The average American's longest-kept car is 8 years old. Therefore every eight years or so, Americans are forced to spend a significant amount of money on a car. The median price of a new car in the United States is ~$41,000. If we generously claim that a Chinese car with the same capabilities could be purchased for minimum $30,000 instead, then the number of money being lost to being forced to purchase a more expensive car, every eight years, is 11,000*350 million, or ~3.8 trillion dollars. Dividing per year, we get roughly 480 billion dollars per year that could be spent by Americans.
I'm not an economist nor a mathematician, so I will not claim that this is a good expression of the economic impact of these restrictions. But I will say that the average American does not care about which country his or her car originates from. They care about navigating our crumbling infrastructure through the only means possible, the car. We have no reliable public transport in 99% of this country nor alternative modes of transport. We are forced to buy cars.
It seems unfair to me that the average American, who is making less and less per year after we adjust for inflation and purchasing power, should be forced to carry the burden of a technologically backwards industry that is still pumping out millions of gas-powered vehicles, which are not only bad for the environment, but are even more expensive to operate compared to the cost of electric cars per mile.
Our country does not think ahead, all of our decisions just temporarily patch our longstanding issues. America is screwed.
I don't think tbis quite holds - money being spent on domestically produced vehicles should be going to working families, so the money stays and is spent again in the country. Now if most of that money just goes to the mega rich, then it's fairly pointless.
But it's definitely more complex than just money saved = money spent elsewhere
I agree with this. It certainly is more complex than just that. Only yesterday was I thinking about this topic, as I was walking around Osaka and looking at the cars over there. I would like to see an actual study on this question.
HN needs some kind of functionality to aggressively filter out slop posts and de-activate the accounts that are boosting them. As of late, a large volume of both news-related and Show-HN posts have been blatant AI trash that contributes nothing to the community.
If you don't have regulatory hurdles to jump over then there are a whole raft of open-weight models that perform basically as well as Anthropic's offerings (and, in many cases, better because they're pulling fewer capacity-stretching shenanigans). Check out Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM series models in particular with something like OpenCode or Pi as a coding harness. If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open WebUI in a container and expose it via cloudflared so you can use it on the go.
Kimi and DeepSeek are impressive for their size but still run slow on any hardware you or I would have. If you’re proposing we run those via a cloud service, I don’t see a reason to do that when it’s an inferior model and I still have to pay per token for it.
OpenCode Go provides a lot of usage for these models for the paltry sum of $10/month. Z.ai's coding plan provides a single-digit multiple of Claude Code's usage for a similar price and performance level. Kimi and DeepSeek models are hundreds of billions of parameters (or, in K3's case, >1T). Many of these models have Opus-level benchmarks and, as I pointed out previously, often practically outperform Anthropic models because they're more consistent.
It’s not, you drink too much Kool-Aid, and your employer has too much money. Or the things you do are simply so irrelevant that nobody cares you’re sending stuff to a company of dubious morality.
Well which is it? Because the first one also contradicts the claim i'm responding to. I think those thinking their codebases are so novel as to not dare to provide to the providers are quite full of themselves. 99.9% of code is mundane.
Nobody says novel. We just ”can’t send not our own intellectual property to a third party because contracts”. Then we roll out on premise. And we don’t miss anything, in fact we feel we gain more than we lose out. With proper tools we are not far off.
Personally I don't care about common benchmarks as I don't find actual coding agent performance correlates strongly with them. One reason to use open-weight models is that they don't hide the reasoning, so you can do very aggressive context management in your harness to use significantly less tokens. Smaller prompts are faster since KV is N^2 plus it can be dramatically cheaper (if you balance your aggressive context management with maintaining the prefix cache as much as possible). Even paying for API prices directly and using agents as much as I want I spend less per month than the $200 I spent on a Claude MAX sub when I had it.
Gauguin, Manet, Rembrandt and Whistler sketches, Weston nudes, Harry Callahan photos, amazing things indeed.
People generally seem quite uninterested in preparatory sketches/studies/maquettes by famous artists, which is absolute madness, to my mind. Unfinished and transitory work is much more interesting to me. Photographers' contact sheets especially.
I'm not an economist nor a mathematician, so I will not claim that this is a good expression of the economic impact of these restrictions. But I will say that the average American does not care about which country his or her car originates from. They care about navigating our crumbling infrastructure through the only means possible, the car. We have no reliable public transport in 99% of this country nor alternative modes of transport. We are forced to buy cars.
It seems unfair to me that the average American, who is making less and less per year after we adjust for inflation and purchasing power, should be forced to carry the burden of a technologically backwards industry that is still pumping out millions of gas-powered vehicles, which are not only bad for the environment, but are even more expensive to operate compared to the cost of electric cars per mile.
Our country does not think ahead, all of our decisions just temporarily patch our longstanding issues. America is screwed.
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