I think America would benifit from people doing what they do best, or doing the things they're currently doing the best they can. If you're a builder, build. If you're a writer, write.
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Oct. 12, 2011 3:01 p.m. Osterkraut SuperDork
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Oct. 12, 2011 3:14 p.m. Twin_Cam SuperDork
Yes. The more someone knows about how to fix things or create things from scratch, the more appreciative they are of it, and the more they respect it and care for it. If everyone knew how to rebuild an engine, I have a hunch that traffic accidents would decrease. (If you put your sweat and blood into a car, you're not going to eat a cheeseburger while talking on the cell phone and reading the paper while driving and risk crashing it. Or maybe that's just me.)
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Oct. 12, 2011 6:44 p.m. vwcorvette HalfDork
Read this.
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Oct. 12, 2011 7:24 p.m. JoeyM SuperDork
vwcorvette wrote:
Read this.
+1. That's the best thing I've read in a half decade. I LOVED the section on The Bettie Crocker Cruiser.
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Oct. 12, 2011 8:35 p.m. BoostedBrandon Reader
I didn't finish my automotive schooling. I regret it big time now. I tell my teenage brother in law, "There will always be jobs for tradesmen. Rich people don't like to do much physical labor. You can make just as much, if not more than alot of people, and not have the college debt."
Not that college is a bad thing, but it's not for everybody. I can't tell you the number of people I know who have a college degree and either aren't working in that field, are miserable in the field they chose, or simply don't know what they want to do. I'd rather work a rather simple job, than have 60K in college loan debt, and work a simple job.
Food for thought for the younger ones (and I'm 24)
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Oct. 12, 2011 11:40 p.m. fasted58 SuperDork
JoeyM wrote:
In biology we talk about producers and consumers (...which can be divided into secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, etc.) an ecosystem can't survive without producers.
I think that economies are similar....they cannot thrive without having both producers and consumers. lots of people talk about us being in a Post-industrial or Post-manufacturing or information age....despite the fact that our information economy depends on thousands of devices (that are manufactured elsewhere.) If anything, we probably have MORE manufactured goods in our lives than we used to.
yes we need more people who make stuff...that is true whether we read GRM or MAKE...or manufacture stuff for a living. We need to remind people that they can create stuff instead of just buying it. The US economy needs producers.
Reminds me of The Third Wave by the futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler who were embraced worldwide for what I call their global blueprint for business, economics, technology, manufacturing and culture. Foreign nations were first to adapt while the US dragged their feet... maybe now seen for good reason. While their first book Future Shock (1970) nailed the future by about 90% IMO, The Third Wave proved to come up short especially for the US.
High tech jobs were supposed to be the 'new wealth creator' and the backbone of the Post Industrial/ New Information Age America but lack of qualified Americans led to more H Visas and then to outsourcing high tech.. mostly now to India and China. Service jobs would replace the US manufacturing jobs lost overseas. The US is the big loser here. China, other Asian countries and India the big winners because they got the manufacturing and now the engineering/ high tech too... not to mention the building of the Chinese military.
Third Wave influence was great including the US Congress, industries, economists, business and academia. The Tofflers referred to traditional US manufacturing and trades people as 'regressionists'... and from my perspective from the mid 90's on academia still believes it too... you must have that college degree to succeed !!
Call me a regressionist but at 30 years in the trades I disagree, there's plenty of good paying, rewarding jobs out there. I would do it all over again.
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Oct. 13, 2011 11:09 a.m. BoxheadTim SuperDork
BoostedBrandon wrote:
I didn't finish my automotive schooling. I regret it big time now. I tell my teenage brother in law, "There will always be jobs for tradesmen. Rich people don't like to do much physical labor. You can make just as much, if not more than alot of people, and not have the college debt."
While I don't consider myself rich (and nor does my bank
), both me and several of my car guy friends/colleagues earn a few bucks more than the average household around here. That comes with a price though, like lack of spare time and we'd love to find a good, trustworthy mechanic around here. Can we? Not much luck so far.
