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I do genealogy and other related things, and I was trying to straighten up and organize all my genealogy ephemera, photos and the like. I also came across old CD's or DVD's which are marked, but not detailed, so I really have no idea what is actually stored on them and if they made the way to the hard drive on this computer, or a portable hard drive. They could also be copies of something from the hard drive. Hence, my desire for the DVD reader. My wife got me the DVD device for Christmas, but had checked with our oldest son who works for Best Buy Corporate, mainly leading television sales, but being a millennial, he knows exactly what to recommend. Anyway, to help out one of the Best Buy retail stores, and as a team building exercise my son and his team worked at a retail store for one day. This makes a lot of sense to me, kind of like an architect should know how to use a hammer. When I opened the gift and thanked my wife who gave me the gift. Our son noted that when he worked at the store, during Christmas shopping period, he had about twelve men, yes all men, in my demographic (generally 65 to 75 or so) desiring the same product. Not only that, they generally wanted it for the same reasons--genealogy research and/or review stored photographs.
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The move from DVD/CD to thumb drives is all part of creative destruction, technological changes that make older items or ideas out dated. I suppose there are generation Z (1997-2012) and Alpha (said to be 2010 or 2013 to 2024, years vary depending on whom you ask). Alpha makes no sense, since it is only a 11 year time span. Has cultural change occurred that quickly, or some marketing person decided what to do? Anyway I am sure some members of these generation groups have no idea what a CD or DVD is. Maybe I will need to ask my neighbor kid who was born in 2011. Blockbuster store went out of business over ten years ago, in 2014. 2010 is the year the I-Pad was launched. It is also hard to find a person that uses a desktop computer anymore. I recall, the early days of computers being in offices, and there was a limit on file names to eight characters. That is because they could take up too much space on the hard drive, which required the use of floppy discs. Back then hard drive capacity was measured in kilobytes, now we have megabytes. Of course, prevalent today is "cloud" storage which causes massive server facilities which require cooling 24/7/365 and not only devour significant amounts of electricity, but also water used for cooling. Our interconnected world, through the internet, is amazing, but has lead to hacking. Even the US Treasury Dept servers were hacked by the Chinese. It wonders how much they have hacked and people do not know.
This all comes at a funny time. For example, many of us our concerned about climate change, and there is a strong desire for a decrease in carbon footprints, and conserve water, yet these large server facilities are massive users of valued resources. When you have an outage of Wi-Fi, or internet provider, one is out of luck today on getting anything done at work or otherwise. Connectivity and convenience come at a cost. The thing is we are an out of sight out of mind society. There is (was) a clamor for electric cars, with disregard for the huge cost of mining the rare earth minerals, and Lithium and other elements, necessary to build the electronics and the batteries. Many of the mines are located in South America or Africa with little concern for the environment or, worse, for the human toll of child labor working in the mines.
Baby boomers have significantly defined the nation, simply by the sheer mass of its generation. Some figures point to 1957, the year of my birth, as the largest population birth in the nation at 4,308,000 with births per 1,000 population being 25.3. By contrast, the largest Millennial cohort was born in 1990 at 4,179,000 but with a birth rate of 16.7. Baby boomers, and later generations have continued to spread out births as women continue to give birth later in life. Further, the national birth rate is at an all time low. Low birth rates will have an effect on the economy. In fact, due to a variety of factors, college enrollment has been on a steady, but gradual decline since 2010. Graduate school enrollment has increased slightly. Some of the two year college campuses in Wisconsin have closed, others are trying to reinvent themselves, and still others not sure of what to do.
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| Population Pyramids in 2000, 2010 and 2020 for the US US Census Bureau |
Demographic change is part of reality. It is estimated that the state of Wisconsin will lose over 200,000 persons over the next 25 years. Dane County is expected to see a significant increase in population. This will pose significant issues of housing, and services in much of the state, but rampant growth, and the other side of a coin for housing and services in Dane County. Housing will become a distribution issue too many in rural areas of the state, and too little in a few urban areas. It will pose issues for school districts and state funding. Social security was based on retention of a population pyramid, which is starting to invert, leading to catastrophe for that important government program that many seem to simply ignore.
Demographics are important. Social and economic trends were moved by the Baby Boomers. Today, those same boomers seem to be driving sales of portable CD/DVD players so as to view what was on a common method of storage for computers. That DVD drive desired by a dozen of my demographic at a Best Buy store in the Minneapolis area, is a sign of larger societal trends, in technological and demographic change. I am not the only old guy, that demographic, that needed a device to view our old stored photos or genealogical materials.
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