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California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

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Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#41

Post by defrost »

bsder wrote: post #22
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the work takes a toll on your body It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.

> Not for welding What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal. My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.…

> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.

A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices.

> And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.

Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins and cool the face, and essentially work smart .. and that's been my experience since I first TA'd in a mining locomotive shed back in the late 1970s.

You can see examples of this in the heavy industry repair domain here:

https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering/videos

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#42

Post by nkrisc »

torium wrote: post #25
siva7 wrote: post #17

Blue collar is the only bastion safe from AI. As we office workers lose our jobs we need to retrain

Spoken like someone who's never been inside an assembly line.

I don’t think robots will be replacing a toilet or retrofitting PEX in an old home anytime soon. Though it might be nice for the drywall guys to have robots make the cuts instead of the plumbers.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#43

Post by bsder »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
bsder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not for welding What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal. My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.…

> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?

So, your hands have no oil or dirt on them after working a welding shift? Wow, I'd love to take a tour of your workplace.

Even if you've got protection on, you still get exposed little by little. If someone is welding next to you on a site, you get exposed. If you have slag, you are breathing vaporized chemicals and heavy metal ions unless you a wearing a closed system breather. Any solvents or fluids tend to be some level of toxic. etc.

Welding is more than just putting rod to metal. You cut things. You grind things. You apply chemicals in preparation. Nobody is dressed in an environmental hazard suit all day--lack of mobility and peripheral vision is its own industrial hazard.

If you're covered in grime at the end of the day, well, all that crap is toxic to some degree.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#44

Post by F7F7F7 »

runsWphotons wrote: post #39

The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.

CTE/Vocational education leading to underemployment is some straight up Boomer propaganda.

A 18 year old who goes from graduation to the electrical union will make $60k in year one.

Sure, not the total comp package that those in tech covet but have you looked at median income?

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#45

Post by vasco »

When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#46

Post by bsder »

defrost wrote: post #41
bsder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not for welding What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal. My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.…

> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices. > And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal. Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins…

Erm: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=592

Sure, he has eye and ear protection. But he's just inhaling the dust from that stuff.

Even worse, he's using old school stick welding that's actually been banned in multiple places because it was so stupidly toxic.

All your video did was reinforce that, yeah, industrial work looks exactly like what I expect it to look like and it still sucks.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#47

Post by solatic »

Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.

https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_

What's the case for optimism here?

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#48

Post by CalRobert »

globular-toast wrote: post #8

"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that…

But shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#49

Post by verisimi »

kleene_op wrote: post #2

That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast. Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.

Getting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.

Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21

#50

Post by geremiiah »

runsWphotons wrote: post #39

The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.

Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in? Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
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