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by locknitpicker·9mo ago·view on hn ↗
> (...) a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, (...) consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive (...)

I don't think this opinion holds a rational basis.

Extreme poverty being a factor in low job demand is an argument for coercing people into performing certain tasks even though they are not economically viable just because it benefits you personally. This is not a valid argument, neither indentured servitude or slavery. Isn't the US supposed to be a free market economy where free Enterprise reigned?

Complaining about regulation, including waste disposal, is also dumbfounding. Being required to dispose of air filters in a landfill is not the reason why you can't afford a repair. This opinion is also comical as HVAC also covers air quality because otherwise you can be cool in a room but literally sick.

This sort of opinion sounds completely irrational and unsubstantiated, and extremely ideological.

The main factors driving repair cost are things like device longevity, unit price, speed and ease of repair, parts availability, etc. That's mainly it. When you call someone to your house to repair something, the price tag covers that person's cost of living for the fraction of the time it takes them to deal with your problems. On top of that, you need to pay whatever parts they need to buy to get your things back to work. That's where the money goes.

4 comments
Regulation, for example occupational licensing of jobs, has become much more prevalent. 60 years ago, only 5% of the workforce was occupationally licensed, now it is 25%.* There is a bipartisan push to reduce occupational licensing, and recognize licenses across state lines. So not irrational, unsubstantiated, partisan, or ideological.

*https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Labor/NCSL_DOL_Report_05_...

The ideological part comes in when you immediately choose to stop your analysis here. This is known as "playing stupid".

Why has licensure increased in the past 60 years? What were the motivations?

And, if we remove some licensing, how can we be sure the motivation does not come back? What is the ROOT CAUSE?

It's entirely possible that we can get rid of the regulation, have a bunch of bad things happen, pay stupid amounts of money to fix those bad things, and then re-implement the regulation - thereby spending more money than if we just did nothing at all and kept things as they are.

I agree, but it is equally idealogical to clean there is no rational basis for the idea that regulation increases costs. It is equally idealogical to stop at your analysis at "if we remove these regulations something bad will happen, so let's not remove any regulations".
> Complaining about regulation, [...] is also dumbfounding.

Regulation is often necessary, but it has a cost even though it's necessary.

If my country's regulations require nurseries to have one staff member for every three young children, there might be good safety reasons for that - but I'm going to have to spend a third of my salary to have one young child cared for.

I agree.

Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.

Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.

Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.

While in understand your reasoning it is a limited view perspective: The rebuild cost of a VM to society as a whole is marginal at best, an entire hvac system has a lot more crap it needs to dump somewhere when it is replaced.
> Being required to dispose of air filters in a landfill is not the reason why you can't afford a repair.

It is for someone - the market price is pretty much always going to be around the point where a small increase causes a noticeable drop-off in customers (otherwise the only sensible thing for the seller to do is charge more). If something causes even a relatively small increase in price will mean someone can't afford the thing any more.

> It is for someone - the market price is pretty much always going to be around the point where a small increase causes a noticeable drop-off in customers (otherwise the only sensible thing for the seller to do is charge more).

I don't think this is realistic within the topic of air conditioning. No one is going to go without HVAC because of an hypothetical small increase in hypothetical trash handling fees, and definitely not the people in this thread complaining about regulation.

That seems to be a classic no-argument-no-evidence assertion. And you really need an argument for this one, because otherwise it requires disbelieving in supply and demand curves. If you concede the price goes up, you have to concede that the seller thinks they're going to have less customers. Ie, that people will indeed choose not to buy the thing if the price goes up even a little bit. Otherwise they would already have raised the price because it would be free money for them to do that.

And it is the case that people don't tend to save, ie, they spend everything they earn. In that environment if a price changes, even a little bit, they're going to have to do without something. The maths is pretty easy. I mean maybe they're going to eat less food or whatever because they bought an air conditioning, but there will be people who are literally facing that choice and choose food over comfort. Someone actually has to be quite wealthy before the price of something going up a little bit doesn't force them to make changes to their lifestyle. For some people on the margins that change will be the difference between having and not having air conditioning.

If you want to make an argument that the cost to the seller is small enough that the price won't go up then sure, that might be so. In fact it does happen sometimes. But the people in the thread aren't complaining about small hypothetical fees, you bought that up yourself. They're complaining about regulations that cause the price of air conditioning to go up and chemotaxis had quite a long list that, practically, will cause that to happen.