Comment by peaseagee
11 hours ago
That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?
Repairing grandfather clocks isn't more expensive now because it's gotten any harder; it's because the popularity of grandfather clocks is basically nonexistent compared to anything else to tell time.
"repairing a unique clock" getting costlier doesn't mean technology hasn't gotten cheaper.
check out whether clocks have gotten cheaper in general. the answer is that it has.
there is no economy of scale here in repairing a single clock. its not relevant to bring it up here.
Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.
Luxury watches have gone up, 'clocks' as a technology is cheaper than ever.
You can buy one for 90 cents on temu.
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not true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT.
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Instead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc.
Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.
No. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies.
Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life.
These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments.
I purchased a 5T drive in 2019 and the price is higher now despite newer better drives going on the market since.
Not much has down in price over the last few years.
Price volatility exists.
Meanwhile the overall price of storage has been going down consistently: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
okay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge?
https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen...
You will get a different bridge. With very different technology. Same as "I can't repair my grandfather clock cheaply".
In general, there are several things that are true for bridges that aren't true for most technology:
* Technology has massively improved, but most people are not realizing that. (E.g. the Bay Bridge cost significantly more than the previous version, but that's because we'd like to not fall down again in the next earthquake) * We still have little idea how to reason about the cost of bridges in general. (Seriously. It's an active research topic) * It's a tiny market, with the major vendors forming an oligopoly * It's infrastructure, not a standard good * The buy side is almost exclusively governments.
All of these mean expensive goods that are completely non-repeatable. You can't build the same bridge again. And on top of that, in a distorted market.
But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time.
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Bought any RAM lately? Phone? GPU in the last decade?
The latest iphone has gone down in price? It's double. I guess the marketing is working.
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Or riding in an uber?