Summary of article: in an uncertain job market, some young people are going into blue collar trades. Others are starting startups. Others are powering through. Journalist says some words about "AI" being the cause of all this uncertainty.
Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons:
- Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc;
- You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services);
- Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money;
- Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc;
- No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it.
One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment.
So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.
Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true.
In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be physically worn out before minimum retirement age (65 in the US to get health coverage as a retiree).
In Germany I'd say you still make more with white collar, if you have a job. The problem for Gen Z though, is that they aren't hiring for junior positions.
Still if you go blue collar you have to build your own business.
This could be said of literally anywhere except a ghost town, and it's only true in a very narrow sense. The problem is not housing supply. It's zoning, which is a political decision.
Might be surprising but I am kinda willing to believe it. Since we bought our house, we had quite a bit of work done by professionals. But whenever I can I do things myself.
Like I had multiple companies quote me $300-500 based on the job for things that take me maybe 2-3 hours total to do, including learning about it (will be faster next time), getting the materials, and doing the job.
When you have a few of these a months they add up. It is usually nothing for a month and then 4-5 things to fix/improve the next
>When you have a few of these a months they add up
If these jobs really number in "a few of these a month", then your inclusion criteria must be absurdly broad (eg. changing your lightbulb), or your home is on the verge of falling apart.
You may be surprised how many people can't mentally disassemble basic mechanical systems. I just helped a family member change the handle/arm on their toilet, and they'd been waiting a month for someone else to help. My mom is currently waiting for me to pick up some drywall anchors to re-mount a (small, lightweight) light fixture.
There are a lot of people who don't understand this stuff to a degree where they don't even know whether a repair is dangerous or not. My family member was afraid that if they messed up installing the toilet arm they'd flood their house.
Those people are very capable of having a few repairs a month, just on random stuff. Cabinet hinge screws wore out their hole and just needs a bigger screw, shower curtain mounting is loose and needs new anchors, an outdoor light fixture with a bulb cover needs a new lightbulb and they can't figure out how to get the cover off, etc.
The difference is that the work a contracted tradesperson will do is typically under some sort of guarantee, e.g. typically 2 years on work done in your home (up to 5 for bigger construction etc. type work), at least here in Germany… which you don’t (need to) factor in when DIY-ing.
From what I see on the other side of the ocean, the same applies to Europe, at least to Italy. Add to the list: wake up early, drive to customers all the day long, learn to always smile and be kind to customers even when they don't deserve it.
> Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true.
This is actually the opposite of Baumol's, which says that productivity gains in one sector result in price rises in other sectors. In this case, you have subsidized social services compensating for the fact that a sector with low productivity growth is not experiencing "enough" wage growth (according to the voters who want these subsidies).
Yes. It’s relatively straightforward to work on a fixer upper house during which time you are drawing no salary relative to that, and then you can turn around and sell it (or just enjoy being in a nice house which otherwise would have cost hundreds of thousands).
But if you're not drawing a salary/wages, how the heck are you buying groceries or paying the mortgage? You'd need to turn houses over very quickly/regularly for this to work...?
I'm not debating that tradespeople can make good money - that absolutely can. But, that's the exception not the norm...
The average plumber or electrician in the US earns about $65k/year... that's about 2/3 (or less) of an entry level programming job. Even if that isn't capturing side work/income, that's still less than a mid-career developer (earning $150-$200, more if they're on the west coast on NYC).
Put another way, even at retail consumer prices, I can buy a lot of plumbing or electrical service and still be money ahead on my fairly average engineering manager salary.
Someone with savings could take advantage. Medicaid is not actually means-based. It's income-based. In many states like California, so is SNAP. So a multi-millionaire can actually get free health care and $300/mo for food as long as they don't have income that year. Spend that time working on something that won't pay off for a few years, and you get a ton of benefits, even though you're already rich.
$10-20k of home improvement work adds considerable value for reselling, and you're only on the hook for raw materials -- you've already got the tools and skills and time
one of the wealthiest dudes I know is a carpenter who loves workin wood. his free time is spent making cabinets and furnature and blasting obscure music
Most people don't like working in addition to working. Plus if you're constantly home renovating, it's kinda of hell living in there and your partner might go to greener pastures.
