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True but the trades are incredibly small

Trade,Estimated Employment Construction Laborers,1,019,090 First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers,777,420 Electricians,712,580 Carpenters,700,290 Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators,450,370

Bls2023

Where as there’s nearly 4 million acredited teachers and 3 million registered nurses


The skilled trades in the BLS stats are[1]:

45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 432,200

47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,225,630

49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,989,460

51-0000 Production Occupations 8,770,170

53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 13,752,760

That adds up to 35 million total employed.

[1] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/21/data-spotlight-employment-of...


The IWPR link from above (with data from the US BLS) suggests that the 320K women in construction trades represent 4% of the total field, implying that there are about 8 million total construction trade jobs in the US. I'm not sure how many construction workers hold 4 year degrees, but it seems plausible this would explain a large portion of the gap.

What do you mean incredibly small? Don’t you numbers show trade jobs are on par with nurses and teachers?

No, it shows that all trades jobs put together make up about as many jobs as nurses OR teachers. This is some basic media literacy that needs to be used when media outlets like the Wall Street Journal publish articles suggesting that all unemployed Americans should just become electricians. (or whatever other trades job they trot out) These jobs can be lucrative for men without a college diploma but are a small fraction of jobs in the USA.

I feel like coal is really useful for new steel

Steel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting.

That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.


Fun fact: carbon footprint was an expressions put forward by Exxon decades ago to shift blame for global warming to the consumers of energy.

Words aren't magically bad by their now-forgotten etymology, unless you keep bringing up said etymology.

Did I say a word is bad?

Yes

consumers are to blame for global warming. Companies are responding to what consumers demand.

That would be true if there had been zero effort and money spent in subsidizing fossil fuels, hiding data about its true long term impact for decades and sabotaging efforts to move away from carbon dependence.

There are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal.

Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.

"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).


One of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.

Yes. Already during the Roman empire the Ruhr valley was denuded as the trees were cut down to make charcoal for iron making.

With modern technology we can do better, e.g. torrefaction produces bio-coal with about 90% of the original energy in the wood, but OTOH the scale is way beyond what was seen in the ancient world.


Electrocatalytic production or using electrolytically produced hydrogen can also make new steel.

Just tried this, freaking amazingly easy.


just installed this and tried it out. How cool. So easy to deploy.


Thanks for taking the time to try it out!


Puerto Rican here. Everything on our island is like that. Preventive maintence is ignored and our insurance companies go bankrupt every big hurricane


Everything in the Caribbean is like that if you want to be honest.


> if you want to be honest.

They might only know about Puerto Rico thus limiting themselves to just that.


If we ever make you a state proper hopefully that will offer an opportunity for that to change.


They will never be a state. They’re in the sweet spot of self governance and endless federal subsidies. Despite what Wikipedia will tell you, English is not prevalent. Statehood will never happen and I’ve been listening to that drum for over 30 years.


> They’re in the sweet spot of self governance and endless federal subsidies

Let's be clear, this is not decided by Puerto Ricans. Congress ultimately decides this. How they decide is up to them. Until now, they haven't done much.


> endless federal subsidies

Wasn't PR denied help with hurricane repair and rebuilding?


Jones Act restrictions on shipping are a lot worse for them than any amount of subsidies. Makes it much harder for ships to come from nearby non-US islands and deliver anything.


Half the people speak English here


Aren't you afraid that US insurance companies will go bankrupt?


If a corporation can't provide a service, they should limit themselves and not provide it, or go for bankruptcy after making bad decisions.


Statehood? Why not independence?


Because they voted for statehood in a referendum.


FWIW, they have all been flawed.

On the other hand, is there a perfect one?


How would independence be better?


Because insurance payouts in Florida are so spectacular? Please, don't lead them along with false hope! /s


nanog is such a treat. makes me miss the old days on irc. Where do nanog people idle now?


Their mailing list also saved my ass from the Crowdstrike debacle


Agreed, the mailing list is the place to lurk.


some in private Signal groups, for engineer to engineer ISP operational discussion which bypasses usual NOC processes


I think a decent number on here.


#ix


I recently switched back to using homemade desktops for most of my work. I’ve been running Debian on them . Still have my Mac laptop for working on the go


hcaptcha cofounder here. Whenever i read these stories and papers they never talk about how captchas have different difficulty levels or what level they were using. I assure you we've been using LLMs since before transformers in the captcha industry and we can catch and defeat them all at the correct difficulty level


You are telling me your students can safely implement single decree paxos.... I worked on a few paxos production implementations before the RAFT paper, single and multi decree. The idea that paxos, as it is to be implemented, is easy for students to understand... Well let me re-read the paper, but i assure you, raft was a big deal


I tried giving it questions like 9.11 > 9.9 and it got basic stuff like that wrong more often than right


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