
What costs are exponentially dropping? - antb123
What costs are exponentially dropping? I.E. dropping Solar panels, Body scan medicine, Chip costs. Cell phone tech?<p>-
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RocketSyntax
To those that say DNA seq; although the cost to perform the actual sequence
has dropped, there are still a ton of overhead costs in acquiring and managing
any genomic data. Context - product platform guy at biobank.

~~~
aroch
I mean, I suppose that depends on how you're defining "overhead" cost? To
sequence a human genome, you _need_ to purchase a ~$700 reagent kit from
Illumina to plop into your HiSeq and a ~$300 library prep kit -- are these
overhead? I wouldn't call them overhead, and this fixed-cost hasn't really
changed for 5+ years.

Those two costs are what makeup the $1000/human genome stat, we don't factor
in the human and consumables components

~~~
RocketSyntax
How much does it cost you to source that data? What kind of programs are in
place to maintain compliance? Who runs the sequencers and performs QC?

I'd like to see how those kind of costs stack up against the $0.6K-WGS. Yes, I
understand the difference between marginal COGS and opex.

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adventured
The exponential part is going to trip up most of this. In the best scenarios
you might get that for a very short duration of time in a segment and then see
a continued, very slow decline in costs.

Space launch costs, thanks initially to SpaceX pressure.

Wireless and wired broadband access costs per bit continue to decline
persistently globally. Satellite broadband costs are about to do a hard one-
time plunk as Starlink comes online (another example of the short lived nature
of the biggest drops).

The cost of entry for a decent virtual reality experience vs the value
potential or value derived. The hardware requirements vs the median machine
has adjusted massively in the Oculus era and the quality of the software will
continue to persistently improve over a long period of time.

The cost of lithium-ion batteries $/kWh.

~~~
rossdavidh
Solar, memory chip, etc. had exponential declines for over half a century, so
it's not always "a very short duration of time".

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theandrewbailey
Lighting.

[https://www.statista.com/chart/10567/the-cost-of-light-
throu...](https://www.statista.com/chart/10567/the-cost-of-light-through-the-
ages/)

------
bufferoverflow
\- Costs of delivering mass to orbit.

\- Nanotubes

\- Graphene

\- Internet costs (I'm pretty sure it's dropping faster than exponentially)

\- CDN and storage in general

\- Many medical procedures

I expect meat prices to collapse in the next 10 years.

~~~
jagged-chisel
> \- Internet costs

The astute reader will recall these are 'costs' not 'retail prices'

~~~
bufferoverflow
Internet retail prices have been dropping significantly, except for the places
controlled by monopolies. In the EU you can get a gigabit connection for 20-30
eur/month, which seemed impossible even just 10 years ago.

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anton_tarasenko
The Wikipedia page on Moore's law includes similar observations.[1] For
example, the DNA sequencing cost.[2]

And another list that features laws, some of which describe exponential
processes.[3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulations_and_similar_observations)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlson_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlson_curve)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws#Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws#Technology)

------
inform880
Apparently on field DNA testing

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/us/politics/dna-tests-
bag...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/us/politics/dna-tests-
baghdadi.html)

~~~
aroch
Ehh, not really for any appreciable amount of sequencing, w've been pegged
right around ~$1000/human genome for a while now [1]. The machine mentioned in
the NYT article is almost certainly a variant of Thermo's RapidHIT system[2],
which is not DNA sequencing.

[1]: [https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-
Sequen...](https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-
Costs-Data) [2]: [https://assets.thermofisher.com/TFS-
Assets/GSD/brochures/rap...](https://assets.thermofisher.com/TFS-
Assets/GSD/brochures/rapid-dna-brochure.pdf)

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huhtenberg
Barely aged electronic devices, like laptops, phones, TVs, etc.

~~~
wincom
Nostalgic comment: My Commodore Amiga lasted for many years..

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IfOnlyYouKnew
Food

(not the largest exponent, but probably the longest history)

~~~
guidoism
I'm not sure. I did some analysis comparing the cost of basic grocery items in
the early 20th century to now and they aren't that different. I used the price
of gold at the time vs now and the average daily wage to try to get a better
feel for relative prices.

Over hundreds or thousands of years, yes, definitely.

All that said, it seems like automation could push the cost of food to near
zero in the coming decades.

~~~
bryanlarsen
These guys find that the price of food per hour of unskilled labour wage was
about 8 times higher in 1919. [https://fee.org/articles/food-prices-
in-1919-compared-to-tod...](https://fee.org/articles/food-prices-
in-1919-compared-to-today/)

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jononor
Don't forget the follow up: Which products/services are now becoming viable or
much more attractive as a result?

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t0mbstone
Television screens.

I bought a 65 inch 4K Sony Bravia tv about 4 years ago for around $2500-$3000.

I would be lucky to sell it on craiglist now for $500.

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ganzuul
Price per megabyte of non-volatile storage, probably.

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thrower123
TVs are still getting cheaper, amazingly. I didn't think there was much lower
they could go, but $500 buys you more and more TV every years - and that's in
nominal dollars, not counting inflation, so the effect is even more
pronounced.

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jerome-jh
Interest rates since 1980? [https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-
bond-rate-...](https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-
yield-chart)

------
durgaprasad351
Stock trading

~~~
inform880
My 11 year old brother trades stocks

Not sure if that's what they meant by free market

~~~
lotsofpulp
If he's doing it based on valuation models he's created and 10-Ks, why not.
Might be a fun math exercise if he has money to burn.

