This is one of the most based articles - on anything - that I have read in a l o n g time :) Thank you so much for putting your experience - and comparisons - to "paper" - I have a technically-minded teenage son who is really good with his hands and simply wants to get out there at the end of this school year and learn a trade (...and then join the army - as a mother I am struggling with that bit...), has absolutely no interest in the study path that his good grades would otherwise take him down. I shall certainly be sharing this article with him - opinions like this are so valuable for teenagers, especially when they come from outside of the nuclear family :) Thank you!
Thank you!!!!! I have been saying this for years because I have chosen an acdemic career and saw all. Now at my age, having seen the degradation of the education at universities, I concur a 100% with you. My field is statistics and computer science and this morphed into data science. I know what is being done and how industry has infiltrated the curriculum to suit their needs. Subjects like statistics are discarded for "new ways" based on algorithmics (Statiscal learning = machine learning=AI) in order to feed the beast of industry, AI. I will share this wide because it is time to realise that "going to university" is just a status symbol devoid of the current reality of our world.
If I could go back in time I would have dropped out of school and learned a trade.
Fortunately I was able to claw my way out of the rat race by building an e-commerce business, and now I spend my time farming and hanging out with my kids.
I will be encouraging my boys to get into the trades, and it’s already started by working on projects with them. They love their tools and building things (ages 4 and 2).
This is a fine article that sells life as a tradesmen very well. If only to get away from DEI and liberal politics, it makes sense. I did hear somewhere that Musk was making robots. Maybe even tradesmen don't have as much road in front of them as we sometimes might think.
Yes, Adam, you certainly bypass all that BS, and in fact, being out in the real world among real, in-the-flesh folk, you can see that there is little to no support for all that nonsense. To your point about robots, no doubt in the 15-minute city living pods, a robot may well be your handy "man". However, out here as it stands, it’s hard to see how a robot could cope with the many variables one encounters on a job site.
For example, one job I did at the start of the summer for an inspirational old woman in her 90s, still living independently, involved a variety of tasks. I cleaned out her gutters, power-washed all her PVC gutters and fascia boards, power-washed her conservatory, fixed two leaking downpipes and a leaking gutter, power-washed the entire bungalow, sealed all her drafty windows, filled and sanded the cracks and blemishes on her exterior walls (of which there were many), painted the entire building including the garages, prepped and painted two lampposts in her garden, and even fixed her security lights. Now, building a droid capable of all that would be Terminator-level stuff, and hopefully a long long way off.
I agree with most of this, but I think there’s nuances here that often gets missed in this white vs blue-collar analysis, particularly when it comes to actually getting into professions on either side.
All the good tradesmen’s I know, more often than not, acquired their skills via an apprenticeship. The difficulty for young people (or even those older who want to retrain) is the lack of smaller firms and one-man bands willing to take people on. You basically need to have a dad or a dad’s mate in the profession to be able to be taken on. Going to college isn’t going to cut it. You’ll end up working for a local council where you’ll be changing plugs and not much else.
Now, there are other trades outside of the ones you mentioned. Telecoms Engineer is one. This is an apprenticeship style route, with room to progress and specialise, earning you decent money. I nearly went down this path myself. However, you are at the mercy of the big ISPs to be trained properly and you can end up with many of the same downsides of white-collar life like pressure to meet managerial targets.
Another option is engineering. I’ve often seen jobs advertised for electrical and/or mechanical engineering apprenticeships, typically with factories, that can pay into the £40k range, after training is completed and a few years of experience. But beyond those, Britain lacks the industry to be able to provide ground for trade jobs be created in the first place. We hardly have a booming semiconductor industry. Unfortunately as well, lot of engineering is still at the university level after the destruction of the polytechnic colleges under Blair.
Finally, there are a lot more white-collar apprenticeships available than there were 10-15 years ago. They can be a good way of securing a white-collar salary and career path without having to put yourself in debt. Granted, a lot of them are artificial solutions to an artificial problem (I.e. mass credentialism via university) and in someways, actually prop up the university system. The managerial elite can’t allow people to just be hired and trained informally on the job. That would undermine the managerial elites and companies don’t want the full responsibility of training people.
Bravo! A great article, and for so many reasons. Thanks!
Just for the record, a great article, in my view, is not necessarily one I agree with. In fact, I have some disagreements, or concerns, very serious concerns, about this article. No. A great article, like this one, directs attention to something worth thinking about, discussing, arguing over, and possibly acting on.
