Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Besides not doing any good and making boring reading, it often ends up being uncollected garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Demand for HVAC is only going to get bigger on current trends.

Hm, I think those industries are subject to boom and bust cycles in construction.

I don't doubt your anecdotal data. However there is a difference between being a trades worker and running a business. Usually running a business means managing a team of trades workers and that comes with it own set of headaches. If you look at the BLS data on median income for traders workers, the data is not so impressive ~60K for plumbers, electricians and other workers.

I was roommates with a heavy equipment mechanic in his >$500k house. He barely spoke English and when his company got terminated from their contract on a tunnel he was rehired the same week for a $40k pay raise. He quit that job for another $30k raise to work for a different company on the same tunnel project a week after that.

Don’t forget welding. I’m colorblind so that’s been my dream if I were to start over. Most of those require a good amount of color coded wiring. I did try to become a cop and passed all the exams, but they also check for colorblindness.

I’m a fan of trades over office jobs. They’re paid fairly, you either have a union or at least paid for your hours you actually work. And I’ve always dreamed about overtime pay. Instead I’m pitted against overseas labor which instead of fighting, I’d prefer to unionize with them against our employer. Anyone that hires overseas deserves it. Certainly didn’t care about jobs here so we shouldn’t care about their well-being either.

That's the last thing I'd direct my kids towards. To spend a third of your waking life digging in people's dirty mouths because of the stable income is how dreams die.

That's a good one, but I wonder whether improved dental hygiene practices will severely reduce dentists' incomes in the next decades. At least in my parent's generation all the expensive procedures were caused by poor nutrition and poor dental hygiene during their youth. There is also the possibility that one of those caries vaccines will finally make it to market.

There's a large supply of Dentists out there not finding much work and there are way more medical school graduates than there are residencies for them.

I know many many medical school graduates who eventually settled for careers in hospital administration because they could not even get a PGY-1 year anywhere. There's not enough supply of the required training. If you went to school in the Caribbean your odds are especially hopeless.