~~~
TeMPOraL
How do you trade stocks with the amounts of money a typical 11 y.o. has?

~~~
bryanlarsen
There are several brokerages that will let you buy fractional shares.

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snaky
The cost of computation.

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superphil0
Gene sequencing

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dekhn
the price of genome sequencing is no longer dropping exponentially. And when
it was, it was heavily amortized across very expensive machines that masked
the true costs.

~~~
henryaj
Huh, didn't know this. Surely the cost of the machines has to be included
somehow in the cost per basepair?

~~~
dekhn
Let's just say that every analysis of sequencing costs I've seen has to play
extensive trickery with the various costs (the capital cost of acquiring the
machine, the operational costs of the reagents, the costs associated with
staff running the machine, the servers required to store the data after it's
acquired). Basically the stated prices are "the operational costs for a
reagent" with the cost of the machine subsidized out or amortized or otherwise
hidden from the calculation.

Many of the predictions about exponential genomics were done during a period
of a few years where those misleading rates were published. I spent a bunch of
time trying to figure out how to engineer systems to deal with exabytes of
genomics data, but there is no reason to do that, because there isn't that
much data being produced/retained or that needs to be maintained on spinning
platters of rust. Just another example of bio hype, unfortunately.

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amirathi
-cloud storage

-data costs (cell phone, broadband)

-hosting (became free in last couple of years thanks to Netlify, GH pages etc.)

~~~
lucb1e
> -hosting (became free in last couple of years thanks to Netlify, GH pages
> etc.)

Uh, GitHub really wasn't the first to offer free hosting, and it's definitely
not something of the "last couple of years". Geocities has been doing that
since 1995 and I don't know if they were the first. Moreover, GH Pages is
super limited, others allow you to run dynamic scripts (PHP being the most
popular). I never heard of Netlify but Wikipedia tells me it's standard shared
hosting for static content.

As for "cloud" storage, that's getting cheaper in the sense that they are
reducing profit margins (getting closer to charging the actual cost price),
but if you roll your own, you can still do it for less than what the cheapest
third party charges. And those costs are also dropping year over year. With
both effects combined, I guess it's dropping quite rapidly, but for two
separate reasons and not because of advances in hard drive tech.

~~~
zer0tonin
No, netlify is basically a fancy-ish github pages.

~~~
lucb1e
So... static shared web hosting? Or does GitHub Pages do something I don't
know about?

~~~
zer0tonin
It's static shared web hosting, with a few cool features like a built-in CI,
server-side analytics and serverless functions. They also advertise worldwide
high availability.

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jedberg
Laptops were for a while, but then stopped once they hit parity with desktops.

~~~
gruez
>once they hit parity with desktops.

I don't think they ever hit parity with desktops, mainly due to thermal
constraints. There's no way that a 15W laptop cpu can ever come close to a 95W
desktop cpu in anything other than short term (< 15s) single threaded
performance.

comparison between a mid range desktop CPU (i5-9600K) and a high end laptop
CPU (i7-8550U): [https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i5-9600K-vs...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i5-9600K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-8550U/4031vsm320742)

~~~
bpfrh
You could argue that it reached feature parity. Today you can do nearly
everything on laptop including basic editing.

Compare that to even 5 years ago where the costs of such a laptop was much
higher.

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vishnuharidas
Solid State Drives.

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jbob2000
Air travel. Depending on the route, it's down to about $1.30 per minute of
flight time.

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maishsk
Computer Storage costs

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throwaway_n
Cost per GFLOPS:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs)

Probably the clearest chart that explains why machine learning is blowing up
now, despite the fact that the same neural network architectures existed since
1990s (e.g., LeNet-5).

It's because cost dropped from $47,000 per GFLOPS to $0.02!!!

~~~
rrss
That $0.02 value is entirely bogus. It is based in the published 30 "teraops"
for Xavier, which it uses as teraflops and assumes is comparable to the other
flops values. ($699/30 "TFLOPS" = $0.02 $/"GFLOP"). "Teraops" counts int8
performance on the GPU plus the random vision and CNN ASICs in Xavier - it is
definitely not equivalent to normal fp32 flops.

It looks like the GPU in Xavier can do 1.4 TFLOPS single precision, so the
correct value is $0.49.

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situational87
Tech startup valuations, all contracting exponentially. Super cheap!

Sorry I'll show myself the door.

~~~
siberianbear
Back when I was a kid, Silicon Valley startups sold dollar bills for ninety
cents.

Now WeWork is selling them for a nickel. The cost of everything is dropping
like a rock! /s

