Some food for thought

What is amazing to me is the speed with which we and our children are bombarded with information. Information and sensory overload are real things to balance in our daily lives. Having moments where we "unplug" are crucial to our health, our relationships, and society.

The rapid learning-redundancy curve in learning puts pressure on children as early as elementary school (I compared my age and math exposure to myself, then my son, and now our grandchildren). I often feel like saying "slow down World so I can get off" and take a break.

Well, if you hear things like so many zetabytes being generated, it is kind of crazy. Do you have ANY idea of the WASTE!?!?!?!? HECK, I had to create a schema for a project on one application and they had it in a denormallized for. What a WASTE! I normalized it and figured I could get about 6 snapshots a second for three YEARS to fit into a gigabyte. And TODAY, companies like google track what system you logged into, when, what options may or may not have been taken, etc... Companies like amazon track what sites used to look like, who visited them when, how long and often, etc... Did they do this 200 years ago? SURE! It was less formal, bit piece, spread out, and maybe more coarse, but companies checked competition, tracked customer history(personal and business), etc...

As for the top 10 professions? I DOUBT IT! According to forbes, the top 10 careers last year were:
From CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. (EMSI) listed in forbes


#1 software developers
#2 accountants and auditors
#3 market research/specialist
#4 systems analysts
#5 human resources, training and labor relations
#6 Network and computer admins
#7 Sales representatives
#8
#9 Mechanical engineers
#10 industrial engineers

The job I had 30+ years ago changed ONLY in that they expect people to do LESS. MY job is part 1,4,5,6 and a few others. BTW I have NO idea what 8 should have been. They SKIPPED that! Anyway, I had to learn a lot of things bordering on networks, and it didn't take me time to get up to speed. The same goes for databases. Databases seemed to become popular over 5 years after I started. Oracle came out with their first database only about a year before I started. STILL, slap a network interface and language onto ISAM, and you have the average SQL database. That is why mysqls first popular backend was called MYISAM or MYI for short. So what the PROGRAMMER used to be expected to do is now programmer, analyst, BSA, DBA, network admin, system admin, DATA ARCHITECT, etc....

As for the idea that the oldest generation, still working, says write me? And HOW old are THEY? 90+? SERIOUSLY! My father and mother probably had phones, much like today's "wired phones" even from their childhood! My mother is dead, but my father is pushing 80. He uses the phone PLENTY! A few years ago, he even got a smartphone! He ran a computer company. HECK, when I was a LITTLE kid, there were even pizza, and chicken, delivery companies TOO!

I must also disagree with the assessment that what people are taught in the first year is 50% obsolete by the third. MOST is probably obsolete from the FIRST day! As for populations and those numbers, who knows. For the most part, I am NOT impressed.

Steve

Don't need food for thought - plenty to think about. Gimme a cheeseburger.