Yea, at least over here in Finland many university degree programmers are hardly worth it, even though there are no tuition fees. A plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business.
I know lots of people with master's degrees who have started studying something practical after graduation, as they were unable to find any job with their degree. Of course the general economic situation (highest unemployment in the EU) is having an impact on everyone, but it's hitting those with higher education particularly badly this time.
>> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business.
And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and they need double knee replacements before they even hit retirement, and suddenly can't work anymore. Some of them try to hire people, but that's hard and not everyone is built for it - so actually (at least in my experience) you go from being very well off to practically destitute, because like someone else pointed out - people in these professions are typically cash only to avoid taxes, they spend it, they don't put it in retirement funds to avoid having to explain the source of income, and they get to a point where they can't work and don't have any income.
It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
> It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no?
Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a 40+ or 50+ year-old SWE? Not many. I am not sure how is that any better than being physically worn out? Physically worn out you can organize work, and hire other people to work for you, but when you're mentally worn out there's not much you can do really.
Avoiding the burnt-out syndrome trap alone isn't enough. You can also easily become unemployable because (1) you're either not good enough for hi-profile jobs demanding maybe 95th percentile skills on the market, (2) you cannot work 50-hour long weeks under high stress continuously because of social and existential aspects of your life (family), or (3) you're simply over-qualified for many other jobs on the market so there's a real risk attached to employing you.
Being a plumber or electrician OTOH does not bear these type of costs or risks so, with things put into a ~20 year context, and given the today's picture of the market, I am also not really sure I would favor SWE over being a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
Many of those folks over here where I live earn 6 figures, and mind that this is only what they report (!), the actual figure is likely 2x as much since the preferred way of paying for the bill is cash (without invoice).
OTOH to break into the 6 figures territory as a SWE over here you need to become a recognizable domain expert - for me it took ~15 years to build the expertise other people believe I am exceptionally good at, and are therefore willing to pay for it. This is far from being easy and there's only of handful such people (in my area) since it takes an unreasonable amount of time and stubbornness to reach that point, barring some other factors of course too.
SWE domain might have been lucrative ~15 years ago but the dynamics in SWE changed dramatically in the last ~20 years. And as we see now with the AI, the change seems not to be declining.
I think that for some reason you took my critique of being a plumber or electrician as an endorsement of being a software engineer, and it's not entirely clear to me why.
Yep. The ability to work without paying taxes in this profession is of enormous value. It keeps prices lower for the consumer, and income higher for the handyman.
I seen many handymen with the latest and greatest luxury cars, and the demand is endless.
On the other side, it seems technologists salaries are stagnating, and the new guys on the market get lower and lower salaries, so it does indeed seem as if the best and quickest way to retiring early is the handyman approach coupled with a high level of non-taxes work.
If you're willing to commit fraud anyway, just run a crypto scam. The payout is a lot higher, and it will use the white collar tech skills you already have rather than forcing you to learn a trade.
It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's.
I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s
Here the barriers to entry are high imo but artificial, you need to complete an apprenticeship paid for through opportunity cost of lower wages and less working freedom for a few years.
A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill.
The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'
Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'
Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.
All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.
-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.
Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.
Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.
As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
> - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase
You mean by how VAT is not paid on materials a company is going to use (at least that's the case here in France, no idea what the rest of the UE does it). Or by doing undeclared work?
Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway.
Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion.
Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone.
Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc.
The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.
> in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse
So it's not "blue vs white collar jobs"; it's being a law abiding citizen or not.
I know a lot of people who matches what you're talking about, but they all have in common to have their own interpretation of the law. There's not a single thing they do by the books.
I am yet to find any "blue collar worker" who would do this properly and actually give me an invoice or (god forbid) would take a bank transfer to a company account or maybe even a card payment. Literally every single person I have ever interacted with for fixing my house was like "mate it's cash only or the taxman is going to get me".
Recently I even needed my rims redone on my car, went to a big autoshop in my town, the owner came out with me to look at the car and went "mate it's going to be £500, cash only, you know how it is with the taxes. Or I can give you an invoice but it's going to be £600".
