1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
> Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
Google, AFAIK the only company with cars that are actually autonomous, has US$98 Billion in cash.
It'd have to be a hell of an accident to put a dent in that.
All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.
For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.
Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.
If it's cheaper for them to pay lawyers a few tens or hundreds of millions to bury any such case in court, in settlements, or putting the agitator through any of the myriad forms of living hell they can legally get away with, then they'll go that route.
You'd need an immensely rich or influential opponent to decide they wanted to march through hell in order to hold Google's feet to the fire. It'd have to be something deeply personal and they probably have things structured to limit any potential liability to a couple hundred million. They'll never be held to account for anything that goes seriously wrong.
This is a crazy take. Google has lots of money to hire lawyers, but that also means that Google has lots of money to pay out settlements. It's worth it to sue them because they have something to take.
Getting richer has never made someone LESS likely to be assured.
> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.
This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.
Far be it from me to tell automakers how to roll out software but I would expect them to have relatively slow and gradual rollouts, segmented by region and environment (e.g., Phoenix might be first while downtown London might be last).
This is true, we had a bad hail storm come through in 2010 that dimpled an appreciable fraction of the cars in the city like golf balls. Most were deemed repairable write-offs. Went right over a couple of luxury car yards. A bunch of people at my work moved our cars undercover 10 minutes before it hit, and felt kind of silly… for 10 minutes, until it hit.
Car insurance premiums jumped by quite a lot that day, as far as I can tell permanently.
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.
My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.
Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
> High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.
I think parent might be implying that a 10 mph collision can total a car just as effectively as a 100 mph collision. There might be more left of the occupants, but the car itself might be still a total loss from a cost-to-repair perspective
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.
I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.
> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.
Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.
>Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.
Interesting theory, I would have assumed the exact opposite. People who want to drive fast and take risks will select manual driving because they'll find the autonomous cars too boring.
It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.
It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.
Watch 'Pop' (Malcome McDowell) in Son of a Critch :) . I don't remember the episode/season.... where he goes on and on about some $1 bill that will be decommissioned and goes to the bank to get some...
There is a simpler explanation - HVAC jobs are directly influenced by the push to covert everything to heat-pumps. And good heat-pumps are expensive. So when you install a $15K to $25K, installation fee also goes up. I am surprised Solar isn't up there. Panels are cheap, install is what we pay for 10 years+
Example of a solar install that was under $20k via DIY - maybe took this guy 1-2 weeks of full-time work. But he was quoted $90k and he did most of it himself - only hiring a backhoe operator to move some dirt around.
We're at the point where the trades are only going to cater to rich/desperate people because the margin they'd make on a job that is DIY-able (and charged a fair price) is not worth it to them. Why do 5-6 low margin jobs when you can do 1 high margin (rip-off) job? Your only competition out there is someone with the will to do it. Builders in CA are massive ripoffs as well.
I think the only way you bring costs from trades down is by having all your workers in-house - which is only doable for corporations. Your average homeowner is just fucked and is gonna have to youtube everything.
What I'm seeing is trades workers basically don't want small one off jobs because you waste so much time on the overheads unrelated to the actual work. If someone has a hole in the wall they need patched, you're spending time answering the phone, estimating the price, driving there, billing the customer, etc. And a lot of jobs are very one off and difficult to evaluate the price.
Why even bother when you could just work for a mass build and plaster up hundreds of walls in a single job on a new apartment building or housing development.
So as an individual it's almost impossible to get someone over to do a small job, and your only realistic option is to do it yourself.
Most of the tradesmen around me won't even get out of bed for less than $1,000. They really don't want piddly little jobs from us peasants. I've started DIY'ing almost everything I need to do around the house because if you call an electrician, he'll quote you a $2,000 "go away" price because he's busy doing $50K new construction jobs.
I don't really know how this is any different now from the 1990s. I think there is a sense of bottom level on price they'll take for a job due to litigation/insurance concerns. But, handymen are what should be doing a lot of these jobs. I do think there is another concern about quality of workmanship as well. You take on these small jobs, one goes poorly - you take a huge hit on your reputation comparatively and have to fight to get small jobs even more than before. That wasn't as big of a concern before the internet made everyone's reputation so important. Losing one customer wasn't losing the whole market - whereas it is now. A few negative reviews can permanently tank your business.
