September 22, 2015

By: Kelly Diamond, Publisher

Tides are shifting, priorities are reconfiguring, values are changing, and the elites in power are woefully behind the times.

Bobby published an article a while back “Go Paperless as a Digital Nomad” discussing how the landscape has changed since the days of his father. Suits, ties, cubicles, and paper ledgers are going the way of the dinosaur. Now in many cases there are digital means of accomplishing the same tasks digitally from a laptop anywhere in the world!

People’s priorities are changing, too. They seem more interested in education and healthcare than being “tough on crime”.

Four Year Degrees

We are still fed the same bromides about how a college degree is essential for success… and yet while people without college degrees are working their way up in a trade, college graduates are saddled with debt and working various food service and retail jobs just to service their loans.

It turns out, and as Ernst & Young discovered, there is no evidence that a person who’s attended or graduated university will be a successful employee. Ya don’t say!? That’s right, there are plenty of capable and talented young folks without a degree in something totally unrelated that might just have something to bring to the table!

There was a show called “Lie to Me” with Tim Roth on a while back. He winds up recruiting a TSA employee to his company because while she had no formal background or training, she had an unrefined gut instinct about people. Tim Roth played an academic who studied how to read people and know when they are lying, but this young recruit had no such knowledge under her belt, and yet she was able to read people with almost as much ease as the man who dedicated his life to the study.   She was a natural, as he called it.

Without a doubt there are natural talents out there… more than we give credit to, I believe… who just need the right mentorship to take off into success. It’s not about formal book training in a classroom. It’s about hands on training in the field. What is often referred to as Praxis.

The days of standardized tests and checking a box if you have a degree are going away. Now employers are leaning more on the online evaluations, personality quizzes, natural talents, and ethic to find their rising stars. It’s not to say they are totally dismissing the academic backgrounds of their applicants, but a degree isn’t requisite anymore to get in the door.

Many industries already practice this: the whole work your way up to the corner office from the mailroom thing. But that larger big-name companies are taking that same path is promising. Promising for future applicants, not so promising for the politicians who build their policies around kids and employers feverishly demanding college degrees.

Some degrees have their place and utility. But many are nothing more than a hobby. Linguistics? Really? It might’ve served me well if I wanted to go on to further schooling to become a speech therapist, translator, or cryptologist. But by the time I finished college I was 20 years old and burnt out on school. Instead I got into advertising where my degree patiently sits on a shelf waiting to be applied in some way. I don’t even write copy! I arbitrage media time! Had I KNOWN what I wanted in life, perhaps I wouldn’t have procrastinated getting to the business of living by going to college.   Hind sight and all that, right?

Taking Down Nations

Oh yes, even this time honored tradition of human history is changing. Jungle and desert wars were a lesson in common warfare. We were not prepared for either. The days of uniformed standoffs are long gone. Wars are still being waged with weapons, but nations are being toppled by information… or the panic from misinformation anyway.

When I was living in Japan, there was a cult called Ohm that was planting sarin bombs in train station bathrooms. The amount of sarin used was enough to kill a couple grown men. The panic, killed and injured far more. At one point it was assumed that eventually the leader, Asakura, would plant larger explosives, but why would he when the panic alone was more efficient in carrying out his destructive plans?

So while we are told that China and the Middle East pose some immediate physical threat to the United States, it really doesn’t make much sense that they would. The mere thought of an invasion was enough to send the United States into a multi-trillion dollar war on terror. Iran and China can literally sit back and wait until we ride our Mach One straight off the fiscal cliff while never loading a single gun!

Even that $1 Billion global bank heist proves the point that robberies don’t even have to happen at the point of a gun anymore. Simply manipulating digital protocols resulted in the bank employees unwittingly facilitating that heist.

As I said, the elites are woefully behind the times. They are still trying to sell overpriced college degrees to the hoi polloi. They are still treating war like it has anything to do with weapons arsenals. They are still thinking that crimes can be prevented with more cops on the streets and more laws on the books. And they still think that raising taxes will make a country richer. These are their platforms. They are antiquated and have been proven ineffective a hundred times over.

Instead, what we will have is something similar to what happened to China’s equity market happen in our education sector: politicians will hype up and sell college degrees, many high school graduates will assume the burden of debt, and that bubble will ultimately pop.

We will continue to pour our resources into this “war on terror” fearfully anticipating the Chinese, Russians, or Muslims showing up at our shores… all the while toppling ourselves.

The government and banks will remain vulnerable to cyber thieves because they still expect people in masks with guns to do all the robbing.

And they will continue to raise taxes, all the while inducing capital flight and chasing the wealth out of the country.

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” –Mark Twain

The question remains, are they really this stupid? Or is this intentional?

Either way, waiting for the government to turn itself around is becoming more wishful thinking than probably reality. Are you protected from any of this? If you would like to be, please schedule a consultation by clicking HERE.