Posts

Fair to middling, recovering from flu bugs and dreaming of the spring 

How about yourself?

I heard one the other day, someone was arguing against the case that car assembly jobs would disappear. Their argument was those jobs have by and large already long gone already due to automation from the 1980's onwards. 

The argument is the reverse is true, there will be a demand for more jobs because vehicle production will become more skilled as vehicles become more electronic and less mechanical. One of the skills in demand apparently will be cognitive engineers that will fine tune self driving cars. It will be an interesting future 

I think time is starting to become a more important and interesting topic, as our lifestyles and work become ever more flexible. Who said you need to work 9 - 5 to get your work done? We now live in a 24 hour society where youngsters are frustrated if their gadget takes longer than 24 hours to magically appear after ordering it.

So I love the idea of choosing the best time to be productive. Why sit there staring into space on a low battery, because convention dictates that you have to sit at your desk between set hours. The more you think about it, the dafter it sounds. Imagine a flexible work lifestyle which fits around your life and means your employer gets you at your maximum efficiency. Win win for everyone.

It's never going to work for all types of jobs, it would be nice to know the school teachers have turned up the same time as the kids, or the airline pilot sticks to an agreed schedule

But there are a multitude of jobs that could be infinitely more flexible than they are, and they reckon for the average school child, 25% of jobs haven't even been thought of or don't currently exist. Wouldn't it be great to start these new job types as completely flexible and optimised to be the most productive for employee and employer.

Problem is it does, and because they can blast this rubbish at high volume, only take a few people to fall for it to make it highly profitable

Greater online education is the only thing that will beat it IMHO. 

To be fair theses phishing emails are slowly getting better. Obviously after years of laughing at the poor English and typos, the scammers have wised up and are starting to use proofreaders 

Although being accused of "circumventing systems" sounds a bit painful!

As always be wary, treat everything as dubious and don't click any links unless 100% sure.

With time quickly running out, if you are a business owner, do you need to make any preparations as we sale into the unknown/abyss? The Government has set up a resource that tries to answer questions for your relevant sector.

euexitbusiness.campaign.gov.uk

May be useful, may be not depending on your type of business , but a few things may surprise you. More obvious ones are if you employ EU citizens, but less obvious are things like an International Driving license if you want to drive in Europe, car insurance, mobile phone roaming charges (ouch). Even online businesses could be affected, with possible geo-blocking of online content.

Obviously mountains of speculation as no-one knows for sure yet what will happen, but lots of food for thought! 

I duuno, Rebecca's right it is a rabbit hole, but I think I'm addicted   To be fair there is also loads of good stuff on there and it's great getting the perspective from say a Carrier Fighter pilot talking about his career or some of the hair raising moments  he had, or from scientists talking about issues you hadn't thought of.

Then there are the plain stupid people 

Welcome aboard Simon 

It's not just about spam, it can be more sinister as well.

The techie boring bit is they are actually keeping a record of your email and the hash of the encrypted password. Long story short, if you utilise the same combination on different sites, then you may be compromised. If your linked in email and password is the same one that you use to login to HMRC, Paypal or the bank, then change it now!

But even your linked in account could be at risk, social media is now widely used for identity fraud, plus your contacts can be scammed in your name etc etc. Private contacts details can then be targeted. (Cambridge Analytica?)

It's about accepting and mitigating risk versus being practical and realistic.

Your email and password are compromised along with 20 million other peoples, so one argument is that you would be very unlucky to be targeted personally. But these databases of addresses are being sold again and again and squirted into ever more sophisticated automated tools. 

The official fix is to have a different email and password combination for every single website and application you visit. The most unpractical and useless advice known to man (or woman ).

There are various digital vaults touted by different providers for storing passwords, but at the very least, move to complex passwords with no meaningful words or dates. Even if it's the same password across a few site  Then utilise 2 factor authentication or any extra level of security on offer.

Until every PC, monitor smartphone and device has an eyeball scanner, we are stuck in this wild west of amateur and easily exploited security 

I spend far too much time on Quora, mainly in amazement of how stupid people are across the world. I can't quite work out if it is some kind of systematic laziness sweeping the global youth, an inability to use reference material, use Google, or a complete breakdown on the world wide education system.

This question in particular brings out the best and worst in humanity. The best being the superb mastery of irony and humour that binds this dysfunctional UK nation together, the worst being an American trying to explain to a Brit that the Chunnel didn't exist in 1941, and that the claim that a squaddie put a sign up saying "out of order" on both tunnels to fool the Germans wasn't true

But the sheer volume of stupid questions do make me wonder if Quora is actually just a beta testing site for a fledgling Artificial Intelligence algorithm and we are all inadvertently suckers. Once AI masters sarcasm, we are all truly screwed!

If you have 10 minutes of boredom to fill, it's enlightening... Why didn't the Nazis use the channel tunnel to invade Britain?