> It's that rich people are the only thing the trades are catering to now.
This is my gut feeling too. I've known so many rich people who just accept whatever number a tradesperson quotes. There is no way that hasn't had a mass effect
I'm not rich (or at least, don't feel rich with the enormous cost increases on everything combined with no promotions for 3 years) -- but how do you negotiate with a tradesperson exactly?
All of the major trade companies around where I live (HVAC, plumbing, electrical etc.) in the US have rates that they quote before the person will even show up. As a new homeowner who didn't grow up in the US, that's all I've ever dealt with.
If the answer is “Give them a number you're comfortable with, and just DIY it as an alternative” -- that's fine, and I do it for anything simple; but for the remaining ones, I have already made a determination that learning this skill would be way more in terms of time invested than the $500 or whatever absurd number they are quoting for a simple repair (this logic likely breaks down over time, and I'm trying to invest more time into learning more house repairs).
I have tried pre-purchasing some parts in the past; and asking them to use them for the install -- that one had some success and a guy told me how much his company marks up parts (n00%).
I do try to get multiple quotes for something, but the difference between them isn't usually appreciable; they're all absurdly high. I've tried to ask them for a parts v/s labor breakdown in the past; some won't even provide that.
If it is a company with more than 2 or 3 employees you are already going to be given a significant markup right off the bat for their marketting and commercial office expenses and have obfuscated costs, individual contractors have lower overhead. Location is also important, if I gotta drive an hour each way for a job that is going into the price. Getting legit parts, especially with short notice, also costs more. While I might buy a $8 ignitor on amazon for my own furnace or a friends, I cant risk crappy counterfit parts for regular customers that might blow up in a week so now its a $35+ part.
Buying your own parts can help but can also burn you if its wrong, or cost the same if something extra is needed that wasnt expected and requires a second visit or bought on short notice from a local parts dealer. A contractor often eats the costs of wrong parts they ordered and just hopes they can use it elsewhere later, but if you bought the parts that is just cost on you.
My recommendation, which is still probably of limited help and won't always be worth it, is to start by hiring a local handyman instead of a specialist and having atleast 2 weeks of lead time for parts. Of course finding a worthwhile handyman can have its own difficulties because so many tradesmen leave the industry after realizing corporate contracting pays workers like trash while taking a lot of the most valuable and worthwhile contracting work off the market from independent contractors.
You'd need to be negotiating with an actual tradesperson, not someone who is a glorified salesperson / unskilled installer who works for a company that has been acquired in a PE rollup.
The easiest way to find a good tradesman is to ask another tradesman. There is an HVAC person in my local area who will come out and do most jobs (such as, for example, moving an AC) for about $500. A PE rollup firm would quote $10k for such jobs.
There was definitely a period from I guess the 80s but definitely the mid 90s to before COVID where the average joe could afford a tradesperson for the bigger things when needed, which are now prohibitively expensive
I feel everyone is competing with a 5-10 dumb rich people who don't batter an eye lid at a job quoted at 20x the materials. I feel people used to have some more morals too on the supply side of that labour, but you can't blame them for chasing the money.
I acquired a minisplit for $450 or so (labelled "For export only - not for sale in US or Canada", because it contained R-410 and doesn't meet the current efficiency standards) and installed it myself.
Getting a similar system installed would have been north of $10,000, and before anyone says "well, that would be a licenced HVAC installer", no it wouldn't - it would be a barely-trained person who is simply "supervised" by a licenced HVAC technician.
If it was so lucrative, wouldn’t more people set up shop undercutting the current offerings? Why not become an HVAC installer and make millions, if you’re really able to make $15k profit on a job you can turn out in a day.
The truth is probably more that the various money sinks in our society are starting to add up, things like healthcare, legal protection, licensure, compliance, rent (business or personal), even just having appropriate work vehicles, fueling them, compensating people for the time spent sitting in traffic to come across town to your house. Somehow you’re paying for all of that when someone’s livelihood is installing your mini split. A lot of those costs have grown faster than wages, if you try to point to a reason why it’s different today than 20 years ago. More people looking to make a quick buck without doing any work or providing any real value, and more people succeeding.