And I say this in spite of the fact that I have dedicated my life to the Western Canon and can't fix things. There's so much to repsond to in this article. But to do that would turn my comment into an article (even an essay, or book, since the subject is that important). So maybe I'll do that on my own page. If so, I'll be sure to attach this great article so that otherrs might read it. Thanks again!
Appreciate that Paul, I agree regarding what a 'great article' is, it is also great to be able to engage on a level were disagreement or nuance is desired rather than despised. I look forward to your article :-)
I was a tradesman for 25 years. The only people shilling this are doing so because whitey has thrown in the towel and decided to let society rot, after being told he is not welcome in most desirable jobs. Why do you think they don't have to enforce D.E.I in the trades? Because it fucking sucks so badly that lazy non-whites and Women don't want any part of it. If trades were a good profession that was well-paying then the trades would be flooded with Women and Blacks screaming for "equality ".
Thanks for your input, mate. I’m not shilling anything, just stating that for the vast majority of young men, they’d be better off by almost every metric learning a trade and working with their hands, rather than wasting three years getting into debt and then spending the rest of their days working at the local Spar or glued to a PC. As for DEI, I’m sure some big companies have to deal with that nonsense, but when it’s just you and your mate in the van, both self-employed, it’s not something you have to worry about.
I'm surprised there aren't more views and comments.
What many don't realise about robots and AI is that silicon chip technology will never compete with the processing capacity and memory density of human brains.
A supercomputer has been built with what is believed to be the same processing level as a person. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it is the size of a battleship, and it uses a million times more power than a brain. At the same time, the cost of maintaining it and replacing its parts as they wear out is vastly more expensive than feeding a person.
Humans are, in effect, a network of self replicating and self repairing nanomachines.
Evolution has produced creatures that are incredibly robust, resilient and far more efficient than anything we have built.
(In your case, you'll
probably change evolution to God, but the point stands)
It will never be cheaper to build and maintain an army of humanoid robots to replace humans for general tasks.
AI is also missing the concept of oathkeeping and trust. It will report you for breaking the law even when the law is morally reprehensible.
It is programmed to never be trustworthy, and obey all authority.
You are definitely not giving a balanced picture of tradework here. Some of the things you say are true but you are leaving out the problems and nuance.
Being self employed doesn't just mean choosing your own hours etc. There is a joy in autonomy but generally you're going to end up working longer hours and having to do a lot more than just 'your job'. You also have to be across the tax codes, accounting software, building codes, quoting, cashflow, advertising, insurances, managing clients.... and all that increases exponentially once you start employing people. I used to be a school teacher and I had far more free time than I do now as a builder. I'm literally working 7 days a week at the moment.
It's true that you use your body and it's probably generally better than sitting around an office. But loads of tradesmen end up with chronic injuries, bad backs etc. because they don't exercise and keep fit because they are already flogged at the end of the day. Physically you're probably going to be better off working a non-physical job and having a good fitness and strength training regimen than someone working in the trades. Just generally the wear and tear on the body means tradesmen are generally pretty beaten up by the time they reach the end of their working lives in comparison to other people.
The other physical problem is that tradesmen often work in toxic environments. Working in an office you have very little exposure to dust, solvents, mould etc. Most tradesmen encounter these environmental toxins regularly.
The risk you take on as a contractor can also be very high which can make it very stressful. Working in an office the printer isn't going to collapse and kill someone because your apprentice loaded the cartridge wrong.
If you just want to have a solid job then being a plumber or electrician is probably ok. If you want to be rich then you should probably go into finance or something like that. To get rich building is generally a sketchy venture and the guys who manage it are generally not good people, they are often pretty much criminals who DGAF about anything but money and will get it any way possible. Obviously this probably isn't 100% true, but I've never met a large builder/developer type that doesn't have the 'used car salesman' vibe so maxxed out that light bulbs pop in the streetlights when he comes greasing up to shake your hand.
The beauty of an office job is that you get a paycheck every week, once you've got the job, you've got it. Contract work means that you are basically applying for a new job every month/week/etc. Unless you work for a large construction firm then you're basically doing contract work. This means that you are constantly cycling between having too much work (clients irritated that you are taking too long to get to them) and not enough lined up. I don't know anyone who has solved this problem, and it is only amplified once you have employees.
Trades are definitely not for everyone and shouldn't be seen as a panacea for males. I know a lot of tradesmen who hate their jobs and honestly I don't blame a lot of them, I don't think I could face being a plumber or an electrician myself.
