221–230 of 251 posts
I saw a vid a few months ago abt low pay 4 carpenters... ao i decided to hire one. Oops! Not as low wage as i was led to believe!
I formally apologize for getting my porch door repaired and will never speak of it again!
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> The last 50 years of American prosperity was built primarily on the exploitation of labor as unions declined and Capital starting consuming an outsized amount of Labor’s productivity This is a really lazy analysis that ignores all of the productivity gains that came from automation and information technology. People who put together cars didn’t start making less money, they got replaced by robots.
Between OP's analysis and your reply, there's only one I'd dare to call lazy.
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Remember that there's a survivorshio bias in the 100 year old buildings you see still standing today. In many cases they are impractical for modern standards too - my home has 2ft thick external sandstone walls, and all the internal walls are brick. It's massively overengineered for the use of the building. At the same time there is nowhere to put any insulation on external walls meaning that during the winter were l…
In my experience I like living with stone walls a lot more than in a cardboard. It’s true though that doing any changes to the stone wall is a lot harder than with drywall, but it kind of proves the point that current construction techniques are optimized for cost (I like to say they optimized for the builder a lot more than for the ones living in that building). I think this is very much subjective in the end though…
My father was a independent carpenter and it took a toll on him. He had to do it if he was going to be able to get by while young and still living with his parents (my grandfather was also a carpenter.) It was a life of toil: plenty of injuries, probably maybe preventable if he managed safety a bit, lost fingers in an table saw accident (while working in construction during the late 60s on new NYC housing project dev…
I like that you mention patience. Carpentry takes patience, you need to pace yourself, and you need to adopt safety behaviors, that will get you through the day. If I watch my family work, they all do things slowly and paced. “Measure twice, cut once.”
He wouldn't even ever stop for lunch. He said he wanted to do that to leave early, but I can assume it was because the time he put into 8am-3pm was his best time to concentrate. I can understand this well now - when I had to work with him, he made me always clean up, but I was slow at it, didn't fully understand the animosity that it frustrated him. But, he needed clean areas.
Needless to say, it did stick with me (but maybe the patience took a bit more time to catch up with me :) )
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I like that you mention patience. Carpentry takes patience, you need to pace yourself, and you need to adopt safety behaviors, that will get you through the day. If I watch my family work, they all do things slowly and paced. “Measure twice, cut once.”
My father would say something like that too. He insisted also to finish one contract at a time and to not take on more work than he can. Since he also planned out the work ahead of time, his mind was completely in one job. He wouldn't even ever stop for lunch. He said he wanted to do that to leave early, but I can assume it was because the time he put into 8am-3pm was his best time to concentrate. I can understand th…
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My experience with shorter versus longer jobs, in the tech industry, consulting a few years back: - 30-60 minute consultations, I need to charge $600/hour minimum to make ends meet - 1-2 week gigs, I need to charge $300/hour minimum to make ends meet - 6-36 month gigs, I need to charge $100/hour minimum to make ends meet Making ends meet means covering mortgage, health care, etc., not having a decent lifestyle. There…
Any tips on how to get into software consultancy?
Random recruiters are fine too. If someone's calling you up to recruit, you can let them know you're not open to employment, but glad to consult. Many companies will be open to both. Indeed, consultants are cheaper on taxes and benefits, and easier to let go, so there are a lot of wins for the company. .
The bigger question is whether you should consult.
Why do you want to get into it?
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For my house, the general contractor I hired ran a union operation. I didn't hire individual welders and plasterers myself. Or perhaps I misunderstood the question. Unions are extremely important for those that don't have a single employer. For a lot of union jobs, you'd go to the union hall to find jobs, often by the day or week for jobs like stevedores (mostly gone now of course). For my house, the contractor had a…
I don't get it - who does the union organise against if there are no managers? If they're just setting floor prices in an open market, that's a cartel. If they're setting industrial standards, that's a trade organisation.
E.g. plumbers unions opposed waterless urinals, and then created a standard that required water pipes installing anyway - https://reason.com/2010/06/24/plumbers-unions-vs-waterless-u...
Temporary job security, but long term makes people hate the union.
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> The other big change I saw was the nailgun and chopsaw revolution This. I hired a union shop to build my house, and am thankful for it. for various reasons, construction is mostly lowest quality possible, but everybody on my house had a ticket and the result is obvious (not just appearance but lower cost of maintenance). When I worked at Terrajoule we were not a union shop but we often hired union contractors for s…
> I hired a union shop to build my house Aren’t most tradespeople self-employed? How do you have a union when you’re the boss?
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How much will you pay for that fruit? Because that will limit how much the farmer can pay the fruit pickers. Automation is the key to getting out of this trap: just build robots to pick the fruit and problem solved. I expect that is the only other way out of all our labor problems except for maybe the child care crisis (licensing boards are adamant about staffing requirements per kid even if that isn’t affordable).
If your job is replaced by a robot you can now have time to look after your kids. The problem is the person profiting from the robot is not the same person who needs the money to raise their kid.
It is a huge problem and we are seeing the effects in real time. At least education is mostly socialized so the problem reduces after 5 or so (but before and after school care is becoming impossible).
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Table saws are no joke, even in the best of circumstances! There definitely is still risk even when you're managing that risk well. (And it doesn't matter how many videos of it I watch, that SawStop stuff still feels like a miracle every time you see a hot dog spared.)
While the SawStop is definitely impressive, almost any modern table saw is safer than one from the 60's due to the standardization of riving knives. For those who don't know, it's the metal fin behind the saw blade, and it's thicker than the body of the blade but thinner than the teeth. It reduces the chances of wood binding on the saw blade (and resulting kickback) by a large amount. They're a required component by…