[1] https://srgexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-cost-of... [2] https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.
There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.
Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.
Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.
Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.
I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.
For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.
These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them.
I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.
The exact same problem exists for small manufacturers in the US. There are lot of people who believe they should have jobs in skilled trades and check some boxes but are missing fundamentals.
I think it's a mixed bag. I've purchased homes where the previous owner thought they were a wizard at home improvement. One apt example is a dryer outlet that was converted from 14-30R to 10-30R because the homeowner googled the wrong thing and went down a bad rabbit hole. A good electrician would tell you to change the cord on your dryer and that anything else is a code violation.
It would be a code violation for me to take my exiting 120yo retaining wall and extend it by copying it in exact detail despite the fact that the details of its construction are provably satisfactory.
The code isn't there to ensure results. The code is there to make the subjective quantifiable so it can be bickered over and litigated in a fairly deterministic manner.
I don't think the chassis of my dryer becoming energized is a provably satisfactory outcome.
I agree that a lot of code amounts to bureaucratic nonsense, but many rules were changed over time for good reason.
Normalization of deviance is becoming common place. There's a lot to unpack here but there is a severe lack of professionalism, responsibility, genuine knowledge, and experience. Now its just a bunch of greedy man children who live by "fake it till you make it" and use every dirty trick to intimidate and mislead the client. Once they secure the job they barely show up to the the job site because they ran off to play with their golf clubs, sports cars and yachts or whatever while a crew of cheap unskilled labor shits all over the job site. And if you call out these morons and challenge them they get angry and defensive because they're the experts and you're a dumb client. Infuriating hubris.
Except often times you can't because of all the regulations. First there's the code which you can't possibly understand sufficiently if it's not your day job. If you do figure out what you need to do you'll then find plenty of things you can't do without a license that you need to put in years for, not just pay and pass a test.
The only stuff that's not subject to exclusionary regulation is the "average homeowner" type renovation stuff and even then only because there isn't political will to tolerate it, not because the government and trades wouldn't try if they could.
But what do I know, I'm just someone who's been told he has to pay for $50k of engineering studies to assess the runoff impacts of converting forested former pasture back to the latter because a bunch of useful idiots 40yr ago heard some politicians talking points and thought it sounded good.
Some of the stuff I found from contractors who worked on my house demonstrate that it turns out people whose day job is understanding the code also don't.
I do feel your pain about vetting "professionals", especially living in a place that tries to prevent me from making my own improvements.
See: https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ and imagine how you would get a rectangular piece of wood for the rafter to sit flush against the rectangular joists/beams.
The roof structure is built by carpenters or framers. Or more likely just delivered as pre-built trusses which are placed on top of the walls.
For a roof built on-site, a speed-square or framing square will include markings for common roofing cuts, hip/valley cuts, etc. You have to know how to use them but you don't really need to understand the underlying trigonometry.
But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?
Needed a moving company. One guy shows up sits in my driveway gives me a quote. The next guy walked thru the house and gave me a quote. The third guy shows up opens every closet every cabinet and has a fairly spot on estimate. The first two were off by nearly 30% on weight/cost.
Needed someone to paint the entire interior of a house. One guy pulls a no show on the walkthru and then 3 months latter says I didnt show on time that day (it was already a done job at that point). Second guy goes 'hmm duno maybe X price'. Next guy measures everything has a itemized estimate. I hired the one with the good estimate.
My sister needed some simple electrical work done. 2 guys just handed her a number and an open ended contract. The 3rd guy had an itemized estimate that was lower than the first two because he did the prework.
Had some AC work done. Again with the 3. 1 just random didnt even come out, 1 driveway guy, and 1 who actually looked around and figured it out correctly. Even then I walk out there and the outside unit is installed backwards. I tell them, they puff out on me. I grab the foreman and walk him over with a 'uh there is a small issue here' didnt tell him what. They had to redo 3 hours of work once the foreman saw it backwards. All because the guys he had were willing to do backwards work. The foreman is usually the key. If they give a crap it will be done right.
Trying to have a covered porch added to my current house. So far 2 no shows and totally ghosted.
I wish this was atypical. But it isn't. I have many more.
Any competent tradesperson is doing majority commercial.
Ergo, if you’re looking for residential, you get…
my father in law who has passed away ran a little independent hvac shop. Just him and another guy, they had more work than they could ever handle and he could have grown to at least a 10-15 person shop but chose to work by himself. In southern US climates HVAC is def. a career option, however it's hard physical work that will slowly destroy your body. heh Not unlike how SWE is hard mental work that can slowly destroy your mind.
edit: i miss my father-in-law very much, he could do anything. he replaced the floor in a pier and beam house while living in it. Just think about that for a moment, how do you replace a floor? that's what holds up the walls and the walls hold up the roof...
