> Because the Internet has enabled clusters like Silicon Valley or Hollywood to be even more prominent.
And bigger cities in general. But I also think people tend to underestimate changes. Small and medium sized cities have been hit hard by the recession and rising housing markets. There are increasingly no good deals to be had anymore. Unless you go to Chiang Mai or something.
I am not sure the situation is the same. Code used to be somewhat valuable, like in for example a game engine. Today code is to some extent free, and programming is a service. You don't sell software, you sell whatever investors wants to see. If the economy takes a hit programming won't necessarily be very valuable anymore.
You simply shouldn't believe the talk about automation. Most people don't even know what they are talking about. What do people think Chinese workers do? Mr. Marsh is right, it is about trade. If you can make something where workers are paid peanuts and have little, throughout the entire supply chain, without any penalties why wouldn't you? (except the obvious moral implications and long term effects).
What people really don't get is that hyper-automation, when you barely need workers at all, isn't going to come from the West. As we soon don't have anything to automate anymore. Most people here, including most engineers, are in the service sector.
Automation isn't all or nothing. It's a progression. That's what I was trying to say. Automation began with the assembly line, interchangeable (uniform) parts, and specifications.
There are two ways to save money on manufacturing: outsourcing to cheaper foreign workers, or automation.
Until recently outsourcing was the cheaper of those two options. That leads people to blame outsourcing for job losses. However, if automation had been cheaper at the time, it would have been more prevalent and probably would have taken the blame instead of outsourcing.
At some point automation will be cheaper than manufacturing in Asia, and then Asian factory jobs will disappear as the American jobs have.
In Sweden, where taxes pay tuition, it costs about $4500 per year to educate a student in humanities and twice that in STEM. The salaries are of course lower though.
I wouldn't really see it like that. The limits of physics are with us every day. That is why cars are impractical at speed and why there is latency to other continents. For all the development in technology, it is mostly the same since the 80s. "Just" more of it.
It isn't an uncommon thought. Unfortunately this isn't very popular, partly because it is actual socialism (which is even less popular than social systems). In general I think it is also too late to introduce such a system. You have to get ahead of the curve before people realize what they have got, sort of like in Norway with the oil fund.
That is probably true, but if I am buying a GPU for hundreds of dollars I don't care as much about the cost of the CPU. I think AMD needs to do something if they want to fulfill the potential of Ryzen. (Removing or minimizing the role of the chipset might be interesting for example).
Not necessarily. For instance if your target is 1080p gaming you can do that on a budget with an RX 570 or RX 580 + a reasonably priced Ryzen 7 chip. This market isn't at all competitive for Intel because it's price conscious and iGPUs aren't anywhere near up to to task.
The only market that doesn't care about CPU price is the market that doesn't care about price at all. i.e people building systems with i9-9900K or X299 platform + RTX 2080 TIs.
I am just not sure it is a super strong market. As far as I can tell those cards have been selling for roughly the same price or more as when they were introduced 2 years ago. A lot of people would just stick with what they got, or get a laptop instead. If the price of GPUs and memory was half of what it is it would make a lot more sense.
Maybe offer a very cheap add on gpu for office use. Something in the igpu range that would sell for say 50usd. It could be based on one of AMDs older gpus but with support for new display types and ports.
Right now, the cheapest "new" video card sold directly by Newegg is a $35 NVidia 210 which was new in 2010. Interestingly, reviews from that time period suggest that it sold for $30 after rebate. It has HDMI, DVI and VGA ports.
In the $50 range you can get an R7 350, which promises 4K support (although I suspect that will be at 30Hz) and would certainly be enough to light a monitor with enough oomph to put shadows and transparency effects on your windows.
Mostly just because there isn't much urgency to improve in the west. There is plenty of IoT in China. I wouldn't say 5G will be amazing in this regard though.
I see what you are saying, but as far as I know this is happening everywhere. Jobs have centralized and you are paying a premium for the opportunity. Otherwise service jobs are mostly what is left. While these apps are less common we certainly have the same pattern all over Europe.
And bigger cities in general. But I also think people tend to underestimate changes. Small and medium sized cities have been hit hard by the recession and rising housing markets. There are increasingly no good deals to be had anymore. Unless you go to Chiang Mai or something.