It would have to be catastrophic for most businesses to make think about escaping the cloud. The cost of migration and maintenance are massive for small and medium businesses.
I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.
To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.
When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.
I have thought that we should make entering the medical professions much easier. In order to become a nurse, you usually need a 4 year degree. This has two issues:
1. This is way to much time in the classroom. Much of that coursework simply isn't necessary.
2. You have people that would be good nurses piking other programs because they can't get passing marks in classes that are irrelevant to day to day nursing.
Binding what are essentially professional programs to the academy is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I love the academy. But we need nurses.
At least in the US, nursing does not require a 4 year degree. You can become an RN with an associates degree. A 2 year nursing degree has one of the highest returns on investment of any training program (especially if you go to community college). Ivy Tech CC in Indiana and WGU both have nursing programs with great returns. Keep in mind, nursing is not an easy path and has a super high burnout rate. It's a tough and demanding job.
Other professions with a great return on training are HVAC, electrician, plumber, robotics/logic systems (CAM, conveyors, etc.). These are especially high paying if you focus on commercial and industrial.
A lot of people are surprised to learn the the average wage for both plumbers and electricians is ~30 bucks an hour, then that’s in exchange for body breaking work. A small subset earn more, but it’s not the norm.
Union electricians and plumbers make good money, and the non-union shops that do commercial work have to pay close to union wages plus some fringes to get enough manpower. I pay $100/hr for a union journeyworker electrician in a metro area of ~3 million, $106
for a foreman, and $112 for a general foreman. Both of those include fringes, the split is about 55/45 or so. The contracts are for three-year terms with raises every year.
Residential construction is a whole different ballgame that I’m unfamiliar with, but I’d imagine that’s where the average gets dragged down.
Because.. that’s what the union charges my employer per hour for an electrician? I don’t have a choice lol
Cincinnati is a rust belt city with depressed wages (no offense to anyone that lives there, but it’s the truth), my market is higher income (Minneapolis/St Paul) where a journeyworker makes $57/hr on the check instead of $38/hr like in Ohio, which is 1.5x (!!) higher.
Well sure, my questions is why is the Union charging over double what seems to be 90th quartile for electricians in small to mid sized MSAs and only a bit more than the 90th quartile on high COL cities.
I suspect the electrician they send over isn’t just pocketing $100/h on wages.
> Well sure, my questions is why is the Union charging over double what seems to be 90th quartile for electricians in small to mid sized MSAs and only a bit more than the 90th quartile on high COL cities.
The union is charging that because *that is what’s in the contract that was signed by the union and the local union contractors after negotiation. Electricians get paid a lot where I live because it’s a wealthy growing area that people want to live in, and not a dying rust belt city.
> I suspect the electrician they send over isn’t just pocketing $100/h on wages.
Did you read the post I wrote initially?
I give the breakdown of how much of the money I pay to the union goes to the worker on his paycheck (55%) with the rest going to insurance, taxes, union dues, pension, etc (fringe benefits, which are 45%)
> Did you read the post I wrote initially?
I give the breakdown of how much of the money I pay to the union goes to the worker on his paycheck (55%) with the rest going to insurance, taxes, union dues, pension, etc (fringe benefits, which are 45%)
I misread that intitially.
At the end of the day, anytime this topic comes up, there’s an oddly large discrepancy between the anecdotes and the BLS data.
Even half of that $100 puts these electricians in the 90th quartile for hourly wages in that MSA. So they’re either sending there most expensive guys or I’m misreading misinterpreting the BLS data.
Union electricians make up the bulk of commercial electricians, with the rest being non-union. Non-union electricians dominate the residential market, and that’s who brings the average wage down, along with the year 1 to year 5 apprentices.
Industrial electrician around here start at 30 - 35 for 2 years as a trainee then go to 40. That's top 10% income for low cost of living area. It's not unusual to hit 100k with no school debt at a young age.
Industrial automation technician I have worked with makes north of 300k but he is traveling all over the world to do it.
Reminds me of when I lived in a shit meth town. Dead economy, propped up entirely by a single military base. Lots of drugs and violence. Most people I knew there worked a shitty low skilled job and sold meth.
One guy I knew had it in his head he could just go back to school for welding and make 6 figures. Of course that didn’t work out. Turns out the local CC doesn’t have anything for underwater welding. Welding programs for sure, but mostly designed to funnel workers into local, lower paying positions that need filled.
I have a suspicion this push towards blue collars jobs is just another learn to code grift.
So are you hoping to be treated by nurses who are worse academically than the ones we have now?
Or are you hoping that "others" will be treated by them while increased supply depresses wages for the good ones that you think will treat you?
Also being a nurse is a very hard job, most people wouldn't last a year as an ER nurse in the US.
We make them take classes like organic chemistry where they have to memorize the reaction of various metal catalysts. Calculus. Physics. These are all two semester classes that are considered hard in undergrad. And yet the nurse will never ever use what they learn in these classes outside them. They aren’t the ones synthesizing the drugs.
