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If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material it

If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof. Transportation is by nature highly distributed among a wide range of actors, unlike industries like semiconductors where the costs are centralized in a factory where a single agent can optimize everything. In other words, the majority of improving construction costs is actually a political problem, and engineers are unsuited to optimizing it. Transportation costs can be reduced, but only at a collective, national or state-wide level. Moving vast quantities of lumber, insulation, wiring, drywall, roofing and other housing materials across state lines is much more a political coordination problem than an engineering one. Sure, a team of engineers could design a more efficient, cost effective transportation method - but how would consensus ever be achieved to actually build the thing and align all the disparate interest groups to rally around it rather than opposing it? My hot take is that in the current era (at least in the United States) "Smart" people have neglected political concerns in favor of technical concerns. But the risks aren't technical, they are political, so this is inefficient. The problem will not be solved simply by engineering, no matter how clever the engineers are, if they are limited to purely technical approaches.

kingsuper20 5y ago
> If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof. You have to go beyond the first section. His main points are that (a) it's hard to standardize on the larger parts and (b) there is no low hanging fruit.
- gpm 5y ago
  > You have to go beyond the first section. Please don't imply people didn't read the article. It's boring, unnecessarily rude, against the guidelines [1], and at least in this case I did read the entire article and agree with that comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > (b) there is no low hanging fruit. There is no low hanging fruit when you divide up the pricing the way he did, but transportation is part of nearly every category that he divided it up into. From the data he shows we don't have any reason to think that transportation is not a single substantial fraction of the house cost, when you some up all the different transportation costs between the different sections he uses. To make an analogy to programming, transportation is like an allocator, and his data shows that execution time is spent evenly between 20 different functions. But all of those functions allocate, it's perfectly plausible the program is spending 50% of it's time in it's allocator and that speeding up that allocator by 50% would reduce the overall execution time by 25%.
wallacoloo 5y ago
I think I need a more concrete example. In many distributed networks, you can add a new path to it, and if that path is cheaper, then neighboring entities will (gradually) adopt it for cost savings. So if I developed a way to transport material between Seattle and NYC more efficiently, a bunch of individual actors will gravitate toward using that route. In a distributed system, I wouldn’t need any external approval to do that, and other participants would be free to choose to interact with me: it’s not political so much as it is markets. Is your claim that any improvement to the system will inevitably conflict with a centralized authority — like a regional government that has to approve commerce or land use? Is your argument that it’s a political problem because it’s not, actually, distributed?
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  How are you going to transport materials more cheaply? I work in manufacturing and a large part of the ultimate bill is S&H. We need to pass that onto our customers. Shipping is bearable outside of the US but as soon as you enter into the US it will eat your margins and leave nothing. As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as with most businesses. So either you need more automation or higher wages for the people who need to buy S&H services.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    > As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as with most businesses. So either you need more automation or higher wages for the people who need to buy S&H services. You just highlighted one opportunity for a technological improvement ("automation"). Warehouse automation: a decades-long trend which -- while it can be slowed -- so far seems to be unstoppable by political force. Driverless vehicles and drones: which, which technical solutions, and contingent upon political outcomes. OTOH 90% of the politics is around how these will be deployed on public land and air space, and those politics could be avoided if the players decided to build their own infrastructure like the big railroads did back in the day. Etc.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
pharke 5y ago
The cost of transportation scales with density of the object. If it takes up a lot of space like insulation or a house, which is by design full of empty space, then it costs a lot to move. To decrease transportation costs you'd have to increase the volume of space available both in depots and in the vehicles doing the moving. You'd also need to make it easier to move large items. The best example of this are container ships which have drastically reduced the cost of transportation. You'd need to replicate that for land or air transport and the last mile delivery to site.

kingsuper20 5y ago

> If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof. You have to go beyond the first section. His main points are that (a) it's hard to standardize on the larger parts and (b) there is no low hanging fruit.

gpm 5y ago
> You have to go beyond the first section. Please don't imply people didn't read the article. It's boring, unnecessarily rude, against the guidelines [1], and at least in this case I did read the entire article and agree with that comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > (b) there is no low hanging fruit. There is no low hanging fruit when you divide up the pricing the way he did, but transportation is part of nearly every category that he divided it up into. From the data he shows we don't have any reason to think that transportation is not a single substantial fraction of the house cost, when you some up all the different transportation costs between the different sections he uses. To make an analogy to programming, transportation is like an allocator, and his data shows that execution time is spent evenly between 20 different functions. But all of those functions allocate, it's perfectly plausible the program is spending 50% of it's time in it's allocator and that speeding up that allocator by 50% would reduce the overall execution time by 25%.

wallacoloo 5y ago

I think I need a more concrete example. In many distributed networks, you can add a new path to it, and if that path is cheaper, then neighboring entities will (gradually) adopt it for cost savings. So if I developed a way to transport material between Seattle and NYC more efficiently, a bunch of individual actors will gravitate toward using that route. In a distributed system, I wouldn’t need any external approval to do that, and other participants would be free to choose to interact with me: it’s not political so much as it is markets. Is your claim that any improvement to the system will inevitably conflict with a centralized authority — like a regional government that has to approve commerce or land use? Is your argument that it’s a political problem because it’s not, actually, distributed?

R0b0t1 5y ago
How are you going to transport materials more cheaply? I work in manufacturing and a large part of the ultimate bill is S&H. We need to pass that onto our customers. Shipping is bearable outside of the US but as soon as you enter into the US it will eat your margins and leave nothing. As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as with most businesses. So either you need more automation or higher wages for the people who need to buy S&H services.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  > As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as with most businesses. So either you need more automation or higher wages for the people who need to buy S&H services. You just highlighted one opportunity for a technological improvement ("automation"). Warehouse automation: a decades-long trend which -- while it can be slowed -- so far seems to be unstoppable by political force. Driverless vehicles and drones: which, which technical solutions, and contingent upon political outcomes. OTOH 90% of the politics is around how these will be deployed on public land and air space, and those politics could be avoided if the players decided to build their own infrastructure like the big railroads did back in the day. Etc.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago

pharke 5y ago

The cost of transportation scales with density of the object. If it takes up a lot of space like insulation or a house, which is by design full of empty space, then it costs a lot to move. To decrease transportation costs you'd have to increase the volume of space available both in depots and in the vehicles doing the moving. You'd also need to make it easier to move large items. The best example of this are container ships which have drastically reduced the cost of transportation. You'd need to replicate that for land or air transport and the last mile delivery to site.