141–150 of 276 posts
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Pay me enough and I will learn how to replace an escalator.
Once you get a license, it will pay about $125/hour. Four year apprenticeship first, though. There is a general shortage of elevator mechanics, so go for it.
I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…
> In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the work. Money isn't the problem. There are 35000 escalators in the US. If a typical escalator needs to be replaced every 35 years,…
I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…
> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. Or maybe not create this arbitrary distinction, and let people who are going to school with the intention of ultimately becoming a welder or a mechanic be able to take an English or a history class. For some reason, people who go to college for basketball get to take art history, but not people learning to be machinists. Maybe…
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In Switzerland, most people go into trades. Higher education is not seen ad having higher status in any way. Also, if you call a plumber to fix your broken sink, it's going to be really expensive.
So most people go into trades and yet it’s still incredibly expensive to hire a tradesperson? Sounds like the market is failing.
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I'll admit I don't know the first thing about escalator repair but I'm confident that a 4 year apprenticeship is absurd. Perhaps that's the real problem. The rules should be amended such that you can get an escalator repair license in 60 days. Problem solved.
> I don't know the first thing about escalator repair I agree with at least that much of what you said. It is near or at the top of OSHA's list of most dangerous construction trades. Elevators and escalators have extreme safety requirements for carrying passengers. I have been in enough elevator control rooms with qualified mechanics to be able to assure you that a 60-day wonder would be a very dangerous actor to let…
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> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college. This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs. The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical prob…
I don't disagree, so this is my opinion on how that reality reconciles against how the world needs to work for us to enjoy comfort and prosperity. Rule of thumb for depreciation is about 2-5% of an asset decays each year and if it isn't maintained the whole thing will need to be replaced every 20-50 years. Some things defy that rule, but most things need repairs. If we live in a world where going into the trades that…
Trade unions have a delicate balance between safety/compensation and cheaper labor alternatives. Developers want to maximize the efficiency of their capital and in construction, human resources are fungible.
Europe does a much better job of OH&S for tradespeople but if you look around there isn't nearly as much being built. America is the economic powerhouse it is in part because of the typically-low cost of human labor and other economies are going through the same thing now.
and
>”Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom.”
I feel dedicated people with an above average IQ could achieve similar things, but this sort of pedigree tends to speak more towards socioeconomic class than sheer intelligence. Where intelligence and high socioeconomic class seem to be a signaling with degrees from impressive schools.
Makes me wonder how many smart working class kids we are missing out on. The high IQ kids who went to schools not ranked in the top 100, those that would have excelled at MIT but for whatever reason never applied and now does who knows what, not performing to their potential. We have so much inbreeding, where we continually get the same kids from the same backgrounds missing out on an entire segment of the population.
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The answer is working fewer hours. As a society, we are overworked. We should all be pushing for shorter work weeks.
Tradespeople work more hours than anybody I know, and the unfortunate reality seems to be that they have to. Otherwise projects would take twice as long, and in the event of an emergency there could potentially be nobody to answer to it. Where I am, it's not uncommon to see an electrician or millwright working 70+ hour weeks to meet deadlines or make emergency repairs.
Moreover, it's been my experience that people in non-trade work (particularly non-exempt STEM workers) often work just as much overtime and don't even get paid for the pleasure. Granted, their base salaries are generally higher, but a tradesman working similar hours can approach or surpass that. (I say this is I sit at 2:40am waiting for code to compile...)
Non-sequitor: I misread that first word in your comment as "Transgenders" and was flabbergasted halfway into that first paragraph until I went back and re-read it :D
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> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college. This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs. The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical prob…
In Switzerland, most people go into trades. Higher education is not seen ad having higher status in any way. Also, if you call a plumber to fix your broken sink, it's going to be really expensive.