Some jobs that are basically nurse will go through standard biology major sequence (usually if there isn’t a more focus prehealth major offered). Physicians assistant is an example. PA school happens after undergrad. A lot of people going to med school end ul taking standard biology majors. Arguably they should have been able to drop all those undergrad prerequisites and spend more time getting clinical hours vs toiling on ochem. As a crude input filter, medical schools often expect you to volunteer for these hours shadowing workers in the medical system even though you have to find the time yourself on top of a full major load that doesn’t account for these extracurricular expectations.
Huh? There have been multiple levels of nursing for many decades, probably longer than you've been alive. At the lowest level a CNA or LPN doesn't even need an Associate's Degree.
In the 1980s 55% of registered nurses were working with diploma. It is down to 6% today. Bachelors or greater was 27% and is now over 70% today.
As your link points out, many states are continually raising the bar and many have already moved to a BSN minimum.
I'm probably dating myself, but there was a time when people started working occupational nursing programs while in high school and were licensed a few years later.
In the US, it's not worth going into because you have to put in hundreds of hours of clinicals which are unpaid, yet just as useful to the employer as a job. Unpaid internships are illegal, yet these are legal and mandatory.
CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) have low up-front training costs, but don't make a lot of money: an average of $19/hr [1]. So at least some of the less skilled work is being done with economic efficiency.
I used to work at a company that stored all dates as ints in a YYYYMMDD format. When I asked why, I was told it was so we could subtract 2 dates to get the difference.
I asked them why they couldn’t use DATEDIFF since this was in a sql db.
They said they hadn’t heard of it and that it must be new.
Which sort of works, but then you also have to deal with the cases where the days or months go negative (at the month and year bounds), and that also involves knowing how many days there are in each month. It's pretty difficult for me to imagine how this could be easier than just converting to e.g. unix time and subtracting seconds.
I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
Whenever I use my partner's iPhone, or even open links on Chrome on my phone (I usually use Firefox with adblock) I feel like I'm being slapped in the face by ads. The difference is shocking.
A decade ago I used to see & hear various ads throughout my day and could ignore them. Nowadays I see so few ads in a month that my brain short circuits whenever somebody shows me their phone with something like youtube and it shows ads.
Mobile web today is like going back to dialup with the time it takes to load a damn article chock full of ads. Worthless. So much for lite mobile websites. Hate browsing on the phone. Only to be done when completely unavoidable.
Even using pihole you see this. I remember a post on reddit, just about every comment was complaining about the ads and how it made it unreadable but it looked just fine to me.
The last time I worked as a CTO I bought them for the whole team. Being able to redraw things on a shared digital white board beats having to redraw the same 4 boxes a dozen times because you keep running out of space.
Also saves people taking photos of the white board before erasing.
I have to say, that's pretty damn cool! I'm such a fan of diagramming code and systems, so having this for everyone on the team I'm guessing would have done wonders!
I now have a A2 paper notebook (I think it's actually supposed to be used as an artist's sketchbook) permanently next to my keyboard (my mouse sits on it) and I can't imagine living without it now... but a 24" pen display, mindblown!
4k and quite affordable. And it's a real screen the rest of the time.
Like I said the main quality of life improvement has been xournalpp. Development in the last year has taken off and it's one of the most pleasant projects to contribute to.
Digital whiteboarding tools are close, but I think they miss some of the magic of working in a shared space with an analog too.
I can make more complex drawings in excalidraw than I could on a really drawing surface. I suspect that leads to simpler drawings and thus simpler designs.
And remember the median number of flights taken by an American in a year is zero. The majority of the population is never affected by it, so they can happily vote and support anything that makes them feel more secure or like they're helping, with no downside they ever feel.
A few times a year I end up in a TSA line where one TSA person is shouting instructions to everyone, and 20 feet away the next is countermanding those instructions and seems exasperated that everyone is doing the wrong thing.
It's such a bad joke.
A few years ago I went through an airport that had a dog checking everyone. The handler was struggling to get the dog to do his job, people were not being checked, dog / puppy just wanted to play.
This is the thing that irritates me most. If I get in one line, I don't have to do anything. If I get in the other I have to unpack my laptop, take of my shoes, accessories, whatever.
Once there was a woman in front of me who asked why we take our shoes off and the response was "Once someone put a bomb in there shoes."
1. I don't love remedies to problems that happened once.
2. We had an international pandemic once... by your logic shouldn't we always mask at the airport?
The thing that's irritating about Read ID (at least in Ohio) is that the BMV would let you get an Ohio ID cheaper than a Real ID. Seems like a money grab when you know that people are eventually going to need a Real ID to fly.
Washington charges more for a Real ID than an Unreal ID too; I assume because it costs more to issue a Real ID and WA likes to push costs of services onto users of services more than other states I've lived in.
I think I priced it out and getting a passport card should have less fees than getting a Real ID here. But then I didn't get around to getting a passport card; I'll just use my full passport for flying and keep my Unreal ID.
Personally, I'm surprised this deadline hasn't been pushed back yet, given that every other deadline has been pushed back, and the original plan was 2008(!)