I literally turned around and left. Yes, they are crooks and fraudsters - but in my experience it's completely normalized. If you can get away with it, they will do it, and since everyone seems to be getting away with it, they do exactly that.
This is a bit surprising to me, but I've only ever rented in Europe. In the US, though, it's common to get discounted pricing for paying cash, usually 2-3% reduction in price as that's what they pay for card processing, otherwise anyone will take a card and everything is done with free estimates in writing up front, signed contracts, and payment due on completion. I can't imagine what you're describing in this thread happening in the US, that's a great way to get sued into oblivion as a tradesman.
I literally just had my roof repaired recently, by a reputable(by all accounts) company, it was recommended to me, good reviews on checkatrader......not cheap work either, about £3000. I asked the guy if I can pay by bank transfer and if he can give me an invoice - he said yes and yes. The work was done really well, so I had no issues - until I had to pay, the bank transfer was fine, but turns out it was to his...partner's private account? And the invoice came from a completely different email and was just a word document with "Invoice" and "roof repair- £3000" - that's it. No address, no nothing.
I wish this was a singular occurance, but every trader I ever worked with behaves like this. They are all allergic to paying tax on the money they make.
You would be highly advised to learn how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and renovation tasks yourself in the US as well. The cost savings is enormous. Finding a quality contractor, in addition to being expensive, can also be very hard - there's plenty of people doing plumbing or electrical who might be licensed and everything but are grossly incompetent or never finish jobs.
A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.
One added benefit of knowing how to do this stuff is even when you hire it out, you typically get much better work out of contractors for a better price. If for no other reason than you can more effectively communicate requirements and handle potential surprises/changes (which is guaranteed to happen when renovating)
In my area, DC Metro, it's $200 for a plumber to show up. That's before they do any work - just the cost to schedule them.
And they don't do drywall - they'll hack a nasty, over-sized hole in the wall or ceiling to get the plumbing and leave you with a $600+ bill and needing a drywalled and painter next.
In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with.
For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.
Yeah, generally if you even have a mild disposition to learning how things work and building stuff for fun (i.e. you tore open things and played with legos as a kid). You can generally crash course most home servicing work in a afternoon and very often end up with a better result than paying someone $500 or even $5000 to do it.
Especially nowadays with AI, you can really quickly consolidate what you need to know for your specific job. Though of course, trust, but verify.
You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that.
Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
> You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all.
Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours.
Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
Context was getting income. You don't get income, by avoiding paying more. So it is about black market jobs. Works until something happens. Disputes, accidents, .. you cannot go to the police or courts to demand money from an inoffical job.
How will people be able to afford to pay for blue collar labor though, when AI will potentially have decimated all white collar and many blue collar jobs; that's what I worry about.
For example, if someone decides to stop being a software engineer and become an automobile mechanic, but few people can afford an automobile; they demand for their services will also greatly diminish.
Either AI causes a collapse in aggerate demand, or it doesn't.
If it doesn't, you still have your blue collar career.
If it it does, you still have your skills at things that are hard to automate, and don't seem to be any worse of than anyone else, even if collectively, we are all worse off.
At an individual level, this still seems worth pursuing. You don't get to control your macro environment.
Of course, one could still use the political and persuasive tools you have towards the aim of ensuring the benefits of AI are broadly shared. It's reasonable to fear that is hard and uncertain work, but you don't get do decide if you live in hard and uncertain times or not.
Affordability is a combination of individual productivity and the economy’s productivity. A substantial increase in the economy’s productivity through AI and robotics should result in greater overall production, which should tend to result in abundance, and thus a lower cost of living, which can even overwhelm a decline in your individual productivity.
I recently had a chat with a young person who'd recently graduated with a degree in marketing, found the work entailed unsatisfying, and left that to become an apprentice electrician.
He said that with the tariffs situation work had severely dried up and jobs were tight. This was in the PDX metro area. It makes one wonder what is really safe...
I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even for products explicitly marketed to programmers.
Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
> Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation
OK, but: that's an economic situation.
> so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
Right, so there's less profit in it.
