Put your data in the cloud. But wait. Isn't that where the lightning is?

This was an extra ordinary event to be sure. The thing is, when you live in extraordinarily accelerating complexity, such events become something other than extra ordinary. No matter what you assume might be unlikely today may be something else tomorrow.

And trust me when I tell you that, as a programmer, one of the things that really fries your bacon is coding upon assumptions in future contingencies. And they are almost always the assumptions you are least aware of. Which can make even finding the source of the problem quite problematic.

Four Lightning Strikes in Belgium Erase Google Customer Data

The easy answer here is: Don't worry, the Republicans will find a way.

Of course the real question ought to be why would you even want to try, but being in touch with reality was never one of their strong points.

Rand Paul: 'How Do You Out-Trump the Irrational?'

Bankers refusing new sources of capital? Can we expect to be hearing from Rod Serling soon?

Submitted for your amazment. Not only might Trump be an actual candidate for president, bankers are truning away significant new capital flows. What's next? Will Ann Coulter suddenly announce she's gay and then marry Rosie O'Donnell?

Pot Risk vs. Profit: Bankers Cautious of Marijuana Dispensaries

Join the Trump Chump Brigade and you too can have certainty on a stick

Don't cloud your mind with confusing specifics. He certainly doesn't. And best of all, he still gets to make money at it. And you get to suck on a brand with confidence that he'll spend your money making that brand even more tasteless than ever before.

In N.H., Donald Trump Skips Policy Specifics, Focuses on Jeb Bush Attacks

See also:

Trump’s $1 Land Deal With a Corrupt Mayor

As well as:

Donald Trump is a bombastic disaster: A video guide to his 14 most ludicrous campaign moments

This is just one example of what happens to work when all that is valued is low cost efficiency

Behind the Alarming Expose on Amazon's Workplace CultureThe New York Times' expose on Amazon's labor practices has put the company on the defense. One former employee said colleagues cried at their desks.

See also:

We are all “Ambots” now: Jeff Bezos just perfected the “burn and churn” philosophy that’s sucking American workers dry

For all its revolutionary rhetoric, Amazon is just an outsize example of what plagues our entire approach to work

Dehumanizing nonsense as a garnish to our daily plate of bullshit

What this really misses, however, is not only the true value most of these people provide to our economy, but the constant input of perspective of what it means to be away from the turmoil they faced in their home land. Turmoil that, for the most part, our history of mucking about in the nations of their birth has caused. Tens of thousands of children at our borders because they have no parents, or home life, to grow up with. Older workers desperate to do anything so as to provide for families torn apart by poverty we're only beginning to viscerally understand, and by drug lords, or despots, our policies, and dependencies, have created.

That we are then treated to the spectacle of blowhards, and idiots, presenting these people as scape goats for all of our institutional problems, is the first step a nation takes towards the kind of dehumanization that created concentration camps, gas chambers, and industrial sized crematoria ovens, as a final bow to insanity as a solution for anything.

And let us not also forget that our institutional problems are also of our own making. We do so by continuing to participate in cruel farce that electrified Capitalism has made of a supposedly democratic republic.

How can you even begin to talk about value when a few have determined that ever more imaginary counters, held in the magical ether of computers, and vast networks of processing nodes, with their huge accumulations of same, are all that matters. All of it racing around at the speed of light via reasoning engines we have ever an ever decreasing understanding of. Providing a bottom line that the only thing that anybody still understands at all is that such accumulations still equate to power.

But still out government as "Reality TV" plays on. The blowhards and idiots are treated as real entities by our media and we lap it up as just more distracting entertainment. America's got talent alright. A spectacular talent for living in that river in Egypt.

Deporting Undocumented Would Take Texas-Size Economic Bite: Study

When information is money, and you also have to pay people to impart that information, education as a job guarantee becomes an exercise in diminishing returns.

As this article from NBCNEWS.com indicates, job growth in what we've always called "Blue Collar" work isn't doing very well right now. And why should it when trade deals past and present make labor, even when it is trained, subject to the world's lowest price competitor. Capital, as well as the proprietary process that creates any end use item, can go anywhere in the world in less than a blink of the eye. And the end use item can be delivered virtually anywhere, in most cases, in no more than a matter of days. It doesn't matter to the wielders of capital where a thing is made, only how much it costs to make it.

But what ought to be really scary to those of you who probably already know these obvious parts of the economic cycle is that the electric acceleration of competition, coupled with the further acceleration of technological advancement, makes the requirement for new skills to be absorbed in ever decreasing time frames. Which leaves a new poster child of absurdity for us to behold: the consumer of training, having already taken on debt burdens (that also increase), has to pay for even more training. And then more training after that.

That, by itself, would be bad enough, but the thing we really don't pay nearly enough attention to is what this does to us as human beings. Of what being made to be more and more like machine tools in the snapping on, and then discarding, of one skill set after another. Never being allowed to become connected, in the long term, to the application of craft and a real relationship with our tools; the very things that help us express ourselves in meaningful ways.

And whether the tools are words, or applied machine languages, instrumentation, or the sharp edge of metal, or the mind, it does matter to the well being of an individual that they are allow the chance to become intimately familiar with their application long term. How are we to have any meaning otherwise? Do you really believe that simply getting some number of counters in remuneration will provide it? Regardless of what they might be traded for?

If you do then you are already a cyborg; a flesh machine waiting for the next skill mod to be plugged in so that more meaningless copies of someone else's idea of what might be marketable can be churned out. Not valuable in any human sense mind you, just marketable.

Why Job Growth Remains Mushy in the Middle After the Recession