"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...."

"Projects I work on..."

Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.

The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.

More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.

You don't work in construction do you?

Lack of skilled tradesmen is a widespread problem and a major source of project delay (on top of massively higher housing production costs).

I assume next comes the zoning-causes-all-shortages and if only we could fix zoning then we'd solve housing – a thesis for which there's zero evidence.

That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.

If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.

Yes, the labor supply for skilled tradesmen is very inelastic. Which is one reason it sucks to have so much of it drawn into a probably-speculative boom.

> and the pay sucks.

This is baffling to me from the homeowner's perspective.

I just checked the last invoice I had for electrical work - $300 for something that took <30 minutes and <$20 of supplies.

(And like, he did good work and I'd hire him again... but at those rates it's worth me doing anything I can myself even if it takes me 5x longer.)

I said the pay sucks, not the profit. Owning a residential electrical company is lucrative because they pay their electricians substandard wages.

It’s not possible for the standard wage to be substandard.

Fine, non-union residential contractors pay lower wages than union contractors.

Are you including travel time in the 30 minutes? Time to travel and provide free estimates? Sick/vacation time?

> Sick/vacation time?

Don't forget health insurance for when they have to use that sick time to get treatment - so they can get back to work ASAP. Plus, during a bust if they get laid off, we don't have universal health insurance, so they have to factor that in as well.

I mean, obviously not. (Though no travel for free estimates, estimates are just done by phone.)

Obviously my electrician isn't making anywhere close to $30040 hours52 weeks = $600k+/year - and I don't begrudge my electrician making a good living.

But from my perspective as a homeowner, skilled trades are punishingly expensive, and my response was to a post specifically claiming that the pay sucks.

> But from my perspective as a homeowner, skilled trades are punishingly expensive, and my response was to a post specifically claiming that the pay sucks.

My post is a response to yours, showing that the provider’s pay can suck even if you find a service punishingly expensive.

Volatility of pay, body wear and tear, hours per day and flexibility of schedule, extensive travel greatly increasing morbidity/mortality risk, and other components go into whether or not pay sucks or not.

What do those residential electricians do then? Become baristas?

tbf, I don't think Wagyu cows were that thrilled about their lot in life before Wagyu became a thing, either.

You may have a unique perspective on that, though...

> Projects I work on have seen prices soar.

Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.

The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.

And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.

>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.

Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.

"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular

That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.

The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.

Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.

The residential buyer has one advantage though: they do not demand as much from those working. You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references. Commercial projects tend to be big enough that you cannot get into them without experience (which in turn you cannot get).

The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.

>The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.

This is not true at all! Parking lots are not particularly complicated, with the main obstacle being machinery and logistics. I know folks that started off residential and moved to commercial once they accumulated enough capital to buy the necessary machines to take on bigger commercial work.

>You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references.

Highly questionable premise. I bet very few people are going to gamble their most valuable asset on a newbie trying to learn the ropes. I’ll pay someone experienced multiples more for my once in a decade or two capital projects on my home.

And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.

> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?

Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?

It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.

Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.

Learn to code indeed.

For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.

> For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating.

yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed protectionist policy to artificially inflate the value of their labor. Let's see how union tough you are when the administration changes and you have to compete with a global labor pool again.

>compete with a global labor pool again

I don't really think electricians have to worry about that. There may be the some shops that employ immigrants as helpers, but most electricians have spent at least several years getting their hours, building their kit and learning the NEC + local codes. It's hard to picture companies importing labor and training them for so long.

That's a nice story and barely a reply to my comment, not engaging at all.

Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.

Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)

How would it be double the cost if it can work day and night and on holidays and during bad weather and not have strikes?

Double is probably a low estimate. There is a lot of engineering required in the robot. Much of the effort is setup, someone still needs to bring it to the site, and feed the blueprints in. Cleanup is also a lot of the cost. Not to mention mortar is made of sand which is abrasive and will wear it out fast meaning lots of maintenance work.

Working day and night isn't helpful as the limit to speed is waiting for the mortar to cure before doing the next row. (Generally you do about 5 rows and then wait a day)

could the robots not do more than one site? 5 rows, move to other side, a house if rectangle does have four sides, and a subdivison has multiple houses?

Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

People are already doing it to some extent, especially the sort of technical non-programmer crowd. A member of my family was even having a (now pretty out of date) version of chatGPT spit out VBA macros for them with precisely no idea what they were doing, but the result worked well enough for them. Now I know lots of programmers will scoff at that but when you see what the big models can do today in terms of breaking down a fairly large task and executing on all the steps with minimal need to stop it, including going to existing docs/web pages etc. to gather info, correcting itself, even troubleshooting issues and correcting them, it strikes me as hard to see a future where programming skill as such remains considered scarce in the market.

> Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen

Hate to break it to you but it is happening, increasingly at the business stakeholder interface later.

> A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

Most of the value in the software engineering process isn't in the compiler, it's in deducing the requirements and weighing tradeoffs for various solution paths. LLMs have now automated the next step: translating human language requirements and specifications to code.

The compiler is just the last deterministic step, which while essential, is entirely commoditized in the value chain. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?

I am a UX Researcher, UX Design and Developer by trade since 2009. I don't know iphone development, python, any back end stuff and or in depth JS stuff.

But, Codex does and just by typing I just published a startup in python in two weeks using Codex and it's iPhone app will be available soon.

How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice? I just feed screenshot after screenshot to Codex to understand what I need to do next. Look forward to being able to share my screen and have it guide me via a voice conversation.

