22 Replies to “From Containers to Trades”

  1. Canada’s labor shortage:
    When you phone the local plumbing outfit for a new water heater and the over the phone quote is $4000. … well you know you’re not going to get laid until the wife has a warm bath again. The women folk really seem to enjoy warm baths.

    Happy wife, happy life.

    1. When you buy a water heater and install it yourself, and charge your wife 4 grand…
      Oops, people can’t solder copper anymore, 240V is so deadly, even to think of it can kill, and Pex is gay, or whatever.

  3. The shortage is a feature not a bug.
    Careful rule and regulation has gone into creating a shortage of technologically savvy young tradespeople.
    And the disincentives to hiring and training apprentices have grown each decade.
    Few grow up as tool users.
    Math skills are not taught in school.
    Top this off with bill C-45 which made being an employer or supervisor into a criminal risk and you get the perfect storm.
    You cannot buy liability insurance for criminal charges.
    Apprentices are an investment,which consumes capital,time and energy.
    A green apprentice is a negative cost ,which we used to absorb, in the hope that we would see some help and payback as they learned..
    Now,it is more time consuming than it is worth to hire or fire an apprentice,so we just lie,”No work for them at this time” when they really should be run right out of the trade.
    Especially the really dumb and dangerous,who are now too extreme as risk to an employers livelyhood.
    Safety idiots override trade protocols,ignoring their ignorance of the real dangers and create confusion and chaos.
    Safety on many Government or Big company sites have made exercising your skills very unpleasant and tedious.
    So as the senior members retire,the replacements are not being trained in real skills or ethics and the tradesmen currently in the field are departing emass..to the black market.
    Cash is king,because we cannot afford to work overtime .
    Perfect setup of perverse incentives and topped off by the utter contempt for tool users oozing out from our parasitic overload.

    Now as an honorary member of the Surly Tradesmen’s Association,I politely recommend freezing in the dark for those who aggravate me.

  4. The assholes got their wish. No inexpensive Chinese goods for you or your corporate overlords, like Apple, Tesla or John Deere. Lucky for the little guy, Banggood and so on can actually keep to their commitments.

  5. Live in a town of once nice, now decaying houses. Most built 100 years ago. We are into a sold 2nd, maybe 3rd single female population. Previously these houses were kept up by husbands and father raised sons. That family model is majority died off now. So its working women and their fem’d sons that the moms are themselves afraid of, and would never let precious use a skillsaw, climb on to the roof…
    So the houses get skankier every year with some cheap, badly done, fly by night repairs.

    I used to kind of care but there’s so much.

    Not blaming the moms or the woose kid, there are bigger, long term forces at work, for the benefit of some, at the expense of the many.

    Rome, and the West didn’t collapse overnight. Long time very slowly, then suddenly.

  6. The people who earned Master’s and Doctorate degrees in gender studies and PolySci have demonstrated their prowess in assimilating knowledge. Learning how to diagnose and correct problems on an assembly line should be easy for them. Welding- a piece of cake. Growing food- Oh Yeah.

    What’s the problem?

      1. I learned General Relativity, and all about the quartic potential of the Higgs field, and how Higgs coupling of the right and left-handed components of the wave function give rise to mass, and how a quartic potential for a complex scalar field, when combined with the necessity of U(1) symmetry gives rise to massless and massive intermediate vector bosons. So far, no-one has done it for the SU(2) symmetry on Utube. I may have to buy a book.

  7. “Despite accounting for 20 per cent of the population, immigrants only make up 8.7 per cent of apprenticeships. The report said that the field has not been able to attract minorities and women into the space. Furthermore, the authors argue Canada is falling short of bringing 3,000 skilled tradespeople annually through immigration with only 2,365 of newcomers meeting those requirements in the Federal Skilled Trade Program”

    Most immigrants didn’t come here for their kids to go into blue collar jobs…

    and never mind the various rules, restrictions and constant promotion of everyone goes to college/university, that has eliminated most of the high school courses that are useful for the trades…

  8. Did anyone actually read the first link in this post?

    This excerpt stood out for me…

    “Twenty years ago there were 100 shipping lines competing with one another. Ten years ago there were 30.
    Today there are eight lines belonging to three shipping alliances that have between 86 and 98 percent market share of the four main east-west liner trades.
    “The alliances operate in lockstep with one another,” he said.
    They have between 200 and 300 vessel sharing agreements, he added, and inform one another about future strategic investments.
    And in many markets, including Canada and the United States, they are exempt from competition laws.
    Welsh said the shipping lines have a vested interest in maintaining the current shortfall of containers because their costs have remained stagnant while freight rates and revenues have been skyrocketing.
    Maersk is forecasting a US$24 billion profit for 2021, while the industry as a whole is poised to make in excess of $100 billion.”

    It’s frightening how condensed the shipping industry has become and how that has affected the supply chain and costs. I deliver truck parts for a truck dealership and we have HUGE backorder issue which not only affects our company but also our customers. Yet companies like Maersk are making record profits. Sonething is wrong here.

    1. I agree. I had no idea shipping was now under the control of what is essentially a cartel. Makes me wonder how much of the container shortage ect is actually planned.

    2. “And in many markets, including Canada and the United States, they are exempt from competition laws.”
      There it is, right in your face. State protection of monopolies.
      Ya can’t even sue them for failure to meat contractual obligations…and competing with them is illegal…and people whine “but…but…but…China!”
      Bring on the SMOD.

  9. I just got an oscilloscope outta Shenzen, took 6 days. I think I’ll get myself a 3-d printer now, then a TinySA, then a nice KSGER soldering station, with schematics, may as well get some Atmels and STM32s while I’m at it.

    1. That’s the interesting part. Stuff like that used to be made in North America. Now, if I want to buy it, I have to get it from a Chinese manufacturer.

      1. Sadly, our own leaders put so much red tape into the local manufacturing game that Taiwan, China and Hong Kong are our only alternatives. I don’t hold out much hope for us, but I’d like to see India start competing. I don’t really like buying stuff from nasty regimes, but value for cost is what it is.

      2. By the way, BADR, I just got a nanoVNA, and I’m working on passing the Canadian HAM test. I didn’t know it was free, Any free tutorials or what have ye would be appreciated. I’ll let you know my call sign if and when I get one, probably start with a Chinese Baofang thingy, they’re only $30 or so on Banggood.
        SDR seems pretty neat, too. Pretty waterfall, and all that. I’ll probably start with something under 100 MHz, so I can see it with my scope.

  11. I remember Standing Wolf at American Thinker. That guy had more insight than most article writers. I remember Selwyn Duke, too. Now look at the place! Remember the early 2000s and 2010s? All that shit is banned by even the best of us, except Kate.
    This woman allows name-calling, cussing, everything she can allow and get away with. She doesn’t even block or censor shit she hates or personal insults against her on her own blog! She actually lets us talk, even folk who call her names and so on. This is Canadian! Those California clowns at AT…but…Standing Wolf. Am I the only man who remembers that guy? If so, that’s a pity. That man had insight into the depths of politics, and human nature.
    Kate, you rock.

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