Yeah, I feel like kids are encouraged to move not to jobs that will be profitable to them (ie the children) but that the moneyed want to pay less for, because the number of people being swayed would collapse any market.

It's like a boat captain telling all his passengers to rush to one side of the boat. Any single side will tip the boat over.

Trades tend to do a good job of preventing people from switching in due to apprenticeship systems. Depends on your jurisdiction, but you probably can't just hang out a sign saying "plumber".

Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.

This is a good point and also why are people so certain that superhuman capable robots aren't right around the corner.

It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even approached understanding what they are saying. Among those, fewer still have validated their assumptions.

Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a specific hardware platform because that was the one that was (in this field) closest in network topology to the exchange. I just read the released docs for the platform, and watched a couple of videos where they hinted at certain architectural decisions and then you could work something out from there. Latency was reliable and our strats made money.

But this was public information and we were actually late to it. It had been released for 3 years at the time. And many people I talked to had told me that what they had was as good as it gets. But they were each just repeating what the other guy said.

Many of the things you see on Hacker News are just that: it's deterministic parrotry.

But I wonder if lower labor costs would change the repair vs replace calculus by a lot.

Well in sweden it's forbidden to fix anything electrical on your own. You're allowed to change your lamps and little else.

I’m convinced plumbing would pay better than programming in certain neighborhoods right now now.

> What does no one get about this?

Its all idiotic romanticisation. Thats why all the out-of-their-ass anecdotes involve someone who's more of an entrepreneur than a tradesmen as well.

Theres some bizzare analog of the noble savage myth, but applied to blue collar work.