No Millennial coder knows COBOL.
They'll laugh when you tell them that the earliest banking systems in the US were built on it, back in the 70s.
We know there are mainframes chugging away somewhere in the background, unseen and unheard but they are the roots of fintech.
They can't be replaced or made redundant because billions of lines of code generated over the years still run the systems.
It could process millions of transactions a day back then. That's how it made its way into the heart of the financial system and stayed there.
Over 50 years of debugging has gone into it, so it's the most time-tested code language out there. Nothing is going to replace it.
There are so few COBOL programmers in the world now that the 73 year old who wrote the initial code still gets calls to come in and add features.
Probably to talk to languages conceived decades later.
Millennials can be proud of the smartphone on which they live and document their glorious social standing and aspirations.
But the Baby boomer generation built the financial foundations for today. They really did change the world.
COBOL has cool written right into it!
No baby sitters required
The majority of players and game developers on Roblox are kids.
The environment is made for them with easy to understand game development. And gameplay modeled on simple Minecraft style graphics.
They build and play the games they like with some even making revenues from them.
Roblox has over 36 million daily players in the US and Canada. Over 18 million games or 'experiences' have been created.
The company's revenue comes from in-game currency used to decorate avatars or other virtual trophies in the games.
It's on track to make $1.2 billion in the last nine months of 2020.
Gaming for pre teens was a market mostly ignored. Roblox saw them as the core audience back in 2006 They encouraged kids to make the games they wanted and created a kid safe environment to unleash their imagination.
It wasn't adults imagining the games kids wanted to play. It was kids experimenting with game concepts they came up with to play with friends. That is a different ball game altogether.
And Roblox got insights on what kids like and how they evolved into game designers.
In time, will coloring books and crayons grow less popular?
Why is climate change like the Bitcoin problem?
Both are fighting established belief systems.
And both are fundamentally important to what the world will look like in a few decades from now.
The business models that will work for both are unclear.
We've tried carbon credits, sequestration and exchanges but they're still work in progress.
Bitcoin is trying to convince the world that decentralized finance is the best way forward.
The internet was a small shift in established systems compared to what climate change and Bitcoin will bring about.
We know we can't keep taking from the earth without balancing the equation.
Money has always had masters. That's the source of the conflict.
What will the tipping points be?
We're already seeing some of them. The wildfires. The pandemic. And the melting of the Arctic.
Venice started building a flood barrier system back in 2003. It was commissioned in 2019 and saved the city from certain flooding in 2020. But what happens when the water rises further?
Nature doesn't negotiate. We can't buy our way out of this.
It's time for a reset. Where we think ahead not in quarters but decades.
If we succeed, you'll see more trillion dollar companies in the news.
Or else, it won't matter anyway.
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Baby Boomers are the coolest