On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:56:38 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

I am having a hard time thinking of a trade that takes 4 years to
learn. This is more about limiting the number of people who can get
into the trades.
There may have been a time when trades were arts but technology has
made the most intricate skills obsolete. Nobody is packing oakum in
cast iron pipe and filling it with molten lead.


Your experience on jobsites that are more than stick built houses and
tilt up strip malls obviously is limited. Try laying out and building a
one wythe serpentine wall 100' feet long, building a 12 story
loadbearing office building, doing the pipe welding for a nuclear
facility or the iron work on a 60-story building and get back to me with
your two weeks of training. Your arrogance about the lack of skills of
construction craftworkers never ceases to astonish.

I did not say "2 weeks" I said "not 4 years" but why let the facts get
in the way of a Harry rant.
In that 60 story office building most of the people working there are
going to be doing repetitive low skill jobs. When I was working for
the state we were not doing any stick built residential, it was all
commercial and stick built is actually pretty rare around here anyway.
That is a northern thing. Houses are typically CBS. By the time you
put in all of the connectors to hold the "sticks" together, it is
cheaper to go in with concrete block.
Block is being replaced with ICF so the block stackers may find their
jobs in danger too, although laying block is not high skill.
You seem to be fascinated by guys who weld pipes in nuke plants but
that is your typical diversion.
Robots weld better than people and we haven't built a new nuke plant
since the Carter administration.
It is still true that technology is dumbing down just about all of the
trades. I am also not saying there are not skills needed but I do
think "4 years" is ridiculous for most of them if the person is much
smarter than a fruit fly. To start with, different people learn at
different speeds but the union is locked into a set schedule.
Universities have the same problem. They have it dumbed down to the
speed of the dumbest person and then pad that up with extra time
anyway. It happens any time you pay by the hour and not the job.

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:02:07 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

I went to school for 36 weeks to
learn to fix mainframe computer systems for NCR.

Yikes, the longest mainframe school I ever went to was 8 weeks. They
sent you back to the field for a while, then you went back for a more
advanced course. Once you got a feel for the culture of the various
families, (Endicott, Kingston or Rochester) you usually did not need
much additional education to figure that stuff out anyway. If you were
trained on a 168, it wasn't hard to figure out what a 3033 or a 3090
was doing. The Rochester machines were even more so. If you understood
any AS/400, you understood them all. The hardware may have been
different but the maintenance package was the same and they all ran
the same software.
When I moved to Florida I waived training on about 400 boxes because
the technology of virtually all of the "industry systems" (ATMs, Cash
registers, teller terminals etc) was robbed from the UC.5 support
processor we had been using on Endicott mainframes for over a decade.
The rest was just belts, pulleys and wheels. Same with the 3890 check
sorter. It took me a few weeks to get a feel for the ink ****er and
some of the adjustments on the feed but it is just a paper pusher, run
by a 360/25 processor and I was a region specialist on the 25.

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:12:55 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 08:35:15 -0400, Poquito Loco
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:56:38 -0400, Keyser Soze wrote:

On 9/11/16 8:00 PM, wrote:
On Sun, 11 Sep 2016 19:42:19 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:


You mean the ones who have gone through three to four years of serious
apprenticeship training and on the job training? Absolutely in
comparison to those who haven't.

I am having a hard time thinking of a trade that takes 4 years to
learn. This is more about limiting the number of people who can get
into the trades.
There may have been a time when trades were arts but technology has
made the most intricate skills obsolete. Nobody is packing oakum in
cast iron pipe and filling it with molten lead.


Your experience on jobsites that are more than stick built houses and
tilt up strip malls obviously is limited. Try laying out and building a
one wythe serpentine wall 100' feet long, building a 12 story
loadbearing office building, doing the pipe welding for a nuclear
facility or the iron work on a 60-story building and get back to me with
your two weeks of training. Your arrogance about the lack of skills of
construction craftworkers never ceases to astonish.

Thank God for the well-educated engineers making the blueprints easy enough to follow, eh?