The general contractors know which subs are (currently) good and bad, so their recs are good, but you have to be friendly with them for them to share (instead of taking the project on themselves).
Worked for me, bathroom guy recommended a carpenter that turned out great. Was hoping it was a general thing one could do.
Much better is local whatsapp groups where people who've hired good people can make recommendations. Those are a trove of good information.
I have guys in Brownsville, TX that I could fly in and put up in hotels to get us through a tough spot, but that would cost a lot of money. And I'd love to encourage them to all move up here to Alabama with their families, but the current political climate has them afraid to do so.
Edit: I'm not saying I wish I could fire anyone I want at any time. I'm saying that it stinks that I literally have no other options for the other trades. So I'm forced to stick with the subpar options.
I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge.
Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?
It doesn’t need to be advanced prompting, it’s enough to provide enough information and ask to “provide advice relevant to the current and applicable codes and regulations”
It’s the first question a forum dweller would reply to a poorly articulated post.
UK, US, Australia all have different rules and regulations, but their websites don't exactly advertise their location. It is implied that you visit them based on your country. The UK has a weird mix of metric and imperial, so you can't even use the units to figure it out!! It's not always easy to figure it out, even for a human.
I'm pretty sure an LLM can provide pretty refined answers given some reasonable context. i.e. I want to rewire a socked in my apartment, which is in London, UK. What do I need to do?
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...
> need for unions
What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.
Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.
Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".
There is a reason why security measures that put the workers life at risk are almost nonexistent on countries where unions hardly have a presence.
No helmets, no eye protection, no masks when dealing with chemicals, bending metal bars with bare hands, no protection shoes, hopping into a ladder alone,....
Some examples of what I have seen in practice.
Do not know about your country - but over here the construction sites are full of people who couldn't even write the word union (mostly Asian countries like Philippines, Nepal, etc.)
I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.
Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.
Al
The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.
What a nonsense thing to say. This is not an opinion most people, and certainly not most economists, would agree with. It's a foundational pillar of regulated free markets.
Moreover in this instance, construction companies are not some sprawling international megacorps, they're locally oowned and operated.
Of course an employee theoretically has total freedom to leave an abusive employer and go somewhere else. But do they have time to search for jobs while working full-time? What if their employer makes them work mandatory overtime? If they don’t have time to search while working, can they afford to be unemployed for a few months? What if their employer threatens them or discourages other employers in the area from hiring them?
It would be great if competition made unions unnecessary, but it doesn’t.
Trade unions tend to have a large focus on training and skill building. Yes they make firing people harder but the flip side of unions can be increasing the average quality such that firing due to quality or skill is less often necessary.
If I have need 10 people and I have a choice between two looks. Pool A is harder to fire and costs more but has a 95% competence rate. Pool B is easy to fire and costs less but has a 70% competence rate.
Setting any contractual rules aside I’m going g to find myself firing from pool B more often, and it is easy to attribute all of that to the rules that make A harder to fire. They are easier to fire (component of variance), they are more likely to be bad (component 2), and because they are easier to fire in going to be more likely to fire than coach for quality (component 3).
(typically, union workers go on unemployment during slow periods; this includes electrical linemen/journeymen, automotive, pipe fitters, etc based on first hand conversations with union tradespeople in my examples)
Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 - April 2025
The Housing Industry Never Recovered From the Great Recession - https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housi... - December 11, 2024
APM Marketplace: In an uncertain housing market, home builders face a range of challenges - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/26/in-an-uncertain... - November 26, 2024
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... - October 31st, 2022
Fannie Mae: The U.S. Housing Shortage from a Local Perspective - https://www.fanniemae.com/media/45106/display - October 2022
The problem with this stat is that the historic data does not support it:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The supply is just fine, more so with a declining population, how we use housing has changed dramatically.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: that you called out states "While the United States does indeed have a national shortage of affordable housing, every state and city's path to addressing it is relatively unique, and the tools and tactics used to create badly needed new housing supply will have to be tailored."
This is a gross understatement of the issue. The problem is voters. No one will vote in more housing, housing benefits for others or more affordable housing. Because the people who vote own homes and go into the voting booth and protect their own interests and assets: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2022/08/problem-homeo... . There isnt a law about having to be a landholder to vote but there is a very strong correlation between the two.
Planing and zoning is hyper local, hyper political and very active. This is why mixed use zoning is harder to find, you can't run a garage out of your garage. The is why the "missing middle" is a thing in America. This is why "corporate ownership" of housing wont get fixed (it is a hyper local issue and the people who would show up to vote against it are the same ones whos property prices are being propped up by it).
I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
Instead I just have a group of ~30 Guatemalans who do it while I listen to my American friends and neighbors complain about immigrants “taking all the jobs.”
20 years ago, before I started making good money as a software engineer, if someone had offered me a similar opportunity, and training, I would’ve taken it assuming there were no big gotchas.
