PhineasC

Plenty of that was already done in the past 30 years, hence the shortage.

And for all the time the talking heads spend bloviating about free college and debt forgiveness, very little time is spent talking about trade schools and investing in getting more of them open.

Hope parents wake up and start being frank and honest with their kids. A 2.4 GPA and a BA in Business from the local state school is just about worthless. Much better bet to enter a trade.

Well, that guidance will basically just mean everyone since there is no organized checking of vax status going on.

I assume you meant shortage of demand... there is definitely a major shortage of good electricians themselves.

I certainly wouldn't be sitting here still holding tens of thousands of dollars in the fake dog coin at this point. Just me...

Once the little guys start getting in and swarming with excitement, the bottom is about to drop out. That means the smart/institutional money has already been pulled out and the choppers have lifted off from the Saigon hotel rooftop. I am just sitting back watching.

The push against the trades started in the 1990s. It messed up many Millennials. The late 20s guy you know making 40k a year doing gig work to pay off half a degree's worth of credits and still living with roommates? Should have gone to a trade school.

Some parents go way overboard with this and raise neurotic, anxiety-riddled adults who feel like they are never good enough.

Yes, that is very much what drove it. Parents were often too scared to have that hard chat with their kids to explain that they really can't be anything they want and they have limits they need to work within.

We need to bring back having parents sit down with their teenagers and be able to have that hard talk about future prospects. "Son, we love you, but your grades and work ethic in HS have been lackluster. We see how much you enjoy working on your car and around the house, on the other hand, and maybe you should look to turn that passion into a career? We don't think it would be a good move for you to invest in a college education in a weak field and not be able to pay off your loans." Not every kid can be an astronaut or the president. That's an unhelpful lie.

So many young people I have seen who are good with their hands but not really very impressive students who were pushed into college. A lot of young people out there with half a degree and $30k in debt who are stuck right where they started. It's a damn shame.

Oh yeah, parents and teachers told me many times I didn't want to end up as a "ditch digger" (the generic term used for all trades). So many kids led astray by bad advice.

hodl

No.

Nah, better for the C student in public high school to go to a large university far away from home, rack up $200k in debt to get a BA in Business/Fine Arts, and then move back home with his parents and become a suburban communist. That's the American Way.

At least you are starting to contribute a little bit. Type some words now.

That wasn't directed at you, it's just something I have been seeing some people online say when discussing why min wage needs to be 25/hr. I don't really have an answer for this. It will need to be some combo of taxation and UBI. I just think people are still fooling themselves that we can get this all back to normal via policy. I think we have crossed a threshold for society. The good jobs are not coming back. There are other long term systemic issues that contributed to us getting here, including women entering the workforce (which caused a glut of cheap unskilled labor -- lowering wages), mass immigration of unskilled labor (same as prior), bad tax policy, bad trade policy, bad social policy (family units destroyed, everyone goes to college and delays entering the workforce until they have racked up huge debt, badmouthing trade schools), welfare policy, crime, white flight to the suburbs, among other things. Those topics are all not good for this subforum so I will leave it at that. LOL

@UMB WX will hit my post with a weenie emoji, but a lot of this lurched the wrong way when Biden came into office. He pushed the CDC and other Federal agencies so far in the other direction of mandating masks at all times in all places that it will take a long while to dig back out due to gov't inertia. It had zero to do with the science; it was all posturing and "keeping campaign promises." He also pressured states to do the same things. Like I have said, I work on a Federal installation. Before Inauguration Day, with no vaccine, you could be outside socially-distanced without a mask or be in your office with no mask. Once Biden came into office, the rules were suddenly tightened and now you need a mask at all times everywhere even if no one is within 100 feet of you. Signs went up all over post overnight and guards are enforcing the rules. Food trucks that had been operating for months were also run out of the area. That isn't "following the science" at all.

I love when I read, "If you can't afford to pay people in unskilled jobs a livable wage, you can't afford to be in business." That seems to be the rallying cry of some out there. It's a really dumb sentiment. When a business folds, everyone is let go and it's a net loss for the community. The other side of the coin that young people are not taking the jobs and desperate businesses are paying more to hire older folks is that those entry level jobs now require degrees and/or years of experience. This is something else the younger crowd complains about a lot, but they helped create the issue.

That isn't sustainable. The bottom is going to drop out of these jobs before long. The people who own the local spas and small hotels are not millionaire fat cats. They don't have a lot more money to dump back into salaries just because the woman greeting people at the door to the spa happens to be 37 with three kids and can't get a job anywhere else... Once the spa closes down, no one will have a job.

Are these older folks taking these jobs because they want to, or because they have no choice? I feel like a lot of the jobs we have added under the last couple Presidents and this one have been kind of fake and lame jobs that are not designed to pay a livable wage and really can't. Now we need to artificially raise the salary of the towel-folding guy at the hotel pool to $50k because it turns out he is a 45 year old man with two kids and a mortgage? That is a house of cards that will collapse soon.

Looking at this more closely, it seems to me they are just saying they won't need to radically alter the design of the vaccine for the variants we know about today. We will still need boosters. Not really news, IMO.

I don't know if they are still pushing the mutant variant message because they think it will drive vaccinations or not. It doesn't seem productive to try to encourage vaccine uptake by casting doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccines, but that seems to be the messaging from the powers that be right now. The messaging should be: "Get your vaccine and then life will be normal for you again."

LOL "triple mutant" now.