===

And the project engineers/managers who track the work in progress.


When I was a kid, my father build a block front to his machine shop. The
union brick layers picketed until they hired them. They lasted one day.
They started mortar in the morning and just added to it during the day.
That evening a light rain and the wall they built collapsed. Yup, union
brick layers are highly trained.

When I built the addition in Maryland I hired union type bricklayers
to do the veneer on the front because they are fast and do a good job
but they were working off the books for cash. The block and concrete
guy I used was just a good old boy who used to be in the union but he
went off on his own. His kid took over the business as a non-union
shop. He was learning the job at the time and I was following along. I
got to be a pretty good block guy after about a week but I am slow. I
know how to square up the job, lay the corner piers and lay block to
the line.

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 10:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Its Me
wrote:


NYC? Haha... that has to be the most tightly union controlled place on the planet. When we shipped equipment into the city, we had to have it off-loaded outside the city to a union driven truck for it to be accepted for delivery at the site. I had to point at connection points in a wiring frame so a union guy could connect the test equipment. Then he'd hand it to me so I could run the test, then I'd hand it back to him with instructions on where to connect it next, just because I wasn't allowed to touch the wiring frame. All because "they'd worked hard to secure their jobs, and they were going to protect them", or some such BS. The guy couldn't do my job, but it took him, the steward overlooking us, and me to do what I could do by myself.

I do have to say the guys ran the wiring very neatly. Too bad it was full of wiring errors I had to identify and tell them how to correct.

No, Chicago has New York beat. The IBEW managed to totally ban non
metallic wiring methods for 70 years. You even had to run wire in
metal pipe in 1 and 2 family. They have backed off a little but it is
still very restrictive.
When I was in the Ed Center in Chicago as a temp instructor we wanted
to move some machines around. I just started pulling floor tiles and
dropping cables. The ed center manager freaked out. We needed to call
in a few IBEW members to watch. They sat there drinking $25 an hour
coffee (in the early 80s) while we did all the work but they had to be
there. There is no way we would actually let them under our covers.
They used to let them pull the cables but they broke too many so we
needed as many feather bedders as we had people doing the work. If
someone just came over and touched a cable, we needed to bring in
another electrician. When I asked "why even let them know we did it",
they told me the union cleaners or other maintenance people would rat
them out and they would strike the whole building.
Maybe that idiocy helped to form my negative image of unions. Bear in
mind I grew up in the shadow of the Teamsters international.

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:46:19 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

On 9/12/16 1:34 PM, Tim wrote:
11:34 AMKeyser Soze
- show quoted text -
Oh, a 12-story one would be fine. Then you could burn it in a bonfire
bluegrass music festival for your area's deplorables.
.....

Why would you want to pay to have a 12 story wooden scaffold built for you just to be burnt? That sounds like something government would do..,


I didn't say I wanted it. I thought it would be a fine attraction to
burn at *your* next local outdoor camper bluegrass concert for the
deplorables.
I rented a rolling scaffold platform a few months ago to make the job of
painting the walls and ceiling of our garage easier. It's a 12' ceiling
and it was a lot easier and faster to work from a raise-able scaffold
platform than from a ladder.

Why didn't you just get a man lift? The articulated ones are really
cool. I used one to cut down a big tree. Everything happened below me
so I felt very safe the whole time.

On 9/14/2016 11:37 AM, wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:56:38 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

I am having a hard time thinking of a trade that takes 4 years to
learn. This is more about limiting the number of people who can get
into the trades.
There may have been a time when trades were arts but technology has
made the most intricate skills obsolete. Nobody is packing oakum in
cast iron pipe and filling it with molten lead.


Your experience on jobsites that are more than stick built houses and
tilt up strip malls obviously is limited. Try laying out and building a
one wythe serpentine wall 100' feet long, building a 12 story
loadbearing office building, doing the pipe welding for a nuclear
facility or the iron work on a 60-story building and get back to me with
your two weeks of training. Your arrogance about the lack of skills of
construction craftworkers never ceases to astonish.

