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There’s a guy on the other side of this wall doing an excellent job on our kitchen renovation. Everything from demo to tile, he did it all. His hourly rate basi

There’s a guy on the other side of this wall doing an excellent job on our kitchen renovation. Everything from demo to tile, he did it all. His hourly rate basically comes out to my white collar salary because he’s a real craftsperson. In an ideal world, he’d have apprentices under him, and they’d level up and expand the flock and so on. Have half a dozen jobs going. grow and build a nice sized business. Slowly just become the person who finds the jobs and manages the operation. He’s almost 40, in excellent shape and is incredibly intelligent, but he wants to get out and into home inspection and such to diversify and have less bodily wear. Meanwhile I want to stop being at a computer so much and do things with my hands, and I’m almost 40 too. America has a weird relationship with physical labor, who should be doing it and what they should get paid, _unless your labor can be easily vacuumed up by a corporation_ (like knowledge workers). It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work…

rapjr9 4y ago
>It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work… Close, it is more like the country was founded with the idea that money can buy labor in any quantity at any time. This just is not true because there are many factors involved such as training, location, family, and whether people even want the jobs to start with. I think few people want construction jobs any more because as the article says it destroys peoples bodies. There needs to be an awareness that construction should only be a temporary job, maybe 10 years at the most, and probably the heavy work should also be intermittent to prevent peoples bodies being destroyed, and hence the number of people in training needs to be huge. Either that or find a way to automate the work. Maybe exoskeletons can help. We're going to need more workers for not only building roads and buildings but for other infrastructure like electric grids. If workers are hard to find now they are going to much harder to find soon as we try to convert the nation to clean energy sources over the next few decades.
- efields 4y ago
  All I think about when I see articles about these “now” problems related to people is how much bigger of a “later” problem it is. Exoskeletons is a far future solution that I don’t think will address the needs of the mid-21st century. We already have a great model of temporary service with paths to go longer. Just flip the army from a force of destruction to a force of construction.

rapjr9 4y ago

>It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work… Close, it is more like the country was founded with the idea that money can buy labor in any quantity at any time. This just is not true because there are many factors involved such as training, location, family, and whether people even want the jobs to start with. I think few people want construction jobs any more because as the article says it destroys peoples bodies. There needs to be an awareness that construction should only be a temporary job, maybe 10 years at the most, and probably the heavy work should also be intermittent to prevent peoples bodies being destroyed, and hence the number of people in training needs to be huge. Either that or find a way to automate the work. Maybe exoskeletons can help. We're going to need more workers for not only building roads and buildings but for other infrastructure like electric grids. If workers are hard to find now they are going to much harder to find soon as we try to convert the nation to clean energy sources over the next few decades.

efields 4y ago
All I think about when I see articles about these “now” problems related to people is how much bigger of a “later” problem it is. Exoskeletons is a far future solution that I don’t think will address the needs of the mid-21st century. We already have a great model of temporary service with paths to go longer. Just flip the army from a force of destruction to a force of construction.