Online reflection 3: Wolf of the Plains

Wolf of the Plains is the first book in Conn Igguldens Conqueror series. The book is about a young boy named Temudjin that gets abandoned by his tribe on the harsh Mongolian plains. He hunted by his fathers old tribe and all alone and the thing he is dreaming about is revenge against his enemies. In time he would unite all the Mongolian tribes and be known as Genghis Khan.

First of all if you haven´t read this series I highly recommend it, I can also recommend you to read Conn Igguldens Emperor series which is about Julius Caesar.

 After reading Wolf of the Plains I started thinking about how much the world has evolved in different ways.

The first thing that came to mind was the technological evolution inside the military. To conquer the biggest empire the world have ever known Genghis mostly used bow and arrow. To communicate with his generals he used messengers on fast horses or sound signals. In today's world we use machine guns and we have a constant radio-contact with all the platoons. Well I know that today we have peace treaties and nuclear bombs it´s a bit harder to conquer so much land like Genghis did, but nevertheless, with the resources he had we should not take away his accomplishments.

The second thing  that came to mind was that everyone had their chores and no one complaint (well no one complained in the book). The children was trained in a trained to a occupation from a young age so they could take the occupation when their master died. Well heir there is a big difference between then and today. Today you can choose be whatever you want to be as long as you have the grades for it. Everyone or most of the people today complain about their chores and wishes they can do something else instead.

The biggest question I got is how great conquerors and/or emperors such as: Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun would do with today's military technology? And which one of them would win the world in a war between all of them?

Reflection of Andrew McAfee´s talk "Are the droids taking our jobs?"

The things Andrew McAfee is talking about are very interesting.

As I wrote in my reflection over the articel "The year of the paywall" we live in a  technological world that is constantly evolving. McAfee confirmes that thesis and he also says that we have gone from involving people to only use droids.

Something else I thought was interesting was the gap between jobs and working age population which was very big and according to McAfee the gap is only just bigger and bigger. This is the part that scares me a little because what are all humans going to do with their lifes if technology takes over all the jobs? We can´t just sit at home and do nothing and how are going to earn money? I don´t think like McAfee that this i going to reduce poverty but I belive this is going to make the world a harsher place. Sure some jobs are maybe better of being controlled by droids such as truckdriving and cabdriving then there are going to be fewer casualties in traffic but overall I belive droids only going to create more problems instead of taking care of the problems.

Reflection on the article "The year of the paywall"

This was a very interesting article to read and it brought up things that just made it clearer in which direction our society is heading towards.

That advertisers flocks around the cheaper alternatives are not so chocking but the amount of payment newspaper have lost was a big suprise. It´s about time the newspaper starts to evolve with the rest of world.
I think with a raise of 5% in circulation revenue and a 10% decrease of newspapers shows that the newspapermarket is starting to adapt towards the new conditions with paywalls and hopefully in the end acclimatized enough to get through these harsh times.

So to conclude it all: We live in a technological and Internet based world where everything constantly evolving and cost money. Probably in a not to distant future we have seen the end of one era of newspaper and the start of a new one.

Byebye good oldfashion newspaper!