In most states it's not about whether you know how to do something -- you can't just take a licensing exam and get a license even if you know the material -- it's about having access to someone who already has a license to sign off on you. From which you get two consequences.
First, if you know someone who already has a license but doesn't know what they're doing or isn't a good teacher, they sign off on other people without actually teaching them how to do a good job, and then you get even more people with a license who don't really know how to do the job.
And second, because the existing license holder has to sign off on several years worth of hours for someone new to get a license, you deter people who would do a good job but -- because of that -- have more opportunities in other industries where you don't have to spend a large chunk of your adult life beholden to someone else because it's still prohibited by law for you to strike out on your own, in an industry that people would otherwise want to enter because they want to do exactly that. Which both lowers the average quality of the candidate pool and creates shortages by lowering the number of candidates.
Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us.
Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs.
Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm).
So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path.
The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them.
They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though.
When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.
As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work.
I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.
Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices.
The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
It is really hard on bodies.
My first construction job ever was in the Caribbean. I got placed with a group of Haitians, and we were all laborers. We never had a tool in our hands. We simply carried materials, loaded things onto the roof, set up scaffolding, etc.
On my third day on the job, the leader of the Haitians became angry at me and kept telling me to slow down. I kept pushing and the lead carpenter on the job noticed. The next day, the general contractor (my boss) pulled me aside and said "when you come in on Monday, make sure you have a tool belt, a hammer, a pencil, a speed square, a tape measure, and a razor blade."
I showed up that Monday with all of the required tools and the GC let me work alongside the lead carpenter. At the end of that first week, the lead carpenter lent me a book that he used to learned carpentry while he was in a union in Wisconsin. I spent all weekend reading that book and I had tons of questions for him when I returned to work the next week.
I never looked back. I have since worked professionally in every single residential construction related trade. I am confident that I can perform each trade at a professional level with the exception of welding. I can weld. I welded everything on my Land Cruiser and I've welded scores of hip plates over the years. But I'm not confident enough to say that I could perform at the same level as a good professional welder.
But HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, siding, millwork installation, finish carpentry, landscaping, and irrigation are all things that I can perform at a top level.
That lead carpenter ended up being my best friend I have ever had and he taught me about a lot more than carpentry.
Even for the explicit goal of getting juniors trained, the crew that does the better job is probably doing more training than the worse crew.
I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry.
I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training.
A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?
There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.
Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."
Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.
This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.
> we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with
But power patterns are the same everywhere and rather than having corrupt corporate bullshit you get corrupt union bullshit. It just might benefit you if you work in the industry and might very much be at the cost of everyone else.
Police unions are the infamous example alongside the teamsters , but almost everyone who’s worked with or for one has stories.
I know someone who works for one and what do you know the people at the top get preferential treatment and there’s all sorts of bullshit going on. It’s still almost certainly better for him but it’s probably not ideal for the projects.
Ignoring cost overruns and hand waving things that fall under “look let’s just let people be people not perfect” you still get a lot of problematic behavior. For example my friend is very good at his job because he was taught by someone very good and as a result has high standards for his work.
This has gotten him targeted because he sets expectations too high which sure feels like a crock of shit.
And that’s just the work related bullshit. There’s still the classics like someone higher up the chain being friends with the right people and throwing others under the bus when they shit the bed.
When it comes to construction you don't even need to involve unions to find corruption. There's all sorts of corruption (or borderline corruption) surrounding zoning laws in most of the heavily populated places in the US and that's in addition to the blatant political dysfunction.
So yea when some CEO golden parachutes out with all the money we’re all rightfully pissed, but people weren’t thrilled with jimmy hoffa or state mandated monopolies that just don’t give a fuck either.
In my city the power company will just tell you to fuck right off no matter what your schedule was for opening your business, no matter how important you are. Hope you can handle your building being built 1+ months behind because “nah fuck you” while the government head makes a million + a year.
Scaling these things so they don’t fall to corruption and graft is very very hard.
I guess it will be an issue for you if your preference doesn't match the majority of your neighbors who would rather cheaper but lower quality service. But TBF that would be the system working as intended.
The police having a state mandated monopoly on violence only adds to the problem but the core issue is still there, and it’s hard to do checks and balances that just don’t erode to either regulatory capture, rampant bureaucracy, over efficient streamlining, or more often than not some mix of all three
If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?
Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.
Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.
It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.
America needs more red tape. Red tape is explicit rules and procedures. In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed. Nobody can come and try and stop you because you just say "I followed the rules", and continue.
OTOH in America the rules and procedures aren't explicit. They're embodied in court precedent (like the environmentalist who sued) and in gatekeepers like the county commissioners.
That’s literally the definition of red tape! How do politicians have this kind of power to stop the projects? Because there is a county/city/state law that grants them this power. It’s literally part of the procedure! In other words, some part of the process is not defined beyond “the council member has veto power for any construction in their district” (hello NYC!).
