What separates an intentionally-founded city of industry and associated government, from a historical population center which has roots that go back many lifetimes before modern versions of these efforts arose anywhere?
If you were a city before there actually was any major industry or good government, these things would have surely developed (as good as they could) over the generations but still not actually formed the root of the reason for being there.
OTOH in a greenfield where the intention is explicitly to build better-than-average industry and leadership from the ground up, it's really a whole different reason to be there or go there to begin with. If that can be the main thing to take root it doesn't have to be very much like most places.
>grim human rights records of most of those successes.
I'm not so sure the Ship Channel would be what it is today if it weren't started out with unpaid labor. But even then labor has always been very expensive even when wages are not being paid, and forever loomed large on the balance sheets of the plantations and their backers who were often from Wall Street.
It still took a while but eventually through the magic of capitalism some very strong financial empires were built which finally could dwarf that nagging labor cost which just wouldn't go away no matter how much work you got out of slave labor or how much you cut back on other labor-related expenses.
I would say that's something that made it feasible for somebody to jump at the opportunity to start a new industrial/entrepreneurial community with bigger dreams than most, by having more wherewithal to get a good portion of the way there if an actual opportunity could be found.
Now it's taken a while but there are so many billionaires at such a high level that they can (finally?) dwarf even well-paid engineers and stuff by an even better multiple than 19th century stock tycoons had over agricultural labor costs, whether wages were paid or not.
Financially they could found a city like they did with Houston and not actually rely on unpaid labor whatsoever this time, and make even more of a killing.
The right opportunity came up with a major change in territorial administration after Texas won independence from Mexico, but it took a lot of foresight and sheer force of will to actually be the ones to pick out a nice spot of vacant land and say "this is where I'm going to build a city like no other".
Well, top performance electronics is usually going to be more expensive than the more nominal options.
And if there's not enough to go around to begin with, it might as well be a niche of some kind, you can't expect everyone to choose the most expensive option by any means.
Now if the user base is nowhere near the majority, and you're already in a high-dollar niche anyway because of the desired performance level, might as well escalate from the merely expensive, to the glaringly overpriced in addition. That's a well-worn playbook.
When the sweet spot is hit with loads of customers striving to afford the top-shelf items, while in actuality everyone is settling for a shadow of what should be offered by the biggest business machines companies, it's not the hardware that's the problem. Too few people are grumbling and accept they just have to make do with what they have.
Most buyers do not use consumer electronics as money-making machines, the genres and cost-structures have undergone generations of evolution to be optimized for consumption of the electronics, as actually opposed to the business machines they once were.
If you want to use yours as a money-making machine, it will probably pay for itself even if the purchase price is a small multiple of the popular budget consumer version. But way more money is being put into making it difficult to tell the difference, more money than most small companies are even worth.
>supported by a company that is user aligned.
Interestingly, you can't buy that with money, even from the most financially-oriented of companies.
Interesting, a few organizations can (very) carefully craft their own LOB software over the number of years it can take to fully free themselves from Excel. And then realize the intended advantage for years to come.
At the same time over a period of years the web approach is to make the whole thing more like a bunch of interlocked Excels, more so than it already was before.
Does that mean any resulting disadvantage during following years is intentional? Any more than huge orgs grew to depend on Excel, one physical desktop at a time since that was the only thing in common among all those diverse desk owners that would do the job, plus it was the first thing to come along to fill that niche.
>things like the potential of the PC were somewhat widely underestimated.
The potential of the AI that comes within reach at maximum expenditure levels may just be more widely overestimated.
The potential to make "that much money" even more challenging.
A very opposite scenario.
I think so many corporations are looking at how expensive actual humans always have been, and can be sure will always be, so much so that it's a major cost item that can not be ignored. AI opens up the possibility of a whole new level of automation or outright replacement for the routine simple-minded tasks, to a degree that never existed before. More jobs could possibly be eliminated than previous waves of mechanical and digital automation.
When you do the business math, the savings could be enormous.
But you can only realistically save as much as you are actually wasting, otherwise if you go too far you shoot yourself in the foot.
Even with all that money to work with, if you're in practice hunkering down for savings because you can't afford real people any more, you surely can't say the sky's the limit. Not like selling PC's or anything that's capable of more unbridled growth.
When PC's arrived they flew off the shelf even at their high initial retail prices.
People in droves (but not the silent majority) are shunning free AI and the movement is growing with backlash in proportion to the foisting.
The message is plain to see with very little advanced math.
The only news is that it is the CEO of IBM saying it out loud.
IMHO he has some of the most credible opinions at this scale that many people have seen.
It's "highly unlikely" that all this money will be paid back to everyone that invested at this point. The losers probably will outnumber the winners, and nobody knows whether it will end up becoming a winner-take-all situation yet. A number of wealthy players remain at the table, raising stakes with each passing round.
It's so much money that it's already too late to do anything about it, and the full amount hasn't even changed hands yet.
And the momentum from something so huge can mean that almost the entire amount will have to change hands a second time before a stable baseline can be determined relative to pre-existing assets.
This can take longer than anyone gives credit for just because of massiveness, in the mean time, established real near-term growth opportunities may languish or even fade as the skew in rationality/solvency balance awaits the rolling dice to come to rest.
Sounds like you are looking at it from a consumer's point of view.
The US "market" is between the drug companies, hospitals, practitioners' groups, insurance companies, and government.
They are the ones that have market participation, the patient's not involved with that, their primary duty is to provide justification for the transaction.
>Healthcare doesn't function as a market, to our detriment.
So true, but even worse than that, the market that is there is predatory to a cumulative detriment worse than when simply dropping the ball makes things go wrong :\
If you were a city before there actually was any major industry or good government, these things would have surely developed (as good as they could) over the generations but still not actually formed the root of the reason for being there.
OTOH in a greenfield where the intention is explicitly to build better-than-average industry and leadership from the ground up, it's really a whole different reason to be there or go there to begin with. If that can be the main thing to take root it doesn't have to be very much like most places.
>grim human rights records of most of those successes.
I'm not so sure the Ship Channel would be what it is today if it weren't started out with unpaid labor. But even then labor has always been very expensive even when wages are not being paid, and forever loomed large on the balance sheets of the plantations and their backers who were often from Wall Street.
It still took a while but eventually through the magic of capitalism some very strong financial empires were built which finally could dwarf that nagging labor cost which just wouldn't go away no matter how much work you got out of slave labor or how much you cut back on other labor-related expenses.
I would say that's something that made it feasible for somebody to jump at the opportunity to start a new industrial/entrepreneurial community with bigger dreams than most, by having more wherewithal to get a good portion of the way there if an actual opportunity could be found.
Now it's taken a while but there are so many billionaires at such a high level that they can (finally?) dwarf even well-paid engineers and stuff by an even better multiple than 19th century stock tycoons had over agricultural labor costs, whether wages were paid or not.
Financially they could found a city like they did with Houston and not actually rely on unpaid labor whatsoever this time, and make even more of a killing.
The right opportunity came up with a major change in territorial administration after Texas won independence from Mexico, but it took a lot of foresight and sheer force of will to actually be the ones to pick out a nice spot of vacant land and say "this is where I'm going to build a city like no other".
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