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I sort of miss the time when knowing how to use Google (and knowing to use Google at all) allowed you to be instantly 10-100x smarter and more productive than everyone else. (it still applies, just not in the tech industry; being able to google to find drivers for obscure industrial or enterprise computing hardware is sometimes a competitive advantage, but that's about the limit)

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I think that being skilled in the use of Google still gives you a huge competitive advantage over your peers. You'd be surprised how many people don't even think to search for answers to their problems.

Heh, I know where you are coming from. In high school (before Google was really well known and popular) I participated in a "science olympiad". One of the competitions was focused on computers. You had to create a spreadsheet to calculate certain values, etc. One of the tasks was to answer a question using the internet. It was something along the lines of "Who was the man that refused to leave his house before threats of Mt. St. Helens erupting and was eventually buried in the ash." I typed something like [grumpy old man buried mt st helens] and the first result contained his name in the snippet. I finished way earlier than anyone else :)

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