Learning time

Well, I'm beginning to learn a few things about myself, including the fact that I can actually live without contact with so-called 'civilization' for days on end.  And enjoy it!

But I did have the opportunity to take a break from my retreat, so I'm spending a day in a large city in the midwest in a hotel room catching up with the world and researching answers to some of the questions I have asked myself the last week.

There are times when it is tempting to be a neo-luddite, and technology can be perverted by the dark side, but technology in and of itself is neither good nor evil, technology is amoral.  The people who use the technology have to supply the morals, have to take responsibility for their own actions and use of the technology.

20-some years ago when we looked for a place to live and landed in Itasca County, we made phone calls and sent letters to chambers of commerces and got phone directories and other info from the places we were interested in.  And this process all took time.  Now, with just the click of the mouse button and a few characters typed on the keypad I can google a city, check its vital stats including employment and crime trends and cross the location off my list or add it to a list for further research.

When I switched careers last from mechanic to computer tech, the Internet had just been born and was mostly a sea of BBS's.  Alta Vista was trying to index the web.  But a lot of data was not available online, or even if it was no-one knew where to find it.  Trying to track down employment trends and skills trends took days of work and help from the people at the Job Search office who had access to their special databases that the public couldn't access.

Now anyone with a few moments of internet access can readily see that the Dept of Labor is predicting that the job outlook for Medical Transcriptionists is going to grow at a rapidly accelerating pace because the aging of America will require more people to visit Dr offices requiring more dictation to be transcribed.  Personally, I think that the DOL has water on the brain, but the fact is, ANYONE can look it up in a matter of moments.

So, time to get busy looking for the answers to those questions.  Things like
Where shall I live, and how shall I pay the bills when I get there?  And who am I?  And how can I prove that I am a US citizen?  Just simple things like that.