| ▲ | peaseagee 12 hours ago |
| That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately? |
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| ▲ | willio58 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Repairing grandfather clocks isn't more expensive now because it's gotten any harder; it's because the popularity of grandfather clocks is basically nonexistent compared to anything else to tell time. |
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| ▲ | simianwords 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "repairing a unique clock" getting costlier doesn't mean technology hasn't gotten cheaper. check out whether clocks have gotten cheaper in general. the answer is that it has. there is no economy of scale here in repairing a single clock. its not relevant to bring it up here. |
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| ▲ | ipaddr 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow. | | |
| ▲ | fooker 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Luxury watches have gone up, 'clocks' as a technology is cheaper than ever. You can buy one for 90 cents on temu. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The landing cost for that 90 cent watch has gone way up. Shipping and to some degree taxes has pushed the price higher. | | |
| ▲ | pas 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | that's not the technology of course it's silly to talk about manufacturing methods and yield and cost efficiency without having an economy to embed all of this into, but ... technology got cheaper means that we have practical knowledge of how to make cheap clocks (given certain supply chains, given certain volume, and so and so) we can make very cheap very accurate clocks that can be embedded into whatever devices, but it requires the availability of fabs capable of doing MEMS components, supply materials, etc. |
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| ▲ | simianwords 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | not true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can't account for inflation because the price increase is inflation. | | |
| ▲ | pas 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | you can look at a basket of goods that doesn't have your specific product and compare directly but inflation is the general price level increase, this can be used as a deflator to get the price of whatever product in past/future money amount to see how the price of the product changed in "real" terms (ie. relative to the general price level change) | |
| ▲ | simianwords 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | this is not true |
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| ▲ | esafak 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Instead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc. |
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| ▲ | emtel 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors. |
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| ▲ | groby_b 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies. Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life. These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments. |
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| ▲ | ipaddr 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I purchased a 5T drive in 2019 and the price is higher now despite newer better drives going on the market since. Not much has down in price over the last few years. | | | |
| ▲ | solomonb 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | okay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge? https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen... | | |
| ▲ | groby_b 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You will get a different bridge. With very different technology. Same as "I can't repair my grandfather clock cheaply". In general, there are several things that are true for bridges that aren't true for most technology: * Technology has massively improved, but most people are not realizing that. (E.g. the Bay Bridge cost significantly more than the previous version, but that's because we'd like to not fall down again in the next earthquake)
* We still have little idea how to reason about the cost of bridges in general. (Seriously. It's an active research topic)
* It's a tiny market, with the major vendors forming an oligopoly
* It's infrastructure, not a standard good
* The buy side is almost exclusively governments. All of these mean expensive goods that are completely non-repeatable. You can't build the same bridge again. And on top of that, in a distorted market. But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time. | | |
| ▲ | solomonb 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This seems largely the same as any other technology. The prices of new technologies go down initially as we scale up and optimize it's production, but as soon as demand fades, due to newer technology or whatever, the cost of that technology goes up again. | |
| ▲ | fooker 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time. Even if you adjust for inflation? |
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| ▲ | arthurbrown 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bought any RAM lately? Phone? GPU in the last decade? | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The latest iphone has gone down in price? It's double. I guess the marketing is working. | | |
| ▲ | xnyan 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Pens are not cheaper, look at this Montblanc" is not a good faith response. '84 Motorola DynaTAC - ~$12k AfI (adjusted for inflation) '89 MicroTAC ~$8k AfI '96 StarTAC ~$2k AfI `07 iPhone ~$673 AfI The current average smartphone sells for around $280. Phones are getting cheaper. |
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| ▲ | epidemiology 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Or riding in an uber? |