To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or in some cases exploit the user's agentic LLM to make a bad decision on their behalf.
the "exploit the user's agentic LLM" angle is underappreciated imo. we already see prompt injection attacks in the wild -- hidden text on web pages that tells the agent to do things the user didn't ask for. now scale that to every e-commerce site, every SaaS onboarding flow, every comparison page.
it's basically SEO all over again but worse, because the attack surface is the user's own decision-making proxy. at least with google you could see the search results and decide yourself. when your agent just picks a vendor for you based on what it "found," the incentive to manipulate that process is enormous.
we're going to need something like a trust layer between agents and the services they interact with. otherwise it's just an arms race between agent-facing dark patterns and whatever defenses the model providers build in.
Maybe. Or maybe services will switch to charging per API call or whatever instead of monthly or per-seat. Who can predict the future?
I mean, services _could_ make it harder to use LLMs to interact with them, but if agents are popular enough they might see customers start to revolt over it.
> What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text?
You're asking someone to answer this question in a text forum. This is not quite the gotcha you think it is.
The distinction between "knowing" and "putting into language" is a rich source of epistemological debate going back to Plato and is still widely regarded to represent a particularly difficult philosophical conundrum. I don't see how you can make this claim with so much certainty.
"A human can't learn to ride a bike from a book, but an LLM could" is a take so unhinged you could only find it on HN.
Riding a bike is, broadly, learning to co-ordinate your muscles in response to visual data from your surroundings and signals from your vestibular and tactile systems that give you data about your movement, orientation, speed, and control. As LLMs only output tokens that represent text, by definition they can NEVER learn to ride a bike.
Even ignoring that glaring definitional issue, an LLM also can't learn to ride a bike from books written by humans to humans, because an LLM could only operate through a machine using e.g. pistons and gears to manipulate the pedals. That system would be controlled by physics and mechanisms different from humans, and not have the same sensory information, so almost no human-written information about (human) bike-riding would be useful or relevant for this machine to learn how to bike. It'd just have to do reinforcement learning with some appropriate rewards and punishments for balance, speed, and falling.
And if we could embody AI in a sensory system so similar to the human sensory system that it becomes plausible text on bike-riding might actually be useful to the AI, it might also be that, for exactly the same reasons, the AI learns just as well to ride just by hopping on the thing, and that the textual content is as useless to it as it is for us.
Thinking this is an obvious gotcha (or the later comment that anyone thinking otherwise is going to have egg on their face) is just embarrassing. Much more of a wordcel problem than I would have expected on HN.
I don’t get it from your message why am llm can’t do it
Related: Have you seen nvidea with their simulated 3d env. That might not be called llm but it’s not very far away from what our llm actually do right now. It’s just a naming difference
This argument was specifically about LLMs, not about other techniques (RL, multi-armed bandit, etc) that might be better leveraged to accomplish this type of goal.
An LLM which makes a tool call to a function called `ride_bike`, where that function is a different sort of model with a different set of feedback mechanisms than those available to the LLM, is NOT the same thing at all. The LLM hasn't "learned" to ride the bike. The best you can say is that the LLM has learned that the bike can be ridden, and that it has a way of asking some other entity to ride on its behalf.
Now, could you develop such a model and make it available to an LLM? Sure, probably. But that's not an LLM. Moreover, it involves you, a human, making novel inroads on a different sort of AI/robotics problem. It simply is not possible to accomplish with an LLM.
Theoretical, infinite-width, single-layer MLPs are universal approximators: modern models that actually exist are not.
And modern transformers definitely underperform models with built in priors (e.g. CNN) when they don't have massive amounts of data. Nevermind that LLMs simply can't at all handle all sorts of data types https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948612.
Just another example of an HN commentator making statements about something they don't have any actual basic understanding of. Try reading some actual papers instead of the usual blog posts and marketing spam from frontier AI companies, you might learn something important.
You have resorted to, "You don't want to end up being wrong, do you?" To paraphrase Asimov, this kind of fallacious appeal is the last resort of the in-over-the-heads
Lot of people in this thread being caught with their pants down. Dunno what it is about LLM and AI discourse that causes people to lie or so freely offer opinions on things they clearly have no understanding about whatsoever. AI discourse truly is a great Dunning-Kruger filter.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint. Is it that he misuses the term Pascal's Wager? Or more generally that he doesn't extend enough credibility to the ideas in AI 2027?
