Bruce Potter was on a panel that I didn’t see about how the security industry is affected by the economy. It got me thinking. I haven’t really noticed it much myself, but perhaps it is simply overshadowed by all the noise in the media, which I try to avoid the best I can. I don’t work in the security industry though, I lump myself into the ‘IT’ umbrella. Sometimes I say I work in operations if I’m talking to someone that I think may care about the specifics, to give them the opportunity to ask more about it. Regardless, my industry is still ticking along. It’s not something that’s directly affected by recession. Eventually people won’t have money to spend on new startups, which will flood the market with jobless folks. But some of us joke that recession is good for technical industries because it lets us chip off some of the barnacles. That is, the folks who don’t really care about technology, aren’t excited enough about it that it’s not just a job to them. You have to believe in the benefits of technology to be any good at it. I suppose that may be true of most industries, but I haven’t really worked in enough of them to make that kind of a blanket statement.

Why don’t I worry about the recession? Why was I annoyed when our CEO made us have a company meeting because he was disturbed by WAMU going under? Why am I not worried about losing my nice things? Their value is likely tied to their usefulness. I’ve been thinking today about how people fill their time, and what a shame it is that it seems most people do it poorly. Entertainment is a nice escape, but it’s not very interesting. I have many trade skills, but if the world was coming to an end I’m sure there’d be plenty of competition for such work. My value really is in my mind; my thoughts and interests.

I was chatting with Adam about the next weather balloon project at HBL, and how I felt projects there were likely a good fit for my broad skill set, yet haven’t engaged the social structure there enough to get involved. This morning I was listening to 3ric’s talk on RFID, I was thinking about the technology being interesting but I’m caught up in configuration management and bicycles and all these other projects there’s so little time kicking around to start something else. I got to thinking about the cliche that it’s all been done before. Electricity has been invented, we got there and moved along. It’s tempting to believe that all the progress left to achieve requires too much up front, such as eight years of college. That’s definitely not the case though.

I remember around high school I was working for a computer repair shop and one of the sons of the family that owned it who was in college expressed regret that so much time had been spent in high school partying and not learning anything. Of course it’s not one or the other, but what makes so many people not eventually get up in the morning, stir crazy, and want to figure something out? Societal programmed fear of failure? I make no claims of grasping human psychology. I can’t imagine living without feeding my need to learn and solve problems. I suppose if your life is filled with entertainment as a distraction, you may not notice. It’s likely something different in each of us controlled by how our brains are wired. I’ve always been trying to figure out how different technologies work. Insert stories about taking bits apart when I was far too young to know what I was doing.

I just finished reading about the history of the shipping container. The interesting parts of that story is the container’s role in globalization. There was a hard change realized by the workers in the ports of America where men had worked as longshoreman for generations and enjoyed union control of their environment. In short form, automation replaced them. There likely wasn’t any way that the majority of these people could stay in the shipping industry, so it’s change the did their best to prevent from happening. It did all the same, and the ability to move “intermediate” goods has changed the way the world develops it’s products. It isn’t simply a matter of putting factories where the cheapest labor is. Interestingly, there’s a particular lack of manufacturing in Africa, do in the part to the lack of major container ports there.

My father’s family comes from northern Maine, known as “the county” due most of northern Maine being in Aroostock county. It’s still mostly wilderness up there. Baxter State Park, which includes Mount Katahdin which is the northern terminus of the Appalachian trail, comes rules in trust ensuring the roads are not paved or improved and the basic remoteness is preserved. But there was still change as the park changed the way the people who lived there used the land. The interstate was build, improving access to the area but simultaneously taking away the sense of community that developed from not easily being able to get anywhere else for what you needed. Walmart did not need to move into town to close many local stores, there just had to be one an hour away. NAFTA allowed not just manufacturing jobs to move south, but timber jobs to move north into Canada as well. This change upsets my romanticism of the area. I realized recently that these changes may not make me happy but they’ve happened for a reason. Being upset clouds the situation. Even if the change happened because heads of corporations simply wanted to make more money by paying people less, global wages will eventually stabilize. The concept of countries and national pride is outdated anyhow.

Change has been promised and everyone is excited about it. If it really amounts to change though, I think a lot less people are going to be happy about it than think they are. It’s not the right, or the republicans, or the conservatives that are going to be upset and others okay with it either. Some change will be, like we’ve seen with the planned closure of detention center at Guantanamo bay. Real change isn’t easy, and I’m not talking about just making it happen but also with living with how different it can make our lives.

I’m trying to delineate different jobs in my head under skilled labor and professionals. I feel like the majority of America’s work force has no skills that make them not easily replaceable. Jobs that don’t need to be here will continue to leave. Fighting the naturalization of “cheap labor” as Americans is an absurd fight against the inevitable. I wonder how much of that fight is against having to allow your self image of importance being destroyed because people you think are lesser than you can so easily do what you do.

Racism is still so prevalent. I find some irony in this. I used to know a social group that was very strongly against anything that resembled racism but held little concern for other forms of judgement like sexism. I feel like I grew up in a time and place where it was cool to not be racist, but very few actually understood why. Thus weren’t even necessarily free from being prejudicial, just particularly aware about not sounding racist.

My mother worked for Downeast Sexual Assault for a while and would occasionally help college students associated with the program by providing kids for focus groups. This usually amounted to getting me to rally some friends, and them to rally more. I had a couple friends that were accepted by ‘in’ crowds, and sometimes these ‘in’ people would find their way into our focus groups. I remember one girl when asked about how openly safe sex was discussed in our school she said it was very high and that everyone talked about it. I confronted her on this point, since I was in her class and I was absolutely sure no student had ever talked about a condom around me, outside of a faint memory of some kind of public service announcement style even in the auditorium. The point I’m making is that our judgements are so very easily shaped by what we want to believe.

One benefit of growing up as an outsider with no self esteem is that I’m less vulnerable to these cases but I’m very reluctant to think that I have it all figured out. My parents and how I was raised help that too, as well as believing in dinosaurs and all that science crap. It’s neat though that being a vulnerable person also helps protect your humanity.

The conclusion is that America needs more education. We need more innovation and creativity, these jobs are hard to move elsewhere because this work force does not come easily and without investment. It’s just America though, you can sell it that way to make people happy, but the reality is that the entire world needs more education. Stubborn people will always be stubborn people, but ideally we can help shave off the percentage of them that do stupid things. Progress will come in all the ways that we can’t see coming. Our country, our industries, they need not to prepare for this change, but we do. People are the common denominator.

I’ve been reading James Boyle’s ‘The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind” recently. I feel strongly about copyright, it’s definitely on my top five issues I care about. I’m reading the digital copy that was released by the author to the public online. My strong feelings make me want to buy a couple cases of the book in paperback and send them to every free thinking person I can think of. It’s interesting that I could send them a link, or a copy of the pdf, but I’m tempted to send them a physical book. Initally when I downloaded the book I figured if I ever got to reading I would buy a copy, even if I finished it, assuming I enjoyed it. I still prefer reading a book and not worrying about batteries, or damage to my laptop, theft, weight, etc.

It is interesting to compare the loss of the longshoreman unions to the successes of groups like the RIAA. It’s death seems inevitable for the same reasons, we really don’t need that middleman as much anymore. Yet money and lawyers seem to succeed where stubborn men with a rough image had failed. Nevertheless, Boyle’s book is obviously the forerunner of a book of the future covering the history of our futile attempts to prevent change from happening and disturbing the status quo that we’re comfortable with and understand.