As a result, the whole process is not deterministic and ill defined due to red tape.
You can in America too, if everything you want to do falls within the current zoning you can build "by right" but the problem is that most projects need a variance here or there, even for something like the type of siding used and that is when all the political negotiation kicks in.
Along with would imply that they are not red tape.
It's an interesting trade off, and getting the right balance is difficult
The first was intel analysis software (DOD contract), and the second was in mental health (medicare and state medicaid contracts). In the first case, they even considered hiring a company who exists solely to help other companies navigate the government procurement process.
Indeed. You can get a FedRAMP AWS account pretty easily but I've been told that getting a FedRAMP Moderate environment for production use is a year-long, half-million-dollar project. On top of this you have to continuously deal with the Joint Approval Board (JAB) and Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) for any non-trivial changes to information flow or infrastructure. As a kicker the Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) and Time & Materials (T&M) contracts that are so prevalent in the space mean that your upside is limited and you have to do stuff like get your employees' resumes approved by the government before you can bill for their time.
I don't blame anybody for taking a look at this and saying "not for me".
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/high-speed-rail-califo...
Those are not pre-construction costs are they? Massive differences in labor costs described there.
Zoning is probably the single biggest block to affordable housing in this country.
I was raised in a construction friendly household, I have the ability to build housing. I saw there was empty land in my city that could nicely fit about 5 houses on it (it was a 5-acre plot). I noticed that housing had become extremely expensive in my city and thought well heck why not try to be the change I want to see in the world and try to increase the housing supply.
Problem was that my 5-acre plot was zoned as “single family” which meant that I was legally allowed to build 1 house on it and not 5. So I tried to get the plot rezoned to a classification that allowed more than one house. Had to pay an engineer over 50k to create a plan for the city that was acceptable, including environmental impact study and drainage plans.
The zoning board committee said they would approve 2 houses to be built on the site but didn’t want to allow more because they were worried there wasn’t enough public transport available in the area (even though each planned house would have its own garage and road access). And literally I’m not kidding one of the members even mentioned that he was worried about this zoning change being motivated by a desire to (in his words): “enrich yourself”.
There are so many bureaucratic barriers to building housing in the US. Zoning is just one layer of bureaucracy that can be tens of thousands of dollars and years of back-and-forth with the city. There are even more layers with their own set of costs. Trying to actually build something is a radicalizing experience. It really feels the system is set up to intentionally limit supply and slow people down.
Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.
Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.
On top of all this is the years to divide the property.
On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.
On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.
These all have a $$$ cost.
$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.
So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.
The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.
[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/04/berkeley-housing-dow...
I live in Wyoming. We don’t have many unions. The cost scourge is still there due to red tape and general fuckery.
I am fairly confident that Europe has a lot more red tape than Wyoming. Yet it's considerably cheaper to build large projects in Europe.
In general that's true, but perhaps not when it comes to construction, especially for large public projects. In Europe, the goal of such projects appears to be to complete the project and have the thing that they're building. In the US, at least as of late, it seems like the goal is to pay various interest groups in money or patronage, and whether the thing gets built or not is only of a secondary significance.
I have a theory that in-house expertise is cheaper in the long run.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks utterly stifling construction restrictions are a good thing, yet they seem to exist everywhere.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...
`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`
Which is about to explode as the tariffs hit the US market.
All of the cost is labor and materials.
That said, the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated.
How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.
Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
This is not the same as costing a bunch of money.
The delay induced costs are not the only negative impact. During permitting the muni will often make varrious cost adding demands that they have no basis in law or good engineering to make, but unless you're willing and able to take on more years of delay (and potential litigation costs) you have to go along with them to appease them.
And, of course, every opportunity for a subjective call allowing a disruption is a opportunity for corruption.
When people complain about the costs of permitting they mean the these total costs, not e.g. some 1% of total project costs filing fee or whatnot.
Otherwise you're on a thread where someone is pooh-poohing an effort to improve costs where we know they exist (labor) and suggesting it is meaningless compared to costs that you can't substantiate.
Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
[1] https://libertylensecon.substack.com/p/unlocking-americas-in...
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
That's not to say some amount of review isn't appropriate, but excess review (wherever the line is) seems to be just a way to discourage building by process nightmare, when there's no other way to do it.
I've also seen a lot of things where variances go to those who have the patience to play politics, which often ends up being pretty inequitable. And then there's the times where permit issuers aren't consistent; request X get told to do Y, update your permit to request Y, get told to do X, etc. Or my favorite, ask to do A, get told to do expensive thing B to prep, do B, then get told A will not be permitted anyway. Typically, there's no recourse for these things either.
Of course it is, why would you think the land and other capital can be held for free?
The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry.
> All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape
This just isn’t true. There are projects that could be happening but aren’t because of red tape, but no, a project that’s happening is spending a tiny portion of its capital on red tape.
