After freezing temperatures, construction, and deferred maintenance, manhole covers can be a damaging obstruction

My car is only two years old, and the one time it needed work …. I hit one of the smaller pieces of road infrastructure - a gas valve maybe. But the pavement was broken up around it so it was a deep hole with a sharp metal edge. It destroyed my tire, a damn expensive tire

It’s just scut work, and needs direction from humans

Software engineering has already gone through a similar transformation where we expect all the builds, scans, tests to be automated, the scut work done by “robots”. That resulted in new job types, DevOps engineers, and the software field has continued to grow. While it remains to be seen how ai will affect the field, automating the scut work allowed the humans to be more productive, the field to continue growing, software to be better quality

I’ve also met entirely unskilled projects management but the organizational and people skills needed to do well absolutely are skills

I can complete the tasks for a project manager. But have neither the organizational skills nor people skills to do it well

Coming up on annual review time at work, one of my successes this year was to persuade a project manager to take up my initiative- while the work needed is easy for me, now I have someone applying it across 50 teams and I can’t compete with that

You’re not giving a context.

Yes blue collar work is skilled in that not everyone can do it and some people do it better than others. You as someone not in that field can’t just take it up and be competent. Really there’s only general labor that’s not skilled anymore.

If the context is special work visas, supposedly these are skills that can’t be found domestically. So no, blue collar jobs and most white collar jobs are not skilled. …. And there’s a good argument that the distinction is companies not wanting to pay more

This is rocket science - the $2m threshold seems low

The shovel makers and shovel sellers always get rich in a gold rush

That’s fine, I’m over here eating popcorn, watching all the drama……

Luckily I’m not likely to need any laptop, phone, tablet. game console, car, tv, etc any time soon. All my higher end devices are good for a few years until the bubble bursts.

That being said, my hobbies tend to be in low end devices. We know raspberry pi’s are now expensive and likely to get worse, but I wonder how it will effect the tiny bit of old technology memory in things like “smart switches” and sensors

But will they fund upgrades to the electrical system?

A while back I went to my high school reunion and met up with the guy who had been my best friend. He admitted to having never been more than 50 miles from where he was born …. And was exactly the same as in high school. No growth, no personal development. I had moved to a large city, which was totally alien and frightening.

Obviously there are degrees and most people aren’t this bad, but visiting other places and other people can really open your eyes. I don’t know if lack of travel is cause or effect but it really seems like people who have never been anywhere tend to be very small minded, have a very narrow view of people and the world.

Thank you. Infinite pagers are such poor usability, just all around annoying. I really don’t understand why people want them unless it’s developers saying “this is cool”

The officer entered the house and saw people fighting. They didn’t listen to him so he started shooting

That capitalism is good. There is no economic system more efficient at progress

It’s government that’s the failure. It’s Governments responsibility to shape the markets so capitalism benefits society and they have failed miserably