claude code, gemini and codex and picks up/starts your sessions from any device https://github.com/siteboon/claudecodeui
I like that it lets you specify the types of accepted docs. The biggest issue i have with Stripe identity verification product right now. And biometric re-log in is also great. Will check it out.
Red light running is bad...but I think the solution to this problem at this point is just "self driving cars". With some exceptions, I would just focus all jurisdictions on this future and avoid policy inline with a world full of self driving cars. Currently in the US, most places feel like you need a car, and many US laws are designed with this in mind. In 5 years, this will no longer be true, so laws should reflect:
1. No parking minimums
2. Less free parking (e.g. street parking)
3. Policy supportive of self driving cars
4. More aggressive removal of driver licenses for human drivers with repeat violations
5. More aggressive penalties for driving without a license.
The average cost of car ownership is $0.69 per mile without insurance, $0.25 per mile to store it, and $0.49 per mile in societal costs (death, injuries, delays due to accidents). So about $1.43 per mile. I do not enjoy driving, so would add more cost per mile, maybe some would want to pay more but I do t see that much joyriding outside of teenagers and classic car enthusiasts, so I don’t think those that do it for pleasure is a large population.
Tesla cybercab is targeting $0.20 per mile. Waymo projections are $0.40 per mile by 2030. Assuming both hit $0.50 and are twice as safe, this is basically $0.75 per mile.
I don’t see may paying more to drive themselves. And I think as society there will be non economic reasons human driven cars get banned. Like MADD but for human cars.
So I expect 5 years and human cars will not make sense in many cases, 10 years new human car sales to be <50% current levels, 15 years you start seeing bans. 20 years bans common.
The original seems to be arguing, among other things, that the singularity has begun because AI has been employed to improve AI development tooling. I can see it both ways, but skepticism on these claims is natural and warranted. I agree with you that there's no shortage of people underestimating the importance of this moment in history.
But the whole reason it's called "the singularity" is because the "AI" improving itself is supposed to already be smarter than us, and better able to make those improvements. Thus, improvement builds on itself exponentially and we very quickly see massive changes, leading to huge new advances in science and technology.
It's not a singularity if we just get LLMs spitting out code to improve LLMs that's approximately what we could have done, just 40% faster and with 50% more bugs.
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