IT Insights Blog — Employment

I’m a firm believer that education is the ladder to a more bountiful and fulfilling life. People with little to no educational opportunities too often face lives of scarcity and struggle. Unfortunately, the cost of education continues to climb at an unprecedented rate. Consumer Report recently partnered with The Center for Investigative Reporting to conduct a survey on the student debt crisis. The 1,500 respondents painted a picture that isn’t pretty — student loan debt in the United States is almost $1.4 trillion, an amount that exceeds all credit card debt!

Paul Stanley, song writer and rhythm guitarist for the American rock band KISS, once said, “Credibility is someone else’s idea of what I should be doing.” It’s interesting that these words came from an artist who was a member of a band that prided itself on being different — really standing out from the crowd. I’m sure there were a number of “someone elses” who thought that KISS should be doing something different, and yet they were one of the most successful bands of their time, and are still one of the most recognizable rock bands to this day.

I enjoy the tomfoolery of Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series that used to be the liveliest thing in newsprint. His sense of humor is kind of warped, and I guess that says something about mine as well. One all-time favorite is Larson’s conception of a “dinosaur conference,” where a stegosaurus is at the lectern and he says, “The picture’s pretty bleak gentlemen.The world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.”

On Monday July 4, the United States of America celebrates its 240^th birthday. To the older nations of the world (yeah we’re looking at you, Japan), this may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but 240 years is still 240 years. Americans owe much of our prolonged national existence to the nation’s first-rate national security efforts. National security threats have arisen in many forms over America’s lifetime, but the latest looming danger presents itself online. National security is now heavily reliant on cybersecurity.

Tradition has been a driving force in human society for as long as mankind has been around. People, it seems, have a natural affinity for doing things over and over again. You could view it as a survival instinct: Certainly the organisms, people included, that tend to thrive on our Mother Earth are the ones that discover successful behaviors and repeat them. On the other hand, some behaviors don't appear to confer any survival advantage or evolutionary benefit at all, but we slavishly reenact them anyway, year after year. (Perhaps this explains how we got eight seasons of Castle, for example, even though only the first two or three were any good.)