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People are starting to make a difference by shaping local policy.

One of the things I've noticed, and found quite interesting, is how people have become a lot more proactive not just holding each other about their actions; but also their local government and other representatives about their handling of the pandemic. Not only that, in some cases they were at the front of not only proposing what actions to take, but of actually taking them before an official came out to enact such actions. People are becoming not only more socially conscious about the needs of their local neighborhoods, they are actively shaping policy and how it is enacted.   People finally become active participant not only sharing important information among themselves, but actually having a hand in shaping how governments respond. It is becoming quite hard for governments to hide what they respond, and how they do it. Finally it seems that more people are becoming conscious that they can wield the power to shape the response of local governments. And this is a ver...

Home office might finally become more widespread.

One of the things that it seems could change significantly after the pandemic, is the way we work and collaborate with each other. With employers asking a higher percentage of their workforce to work from home, and the amount of time that people will have to fulfill their jobs this way, it quite likely that a significant percentage of the workforce might just keep working this way. This could be beneficial not only for employers, and the employees, that fall in this arrangement. This could mean less people having to move on daily basis to their workplaces, alleviating some of the congestion we have on our cities, but also it could mean that by staying home they could spend a larger percentage of their income on local businesses of their neighborhoods. Not only that, quality of life could greatly increase by not having to commute and sharing more time with their families, or friends. Not only employees could save money, and increase their quality of life. Employers could see th...

No country is fully standing on its own.

One of the things that the outbreak  of COVID-19 has demonstrated, is how interconnected the world has become. It highlights how much people move around, not only for tourism but also for business. Very few things are completely manufactured in one country, or any country produces all the products that move their market places. Economies are interconnected in various degrees, directly or indirectly. There is no country that is fully insoleted from what happens on other countries, it has become a question on how much it will impact them. For better, or for worse, we have built a world where we share a common fate. This is why we need to start demanding governments to start working together in such a way that allows people to work together in a more effective way. Closing borders is no longer a viable option to make the best possible future come for us. Such integration is not out of the hands of the those who want to stop it, now we have to work to make beneficial to a...

New brave world, we can choose if it will be for good or bad.

For me, one of the thing that is more underused, and underrated, about smartphones, is how easy they make for us to access any information(and content) at any time, anywhere we are at the moment. Not only we can access it, but we have the opportunity to be active contributors to the pool of knowledge not just passive consumers of it. This fact marks a flexing point in human history, when the traditional gatekeepers of what went into that pool, and who could access it, are losing its power. Now, that role has been spread into more hands, many of which would be even considered possible. Old barriers have been broken, new ones come and go as we are still learning how to use this new power. Now, we need to learn the tools needed not only to find the information we want, or learn new skills. There is a need to learn how to filter trough until we get to the relevant information, and to process it in order to use it effectively. We are now directly responsible to find, and use, more ...

No silver bullet for complex problems.

The fact that there are no simple solutions to the problems we face, is something that most people don't seem to be able, or want, to coupe with. So much so, that people seem more than willing to over simplify things just in order to feel comfortable with the world around them. Add to that, it seems hard to make sense of things with all the information we are constantly bombarded with continuously it make harder to make sense of things. It hard to filter what's information is relevant to solve any given problem, not to mention that its even harder to determine what is true. Without the tools of critical thinking, is hard to recognize what information is actually relevant to solve any given problem. To make things worse, not everyone receives the education needed to have the tools needed for critical thinking, much less how to use them. This complicate things, because it makes it hard to communicate that the solutions we need are complex in order to actually solve thing...

Change has become a tool in the hands of the people.

It's interesting, and somewhat irritating, that every time changes come our way people tend to forget that things haven't been a certain way. Specially in the last hundred years, we have seen changes come with unprecedented speed and scope. For the looks of it, things will continue to keep constantly changing in the short and medium terms. Only the speed of these changes might change depending on the area we are talking about, but things will be changing we like it or not. We'll have to adapt, and solutions found to the new issues that those changes bring. At the end of the day, people will have to learn to adapt to change and make the best out of it. For the look of it, the new generations are learning not only to cope with change, but actually be a part of it or be who makes change happen. More and more people are not willing to see change, but to change things by themselves. Change is becoming a tool, and not a problem. People are learning to see change as s...

Ignorance is not bliss, but the tool that keeps us subjugated.

One of the biggest ironies of having the tool that enable people to actually look into things to learn about them, or find all the information you need to understand whatever you want, is that most willingly don't do it. There are people who are even proud of not doing even basic research to have some level of understanding about any of the subjects that affect them. In some ways, ignorance is now somewhat of an option. With the advent of the Internet, and smartphones that give us access to it from mostly everywhere we are, is hard to make a point that people don't have access to information they need to learn about anything. Not only that, now there are many ways to access courses that allow people to learn almost any skill they choose, or have an interest in. Not knowing something is not an excuse any more not to go, and learn something about it. Whats more, now more than ever before we have access to news from many different point of views. Which means that maki...