NikkelNet

There are two very fundamental skills which I see becoming more and more important, but which fewer and fewer people are actually able to do effectively:

• Reading
• Writing

They are the foundation of all human knowledge. How can one expect to function in a demanding environment without them? The information age requires them of us more and more, as electronic communications mediums become more and more efficient, widely used, and commonplace. The telephone is antiquated, and for good reason. It still serves it’s purpose, but how can a phone call to 30 people compete with the clarity, precision and speed of a well written email?
I work on a large program which consists of many hundreds of people at the moment. I see it daily. Hundreds of people supposedly working towards a common goal, primarily interacting with each other verbally, despite the company’s best attempts to take advantage of electronic doodads. Person A hears Person B and C say something he thinks is wrong, be it in a meeting or a hallway conversation, but really doesn’t even know what the conversation was about to begin with, or got mixed up, and goes and starts spreading a tiny rumor, which then propagates, compounding along the way, until it finally somehow makes it back to the true originators, B and C, who, if they are a) smart and b) lucky, realize the potential ramifications and impending disaster that could be caused by said rumor to a design, procedure, program, or process, and then spend the remainder of their day either talking or writing to try to mitigate the situation and correct all the falsities that crept in.
Everyone fights the new, efficient, parallel communication medium. Even some of the young people, who have grown up with it. Some can handle it, and some can’t. Stores of human information are compounding at insane rates. Look, I’m adding to it right now. How can one person possibly keep up with it all?

One can’t. Not all of it We have limits. We are human. Our brains and bodies have physical capacities and bandwidths.
But one can under sample the information. We don’t have to read every word. There are patterns. High level constructs. Orders of knowledge. One can start at a higher order, absorb the important aspects of the configuration and format, and then head down the chain, absorbing only the levels of detail required at the moment.

It’s called skimming. Speed reading. It takes effort. Mental effort. You have to force yourself to do it. Learn how to do it, or prepare to get trounced by the coming oceans of expanding knowledge. We’re only at the tip of the iceberg.

Today, I listened to a story about a bunch of whiners whining about our flags are being made in other counties. This isn’t a question of patriotism (both sides of that argument are pretty equally weighted I think); it’s a question of economics. What gets my goat today is listening to all the whining and moaning in this country about the exportation of jobs.

This issue is simple, just like it is with every other story of exportation. They’re making our flags (and more importantly, people here are buying them!) because a) they have people willing to do it, and b) they can do it for cheaper than us. More power to em!

The way I see it:

The exportation of lower tier jobs opens the door to (and in some cases, forces) further innovation! We no longer need to make our own flags, and we can devote our labor/talent pools to newer callings. The sooner people realize that, quit their whining, and DO something about it, the better off EVERYONE will be.

Globalism is here to stay people…and it’s a sink or float.