In my state (OR) it takes 4 years to become licensed to do the work for others but homeowners can do the work themselves.
My experience is that it’s not generally well understood how simple it is to install mini splits. The supply companies won’t sell to you directly outside of d2c web companies like hvacdirect
My state has a program where they give you big rebates but only if you use some one on their list of approved installers and since there aren't many installers it creates a big backlog. Homeowners who could install them themselves miss out on the rebate.
In Seattle, installing AC requires a refrigeration permit, which requires a refrigeration contractor license to pull and a licensed HVAC tech to install, which takes 4+ years of training.
It is expensive, but I think you're underestimating the costs.
If the AC catches fire because your electrician skills are bad, what happens? I guess you can rent a ladder if you need one, but they're at least $200 if your split is on the second floor and ladders can be deceptively tricky, and load ratings must be considered. Condensation can kill you and be an extreme cost with mold. Your first mini split is going to take a real long time to install, I promise, assuming you size it right. There is a non trivial risk to life and limb.
This is one of those "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" things.
If you're not comfortable with the electrical work, hire an electrician.
Of course don't DIY it if you're not comfortable, but a simple exterior wall install is fairly straightforward. On a second floor install, (with the condenser on the ground) you only need a small egress hole you can drill from the interior. You'd need a ladder just to secure/cover the lineset.
I don't know what the deal is about people saying heat pumps are expensive. They used to be a little pricier than AC units, but it's just a 4-way valve in addition to one.
I just looked it up, and I can buy a heat pump for 200-400 euros (depending on desired output), installation is ~400 euros. Why are you paying 20-30x for something identical? This sounds like a price difference created by government behavior, like with solar panels and related hardware which seem to be significantly overpriced in north america.
> This sounds like a price difference created by government behavior
It's a price difference created by market segmentation of heat pumps as a luxury product in the US, and the relative lack of qualified installers due to our under-investment in education in the trades.
Is this some country specific terminology? At least in Australia I've never seen an air conditioner that didn't use heat pump technology. Aside from evaporative cooling that is.
Air conditioners (the things that can make a room colder, but not hotter), are indeed heat pumps, but in the US when we refer to a "heat pump" we mean the same technology, but with a reversing valve so that it can make rooms both colder and hotter.
Interesting. I’ve never seen one that couldn’t heat and cool before. Even crusty 30 year old window units can do both. Seems almost absurd to not utilise it both ways.
You have to specifically look for cooling only AC where I am. Most ACs come with heat-dehumidify-cool mode selection and therefore qualify as "heat pumps", as far as how the term is used. I think it's just quirks of regions that traditionally didn't have ACs by default.
+1 This whole mentality of voucher system is selfish.
Even if we consider it as an "efficiency" problem, it is far cheaper for a person to be paid to take care of N children (where N is not too large), rather than have the have the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field, take care of just their children.
It’s not any more selfish than wanting subsidy for childcare. A voucher system is about choice. Parents get to have some financial assistance to make it possible for them to stay at home and be with their kids, or to provide their children with experiences that aren’t just sitting in the daycare center’s room. If they want to do things differently, why shouldn’t they be able to? Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
> the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field
Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids. And their qualifications in some other field doesn’t mean that working that field is better for them or their kids or the country. Having strong family structures and time together is pretty valuable.
If I as a taxpayer am going to subsidize someone else's activity, then why shouldn't I get a say in how they perform that activity?
If it costs $100/child at a daycare facility, but $200/child for someone to be a stay-at-home parent, and you're asking me, a random taxpayer, to pay for one of those for someone else, from a financial perspective I will likely prefer to pay for the former.
Now, I personally don't get to decide where tax dollars go, but I could easily imagine there are enough people with this preference that it could influence public policy.
Having said that, if it's actually significantly better for a child to have a SAH parent, I might change my tune. (My mother was a SAHM, and I think that was great for us growing up.)
