Protesting that we didn’t resume bombing is stupid as fuck

Everyone should dodge the draft. I’d rather go to prison than serve

I’ve thought about selling my house and everything I own and skipping off to the other side of the world too, haha. But I’m 33 and want to move to Australia and work as an electrician in the mines. It’s 2 weeks on, 1 week off, they fly you in and out of the mines (FIFO), set you up with a free dorm, cafeteria, gym. We have a friend in Melbourne so we’d probably live there. The week off regularly sounds great if I wanted to hop around SE Asia and check out Vietnam for a week or something.

We currently live in Pittsburgh. I have a lot of experience in industrial electrical work and am fine with hard work and long 12 hour days over and over. But my future husband just works crappy food service jobs. He’s been working in a commercial kitchen, basically just like a tiny factory for grab and go food for small businesses around town. Idk how feasible it is for someone like him to immigrate to Australia without any kind of marketable skills or whatever they look at. He dropped out of high school when he was a teenager.

Skilled trades have been flushed with folks who are green and have no experience that they’re becoming very competitive to secure an apprenticeship and long-term employment. It can be tough finding something in plumbing or electrical with no prior experience. Even moreso in the unions. If more office-level workers start getting laid off and start competing for those jobs, it’ll be even harder to make the switch into something like that.

There’s a massive shortage for skilled journeymen and people with lots of experience. I love electrical work to death, but I hear “I’ll just be an electrician or plumber” a lot which grazes over the fact that any company training you is taking a hit for the first year or two of you working there.

Any and everything is on soulseek

Fwiw, soulseek’s usability is not horrid. I have about 8500 albums, mostly downloaded from there and bandcamp. I also combined libraries with a few friends over the years, which is always fun to just bring over a hard drive and share.

Yes, it’s more work but with things like Plexamp I have all the music I could ever want and it works wonderfully when remote, even does the whole “radio” suggested artists thing within my own library.

Another friend of mine has 38k albums. Sometimes I’ll change the source to his and bop around.

What good is piracy unless you’re amassing a huge server full of all your favorite media

Brand new sentence

My favorite was for a job installing cable for some subcontractor for Comcast and there was a bunch of talk about how much money I could make I just had to “hustle” and “get my numbers up” and I could “make my own way as my own contractor”. Red flags all around but I was like 20 and just getting out on my own and before I got serious about doing real electrical work as a career.

Anyway after orientation that included the guy telling us “don’t have sex with any clients this isn’t like those pornos where she bangs the cable guy”, I go out in a van with a dude. He was basically like “listen man this job pays jack shit. If they don’t have enough work for you you’re gonna be sitting in the van making minimum wage. I would honestly plan for your pay to be around that for your first year”

I basically quit on the spot. Got to go up on a telephone pole though, that was cool I guess.

I know what you’re sayin but AWG doesn’t use fractions. A good equivalent would be like shirt size. Small, medium, large, extra large. It’s just that size wire and that’s the end of it. You don’t need to know the diameter or cross section of conductor or whatever.

And even fractions are more of a feeling for us I guess. If you work with tools you can spot an inch, quarter inch, foot, etc. It really does come down to a “feeling” in a way that’s difficult to put in words.

They’re defined like all American measurements. By “feel” of each size

I’ve been doing electrical work for 11 years and I can feel a 12, 14, 16, or 18 awg wire in my hands and tell you the difference.

I mostly don’t like how there’s no rhyme or reason to the metric equivalent. All the numbers are basically random in order of each other so it’s a crapshoot tryin to say something is one or the other. But again, I don’t use it regularly

I like using metric for measuring with a tape measure. Feels a bit more accurate and easy to remember as you go.

But wire size I think AWG (American wire gauge) is far superior than metric. Easy to remember, 18 16 14 12 or 10 AWG. Compared to metric which just lists the outside diameter. So those same sizes in metric are 1, 1.5, 2.5, 4, 6 mm²

I’m sure if I used it every day it’d be different. And the larger sizes in AWG are kind of a mess. It’s even numbers til 1 AWG, then there’s technically a 0 AWG, then it goes 1/0 to 4/0, then 250 - 1000 MCM (but also some people call it kcmil?)

Still just “feels” right to me after using it for so long

I test and do QA on electrical industrial systems. The one older engineer told me sometimes he will roll a wrench across a keyboard to see how the system / code will react. The idea being someone in a steel mill might trip and land on the keyboard.

Breaking things is the best way to test them

Are PVC pipes like that common for water lines in the UK? In the US they’re illegal in some parts of the country and are typically seen as “not if but when” they’ll fail. I’ve seen them just randomly explode and dump full pressure water into somewhere.

Might be slightly different in the UK but the way they’re installed in the US is gluing the different CPVC pieces together. This is different than PEX which is the more modern method and is crimped water lines.

I am extremely focused on industrial electrical work as a career and have done it for about 12 years. To be quite honest, I can’t picture myself ever doing anything else.

As a hobby though, I love working with wood. I’ve been slowly building my new kitchen and enjoying it quite a bit. Woodworking may be in my future. A good friend of mine has a membership to a shop that’s close by

Side note but I really don’t know that drill. I’ve used Linux since 2010 and only begrudgingly dual booted in the years before proton was a thing, but now have used it as my only OS since Valve started developing it.

Highly recommend trying it out if you like to tinker. Modding things like Bethesda games is possible, but it’s been a while since I played one so I can’t remember all the specifics.

Achievements are cool sometimes. I did some challenge runs on Factorio like “there is no spoon” which is launching a rocket in under 8 hours. There is almost always a mod that turns achievements back on for most games fwiw

Yeah I have some of the traditional tin snips. These are pretty similar but way more “scissors” like. I’ll probably be grabbing them next time I go to the store

I saw a pair of $40 scissors at the hardware store the other day. These things were like almost the size of my forearm. I have no idea what I’d use them for. I may pick them up next time I go.

Edit: Ok looks like cutting thin steel and plastic stuff like siding. I don’t know when I’ll need this but I know I will at some point.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Malco-1-in-Straight-Cut-Tin-Snip-M12TS/100147753

They make these electrician scissors that I used to have. They’re more meant for cutting cables and stuff. I used them to cut some flat rolled roof material and ruined them but got the job done. These would have been great for that.

Been hearing this exact line for decades. Yawn

I took a keyed industrial switch home from work that I have the power cord ran thru which also has a CT wrapped around it hooked up to a little ammeter screen and it gives accurate power draw info (volts, watts, amps)

It’s cool but I have to turn the switch to put power on my PC which every time I do I see something flash on the motherboard and it posts three times before booting and does this weird power cycle thing so I hope I’m not fucking up the caps or something LOL.

I’ve been meaning to re-wire it so the PC stays connected to the wall and I just use the switch on the case to turn on and off. Then keep the CT and ammeter connected and those turn on only when I turn the switch because I don’t want that screen on when I’m tryin to sleep.

I also have a little light controller in the box with the switch, ammeter, and 120v light that’s like this old school bay accessory from 2006-ish that’s supposed to hook up to lights in your PC case but I took some multiconductor cord and terminal blocks home from work and strung them around under my desk.

I realize all this is like an unhinged setup lol. I also have a remote start button in my living room so I can turn the PC on when I’m chillin in there and interact with it via a KVM.

Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.

Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.

I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.