One may find it easier to give in to the doomy gloomy reports coming in from all corners. These were tumultuous times.
However when one thinks back, those corners have always been there. One's personal vantage point changes, but against something a lot more fixed and remote, or so it seems.
Halloween has come around again, with more of the usual bellyaching about how it might all be some Satanist plot and so on. If you study folk religions, going back, you find some people are always up in arms about something or other. What is life without melodrama?
I'm looking back over work around the Trucker Exchange Program, variously named. I'd be foolish to back away from the Peace Corp influence, given my long history with Thirsters here in Portland, and as part of a family that might invite you to dinner, give you a place to stay, if you were a volunteer overseas. So were we (overseas voluntarily).
I'll be accused of trying to "gentrify" the job of trucker, now that tables might have turned, and coders are looking to learn a new lifestyle. They used to tell truckers to "learn to code" which came across as obnoxious and annoying. Part of the conceit was the coders were actively working to put truck drivers out of a job, because "driverless" would be just around the corner.
Some types of convoy service, like a truck-to-train hybrid, might be in the near future, but the fantasies they've been projecting lately have felt like recycled 1920s stuff. You'll have those conversational robots tomorrow, as you prepare by becoming more like robots today (the better to converse with them, right?).
Probably this was one of those dialectical things, where apparent thesis (the profession of trucking) and its antithesis (no drivers needed) were on a collision course to higher synergy.
The job of "truck pilot" (and "crew") was about to get more data centric and feature more programming. The coder-driver would take on multiple languages (human and computer) in the context of a work-study scenario in the Global U. Truckers are the new citizen diplomats, with truck stops (campus facilities) our new venues for mutual understanding and diplomacy. Don't leave it to the cube farmers and think tankers.
On the Synergetics front, I think we have a pretty good flow among the various websites, should browsers get into the groove, which is not saying they will.
Let's just say some already have.
We're not aiming to be too insistent or "in your face" as they say.
I won't say "subliminal" so much as "peripheral" in the Amber Case way of talking. We're here when you need us.