What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.
[1]: https://jerseydigs.com/american-dream-owners-default-on-1-2-...
[2]: https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/11/08/one-camelback...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/y2ein5
"The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry."
Confusing statement, the IRR is low and the risk is high because the carrying cost is unknown (and unbounded).
In New York and San Francisco? And it's not just land, it's keeping all the environmental reviews and neighbourhood associations on board. It's delays in pre-selling, or, if you're pre-sold, customer service to impatient buyers. It's constantly redrawing plans because a community member wants an offset 3/8ths of an inch further so their petunias don't catch shade.
Again, these costs add hundreds of thousands of dollars to each and every apartment built in San Francisco.
> This just isn’t true
What are you responding to? The quoted text isn't mine.
Nobody notices it because it's nationwide (and to a certain extent worldwide) and it's a city-by-city policy issue [1][2][3]. But it's the same issue everywhere, over-indexing neighborhood preferences to slow down and kill construction projects behind a permitting process.
[1]: Denver, https://denverite.com/2025/04/14/denver-construction-permitt...
[2]: Toronto/Ontario, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-const...
[3]: Atlanta, https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2024/06/20/metro-at...
I am not denying permitting exists and it slows things down. The original point was that this is a major contributor to cost of construction, which it's not. They specifically said "a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials [compared to permitting etc]"-- this is absolutely not true. It is not even close to reality in the US.
Here you're just pointing out two facts:
1) Permitting exists (and slows things down)
2) We have a housing shortage
No argument there! But what you are failing to do is demonstrate that (1) is the major driver of (2).
The actual drivers are the cost of well-situated land, cost of labor, and cost of materials. This is evident in ANY actual budget from ANY actual construction project.
Add to that the fact that large scale homebuilders are petrified of creating a 2008-style oversupply so they've been chronically underbuilding since then -- and will continue to do so regardless of permitting reform. This is evident in the housing starts compared to population growth since the GFC.
But specifically, it's the worst one because it's unbounded (labor and materials is really costly now, but its a known cost) especially in states with heavy environment regulations or other zoning regulations. In those states, usually any one person can bring in a lawsuit alleging a lack of environment studies or alleged personal damage to slow down construction, so how much holding costs do you budget for? How much lawyer fees? How many people will bring lawsuits? You have no idea!
Most projects just don't start if they have a bracket for unbounded costs like that. So now you have fewer and fewer parties willing to take on these projects with more and more people (neighbors, bureaucrats etc.) having the bandwidth to pour over each individual project looking for an opening to sue and stop. It's a doom-loop of red-tape.
Do you think the California legislature (not the San Francisco legislature mind you) is wasting its time dealing with this, if it's "not that big of a deal" [1]. The governor ransomed the whole state budget to get this passed. Similar things happened in Minnesota. This is a huge deal.
I encourage you to read the various books laying out example after example of these issues and the background data [2], [3].
[1]: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
[2]: https://www.philipkhoward.com/the-rule-of-nobody
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
I have at least skimmed every one of the links you've shared (except the Atlanta BizJournal since I don't have the nationwide subscription) and none of them say what you're suggesting they do.
I agree there's a problem here. I agree that these risks kill many projects before they are birthed. I do not agree they come anywhere close to the costs of land, material, and especially labor for any actual construction project. Nothing you have posted even attempts to argue that, AFAICT.
It's like buying a home and having to pay 10% in agent fees and having a 6 month arbitrary holding period while you are still having to pay the mortgage. "Well the money you're losing is less than the cost of the land!" you would say. lol.
That's basically what's happening to construction projects, it's an industry-wide show-stopper regardless of what fraction it is of the land price.
All the links I've shared confirm that these costs are the prime-driver of project cancellations and projects dying on the drawing board, not that the costs are larger than all other costs in an absolute sense because obviously mortgage payments while you're waiting for lawsuits are less than the whole land value itself.
You are now saying the exact thing that I stated above.
Yes or no: can the USA get a medium sized build done on time and budget comparable to the top 15% worldwide?
There has to be way to kick this problem in the butt. And i think management side has gotta step up
all the labor is imported from abroad and live in miserable conditions, no unions or paperwork, just lots of earthworks to be done
I remember Louis CK said he had a hell of a time trying to run his own comedy shows so he could offer lower ticket prices for his fans, but because every bit of the theaters were unionized it got really expensive fast and failed. They couldn't even touch the curtains, they had to pay a union guy to stand around all day and his only job was pulling a curtain cord at the right time. Which was some NYC rule.
And that's OK. At the end of the day, labor unions exist to help people and not robots.
People were worried robots were going to take their jobs. Then people were seeing their jobs get shipped overseas. Today, robots are finally taking over what jobs are left.
That union did just fine for America, it's better off for it having existed.
Say less.
