Arnel November 1, 2012, 01:58:20

Me? No, I’m a Florida suburb kid. It’s the pepole finding themselves having to support something they find horribly distasteful because that’s the only job path they know.And I have nothing really against tobacco farmers, just tobacco. And it’s a dislike that firmly marches across the border to irrational for personal reasons But if there’s to be a general reduction in smoking, there needs to be a reduction in tobacco purchasing, which in turn needs something to replace the income from farming it.This is part of other conversations with pepole physically, as well. The cloud for computing is a way to send machines off to places with less-skilled technical labor, perhaps the Appalachians (e.g. Goog’s place in Lenoir NC) In my field (high-performance computing), clouds are currently less than useful, and there’s quite a bit of debate about their future. I’m trying to convince pepole there are non-technical reasons why they’re interesting and should have a future.But for server farming (no, seriously, that’s one term) to be more than just another collection of jobs that can flow away as easily, the cloud platforms need to give the opportunities for the labor to learn and grow. That’s not my immediate area, but with the push to make clouds more useful for us, perhaps we can encourage the use of more open systems that permit pepole to learn. And then hopefully the skill set is a bit more secure than, say, apparel. That used to be big in the tri-cities area (SW VA, NE Tenn), but all those jobs floated across the seas.I’m just one person without a whole lot of leverage at the moment, so perhaps this is all just babbling. If I babble at the right pepole, though I don’t even know where to start about the electricity aspect. There are so many inefficiencies even in the current generation and transmission system sigh.