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Comment by Hardwired8976 | Hacker News Reader

Being new to a hobby and spending 30k on a robot is crazy, props to your wealth.

There are a lot of guys with garages that have a $40k CNC mill in it. If you've got the money -- and in America, a LOT of people have the money -- $30k to be able to experiment with a fairly open platform that may play, as a category, a pivotable role in humanity for the next 15+ years is not very crazy.

New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

> New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

In the US, certain purchase categories make taking on debt to cover upfront costs trivially easy. Open robotics platforms are not one of those categories, while automobiles are.

Automobiles as a whole, yes. Spending $30k+ more than you needed to for a luxury or big honker, no.

It's a misallocation of resources. Actual roboticists can go their entire careers without touching hardware like that, and if they want it they have to spend years writing grants to get ONE to split between three other researchers and a dozen grad students.

Meanwhile a guy who made a fortune in tech optimizing ad placements (not saying that's OP) can pick one up on a lark, and as you said it usually ends up in the garage next to other expensive toys like an $80k truck or autonomous Tesla. Also the $80k trucks are a great example because they're more of a status symbol, just like the robots will be.

Of course they used go their whole careers without seeing these robots, they've only been around for three years and used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These days, $30k is cheap enough for a university lab and so a lot of them have picked up these models.

I still don’t understand why ads are so profitable. Seems to be one of the few real business models

Cars are different because there's an industry that provides financing and leasing options to make it very easy to spend beyond your means

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