Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index

What kind of education and job skills should you recommend to young people today (assuming career/economic success is the goal. Yes, the world needs philosophers and musicians but sadly that is not a path to material success for many)? I figure biotech, materials science, robotics and computer science (deep theoretical understanding and/or engineering, not just code writing). Again, if material/economic success is the goal, I think you need knowledge and skills that are attractive to the private sector. (My own are mostly of interest to the public sector. I don’t regret my choices but this does put a ceiling on the potential size of my bank account.) There should be plenty of jobs in education and health care services, but not necessarily well paying ones at least in the U.S. I think there will always be plumbers and electricians.

Okay, now let’s see if I’m right. Here is the Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index. There are way too many jobs to list here, but their categories are:

  • algorithms, automation, and AI (okay, this is the computer science route, although someone could also try the math/statistics or even actuarial science path)
  • customer experience (this appears to cover what might be traditionally known as sales and marketing)
  • environmental (includes energy-related fields and environmental engineering – well, what do you know, maybe my choices aren’t so bad after all…)
  • fitness and wellness (home health care, physical therapy, etc. – things an aging population will need and hard to automate at least in the near term)
  • health care (includes the obvious, but also data science, genetic related, and medical device engineering related jobs)
  • legal and financial services (yes, lawyers will still be a necessary evil)
  • transportation (more on the engineering and planning side, not so much taxi and truck drivers…)
  • work culture (your human resources department will also continue to be a necessary evil)

So, I think a kid could do worse than a degree in chemical, mechanical or electrical engineering, then specialize from there. (Civil/environmental is nice…but again…the public sector thing). If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, go for it. The world will still need artists, philosophers, and in general people who can think, understand systems and solve problems, but it is still unclear when we will start valuing these things.

porous paving for all new commercial parking lots in New Orleans

The headline pretty much says it – New Orleans is requiring porous pavement for all new commercial parking lots. This is a pretty old technology that U.S. construction companies are still not very familiar with, so they think it is new, expensive, difficult, and unproven. Well, it is expensive and difficult when done only on a very small scale, so requiring it across the board will solve that problem. And it is proven to work when installed by contractors and construction managers that know what they are doing, and proven not to work when they don’t. So requiring it across the board will solve that too. Notice there is nothing here about requiring it on streets or highways. Well, one step at a time.

#unblockbikelanes

Just following up on yesterday’s “paint and pray” post about ignorant, unsafe street designs killing people in New York City and Philadelphia. There is a Twitter hashtag called #unblockbikelanes. Maybe the Philadelphia Police and Philadelphia Parking Authority look at it on occasion. Maybe they don’t. Maybe the engineers at the Philadelphia Streets Department will be inspired to learn about safe street design. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it’s indisputable photographic evidence that may eventually have a variety of uses.

https://twitter.com/printtemps/status/702941757009326080

Resources for safe street design:

“paint and pray”

This article makes a case against Bill de Blasio in New York City talking a good game on climate change while refusing to make safe bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure happen. I could ask exactly the same thing of my mayor, Jim Kenney in Philadelphia.

Bike lanes have expanded in de Blasio’s time but at a shameful pace and in a frankly dangerous way. Most new lanes are not protected. Instead of a firm barrier that moving cars are unable to cross, all that separates bike riders from their deaths is a painted line or a plastic stick every 20 or 30 yards. This has been referred to as a “paint and pray” policy: painting bike lanes and praying nobody will get hurt. It might be sufficient if several other things existed that do not. They include the following:

Drivers respecting the lines and not driving into bike lanes.

Delivery trucks and other vehicles not parking in bike lanes.

Drivers not opening their doors in front of bikers.

Police enforcing these rules.

These things do not prevail, which is the main reason bikers and pedestrians are being killed and injured by the tens of thousands every year. On my daily commute, it’s not unusual to encounter several delivery trucks, Ubers, or other vehicles parked in unprotected bike lanes on a single block, requiring me to merge into moving car traffic. Often the vehicles, rather than being stationary in the lane, are moving into it.

