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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

#51
post #46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

He's descaling with his mouth shut. Not inhaling.

> Even worse, he's using old school stick welding.

Can you show an example of that? (You linked to him using a needle gun not a stick welder)

He's got top of the range spooled feed welders and does jobs at a scale that take hundreds of metres of feed .. these are not the jobs you spend all day swapping sticks for.

If you watched more of the channel you might pick up a lot of discussion about what is and isn't toxic, what are safe and unsafe practices.

The same job | video you linked, different time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZf-fTK7q7E&t=592s

That's gouging out metal wearing a closed system breather as that's actual toxic residue.

Welding a nut on to help separate the metal sleeve - not a stick welder: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=438

> All your video did was reinforce that, ...

It honestly seems as if you saw what you wanted to see without paying attention to detail about what was actually happening.

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

#52
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

True, didn’t think about grime like that. I’d be curious to see actual health outcomes comparing the risks of a sedentary occupation with one that has some toxic exposure.

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

#53
post #47

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?

Arc time is 10-20% of welders workday.

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

#54
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?

Probably the same way they’d view the young tech startup billionaire. They’d understand they’re just seeing snapshots of an industry they don’t fully know so they’d avoid generalizing to “all young tech workers are billionaires”.

Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.

A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.

Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.

Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.

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

#55
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 18? Who is starting a family at 18 years old in that climate? Claude Opus's Fermi estimate of the number of 18 year olds, making at least $100,000 a year, in California, with children, to be about 8 people. Not 8 thousand, not 8 hundred. Eight. Single digit. In a state of 40 million people.

That’s also because it’s just making that number up. I guarantee you there are more than that just from trust funders/people working for their parents and religious enough to start families early. Stop pasting LLM slop here.

I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.

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

#56
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the Bay Area, sure - California is a pretty big place, and trades are in demand all over.

Will they make the 100k in the lower income parts of Cali though?

There's this really innovative practice done called commuting.

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

#57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s also because it’s just making that number up. I guarantee you there are more than that just from trust funders/people working for their parents and religious enough to start families early. Stop pasting LLM slop here.

I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.

lol. +- 4 orders of magnitude? You’re not even making a point.

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

#58

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.

I love my work personally.

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

#59

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.

No, because they are not the people who love to do it in their spare time. They never do it in their spare time, because they don't love the activity that much.

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

#60
Isnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers.

Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?

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