You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!

So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.

[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05

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gwerbin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.

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parineum 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end user.

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keybored an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Renters are ecstatic as price of commodities are plummeting as house prices go up and up: “distracting myself has never been this cheap”, Anon. says.

People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.

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PaulHoule 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This chart tells the story pretty well: to get it down to a quip "some things we want got a lot cheaper, things we need got a lot more expensive"

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3

The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.

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parineum 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.

Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.

Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.

	▲	keybored 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices. A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself. I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.

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gwerbin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.

	▲	parineum an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Food, clothing, electronics... Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really. Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).