I did not say "2 weeks" I said "not 4 years" but why let the facts get
in the way of a Harry rant.
In that 60 story office building most of the people working there are
going to be doing repetitive low skill jobs. When I was working for
the state we were not doing any stick built residential, it was all
commercial and stick built is actually pretty rare around here anyway.
That is a northern thing. Houses are typically CBS. By the time you
put in all of the connectors to hold the "sticks" together, it is
cheaper to go in with concrete block.
Block is being replaced with ICF so the block stackers may find their
jobs in danger too, although laying block is not high skill.
You seem to be fascinated by guys who weld pipes in nuke plants but
that is your typical diversion.
Robots weld better than people and we haven't built a new nuke plant
since the Carter administration.
It is still true that technology is dumbing down just about all of the
trades. I am also not saying there are not skills needed but I do
think "4 years" is ridiculous for most of them if the person is much
smarter than a fruit fly. To start with, different people learn at
different speeds but the union is locked into a set schedule.
Universities have the same problem. They have it dumbed down to the
speed of the dumbest person and then pad that up with extra time
anyway. It happens any time you pay by the hour and not the job.

Luddite has a welder story. It has to do with an incompetent welder and
a Navy welder. I won't give the whole story away.

wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:02:07 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

I went to school for 36 weeks to
learn to fix mainframe computer systems for NCR.

Yikes, the longest mainframe school I ever went to was 8 weeks. They
sent you back to the field for a while, then you went back for a more
advanced course. Once you got a feel for the culture of the various
families, (Endicott, Kingston or Rochester) you usually did not need
much additional education to figure that stuff out anyway. If you were
trained on a 168, it wasn't hard to figure out what a 3033 or a 3090
was doing. The Rochester machines were even more so. If you understood
any AS/400, you understood them all. The hardware may have been
different but the maintenance package was the same and they all ran
the same software.
When I moved to Florida I waived training on about 400 boxes because
the technology of virtually all of the "industry systems" (ATMs, Cash
registers, teller terminals etc) was robbed from the UC.5 support
processor we had been using on Endicott mainframes for over a decade.
The rest was just belts, pulleys and wheels. Same with the 3890 check
sorter. It took me a few weeks to get a feel for the ink ****er and
some of the adjustments on the feed but it is just a paper pusher, run
by a 360/25 processor and I was a region specialist on the 25.



The 36 weeks was basic electronics for some weeks, and then the mainframe,
and all the peripherals. They we still discrete transistors back then, and
we learned to fix individual boards.

wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:12:55 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 08:35:15 -0400, Poquito Loco
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:56:38 -0400, Keyser Soze wrote:

On 9/11/16 8:00 PM, wrote:
On Sun, 11 Sep 2016 19:42:19 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:


You mean the ones who have gone through three to four years of serious
apprenticeship training and on the job training? Absolutely in
comparison to those who haven't.

I am having a hard time thinking of a trade that takes 4 years to
learn. This is more about limiting the number of people who can get
into the trades.
There may have been a time when trades were arts but technology has
made the most intricate skills obsolete. Nobody is packing oakum in
cast iron pipe and filling it with molten lead.


Your experience on jobsites that are more than stick built houses and
tilt up strip malls obviously is limited. Try laying out and building a
one wythe serpentine wall 100' feet long, building a 12 story
loadbearing office building, doing the pipe welding for a nuclear
facility or the iron work on a 60-story building and get back to me with
your two weeks of training. Your arrogance about the lack of skills of
construction craftworkers never ceases to astonish.

Thank God for the well-educated engineers making the blueprints easy
enough to follow, eh?

===

And the project engineers/managers who track the work in progress.


When I was a kid, my father build a block front to his machine shop. The
union brick layers picketed until they hired them. They lasted one day.
They started mortar in the morning and just added to it during the day.
That evening a light rain and the wall they built collapsed. Yup, union
brick layers are highly trained.

