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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

In the same way a lot of products have become cheaper because of some process optimization (packaged more compactly to reduce transportation costs), I'm excited to see modular homes/home 3d-printing etc. play out and become cheaper over time until they are more affordable than convention home construction or somehow unique and better in ways that conventionally constructed homes cannot be.

To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.

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The substack Construction Physics has an excellent overview of the now 100 year failed promise of modular building and the eternal cycles of the exact same value props being pitched in ambitious efforts to reform construction and why conventional construction has refused to be disrupted.

Some great posts are:

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/building-componen...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/operation-breakth...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/construction-effi...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/book-review-indus...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/industrialized-bu...

Despite this, he's cautiously excited about some of the potential future industrialized systems such as Foldable Buildings https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/folding-at-home 3D printing https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/3d-printed-buildi... Plywood Systems https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/facit-homes-wikih... And Broad Homes https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/broad-group-part-...

In what you linked first, his criticisms are (rightly) directed towards pre-fabed concrete. That's not this system.

This is a folded system - exactly what you indicate he's cautiously excited about. As am I. Let me link together two or three of those modules - say a living room/kitchen/laundry and two bedroom/bathroom modules. Would be perfect!

Thanks for sharing these links! I was looking for an analysis of B-Core from Broad and I finally found one.

Although I don't quite understand why they initially excited about B-Core but later call it poorly thought out. Is it because of the cost of stainless steel?

If you are rich, there are a lot of options that are likely to better cater to your richness. Or why build a 50k shed on a million dollar piece of ground?

In Elon's case so you can have a few hundred on the not very expensive land at Starbase Texas.

As always, the premise is “you should” not “I should.”

Savings of time to build and use, can be removed as easily as it’s deployed.

$50k will buy a reasonably nice RV that includes wheels and a hitch and such options abound.

RV's have a ton of compromises to make them light that do not restrict this solution.

There is simply no comparison. Buying an RV to park it permanently would be daft.

RVs have much higher maintenance. Maybe Tiny homes would be an alternative.

> (wo)man

'Person' is the non-gendered word that goes here.

In old English man was gender neutral. Wer, as in werewolf, was the masculine. World comes from Wor-old, or literally, age of males.

Are there any countries or communities that currently use "old English" as their native language?

No, that's why we call it "old" English, as opposed to "South-African", "New Zealand", etc.

> No, that's why we call it "old" English

Which surely means it has little relevance to a conversation about modern English then, no?

Pedant comes from French or Italian and meant teacher or schoolmaster.

We know. But language shifts.

But with ‘son’ in the word doesn’t it’s usage continue to promote the patriarchy?

No, “Son” as in “male child” is derived from Porto-Germanic “Sunnus”, “person” as in “human being” is derived from Latin “persona”. It’s just a coincidence that in modern English we write them with the same characters.

There are some (fringe?) groups who'd argue against this, evidenced by variant spellings like "womxn" and "womyn" that are attested since the 70s, in order to remove "man" from the words. Different in that "woman" is etymologically an extension of the word "man", but somewhat absurd because the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man.

Point being, perception of a word can be more meaningful to some people than the historical meaning.

Good 'ole prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics...

This kind of thinking, linguistic relativity - that the words available to you shape your worldview - is not really held in high regard as I understand it. At least not in the hard sense, where one is completely unable to conceptualise something because they don't have the words to express it.

For example, some have claimed that if we had no separate terms for "man and woman", "male and female", etc, we'd be unable to perceive a difference between the two.

> the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man

For anyone playing at home, this is "were" or "wer". The phrase "man and woman" would once have been something like "were and wif", which is where the "were-" in "werewolf" comes from, and is the ancestor of "wife".

If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.

Oh, for sure. I didn't mean to suggest it's a common or respected belief, only that there are some who support it.

(and probably more who use examples of it in bad faith arguments presuming that such groups exist in larger numbers, e.g. "look at those crazy feminists!")

> If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.

There's a part of me that loves this idea, even if I recognize the absurdity of suggesting it. I guess it's made more sense to me than trying to replace a large portion of English vocab en masse, like all the vocational terms ending in "-man".

A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).

As far as I know the other Nordic languages didn't develop this usage, but I'm less familiar with them.

> A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).

We sort of have this in English too: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Although I can't think of any cases where we use "man" alone to mean "one".

"That's one small step for a person, one giant leap for personkind"

Time to rewrite the history books! (1984 anyone?)

"_Man_ borde inte tvinga andra att anpassa sig efter en skrikig minoritet" (_One_ should not force others to conform to a loudmouthed minority)

Also German, kinda: Man darf nicht.. Frau/Mann

I guess you can find fringe groups against anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my native language (Ukrainian), the word "person" (людина) is always feminine. Even if someone wanted to say "I'm a very masculine person", they would still need to use a feminine form of the word "masculine" to say "masculine person". And no one has ever had any issues with that, ever.

That would probably be because It's just a superficial issue for people with too much time and money on their hands to enforce their ways upon others.

In Italian (which shares I believe no common roots with Ukrainan) it is the same, "person" (persona) is always feminine, and of course goes with feminine articles and adjectives are conjugated at the feminine gender and as well noone ever had issues with that.

Yes, it is the same thing. Italian and Ukrainian belong to the same language family (Indo-European), so they are distantly related.

Well, quite distantly I believe, I mean Slavic vs. Latin/Romance languages.

Maybe people in hurricane and flood zones? If you insist on living there, might as well live in a disposable house (Possibly want to get the price lower than 50k).

Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.

That's a contrived example. I assume someone rich would hire a construction firm to make a fancy treehouse.

The target audience for these are squeezed between owners of trailer parks and cheap shacks.

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