Of course I love being a builder, I find it all invigorating and interesting and I've always loved building things. Some people really don't though and they shouldn't go into trade work, there are too many of them in the building industry already. If the idea of building a roof frame doesn't make you think 'this is going to be awesome' then you shouldn't go into it. There's nothing worse than tradesmen who are just doing the bare minimum, there's a lot of them around and they're a pox on the building industry.
I agree 100% with everything you say above mate, thanks for adding the needed balance I didn't in the article. The article is of course from my own perspective having lived in both worlds several times and that of several friends. Thanks for pointing out the dangers of manual work, I'm sure we all know lads who have had serious injuries on the job and even lost their lives, ladder work is notoriously dangerous and still claims far too many lives. On your great point of toxic environments, just this week I had to sand a large sports hall floor and then varnish it with varnish that would blow the head off and elephant, very sickening work all around and definitely not the healthiest, however office jobs and factory work are probably full of radiation and toxic processes too. As hard and toxic as the work was this week on the sports hall, the craic we had doing it and the end product was well worth it, and gave a sense of job satisfaction that is very rare in white collar paper pushing work. Thanks again Steve for your very well written comment, it is much appreciated.
I think you describe a dichotomy between university educated “white collar” jobs in offices and hands on honest jobs in trades that doesn’t necessarily exist?
Where would you put men who work in engineering, geology, agriculture and so on? The vast majority of decision makers in these have numerical degrees from colleges and universities, but also work outside doing actual things.
The skills and knowledge they gain from their education is essential in the daily routine of their work, many are paid very well, and these are traditionally masculine jobs requiring agency, perseverance, problem solving, and hard work, while avoiding office politics, lack of exercise, and the other things you identify as negative.
The top level roles in these kinds of jobs are not replaceable by AI, and they do generally require a taught knowledge base in order to be successful.
There is nothing wrong about becoming educated, particularly where it is essential to becoming functional in the area that interests you.
Hear hear, you should absolutely pursue the demand in the market and skip the degree mill - far too many people were pushed into higher education without actual purpose for the country at large. Its important though to note the competition in the labour market for the low skilled jobs, so as you point out, specialist trades are absolutely the target for any young men aspiring to make a decent living.
This is one of the most based articles - on anything - that I have read in a l o n g time :) Thank you so much for putting your experience - and comparisons - to "paper" - I have a technically-minded teenage son who is really good with his hands and simply wants to get out there at the end of this school year and learn a trade (...and then join the army - as a mother I am struggling with that bit...), has absolutely no interest in the study path that his good grades would otherwise take him down. I shall certainly be sharing this article with him - opinions like this are so valuable for teenagers, especially when they come from outside of the nuclear family :) Thank you!
Thanks for the kind words Katherine, glad the article helped.
https://oswald67.substack.com/p/a-postliberal-education-system?r=2r3au
Thank you!!!!! I have been saying this for years because I have chosen an acdemic career and saw all. Now at my age, having seen the degradation of the education at universities, I concur a 100% with you. My field is statistics and computer science and this morphed into data science. I know what is being done and how industry has infiltrated the curriculum to suit their needs. Subjects like statistics are discarded for "new ways" based on algorithmics (Statiscal learning = machine learning=AI) in order to feed the beast of industry, AI. I will share this wide because it is time to realise that "going to university" is just a status symbol devoid of the current reality of our world.
100%
If I could go back in time I would have dropped out of school and learned a trade.
Fortunately I was able to claw my way out of the rat race by building an e-commerce business, and now I spend my time farming and hanging out with my kids.
I will be encouraging my boys to get into the trades, and it’s already started by working on projects with them. They love their tools and building things (ages 4 and 2).
This is a fine article that sells life as a tradesmen very well. If only to get away from DEI and liberal politics, it makes sense. I did hear somewhere that Musk was making robots. Maybe even tradesmen don't have as much road in front of them as we sometimes might think.
Yes, Adam, you certainly bypass all that BS, and in fact, being out in the real world among real, in-the-flesh folk, you can see that there is little to no support for all that nonsense. To your point about robots, no doubt in the 15-minute city living pods, a robot may well be your handy "man". However, out here as it stands, it’s hard to see how a robot could cope with the many variables one encounters on a job site.
For example, one job I did at the start of the summer for an inspirational old woman in her 90s, still living independently, involved a variety of tasks. I cleaned out her gutters, power-washed all her PVC gutters and fascia boards, power-washed her conservatory, fixed two leaking downpipes and a leaking gutter, power-washed the entire bungalow, sealed all her drafty windows, filled and sanded the cracks and blemishes on her exterior walls (of which there were many), painted the entire building including the garages, prepped and painted two lampposts in her garden, and even fixed her security lights. Now, building a droid capable of all that would be Terminator-level stuff, and hopefully a long long way off.