More the former. Re the latter, it's not so much that I'm annoyed he doesn't agree with the AI2027 people, it's that (he spends a few paragraphs talking about them while) he doesn't appear to have bothered trying to even understand them.
Insurance companies absolutely benefit from the higher and opaque prices, because they negotiate rebates with providers. This allows them to maximize patient copays and ensures they hit their deductible, i.e. paying as much as possible under their respective insurance plans. Contrast this with a no-rebate world with cheaper/more transparent pricing. Fewer patients would hit their out of pocket maximum.
They can use the rebates they get from the providers to subsidize the insured, allowing them to offer lower premiums and gain market share. This is what people mean when they say "In America, the sick people pay to subsidize the health care of the healthy people".
Of course, that above only applies if there is competitive pressure. If there is no competitive pressure (e.g. in states with only one or two insurers), they can keep premiums high and book as profit the difference between what the patient paid out and what the patient would have paid out in a lower-cost no-rebate world.
> Contrast this with a no-rebate world with cheaper/more transparent pricing. Fewer patients would hit their out of pocket maximum.
And premiums would go up. Every insurer has to get their premium approved by every state’s insurance regulator, and every state’s insurance regulator is not going to allow them to have more than a few percent of profit.
> They can use the rebates they get from the providers to subsidize the insured, allowing them to offer lower premiums and gain market share. This is what people mean when they say "In America, the sick people pay to subsidize the health care of the healthy people".
I’ve never heard of this, and it’s legally not allowed. The ACA mandates insurers price plans so that old people only pay at most 3x what young people pay. And the ACA does not allow insurers to charge more to people likelier to need healthcare. Mathematically, that means younger and healthier people pay higher premiums so that older and sicker people can have lower premiums.
NY state goes even further and says all ages pay the same premium, so young subsidizes old even more. MA has a 2x cap, I believe. And then of course, FICA taxes mean the young and working are paying for the healthcare for the old and non working, the vast majority of all healthcare spend in the US (Medicare).
Yes. As I wrote above, insurers compete on premiums, and they do do so by using rebates to subsidize those premiums by spreading patients' deductibles across the insured population. As far as profits go, I can't speak to regulatory issues since they will vary by state, but in any case the same critique would apply if insurers are pocketing a fixed percentage of a larger amount.
Re your second point, it completely twists my point and is largely irrelevant. Yes, older people paying the same premiums as younger people is a counter-argument in that older people are more likely to need healthcare, but the central point is that people who have to USE their insurance (i.e. sick people) subsidize the premiums of people who don't (healthy people), and this critique applies regardless of age. Now, one could argue that the structural factors that control costs across age cohorts counterbalances this phenomenon. And I'd agree with you! But that doesn't negate the original point that insurance companies benefit from, and advocate for, high sticker prices.
> but the central point is that people who have to USE their insurance (i.e. sick people) subsidize the premiums of people who don't (healthy people), and this critique applies regardless of age.
You’re losing me here. This claim is categorically false. You cannot consider only the deductible when calculating who subsidizes who.
The only way to calculate it is premiums + deductible + out of pocket maximum = total healthcare costs. And the subsidy via premium is so large that it negates effects of a deductible and out of pocket maximum.
Note that all plans have to be actuarially equivalent, regardless of what deductible you choose. The actuaries have to account for rebates and other pricing strategies when ensuring actuarial equivalence, so that the ratio of what the plan pays versus what you pay meets the required ratio for that metal level.
Since your health is not a factor in pricing your insurance, it has to be that people less likely to need healthcare pay for the people likely to need healthcare.
It is the same as if the government forbade auto insurers from using moving violations history, or life insurers from using health measures, or home insurers from using flood maps.
The claim about who subsidizes who was always hyperbole, I'll grant you that. I included the statement to make the point that this is the phenomenon people are referring to when they make that statement.
I happen to think there is validity to the statement if you control for other actuarial factors. But if you don't think that makes sense as a lens through which to look at the problem, I won't quibble, even though I disagree. We're also only talking about drug prices here, which is a small portion of overall healthcare spending.
In any case, the central point, that insurers benefit from higher prices, still stands.