This could describe my bike commute in Philadelphia. And I am a (relatively) young, able bodied person. Biking should be the mode of choice for families with small children and healthy older people, and we are not even close to that being a safe option.

revisiting the trophic theory of money

One of my most popular posts ever is a brief musing about the “trophic theory of money” I wrote back in 2014. Brian Czech, who developed or at least clarified and named the theory, has a new journal article about it here. He writes pretty well for a lay audience so I would encourage people to read the paper rather than rely on me to summarize, but nonetheless here are a few key points in my own words so people can start yelling at me:

  • Before humanity figured out how to produce an agricultural surplus, everybody was trying to scratch a living out of the dirt and there was no need for money to be invented. Once the agricultural surplus became significant, many people were freed up to do other things and this led to money. So money is essentially measuring the amount of activity happening outside of agriculture, and indirectly measuring the amount of agricultural surplus that allows this to happen.
  • Towards the end of the paper, Mr. Czech acknowledges that improvements in technology over time (usually driven by intentional investment in research and development) have been able to reduce environmental impact per unit of economic activity, even though total environmental impact has continued to grow. However, he believes this process has nearly reached its limit and will not continue much longer.
  • It is possible the economy could transition to a steady state where GDP (adjusted for inflation) is no longer growing. It is also possible our environmental impact will overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity enough and for long enough that a sharp contraction in GDP (and necessarily, the amount of agricultural surplus) will occur.

Where do I stand on this? I take the laws of thermodynamics, and the fact that humanity is a species existing within and not apart from nature, as a given. I think there is a lot of knowledge out there yet to be discovered, and if our society took the right steps we might be able to keep growing in a sustainable way for some time. I don’t think there is any evidence that our sociopolitical system even understands the problem let alone is likely to take those steps. I don’t think action on the necessary scale will take place unless and until we reach a crisis stage. About the most positive I can be is to hope for a relatively minor crisis rather than a civilization ending one.

there are crazy people with guns on airplanes right now

They’re called air marshalls and they are put there by TSA. This article says being an air marshall might be the hardest, most stressful job ever devised. Everyone knows flying is stressful. It’s almost like a form of solitary confinement. Electronic diversions and moderate use of alcohol and over-the-counter substances can help. Air marshalls are not allowed to do any of these things. They just have to sit there. They have high rates of suicide compared to other law enforcement and military jobs, and they also die of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

So I feel bad for the air marshalls after reading this. I also wonder if having a stressed person with a gun on the plane makes me safer statistically than not having one. I feel the same way about armed teachers. There is just a certain rate of mental illness and substance abuse prevalent in the human species, and having more guns around means that more people will have access to deadly weapons at times when they are not thinking and acting clearly. You have to compare that to the very rare (but horrifying) rate of homicidal maniacs walking into schools and shooting. And teachers are not trained in use of deadly weapons or screened for mental health to the extent that law enforcement officers are, at least to my knowledge.

special operations culture

This article by a Marine special operator says special operations have a culture problem. That doesn’t surprise me too much. Anyway, here is the prescription the author gives for addressing an organization’s culture problem:

  • Acknowledge the problem. It’s hard to spot a slow change from within an organization. One solution is to have a peer organization do a review.
  • Employ trusted agents. These are sort of the blue collar leaders.
  • Harness and rein in the cultural power brokers. These are more like the middle management.
  • Win the population. This is an idea for counter-insurgency where you try to peel the bulk of the population away from a few bad actors within their ranks.

The article mentions “core values”. My own observation about core values is that strong, well-functioning organizations tend to already have them implicitly, and when you have to make a big deal about training people in them explicitly your culture is already lost. I’m not sure you can change individuals’ core values all that much. You can try to weed out people with bad ones and bring in people with good ones.