HN used to be a message board to gain better knowledge around certain topics, but seems it more or less has the same armchair dilettantes that plague other platforms.
Why are heavy machines like diggers and cranes legal then? Human operated, but replace countless workers on the site.
There are laws for people, but not necessarily for tools.
Like yeah, typical pre-fab, where it's legal, is going to go into a trailer park or something, but nothing says pre-fab has to be cheap and crummy. Why are we still cutting lumber on site?
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
And if one asks Claude.ai , one gets this:
Bottom Line: US infrastructure costs are dramatically higher than Europe - often 10-30 times more expensive for transit projects, with subway construction in NYC costing $3.2 billion per kilometer compared to just $100 million per kilometer in cities like Madrid.
I suppose only once the boomers die out will we have a chance of course correcting incuriosity. I actually remember many years ago some of the justices at the supreme court got real uppity when examples were brought up from other countries (forgive me i forget the case name).
Even still, the linked website doesn't really seem to say permitting is a major driver. And it certainly doesn't dwarf labor and materials.
Unless you know the loopholes.
Well, we've seen what happened without the red tape, when people were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and the results often aren't pretty. Sometimes, they were deadly, and occasionally we are reminded of why it might not be a good idea to just let the "free market" do what it wants [1].
Red tape doesn't just appear out of thin air, it appears when politicians are so pissed off about the "free market" that they actually find it worthwhile to do their goddamn jobs for once.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...
You mean most of the built environment of New York City?
The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.
What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
It mostly appears when politicians force law-enforcement not to punish bad actors for so long that society requires them to punish everybody so that the bad actors will go away.
Software engineering IMO is alive and well, we're just going faster. Job will shift with AI, but that happened with compilers, etc. Clever engineers will continue to build. Going faster could mean you mean fewer SWEs, but could also mean you just go faster and build more things. If we go faster, the next thing will be down the chain (enough compute, enough hardware to work on). Since AI has always been insanely software bottlnecked, if it goes faster yeah there will be more jobs.
Robotics works now! We should build more robots! Some of the best companies in the next decade will for sure be building some of the robots from Star Wars and the Jetsons. This will be heavy on hardware. Outside of robots, hardware will change too - no idea if Meta's glasses are the best thing, but certainly the iPhone format isn't AI native. This will be new hardware, and we'll need smart objects everywhere in our lives (car, home, etc). Will be very cool and definitely more hardware oriented.
How would I handle faulty geotechnical surveys? It has happened several times that the trench caved in and the operator saved a persons life.
Faulty geotechnical - I'd be interested in understanding how the operator helped here. Will take time, but anything the operator is doing (watching subsidance, feeling the ground, watching a wall collapse, confirming that the ground is actually what you think it is), will be doable with the sensors we have on board. The operator we're building will have many lifetimes of experience, so will be able to learn things that even the best operators can't. We saw this at Waymo (now at 100 million miles!!!!) - it seems like magic, but if you had 1000 lifetimes of experience, you'd be incredibly good at very subtle things like this.
i looked this up in a "cost of humanoid robot" versus just doing a retrofit on a computer/actuators on older equipment. i think even in the actuator approach, adding 12 electronically controlled hydraulic valves to replace the human actuated valves is still gonna be cheaper than a humanoid robot
The variety of machines and their specificity is super fascinating and very specific. Definitely will change.
That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too...
These folks seem to be concentrating at the moment on excavation which (without looking) if I recall is already a pretty active and developed in terms of automation. But get out of the ground and you hit some pretty big issues pretty quick. To get a sense, heres's one of my go-to articles when people wonder about jobsite automation...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/where-are-the-robotic...
But like all real world optimization problems, better solutions based on the specific nature of the inputs are usually possible.
In the case of construction scheduling, relationships are the most likely route to optimization. You can dig all night long, but if the plumber does’t show up in the morning to lay pipe, your schedule is not improved and the plumber shows up in the morning at your job site because of the long term business relationship across many projects instead of some other jobsite.
[I practiced architecture in the past. Everything takes as long as it takes].
Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
I'm sure this is already something they've taken into consideration, but it seems like this will be more focused on partnerships with existing OEMs rather than selling add on kits to current fleets.
Seems like that is a pro not a con. An exit scenario
24/7/365 large fleet operators that move a billion tonne of ore per annum and alter the spin balance of the planet by a detectable amount.
Pages such as https://www.riotinto.com/en/mn/about/innovation/automation are out of date and don't do justice to the extant of and demand for grand scale semi autonomous mining and construction equipment.
BBC coverage of one site and mining automation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgej7gzg8l0o
There's a large yet to be built copper project in the US that has autonomus mining plans in the economic technical report.
https://resolutioncopper.com/mining-method/
https://resolutioncopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RTRC...
Sounds ripe for disruption, then.