> In any case, the central point, that insurers benefit from higher prices, still stands.
All sellers benefit from higher prices. No one limits the price they ask for out of the goodness of their hearts. Lower prices are because a competitor offers a lower price, and because buyers can’t pay a higher price.
I have found MCPs to be very useful (albeit with some severe and problematic limitations in the protocol's design). You can bundle them and configure them with a desktop LLM client and distribute them to an organization via something like Jamf. In the context I work in (biotech) I've found it a pretty high-ROI way to give lots of different types of researchers access to a variety of tools and data very cheaply.
I believe you, but can you elaborate? What exactly does MCP give you in this context? How do you use it? I always get high level answers and I'm yet to be convinced, but i would love this to be one of those experiences where i walk away being wrong and learning something new.
Sure, absolutely. Before I do, let me just say, this tooling took a lot of work and problem solving to establish in the enterprise, and it's still far from perfect. MCPs are extremely useful IMO, but there are a lot of bad MCP servers out there and even good ones are NOT easy to integrate into a corporate context. So I'm certainly not surprised when I hear about frustrations. I'm far from an LLM hype man myself.
Anyway: a lot of earlier stages of drug discovery involve pulling in lots of public datasets, scouring scientific literature for information related to a molecule, a protein, a disease, etc. You join that with your own data and laboratory capabilities and commercial strategy in order to spot opportunities for new drugs that you could maybe, one day, take into the clinic. This is traditionally an extremely time consuming and bias prone activity, and whole startups have gone up around trying to make it easier.
A lot of the public datasets have MCPs someone has put together around someone's REST API. (For example, a while ago Anthropic released "Claude for Life Sciences" which was just a collection of MCPs they had developed over some popular public resources like PubMed).
For those datasets that don't have open source MCPs, and for our proprietary datasets, we stand up our own MCPs which function as gateways for e.g. running SQL queries or Spark jobs against those datasets. We also include MCPs for writing and running Python scripts using popular bioinformatics libraries, etc. We bundle them with `mcpb` so they can be made into a fully configured one-click installer you can load into desktop LLM clients like Claude Desktop or LibreChat. Then our IT team can provision these fully configured tools for everyone in our organization using MDM tools like Jamf.
We manage the underlying data with classical data engineering patterns, ETL jobs, data definition catalogs, etc, and give MCP-enabled tools to our researchers as front end concierge type tools. And once they find something they like, we also have MCPs which can help transform those queries into new views, ETL scripts, etc and serve them using our non-LLM infra, or save tables, protein renderings, graphs, etc and upload them into docs or spreadsheets to be shared with their peers. Part of the reason we have set it up this way is to work through the limitations of MCPs (e.g. all responses have to go through the context window, so you can't pass large files around or trust that it's not mangling the responses). But also we do this so as to end up with repeatable/predictable data assets instead of LLM-only workflows. After the exploration is done, the idea is you use the artifact, not the LLM, to intact with it (though of course you can interact with the artifact in an LLM-assisted workflow as you iterate once again in developing a yet another derivative artifact).
Some of why this works for us is perhaps unique to the research context where the process of deciding what to do and evaluating what has already been done is a big part of daily work. But I also think there are opportunities in other areas, e.g. SRE workflows pulling logs from Kubernetes pods and comparing to Grafana metrics, saving the result as a new dashboard, and so on.
What these workflows all have in common, IMO, is that there are humans using the LLM as an aid to dive understanding, and then translating that understanding into more traditional, reliable tools. For this reason, I tend to think that the concept of autonomous "agents" is stupid, outside of a few very narrow contexts. That is to say, once you know what you want, you are generally better off with a reliable, predictable, LLM-free application, but LLMs are very useful in the prices of figuring out what you want. And MCPs are helpful there.
This is fascinating. I really appreciate the length reply.
How do you handle versioning/updates when datasets change? Do the MCPs break or do you have some abstraction layer?
What's your hit rate on researchers actually converting LLM explorations into permanent artifacts vs just using it as a one-off?
Makes sense for research workflows. Do you think this pattern (LLM exploration > traditional tools) generalizes outside domains with high uncertainty? Or is it specifically valuable where 'deciding what to do' is the hard part?