When I built the addition in Maryland I hired union type bricklayers
to do the veneer on the front because they are fast and do a good job
but they were working off the books for cash. The block and concrete
guy I used was just a good old boy who used to be in the union but he
went off on his own. His kid took over the business as a non-union
shop. He was learning the job at the time and I was following along. I
got to be a pretty good block guy after about a week but I am slow. I
know how to square up the job, lay the corner piers and lay block to
the line.


My last house, I built a concrete patio and a slump stone planter. Not
real hard to lay bricks, and that is all slump stone is in the end. Patio
was good enough that a backhoe drove over part of it to dig the pool and
one corner broke. Was maybe a 6" break/crack.

On 9/14/2016 2:45 PM, Califbill wrote:
wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:02:07 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

I went to school for 36 weeks to
learn to fix mainframe computer systems for NCR.

Yikes, the longest mainframe school I ever went to was 8 weeks. They
sent you back to the field for a while, then you went back for a more
advanced course. Once you got a feel for the culture of the various
families, (Endicott, Kingston or Rochester) you usually did not need
much additional education to figure that stuff out anyway. If you were
trained on a 168, it wasn't hard to figure out what a 3033 or a 3090
was doing. The Rochester machines were even more so. If you understood
any AS/400, you understood them all. The hardware may have been
different but the maintenance package was the same and they all ran
the same software.
When I moved to Florida I waived training on about 400 boxes because
the technology of virtually all of the "industry systems" (ATMs, Cash
registers, teller terminals etc) was robbed from the UC.5 support
processor we had been using on Endicott mainframes for over a decade.
The rest was just belts, pulleys and wheels. Same with the 3890 check
sorter. It took me a few weeks to get a feel for the ink ****er and
some of the adjustments on the feed but it is just a paper pusher, run
by a 360/25 processor and I was a region specialist on the 25.



The 36 weeks was basic electronics for some weeks, and then the mainframe,
and all the peripherals. They we still discrete transistors back then, and
we learned to fix individual boards.

When I got into the game Burroughs was using parallel plate packages and
memory cores hand wired in Brazil. No monitors, just TTY with paper tape
or cards for input. Man, I'm old.

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 2:12:47 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 10:46:09 -0700 (PDT), Its Me
wrote:


NYC? Haha... that has to be the most tightly union controlled place on the planet. When we shipped equipment into the city, we had to have it off-loaded outside the city to a union driven truck for it to be accepted for delivery at the site. I had to point at connection points in a wiring frame so a union guy could connect the test equipment. Then he'd hand it to me so I could run the test, then I'd hand it back to him with instructions on where to connect it next, just because I wasn't allowed to touch the wiring frame. All because "they'd worked hard to secure their jobs, and they were going to protect them", or some such BS. The guy couldn't do my job, but it took him, the steward overlooking us, and me to do what I could do by myself.

I do have to say the guys ran the wiring very neatly. Too bad it was full of wiring errors I had to identify and tell them how to correct.

No, Chicago has New York beat. The IBEW managed to totally ban non
metallic wiring methods for 70 years. You even had to run wire in
metal pipe in 1 and 2 family. They have backed off a little but it is
still very restrictive.
When I was in the Ed Center in Chicago as a temp instructor we wanted
to move some machines around. I just started pulling floor tiles and
dropping cables. The ed center manager freaked out. We needed to call
in a few IBEW members to watch. They sat there drinking $25 an hour
coffee (in the early 80s) while we did all the work but they had to be
there. There is no way we would actually let them under our covers.
They used to let them pull the cables but they broke too many so we
needed as many feather bedders as we had people doing the work. If
someone just came over and touched a cable, we needed to bring in
another electrician. When I asked "why even let them know we did it",
they told me the union cleaners or other maintenance people would rat
them out and they would strike the whole building.
Maybe that idiocy helped to form my negative image of unions. Bear in
mind I grew up in the shadow of the Teamsters international.

A friend I worked with lived in a suburb of Chicago for a while. Says that PVC water pipes are not allowed up there, so when you had an issue you had to call a union plumber to sweat the copper.. Also told me about the house wiring having to be in conduit.

What a crock.