> How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice?

Extrapolate that to any other engineering or even medical discipline and you will understand that your conclusion has some flaws.

Well i guess there are two sides of table / arguement. Im on the side of believing the hype of the AI overlords who promote UBI not cause I don't want to work because I personally experience and see it slowly playing out now.

Careful with UBI. What they are thinking is reshuffling/re-branding Medicaid/Food Stamps/Housing voucher, etc, into one lump sum that just like the current welfare, will barely be enough to keep you alive.

What is you opinion of U.I "designed" by someone without UX experience, thru prompting. Most likely you cringe at how bad they are, as do the reset of us.

Similarly, programmers have a name for code generated without a coder guiding and reviewing, A.I slop.

Getting an idea out there quickly and cheaply is definitely a good use for AI. In the context of the original op, this is not putting any developers out of work. Quite the contrary, if the idea takes off then you will probably want to make a proper implementation with a carefully thought out UX.

The UI/UX Gemini made is less is more and follows how I have designed for years. The idea is musicians/bands find local venues to play out. Which is an easy UI/UX .. a logo ... sign up button, header that says "Bands find local venues to play out," and a search bar below for them to search local spots. Ive done these sites for forever so I know how to describe a startup idea quickly to humans and an LLM. That's a unique skill yet can be taught quickly like stop going on and on about your idea i dont care give it to me in 15 to 30 seconds.

That's pretty disingenuous.

The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.

As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!

However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.

As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)

Well let me know when US stores stop selling everything in imperial units and framing is done in metric.

That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!

I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...

I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"

I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.

>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.

I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.

If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.

>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.

Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.

>Datacenters are fine.

Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.

> Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction

Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue and opinions are rarely stated in clear and falsifiable terms. They stay vague because there really aren't that many good reasons to oppose them, and IMO sane discussion on the subject leads to "building these really doesn't change that much" or "AI slop is really not that different from any other kind of slop."

> The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.

If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much. If you said "I think we should build fewer roads because adding more lanes doesn't really work that well to reduce traffic" then that would be different; you wouldn't be a hypocrite for saying that.

See my above statement. Opponents of AI and/or datacenters rarely seem to say what it is about them that they actually dislike. Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?

>Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue

I don't care. I'm responding on the topic of AI. I won't let you treat them as interchangeable just because you perceive them as treated that way.

>If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much.

Cool, but you've specifically constructed a person that fits your narrative. What you said originally what the sheer number of users of AI means that some of them must be anti-AI. You went from a deduced existence of a broad kind of person to an asserted existence of a specific one, with no justification. I'm not sure your opponents are the only ones guilty of not thinking clearly.

>Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?

I don't know. Can't they? I don't even know who you're talking about because you're treating complaints about datacenters and about AI as equivalent. Myself, I don't think I've seen anyone be just anti-AI in the sense you said, of despising the existence and development of generative models, wholly and completely. Some people are concerned about the business practices of the AI industry; some resent the effect of AI on the hardware market; some are concerned about the labor market (even if they don't think they're in danger of being replaced); some look at it from the more physical aspect of it, as you've said the construction and operation of datacenters. If you treat these swaths of people as just one person, it's small wonder you'll think they flip-flop from one position to another.

> If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

Something can have a great deal of utility to everyone while simultaneously causing damage to a subset of people. Electricity is universally useful, but anyone downwind of a coal plant is hurt by air pollution even if they benefit from electricity. It's not contradictory for those people to ask for stricter controls on pollutant emissions.

Likewise with LLMs, they can provide a lot of utility to enterprises and individuals, while simultaneously causing damage to those individuals.

Hordes of now-fragile white collar workers are currently trying to use AI to figure out how not to be rendered obsolete by AI.

People who live near proposed datacenter sites are using LLMs, while also facing spiking utility costs due to the AI datacenters, and maybe significant quality of life regressions.

Everyone is trying to figure out how to maximize their own benefit from LLMs while simultaneously trying to put the costs of this technological revolution on others, and everyone has different positioning in that race, depending on their skills, adaptability, and privilege. This situation will test all individuals, institutions, and societies.

>You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.

There's a word for that: hypocrisy.

That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.

I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.

And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".

No. That's not what the word means.

> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.

Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.

It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!

> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.

Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.

But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.

I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.

And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.

The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.

The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.

wouldn't the analogy be Wagyu farmers?

resi has been drained pretty hard in the last 10 years, this just adds more fuel to the fire.

If Meta decided to pivot to a brothel and meth lab building spree would you consider that to be a worse, equal, or better use of their capital and the labour in the regions where they are building out this infrastructure? Why?

I mean, at least some of us would consider it better with meth and hookers than them ruining the internet with their panopticon shit.

Yeah, I'm okay with that.

Uhm, aren't we all allowed to have an opinion on what's best for mankind?

FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.

I used to be an electrician.

I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.

For example, keep the lights on for schools.

You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.

These sort of moral grandstanding arguments are annoying.

There is no "moral grandstanding". I wish to live in a functional society.

You're framing it so you can't lose by making the argument seem like a moral choice between "have data centres" or "live in a functional society".

That's a fallacy, and it is moral grandstanding. It's a useful way to win internet arguments (and internet points), but it is just a debate ending strategy.

No, I’m fine with data centers, I’ve built one myself and I’ve maintained multiple.

I argued against “if you have capital, you can do what the fuck you want”.

> Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor?

> In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on

Feels like there are some mixed signals here.