If a startup demonstrates promise, VC money will flood in. Then it's just a balancing of economics. Is the new VC-backed method cheaper? If so, the incumbents will lose market share relative to the value prop.
disclosure: I work for jonh deere but am not speaking for the company. The above is all I feel I can say on the subject
Might be less successful now that money isn't free.
Maybe they aren’t as powerful as you think outside the comparatively trivial “build some software” markets. Hell even in networking, compute and storage there are only three or four real success stories in the last two and a half _decades_.
It's the kinda startup that may be able to pivot easier than others.
Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.
This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.
Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.
Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
Management may invest many years developing some new key technology on the side but when it comes to actually taking the market, it's hard to focus on two areas at the same time.
Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
Will be neat to see where this goes. But I'm reminded of some Amazon guys that were supposed to revitalize the supply chains. My memory is that that didn't work out so well.
This isn't somehow a new industry because some Waymo engineers decided to make a company.
This may be an instance of companies not having enough capital or talent to fend off new entrants.
Talent will flock to the new and exciting. The place where they can get the bigger exit and work with the coolest people.
A newcomer in the heavy equipment space will have similar challenges and advantages. Funny enough, a lot of heavy equipment works very similar to cars with their CAN (and other) Buses for control and feedback.
Yes, Tesla was valued more for potential growth. But it was also the kind of potential growth that I'm not sure is viable outside of consumer spaces.
If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.
https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
It is completely idiotic to kick people out for smoking weed on their own time. And then you wonder why you have trouble filling these positions. People use drugs and have since before humans were human, get over it.
For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.
Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.
Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.
App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.
If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.
Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.
Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2. Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.
What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?
What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?
Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.
I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).
Civil engineering is already a field where the very largest projects are done by humans planning and building the roads and bridges for the robots to move in (such as things rented from Mammoet [1] with extra control systems), but it does require significant human oversight (typically a metaphorical red button).
It's all very one off and specific, and given how big those projects are that seems unlikely to change. The manufacturing of suburbs though would be a whole different ballgame.
[1] Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_modular_transpo...
Most of the actual planning and execution work is done by the usual big civeng consultant companies in a very globalized manner.
* Construction sites are smaller in footprint
* They’re more easily covered in sensor networks to support autonomous operations
* They’re typically controlled-access environments, which reduces potential interruptions to automated routines
* Since they have higher risk profiles than public infrastructure, the expectation is that workers will be more aware of autonomous operations and any deviations before they cause serious harm
Honestly, I’d wager closed-site autonomy takes off before anyone nails national or global self-driving on existing infrastructure.
For construction sites, on the other hand, you could (more) easily automate things like dump trucks or material transports using preprogrammed routes and manual triggers when something is done or needed. Then you can iterate on those systems to add more capabilities, more automations, more integrations with other equipment.
Kind of like how tractors have iteratively improved over time because they benefit from a lot of the same limitations as construction sites. At least that’s my thinking on it.
I just don’t think that a single solution will cover the full suite of construction site machinery. Scaling will be tough. But as you said they will be printing cash in the meantime.
It streams vision+voice+text+spatial data to a multimodal llm, to help users solve problems on the job. Basically a "Cursor" for tradesman. Most of my work now has been figuring out what to put in the context window, when, and how to provide the best deterministic response.
This assistant is a bridge between where we are now (little to no tech for these guys) and where the future will be (robotic automation). I think the in between stage will be a significantly longer timeframe than people realize, and I hope my app can provide value to these guys while they work. www.camerasearch.ai
Deforestation is usually bottlenecked by major multi-million dollar equipment, not hourly unskilled laborers
Especially, as automated construction has very little to do with "copy human" constructors and replicate and all todo with abstract the environment away and get it done. Meaning, you will want classic autonomy with excavators and trucks and concrete trucks - until you have poured the base plate for a house.
Then the best approach still is, to have basically a factory for pre-built components and assemble them on site. The "doing constructor things" with machines on site- does not scale.
Operating hours are the least of logistical hurdles for most projects. Schedule coordination dominates and the critical path can only move as fast as the slowest element on it.
None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.
> Bedrock is “upgrading existing fleets with sensors, compute, and intelligence that understands project goals, adapts to changing conditions, and executes work around the clock,”
I can also imagine this applying to all kinds of mining too, where there's already all the heavy equipment to mine and transport resources and we're just turning it into a robot so they don't have to employ a human anymore.
I wonder how that problem could be solved. Could something along the lines of warranty and service indemnification work, maybe?
But really, an acquisition by the OEM might be the only way to make this work in the long term?
Once they have the whole stack vertically integrated, you could just contract out the job to them entirely? If the excavator breaks, that's their problem, they'll bring another, you're paying for results not equipment.
> adapts to changing conditions
The real play here is starting a business that specializes in getting construction equipment unstuck from the mud.
And an $80M round sounds sane these days
Wouldn't the value of their target market be the pay of operators (~$30/hour)?