I agree with most of this, but I think there’s nuances here that often gets missed in this white vs blue-collar analysis, particularly when it comes to actually getting into professions on either side.
All the good tradesmen’s I know, more often than not, acquired their skills via an apprenticeship. The difficulty for young people (or even those older who want to retrain) is the lack of smaller firms and one-man bands willing to take people on. You basically need to have a dad or a dad’s mate in the profession to be able to be taken on. Going to college isn’t going to cut it. You’ll end up working for a local council where you’ll be changing plugs and not much else.
Now, there are other trades outside of the ones you mentioned. Telecoms Engineer is one. This is an apprenticeship style route, with room to progress and specialise, earning you decent money. I nearly went down this path myself. However, you are at the mercy of the big ISPs to be trained properly and you can end up with many of the same downsides of white-collar life like pressure to meet managerial targets.
Another option is engineering. I’ve often seen jobs advertised for electrical and/or mechanical engineering apprenticeships, typically with factories, that can pay into the £40k range, after training is completed and a few years of experience. But beyond those, Britain lacks the industry to be able to provide ground for trade jobs be created in the first place. We hardly have a booming semiconductor industry. Unfortunately as well, lot of engineering is still at the university level after the destruction of the polytechnic colleges under Blair.
Finally, there are a lot more white-collar apprenticeships available than there were 10-15 years ago. They can be a good way of securing a white-collar salary and career path without having to put yourself in debt. Granted, a lot of them are artificial solutions to an artificial problem (I.e. mass credentialism via university) and in someways, actually prop up the university system. The managerial elite can’t allow people to just be hired and trained informally on the job. That would undermine the managerial elites and companies don’t want the full responsibility of training people.
Bravo! A great article, and for so many reasons. Thanks!
Just for the record, a great article, in my view, is not necessarily one I agree with. In fact, I have some disagreements, or concerns, very serious concerns, about this article. No. A great article, like this one, directs attention to something worth thinking about, discussing, arguing over, and possibly acting on.
And I say this in spite of the fact that I have dedicated my life to the Western Canon and can't fix things. There's so much to repsond to in this article. But to do that would turn my comment into an article (even an essay, or book, since the subject is that important). So maybe I'll do that on my own page. If so, I'll be sure to attach this great article so that otherrs might read it. Thanks again!
Appreciate that Paul, I agree regarding what a 'great article' is, it is also great to be able to engage on a level were disagreement or nuance is desired rather than despised. I look forward to your article :-)
I was a tradesman for 25 years. The only people shilling this are doing so because whitey has thrown in the towel and decided to let society rot, after being told he is not welcome in most desirable jobs. Why do you think they don't have to enforce D.E.I in the trades? Because it fucking sucks so badly that lazy non-whites and Women don't want any part of it. If trades were a good profession that was well-paying then the trades would be flooded with Women and Blacks screaming for "equality ".
Thanks for your input, mate. I’m not shilling anything, just stating that for the vast majority of young men, they’d be better off by almost every metric learning a trade and working with their hands, rather than wasting three years getting into debt and then spending the rest of their days working at the local Spar or glued to a PC. As for DEI, I’m sure some big companies have to deal with that nonsense, but when it’s just you and your mate in the van, both self-employed, it’s not something you have to worry about.
A good article and excellent advice thank you.
I'm surprised there aren't more views and comments.
What many don't realise about robots and AI is that silicon chip technology will never compete with the processing capacity and memory density of human brains.
A supercomputer has been built with what is believed to be the same processing level as a person. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it is the size of a battleship, and it uses a million times more power than a brain. At the same time, the cost of maintaining it and replacing its parts as they wear out is vastly more expensive than feeding a person.
Humans are, in effect, a network of self replicating and self repairing nanomachines.
Evolution has produced creatures that are incredibly robust, resilient and far more efficient than anything we have built.
(In your case, you'll
probably change evolution to God, but the point stands)
It will never be cheaper to build and maintain an army of humanoid robots to replace humans for general tasks.
AI is also missing the concept of oathkeeping and trust. It will report you for breaking the law even when the law is morally reprehensible.
It is programmed to never be trustworthy, and obey all authority.
You are definitely not giving a balanced picture of tradework here. Some of the things you say are true but you are leaving out the problems and nuance.