The ask isn’t for more for the parents who stay at home, it’s for the equal amount.
In your system you’ve created a messed up incentive where parents are better off just sending the kid to the daycare and having the mom sit at home and do absolutely nothing.
> Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
I generally agree with you, but often the reason that these programs work economically is that those who don't choose to use them still contribute. There are (at least) three different categories: (1) caregivers who will care for their child themselves regardless of whether or not free care is available elsewhere, (2) caregivers who will find care elsewhere regardless of the cost, and (3) caregivers who will make use of free care if available, or otherwise, care for their child themselves.
I think the group (1) has a tendency to be higher income. It's certainly not true of everyone in that group, but I would wager that a significant number of people in that group do not need the financial assistance. Those people not using the free resource, but still contributing to funding it is what makes it economically viable.
Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.
"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.
People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.
> Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids.
Are they really though? I mean, I was raised by mine, and I've done well enough for myself, so that system can't be too bad, and most of the rest of humanity has also been raised by parents, for since... before there were humans. But if we look at this from first principles, it doesn't actually make sense. First, we let just about any random pairing of two humans, one of which has a uterus, can be a parent. Think of the most average person you know, then realize that half of everyone is dumber than them. Then put them with someone else that's just as dumb. Now give them a baby. And then add sleep deprivation on top of that. Seriously, it's a wonder that the human race has managed to survive this long.
Experience is another thing. Even the most talented brilliant person needs to practice to reach their full potential. Raising a child as a skill is no exception. So we're gonna have absolute amateurs each raise a child, and then, most likely, throw all that learning and experience they did away and not have 10 more. Practice makes perfect, so let's not do that.
What sort of training do we give parents before and during their parenthood? Before we send people off to do a job, non-stop for 18 years, how much training do we give them? Four dedicated years of college with plenty of lab and field work? Not in the slightest. Parents are expected to fund their own education for this job.
Finally, the incentive structure is misaligned. Children don't make any financial sense, since the passage of child labor laws. Don't get me wrong, those laws are a good thing! But from an economic intellectual standpoint, it doesn't make sense to fuck up your life like that. Birth rates in the developed world reflect this. It's obviously a problem though, because children are our future and without them, humanity dies out in a generation. So omg holy shit, have kids. Societally, we need them. Society's only allegiance is to it continuing, and it doesn't without kids. Unfortunately they can't show an ROI in a single quarter, so we'll have to figure out a better mechanism for it, but for something so important, our future, shouldn't we want our best and brightest people on the problem? Yet we don't spend rationally. In the US, the school shooting industry (what schools spend on security in response to school shootings) is a multi-billion dollar industry. That money would be better spent on counselors and on the teachers. But back to my point, we'd rather have unpaid amateurs raise children on their off hours, instead of hiring professionals to do it? And make them pay for it as well? Make that make sense!
The failure modes are known. Children get molested, abused, killed. Raised wrong. Those are corner cases, for sure, but I wouldn't argue that those parents are qualified to raise kids.
Still, that's how we've always done it, and holy shit kids are cute, and you love yours, so of course we think parents are qualified to take care of kids, but we don't actually do any qualification except in the worst cases that we know about. Everyone knows somebody that knows somebody that had a bad childhood and didn't get the government called on them though.
Children being raised by parents we assume are qualified is how we always done it, so the system works well enough, because humanity hasn't ended. But if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it that way.
I agree with your point in general, and I'm curious if it's a problem in Lobster. Here's one in Rust:
let i = 1;
let j = 1;
print!("i: {:?}\n", !i);
print!("j: {:?}\n", !j);
// pretend there's a lot of code here
// spooky action at a distance
let v = vec![1, 2, 3];
v[i];
You might think those two print statements would print the same value. They do not.
In Lobster you must initialize a variable declaration. Now you can produce your bad case with `var x = nil`, but that is undesirable because nil types must be explicitly checked at compile time, so typically you want to use as few nils as possible. More likely thus is `var x = ""` if you must initialize later.
For case like this, I'd say your text editor should definitely just be able to tell you right away that this variable is a "string" when you mouse over it.
"Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default"
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179426