I guess it's cheaper to use a computer to drive a Bobcat than a human driver. But I wonder if the cost is worth the loss in immediate knowledge and speed. There's no way a computer is going to be faster than a human while also being safe. So I have my doubts.
Not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't be surprised if the company has to pivot to supporting a subset of their goal and then gets bought out by some larger company to work on their line of construction vehicles.
The “add on” thing belongs in he list of tarpit ideas. Watching Cruise and Ghost Automation flail about for years vaporizing cash trapped on this idea was like watching a comedy.
Waymo got away with what they did b/c they stayed focused and didn't grow too big, but they could only do that because they had Google to finance them.
Traffic laws are a hell of a lot more lax than the situation around on the job injuries.
Plug in your own longevity and uptime assumptions, but if that roof-mount kit costs on the order of $50k, it seems viable.
And then an explosion of underground bunkers and volcano lairs.
To build a commercially successful autonomous bulldozer requires building a commercially successful bulldozer. That’s hardware and hardware is hard. Probably harder than the autonomous part because bulldozers are a century past the proof-of-concept era.
My cynical take is this is financial engineering more than construction engineering. YMMV.
Wouldn't it only be necessary to put a "robot" in the driver's seat of any existing dozer?
Basically you can get rid of the air conditioner and the seat. Most of the hazards related to heavy equipment involve hitting something outside the machine.
Rolling is the major hazard to an operator and you still want to avoid that without one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...
Jumping straight to autonomous operations seems expensive/hard.
Cool idea, but a lot cooler to be able to attract talent with QSBS stock
Eg. if bricklayers could talk to their machine the way we can with coding agents, and say “yep, wall here please, check the blueprints to confirm how high and where the holes for the windows go”, retired & injured tradespeople could choose to come back. Less injuries means cheaper insurance & better margins. People could work in multiple parts of a site by supervising several robots, and not be exhausted at the end of the day. The list of benefits to individuals and the industry is long.
Lots of remote jobs (pipelines etc) could be done with robots and satellite internet.
If the maintenance and recovery teams can also be robots, suddenly lots of big projects could get done in very hostile environments.
If legit construction robots were a thing they'd be primarily trained on assembling the most automation friendly cladding systems instead of wasting time laying bricks, incidentally why brick fell out of favor.
Ironically a lot of construction robot explorations has been bricklaying / mason bots, but that's because laying bricks is computation and mechanically simple repetitive task not because it's an efficient building system. The benefit is we'll probably be able to build with bricks/masonry cheaper, the caveat being it will probably be relative more expensive relative to automation optimized building systems.
Second, all the prep work before actual construction costs the same regardless of the size of the home. Its profitable for builders to build large homes (cheaper per square foot) and sell them at a premium.
Third, zoning laws that make anything thats not a SFH mostly illegal to build.
Fourth, manufactured homes are illegal in most areas.
Finally, The building codes are localized to each county, there is no federal/state building code.
As long as these perverse incentives exist, costs are not going to come down.
There are a ton of jobs that should be automated like working in an Amazon warehouse. Automation can go one of two ways: it can make all of our lives easier or it can displace the workforce and suppress the wages of those who remain so those are the very top can have $250 billion isntead of $200 billion.
Those displaced will be told to find new jobs and that will work for a time with considerable personal hardship for those affected. We've seen the impacts of this with manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas from the Rust Belt, for example. But at some point we'll start to run out of jobs for people to go. And then things will get very, very bad.
I imagine a distant future where food is grown with automation, houses will be built that way, robots will pick up the trash and so on. This will leave people to find more meaningful pursuits. But this will require the ultra-wealthy to share and history has taught us that this will get bloody.
Instead we'll face a future where companies will fail because there simply aren't customers because nobody can afford anything.
I welcome less labor intensive constructions but construction is a significant (~20%?) sector of the economy. The potential for negative impacts from such mass layoffs is enormous.
and as others have mentioned: there's a ton of cost built in that really comes down to corruption and overcoming NIMBYism.
Seems sensible a project. $80m raised also seems a sensible amount. And the guy has a background in this field. Good luck
As long as the bills are paid then most people will be happy to not go to traditional work, but instead do more interesting/ of value to the community work.
If AI completely changed the system, then the present method of exchanging labour for money would also need to be replaced or tweaked.
And as many of the overlords claim to believe in a Christian/Jewish God, and so believe that one day God will come down to Earth and build a city at Jerusalem (or something like that) they will not want to anger their god by killing all of us (perhaps just the remainder of Gaza...)
"As long as the bills are paid" is the key point. They won't be because people will be out of a job with no safety net
What is more enjoyable, working on the language and database dictated by work, or whatever tech he wants to use.
As long as a person gets out of bed and does a days work doing something productive in some way, it doesn't matter that it's not traditional work.