Being self employed doesn't just mean choosing your own hours etc. There is a joy in autonomy but generally you're going to end up working longer hours and having to do a lot more than just 'your job'. You also have to be across the tax codes, accounting software, building codes, quoting, cashflow, advertising, insurances, managing clients.... and all that increases exponentially once you start employing people. I used to be a school teacher and I had far more free time than I do now as a builder. I'm literally working 7 days a week at the moment.
It's true that you use your body and it's probably generally better than sitting around an office. But loads of tradesmen end up with chronic injuries, bad backs etc. because they don't exercise and keep fit because they are already flogged at the end of the day. Physically you're probably going to be better off working a non-physical job and having a good fitness and strength training regimen than someone working in the trades. Just generally the wear and tear on the body means tradesmen are generally pretty beaten up by the time they reach the end of their working lives in comparison to other people.
The other physical problem is that tradesmen often work in toxic environments. Working in an office you have very little exposure to dust, solvents, mould etc. Most tradesmen encounter these environmental toxins regularly.
The risk you take on as a contractor can also be very high which can make it very stressful. Working in an office the printer isn't going to collapse and kill someone because your apprentice loaded the cartridge wrong.
If you just want to have a solid job then being a plumber or electrician is probably ok. If you want to be rich then you should probably go into finance or something like that. To get rich building is generally a sketchy venture and the guys who manage it are generally not good people, they are often pretty much criminals who DGAF about anything but money and will get it any way possible. Obviously this probably isn't 100% true, but I've never met a large builder/developer type that doesn't have the 'used car salesman' vibe so maxxed out that light bulbs pop in the streetlights when he comes greasing up to shake your hand.
The beauty of an office job is that you get a paycheck every week, once you've got the job, you've got it. Contract work means that you are basically applying for a new job every month/week/etc. Unless you work for a large construction firm then you're basically doing contract work. This means that you are constantly cycling between having too much work (clients irritated that you are taking too long to get to them) and not enough lined up. I don't know anyone who has solved this problem, and it is only amplified once you have employees.
Trades are definitely not for everyone and shouldn't be seen as a panacea for males. I know a lot of tradesmen who hate their jobs and honestly I don't blame a lot of them, I don't think I could face being a plumber or an electrician myself.
Of course I love being a builder, I find it all invigorating and interesting and I've always loved building things. Some people really don't though and they shouldn't go into trade work, there are too many of them in the building industry already. If the idea of building a roof frame doesn't make you think 'this is going to be awesome' then you shouldn't go into it. There's nothing worse than tradesmen who are just doing the bare minimum, there's a lot of them around and they're a pox on the building industry.
I agree 100% with everything you say above mate, thanks for adding the needed balance I didn't in the article. The article is of course from my own perspective having lived in both worlds several times and that of several friends. Thanks for pointing out the dangers of manual work, I'm sure we all know lads who have had serious injuries on the job and even lost their lives, ladder work is notoriously dangerous and still claims far too many lives. On your great point of toxic environments, just this week I had to sand a large sports hall floor and then varnish it with varnish that would blow the head off and elephant, very sickening work all around and definitely not the healthiest, however office jobs and factory work are probably full of radiation and toxic processes too. As hard and toxic as the work was this week on the sports hall, the craic we had doing it and the end product was well worth it, and gave a sense of job satisfaction that is very rare in white collar paper pushing work. Thanks again Steve for your very well written comment, it is much appreciated.
I think you describe a dichotomy between university educated “white collar” jobs in offices and hands on honest jobs in trades that doesn’t necessarily exist?
Where would you put men who work in engineering, geology, agriculture and so on? The vast majority of decision makers in these have numerical degrees from colleges and universities, but also work outside doing actual things.
The skills and knowledge they gain from their education is essential in the daily routine of their work, many are paid very well, and these are traditionally masculine jobs requiring agency, perseverance, problem solving, and hard work, while avoiding office politics, lack of exercise, and the other things you identify as negative.
The top level roles in these kinds of jobs are not replaceable by AI, and they do generally require a taught knowledge base in order to be successful.
There is nothing wrong about becoming educated, particularly where it is essential to becoming functional in the area that interests you.
How an autistic person with "low suitability" for physical labor like construction could cope with such new age ?
Hear hear, you should absolutely pursue the demand in the market and skip the degree mill - far too many people were pushed into higher education without actual purpose for the country at large. Its important though to note the competition in the labour market for the low skilled jobs, so as you point out, specialist trades are absolutely the target for any young men aspiring to make a decent living.
I see what you did there, and I love it.
It fills me with confidence I didn't know I had.
Thank you.
Perfect title. Here is my manifesto to achieve the same https://oswald67.substack.com/p/a-postliberal-education-system?r=2r3au