Don't get me wrong, I like working on my cars and bikes as a hobby, but I can't really afford to have to work on my daily driver because I'm a tad screwed if I can get the work done in time and then lack the means to get to work.
My point isn't to whine about my lack of spare time, rather than point out that there are a bunch of people like me out there who are more than happy to pay good money for a good tradesman even if we're able to do the work ourselves (albeit slower, and at the expense of something else). The problem is that because we know enough about certain jobs, it's easier to spot those tradesmen who take a, shall we say, less than thorough approach...
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Oct. 13, 2011 11:31 a.m. BoxheadTim SuperDork
fasted58 wrote:
High tech jobs were supposed to be the 'new wealth creator' and the backbone of the Post Industrial/ New Information Age America but lack of qualified Americans led to more H Visas and then to outsourcing high tech.. mostly now to India and China.
As someone who works in High Tech and has some economics training, I have a couple of comments about this...
High Tech jobs are a wealth creator in the sense that they both opened up new job fields that pay/paid quite well and, at least initially, were open to people from all sorts of educational backgrounds. The latter has changed somewhat, you don't see that many programmers (just to pick an example) amongst the younger generations who like me either never finished their degree or come from a non-CS background (which a lot of my peers came from).
IMHO the H visas are a bit of a fluke for multiple reasons. There is a genuine shortage of good, experienced programmers simply because of the standard career paths that seem to work against people who just want to program (or sysadmin, or whatever) and you'll have to climb up the corporate ladder if you want to or not just to be able to get a raise at some point so you can keep up with the cost of living. People like me who have been programming for 20 years+ and still want to do it are pretty rare and not cheap. Which brings us to the second half of the point - businesses can't find bums on seats in this field who'd work for the sort of peanuts they'd like them to work for, so it's cheaper (but not necessarily better) to hire five people in India or China for less money. Well, they don't have to pay US cost of living for starters... Add to that that a lot of companies are unwilling to train people, plus especially in the software field they still like the cheap, fresh out of college labor, plus you can probably get someone with a few years experience for similar money on an H1-B, but it's a fairly minor difference.
fasted58 wrote: Service jobs would replace the US manufacturing jobs lost overseas.
My preferred quote on this is back from the time when Gerhard Schröder was Chancellor in Germany (ie, back in the 90s) he supposedly said "we can't live off cutting each other's hair" when pressed about the continuing push for manufacturing jobs in Germany. I don't like the guy much but I think he's spot on.
fasted58 wrote:
Call me a regressionist but at 30 years in the trades I disagree, there's plenty of good paying, rewarding jobs out there. I would do it all over again.
Well, it is hard to outsource plumbing to India
. Seriously, call me a weirdo but I'd rather buy locally manufactured products if they're any good compared to stuff made in China if I can. And they're mostly better, because companies have to compete on quality because they can't compete on quantity in this scenario. But it's getting harder, partially because for some items you can't find anything that's made locally, no matter what the price and partially because the downward pressure on real wages (as opposed to nominal wages) over the past 30-odd years often means that people simply cannot afford to buy locally made goods anymore.
And that's before we even get to Wallyworld's business model of flooding the market with cheap E36 M3.
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Oct. 13, 2011 2:54 p.m. mad_machine SuperDork
everything Rowe is saying is true. I look at my own chosen Field. While I do have a college degree.. I have been happier being a theatre electrician than I ever was working in Television.
I look around me and I see a LOT of techs getting ready to retire in the next 5 years. Many are in their mid sixties and still working. I do see a few "young guys" in their 20s.. but almost none in the middle where I am.
It's going to be interesting for me in the next 5 years
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Oct. 13, 2011 2:59 p.m. rotard Reader
Generally, there needs to be one "degree holder" and several "grmers" working with/for the degree holder. For instance, there should be an engineer or scientist with several technicians under them.
