Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkjelden | Hacker News Reader

I have been wondering lately if we have become so dependent on certain sectors of the US economy (housing, infrastructure, healthcare, education) that risk aversion is suffocating innovation.

No one wants to send their kid to an unproven, experimental university. No city wants to beta test a new style of road building. No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment. We are so dependent on these things that the cost of failure is astronomical. Because no one is willing to try new methods of doing things, costs never go down. There are marginal improvements, for sure, but no disruptive changes.

It feels like a weird manifestation of NIMBYism. We all want innovation, but we want to test it on someone else first.

View on HN

People are so incredibly willing to try unproven experimental universities and medical treatments that people getting scammed over fake ones is actually a fairly large problem. I'm not sure where you got the idea that no one is going to Trump University or University of Phoenix and that no one is trying alternative medicine or pushing right to try bills across the country.

> No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment.

Plenty of patients are willing to try new treatments. New treatments are incredibly expensive, but unlike in other countries and industries, old treatments/technologies continue to get more and more expensive. The problem there is that pricing is totally obfuscated, and providers are able to get monopolistic profits as a result. The government could step in and hold down prices, as they do elsewhere (or at least require transparency), but their pockets are too stuffed by the monopolists to do anything. "Free markets!" they declare, destroying capitalism.

In medicine and higher education, at least, money has shifted dramatically from actual useful services to administrative overhead.

Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen have a lot to say about this subject. The argument boils down to regulatory and cultural pressures have caused innovation to slow down drastically since the 1970s in all areas but ICT.

I strongly suggest you read "The Complacent Class" if this is a subject that interests you

You mean right after the Copyright Term Extension act was passed?

There are a number of different causes for the slowdown. I'd argue the slowdown was caused in large part as a reaction to the chaos and violence of the 1960s. Desire for safety -> more regulations & less investment in new things. I don't know that any specific law or rule can be attributed to the slowdown or its start.

Think of the economy as having a temperature-- 100 years ago, the US was hotter, more dynamic, more dangerous. And it's gradually settled into a more stable structure. Safer, but harder to make changes.

Your question reminded me of the resistance of PEX adoption in California, even though it has been widely accepted in Canada.

http://www.remodeling.hw.net/products/house-systems/californ...

I was surprised the article didn't address regulation much nor the fear of litigation (when I googled for canada pex legal, I found class action suits...)

The obvious next question being, _are_ PEX pipes safe? Perhaps California is just ahead of the curve banning it.

As far as we can tell. Pex is just polyethylene or (C2h4)n - there is nothing about that chemical formula to be particularly concerned about. It doesn't leach anything - when pure water is desired it the most common pipe to specify as it is cheap and works well (glass is better but that is mostly because glass does not allow air to through to dissolve in your water - and obviously more expensive)

The alternative is copper and cPVC. cPVP is just another plastic. Copper leaches copper into your water (though not harmful for most purposes), and is attacked by common water ph to corrode and ultimately break requiring replacement (though this takes about a lifetime). Copper is more expensive - 10 feet of copper pipe will cost as much as 100 feet of pex, and you have to join the copper every 10 feet: more expensive labor.

The claimed worry is impurities from manufacturing exposes workers to them when the pipes are first turned on. Note that there is no particular reason to believe those objections do not apply to approved pipes. My opinion is they don't like the idea of pex because it is less labor which means less money for them.

I personally use pex for all my plumbing in my house. It is cheap, quick and easy.

I've noticed that Pex has taken over new construction in my area. I built my house 17 years ago and copper water pipes were still standard. I just assumed cost was the big driver since copper has gone up about 200% in that time.

You say that copper will eventually corrode, but how does that compare to the lifetime of Pex?

Good question... Regular polyethylene is rated for 50 years in ground (I was researching geothermo at one point), and experts say that is mostly because nobody wants to bother with caring about things that will happen after they are dead. Generally it is believed we should get 200 years out of it, perhaps more.

PEX has essentially zero resistance to UV, in sun exposure salutations you get a few weeks of lifetime. Most buildings don't expose plumbing to sunlight though. There are a few (very few) chemicals that attack PEXs, but all the ones I know of are nasty enough that I'd wear full protection if I ever have to work with them - not something I expect drinking water will ever contains. Pex is resistant to any PH I'd want to drink.

California plumber's union officials are busy folks -- their other pissing match:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff_waterless_urinal/

Where I work they swapped from waterless back to flushing. I'm sure they were glad the water supply had been plumbed.

But... I think they were replaced with autoflushers that don't flush at every visit, but perhaps have a delay so that it flushes more than one usage.

Do you really think France and Japan, two of the countries cited here, are less risk averse?

The distinction that I see is that the US is perhaps not individually risk averse, but is systemically accountability averse. There is no end to the inefficiencies that can be introduced by constant ass-covering and compulsive subdivision of responsibility to the point that no one human is accountable for anything of note.

I don't think this is the problem. I think that PENSIONS are the problem. The risk aversion comes from municipalities that are flat broke because they over-promised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com