My experience is more people having those devices on top of having laptops. I don’t know a single person in Uni that does not have a laptop at all. At last when it comes to writing reports or thesis you just need a proper keyboard device.

Meanwhile gaming and also PC gaming has become much bigger over the years, which keeps driving computer sales.

“hillbilly regions”. But that can include cities with up to 200k 300k inhabitants in the former eastern Germany.

Depends. Are you white? Would you be recognizable as a “foreigner”? In the latter case avoid all of Germanys provinces, especially in the former East. Do not travel alone and be wary of the cops. They are usually the same groups as the local Neonazis.

An educated bully with a badge is still that. Look at how the Police in Amsterdam broke up peaceful protests at universities. You could see them very happy to swing their long hard batons at young women because they need to compensate for something lacking those attributes.

I mean if the driving lessons are properly preparing them, i dont see an issue with that. E.g. in my country it is a couple month full time course to acquire the necessary license.

it is not about it being hard. It simply creates effort to coordinate. And this effort needs to be considered. If you do things externally that means there is two PMs to pay, you need QMs on both sides, you need two legal/contract teams, you need to pay someone in procurement and someone in sales…

I agree with you that doing software inhouse when there is good options on the market is usually not a good idea. But for infrastructure i don’t see there to be as much of an efficiency loss. Especially as you very much need experts on how to set things up in a cloud environment and you better look carefully at how many resources you need to not overpay huge amounts.

If you are a small company then yes. But i would argue that for larger companies this doesn’t hold true. If you have 200 employees you’ll need an IT department either way. You need IT expertise either way. So having some people who know how to plan, implement and maintain physical hardware makes sense too.

There is a breaking point between economics of scale and the added efforts to coordinate between your company and the service provider plus paying that service providers overhead and profits.

And we should also consider the longevity of these infrastructures. Cities that built their subways in the 19th century are still running them today and are vastly superior in terms of transit abilities than car cities. The population densities of today are unimaginable without central sewers and water infrastructure. Having continent spanning electricity grids are gigantic achievements. All these have shaped our lives for decades and sometimes centuries already and they are set to do so for centuries to come.