site maintenance: This is going to take a while. Excuse the mess while we update the website.
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Moving towards a new economy of independent workers, distributed teams, and heavy automation following a rough recession of low incomes for everybody requires a reminder of short term plans and an overview of where things where when the recession started. Most people were in the 2016/2018 time period when they hit the pause button on economic activity to wait for the data on revolutionary work requirements called w2 employment. While W2 employment is fairly stable, it has its limits on income, is mostly winding down, and often discouraged for those under 50. Most people don't want to work long term after reaching the ages of 35 to 50.
For independent workers, traditionally 1099, freelancer, contractor, sub-contractor or B2B DBA, S-Corp, or LLC, the work pace is different, the budgeting is different, there is much more time management, and accounting is part of day to day work tasks. Most workers in this group have portfolios, contacts, and ongoing worklists that can be paused and resumed for several months, pending savings is available. The number of workers in this category is over 60 million in the US alone and many work on globally distributed teams even though, local or regional teams are encouraged to be prioritized first.
Before the recession, the goals were epoch time software errors or omission, and this was scheduled to be fixed by 2032. Canonical links were a priority, this is likely similar to doi.org urls. Social media and search engines would prioritize content published within the past 5 years, most of this is done, and older content still ranks well if there are no new subject or topic updates. That is considered a room for improvement. Suggestions were 5 years fresh, 10 years recent, 10+ archives with content being archivable immediately but recommended and suggested at 10+.
A more professional approach to immediate archives is publish for 1-2 years, then archive. Its also recommended to redirect for 1 year, or 12 months before deregistering a domain, setting it to no response, or setting a not active page. The website does not need to be installed for the redirects to work properly.
Cloud services didn't work well for most people. It requires as much IT inolvement as locally installed services. It has the same or more data breach concerns. Many people decided hosted services with better legal procedures is a good step for now. Cloud services will work well for large corporations with established cloud budgets. Social media will also begin to charge for service and provide more limited free services. The price point is $2 to $12 dollars to start.
Open source was a disaster, major OS components and kernels now require the open source team to carry liability insurance and appear at human safety hearings. There are other hearings they may have to appear at as well, to explain what their software did, why it did it, and how it can be fixed.
Many IT workers went into regular business administration or just any other job before and during the recession; like tour guide, retail manager, accounting, attorney, or HR. Almost any job that had a computing device available qualified them for employment.
Hardware designers now work off their own patents and hardware modeling software or developer platforms are easy to get and affordable. For example, the compact computers and logic boards. These are mostly for hobbyists, most people don't want to sell their designs to the public, there is not much interest and there is a lot of liability.
My websites will be updated soon. My .com domain used to have an IT portfolio, it is offline, and might stay offline long term. The .IT domain will have a technology focus, but with concepts from legal, HR, human services, and psychology. It will contain some code excerpts and configurations but lots of links to standards bodies who are liable for those areas.
These updates have a goal, to be completed by December 31st and to be published and available online by 1/15/2026.