Someone else mentioned using Chrome dev tools + Cursor, I'm going to try that one out as a way to convince myself here. I want to make this work but I just feel like I'm missing something. The problem is clearly me, so I guess i need to put in some time here.
I'll give you a short reply, as another person who finds MCP very useful. I think a big gap is that MCP's are often marketed as "taking actions" for you, because that's flashy and looks cool in the eyes of laymen. While most of their actual value is the opposite, in using them to gather information to take better non-MCP actions. Connecting them to logs, read-only to (e.g. mock) databases, knowledge bases, and so on. All for querying, not for create/update/delete.
> How do you handle versioning/updates when datasets change?
For data MCPs, we use remote MCPs that are served over an stdio bridge. So our configuration is just mcp-proxy[0] pointed at a fixed URL we control. The server has an /mcp endpoint that provides tools and that endpoint is hit whenever the desktop LLM starts up. So adding/removing/altering tools is simply a matter of changing that service and redeploying that API. (Note: There are sometimes complications, e.g. if I change an endpoint that used to return data directly, but now it writes a file to cloud storage and returns a URL (because the result is to large, i.e. to work around the aforementioned broken factor of MCP) we have to sync with our IT team to deploy a configuration change to everyone's machine.)
I have seen nicer implementations that use a full MCP gateway that does another proxy step to the upstream MCP servers, which I haven't used myself (though I want to). The added benefit is that you can log/track which MCPs your users are using most often and how they are doing, and you can abstract away a lot of the details of auth, monitor for security issues, etc. One of the projects I've looked at in that space is Mint MCP, but I haven't used it myself.
> What's your hit rate on researchers actually converting LLM explorations into permanent artifacts vs just using it as a one-off?
Low. Which in our case is ideal, since most research ideas can be quickly discarded and save us a ton of time and money that would otherwise be spent running doomed lab experiments, etc. As you get later in the drug discovery pipeline you have a larger team built around the program, and then the artifacts are more helpful. There still isn't much of a norm in the biotech industry of having an engineering team support an advanced drug program (a mistake, IMO) so these artifacts go a long way given these teams don't have dedicated resources.
> Do you think this pattern (LLM exploration > traditional tools) generalizes outside domains with high uncertainty?
I don't know for sure, as I don't live in that world. My instinct is: I wouldn't necessarily roll something like this out to external customers if you have a well-defined product. (IMO there just isn't that much of a market for uncertain outputs of such products, which is why all of the SaaS companies that have launched their integrated AI tools haven't seen much success with them.) But even within a domain like that, it can be useful to e.g. your customer support team, your engineers, etc. For example, one of the ideas on my "cool projects" list is an SRE toolkit that can query across K8s, Loki/Prometheus, your cloud provider, your git provider and help quickly diagnose production issues. I imagine the result of such an exploration would almost always be a new dashboard/alert/etc.
If you had developed novel techniques of sfumato and chiaroscuro, spun new theories of perspective and human anatomy, invented new pigments, and then explained all of that to a journeyman painter, with enough coaching, detail, and oversight to ensure the final product was what you envisioned, I would argue that 100% makes you Da Vinci.
Da Vinci himself likely had dozens of nameless assistants laboring in his studio on new experiments with light and color, new chemistry, etc. Da Vinci was Da Vinci because of his vision and genius, not because of his dexterity with his hands.
I'm no fan of tariffs, but oh please. Last time their prices went up because of COVID and because of supply chain disruptions. Now they are going up because of tariffs. All of their earnings calls are filled with analyses of their "pricing power" i.e. the degree to which they can pass on these costs to customers. But when the costs decline, they are happy to keep the prices inflated and pocket the profits.
low net profits margins are simply how retail works, it's not news that retail requires scale. and in fact both target and best buy did see record profits shortly after the pandemic started.
Consumer spending was shattering records during the pandemic.
If consumer spending was dropping as prices were going up, then sure, greed. But prices were rising and consumers were relentless. Which is totally logical. Even more logical when the "spending class" was getting massive raises/offers and rock bottom credit.
This does not at all resonate with my experience with human researchers, even highly paid ones. You still have to do a lot of work to verify their claims.
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