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The article makes a more extreme claim: that quotas are not equal per school, but differ based on LCFF+ status.

  but I suspect that the people working in the TV factory do not find that the TVs are cheaper than finding a local plasterer
I wonder whether this is true of Tesla factories in the USA? If you have a very badly wrecked Tesla with some valuable salvageable parts, would it be cheaper to buy a new Tesla or to pay someone to replace the 80% of parts that need replacing.

I suspect the new one would be cheaper.

Automation and economies of scale matter, not just labour costs.


  and it's pretty obvious that whoever was said that quote was going for shock/cleverness and sacrificed truth and understanding
It's not obvious from the quote, which just states something that is obviously true, and doesn't attempt to explain it.

But ... Andreessen has elsewhere claimed it's due to regulation: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment

But ... more recently his firm has explained they know what Baumol's cost disease is: https://a16z.com/why-ac-is-cheap-but-ac-repair-is-a-luxury/


Is Andreessen the source of the OP's quote?

He does have his head up his ass, so I wouldn't be surprised [1]. However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.

[1] FFS, he really implies day care is expensive because regulation is preventing "technology [from] whipping through" the sector like it has in TV manufacturing. I don't want to live in his nightmare fantasy.

But in the spirit of deregulation and techno-utopianism, here's an idea to use technology to slash day care prices that's held back by evil government regulation: lock kids in padded rooms while their parents work. Maybe stick a TV on the wall playing Cocomelon. It requires no labor for supervision, and the kids can't get hurt because the room is padded. That's a "technological innovation" that will "push down prices while increasing quality," for certain definitions of "quality."


  However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.
Check the first paragraph of the first article. It says 'Source: Marc Andreessen' and links to a YouTube video where they discuss it.

I don't know how I missed that. Thanks.

  I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy
Marc Andreesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_1cTlLpNMg&t=4262s

Thank you. I thought it was a VC but couldn't remember who.

Some people use git worktrees so each agent is working in a separate directory.

Some people have multiple agents working in the same directory, and allow the agents to tell each other what they're doing and which files they're editing: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail


If you use Anki and want to analyze your review history, you can export the review history into a CSV, and then use pandas to analyze it.

https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...


  The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.
Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...

What a great comparison; I've never thought of it this way. It's obviously not perfect since the automation is so temperamental shall we say, but this does give me more empathy for the countless workers whose jobs have been re-natured by technology.

From their prospective, the efficiency increases and more gets done, but the hours and wage stay the same and the number of co-workers may decrease.

I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs.

I believe that was the point

Reading it back now it does seem pretty obvious. That’s what I get for commenting right after waking up!

All good, it's a Monday morning

efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?

The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.

There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.

There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.

At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.

Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.


Nursing massively expanded but they didn't want to take it.

You can't expect factory workers to magically turn into nurses. Sure, people can learn new things, but human skillsets are not entirely fungible.

The last time this was posted on HN (October 2023), I posted this comment which I think makes it easy to understand the fundamentals of accounting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37951781


It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason.

If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreciation properly isn't likely to make a big difference.


This is a great point.

I take it for granted that people want to be able to read a balance sheet and an income statement.

But most people don't.


That was my thinking reading this. You need the basics but I would assume the main motivation is to look at a company's financial statement and at least recognize a lot of the language and the significance of the relationships. Of course there are going to be a lot of subtleties but the statement shouldn't be seen as being written in an ancient language.

It seems like the addresses cost about $20 each, and can be rented out for ~$5/year.

That doesn't seem terrible.


When I played an anamorphic PAL DVD on a 4:3 CRT, the picture would look vertically stretched until I pressed the 'aspect ratio' button on the TV.

This would correct the display, but how did it do it? Was it by drawing the same number of scanlines, but reducing the vertical distance between each line?


I've never used a 4:3 CRT that could deal with different aspect ratios like that.

Was the CRT natively HD, or SD? Was it zooming in on the middle of the frame, or letterboxing?


I don't remember the model. It was a Sony CRT that I bought for about 600GBP in maybe 1997?

Back then, there was no concept of SD or HD. PAL has 625 scanlines (~576 visible). No fixed horizontal resolution.


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