Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
Retiring early to pursue something different is a great goal, but I think that means liking your work enough to get there. And some luck maybe that someone shared the importance of investment which is often the missing piece.
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
It doesn’t need to. 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 died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body.
Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.
tho i guess staring at a screen for 90% of your day is probably also bad for the eyes
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?
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting.
House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_
What's the case for optimism here?
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
But alright, gather all of these other miscellaneous expenses up and take out another $10k per year to cover them. You still have $30,000 left if you're paying $2k a month on rent.
I agree an 18-year-old earning $100k is doing great even in the most expensive parts of California, but you don't sound like you've ever actually had to think through a household budget.
If you have a car, - car insurance - gas - car maintenance costs such as 6 month services
I can’t believe you’re trying to be sarcastically condescending with this kind of comment. It’s difficult to respect that.
Next time try rebutting in good faith.
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:
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.
> 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.
How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?
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.
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.
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.
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.