This isn’t true. There are dozens of car models near $20k today, and most of the base model inexpensive cars in the US have always cost around today’s $20k-$30k in adjusted dollars. Even the Ford model T: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-inflati...
Quality of cars today is unquestionably better, and the number of features and conveniences is unquestionably higher. Cars last longer than they used to, a lot longer on average. There’s ample stats on this.
The average price of cars has gone up slowly relative to inflation because there are now better cars to choose from, and people choose to pay more. But you can’t even buy something as bad as a 1930s or 1950s or 1980s car today, and you can get a much better car now for less money than you could then.
That is uniquely american or first world experience. I won't comment on the mechanisms of wealth transfer from rest of the world to first world. The rest of the world has been very hardworking and trying to make it one day at a time. Here's an example.
Great recommendation, I'm watching it now. It reminds me of another documentary about a festival with hand-built vehicles made of recycled Vespas that are extremely customized.
Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive because they get more and more stuff included. I owned cars in the 90's and cars from 2015, the newer one came in the basic trim with stuff that adds to complexity and cost, from AC and electric windows to dozen aibags, sensors and driving aids.
For housing, there are 2 things that happened: regulations made houses more expensive to build (I personally built 3 houses in the past 35 years, I saw the increase in cost) and second thing is house prices are totally disconnected to cost, my current home is evaluated (for tax purpose) about 3 times the real cost to build it. Except the buyers, everyone is happy to have a huge increase in housing cost, builders make more money, local governments raise more taxes, buyers are screwed from all sides and not many people go build their own, even if it many places is still possible (I currently planning to build a house for some friends).
But in a way building a house is cheaper: tools, technology and new materials make it faster and cheaper to build. It should make houses more affordable, if the other factors would not completely eat this saving.
Car prices are affected by ease of financing and a huge second hand market. The former make it easier to “afford” a fancy vehicle (whether or not you actually afford it is another question) and the later means fierce competition in the lower parts of the market making cheap cars less profitable.
Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now than decades ago, especially factoring in huge safety and tech improvements. Entry-level models remain affordable, while buyers voluntarily pay more for SUVs and tech-heavy EVs.
> Housing is becoming a luxury.
Rising housing prices are mostly driven by land scarcity and zoning. The actual cost per square meter of construction (build quality) has improved and remains stable.
> Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.
Nope. Electronics, clothing, and appliances have become dramatically cheaper. Quality-adjusted prices for TVs and computers have plummeted.
> Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.
Craftsmanship is alive and well, if you are willing to pay for it. Which most consumers are not; they prefer being able to afford more things at lower prices and quicker tech cycles.
In snowbelt (and even somewhat sub-snowbelt) regions, cars would pretty much rust out at 50K miles and starting when conditions were wet or cold could be an adventure.
And, while I have the option of buying an expensive "handmade" (with the aid of expensive CNC equipment) dining room table--which I have done--I also have the option of buying a sturdy and nice-looking mail-order bed for $300 that I assemble.
Housing is the main thing but, as you say, that's mostly a matter of location. There are a ton of cheaper locations but many don't want to live there--even if they're fairly accessible to a major city.
Disagree. Real wages are ahead of all market sectors except medical and rent. People are making a bad comparison--they look at what they have vs what their parents have and see their parents doing better. Yeah, 20 or 30 years later in their career, plus a lot of time building up assets, that's actually to be expected. The proper comparison is between cohorts, but that can only be done by digging into the data, not by experience.
Wealth inequality? The majority is from comparing those starting out to those at retirement. Likewise, the majority of income inequality is hours worked. (Not to say that there aren't other factors, but in both cases when you compare apples to apples it explains more than half the range.)
But their parents didn't need 20 or 30 years to build up their assets, or did they? They could purchase a new car when they were in their prime at 20-30 years old. Real estate they already had before buying the car. People who are in their prime today have to wait to be 50+ to have real estate, and if they want to have a new car they have to forgo that.
My parents, both PhD's. AFIAK first car (they had lived where they didn't have as much need of one) was in their 40s. First house in their 50s. We bought our first house (bigger and better than anything my parents ever owned) when I was still in my 20s. (She's older but did not come with any assets beyond her education.)
Cost per square meter is a misleading measure. A model that assigns a fixed price to a 0 m2 home and an additional price for each square meter is a better match for both construction costs and subjective utility.
Or maybe the additional price should be based on the number of rooms instead. Adding empty space by making the rooms bigger is cheap, but extra rooms are usually more valuable to those on a limited budget.
Where I live in California, construction itself has become unaffordable. Even if the land were free, construction and permits are now so expensive that it's impossible to build affordable housing without subsidies.
safety... maybe. tech? no. Having to plug in an expensive proprietary diagnostic device to diagnose problems, dozens of computers, hundreds of sensors many of which can render the vehicle bricked and inoperable if they're not working correctly.. None of this is better.
Adjusted for inflation? Who cares? People's compensation haven't risen enough to even account for inflation so how is that helpful?
It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago after they adjust for inflation.
That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.
I guess it depends on the type of tasks you give it.
They all seem to work remarkably well writing typescript or python but in my experience, they fall short when it comes to shell and more broadly dev ops
For context, my experience is colored by the kind of work I do: building codebases from scratch that tackle ‘niche’ (read: not readily available as FOSS or described online) problems, usually in small teams or solo.
For a completely inexperienced dev, they may delegate to having AI draft the entire project for them. If a part doesn’t work, they just keep repeating the prompt until it does. They’re not tweaking and twiddling, so the mindset is ‘if it works then I’m done’.
For an experienced dev, usually they will define a structure and have a clear understanding of what the inputs and outputs of each component are. They’ll also write what are known to be critical code sections themselves. AI is usually used here as they might take advantage of an intern—to do the busy work—and because they have adequate experience it’s fairly trivial to review the code and manually fix problems before adding it to the codebase.
For people in the middle ground, they end up with hybrid of these qualities, and it generally doesn’t turn out well. They might define a structure, but not well enough to know exactly what components to create from an LLM, nor knowledge of which sections need to be done by hand, nor be adept at finding deficiencies in the code they’re given. Because they have the ability to debug, they spend time debugging failures instead of just promoting again, and because they let bad code slip into the codebase failures happen just as often as if done by hand, but with the disadvantage of not having authored the code in the first place.
I'm a CTO in a startup and all our docs are in .md files, mermaid diagrams with dynamic Table of Content generation.
We have two repos: Product (to anything relating to product) and Wiki (anything else, ranging from onboarding checklists, brief design documentation of key parts of the code ... to meta documentation)
Although our team is small by many standards (8) everyone likes it.
We spend a ridiculously small amount of time on meetings.
The obvious and great upside is the code/documentation integration which has virtually 0 context loss.
One downside however is indeed the difficulty of git branching to non-developers.
Once in while I find myself debugging a messed up version.
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