ORH_wxman

Yep, that is the model now that many are striving for. Though many are afraid of this "purge" of low skilled jobs, it's probably overhyped because they will just be replaced by other low skilled jobs.

This is econ 101 too...if you can't find people to fill your crappy job, then give them more incentive (raise wages and/or benefits). We'll see what happens when unemployment winds down more, but it takes 2 to tango. A healthy job market will have plenty of competition. Now, we can go down the rabbit hole on how healthy competition is stifled by things like monopolies (and very generous unemployment benefits), but no need to go down there. Bottom line (whether it's "fair" or not, all barriers aside), if you want to attract workers, make it worth their while.

The obesity trends in the United States certainly support this. Though not all of this is due to lifestyle/employment....we subsidize obesity in the U.S. All you have to do is look which food products are subsidized and which ones aren't to see why. Corn syrup anyone? One day, we'll eventually start subsidizing produce instead. Who knows when.

I am not sure how different it would be if this same thing happened 30 years ago. Maybe on the margins but probably not the larger picture. This is econ 101....when you subsidize something (in this case unemployment), you get more of it. When you tax something, you get less of it. These days, everything gets amplified with millions of opinions on social media too. Either way, it's going to be winding down this year so we'll see how the employment numbers respond. I was saying earlier, that this may be a golden opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs over the next year or two....a lot of small businesses folded up so there will be some demand to take advantage of.

Charlie Ward was a freak. Ended up in the NBA but I always thought he could’ve been a bigger football star. He was a tad small though...esp for back in the 1990s when you could knock QBs back to the Stone Age and not get a flag. Health wise he def made the better decision. I remember the epic FSU/ND game late that season. FSU was #1 and ND was #2. ND pulled it off and then the very next week (I think?), BC goes into South Bend and upsets undefeated ND. That was back when BC had Tom Coughlin as head coach and Glenn foley at QB. They were good but still massive dogs in that game. A lot of people said that game was the beginning of ND’s decline as a perennial powerhouse. I don’t think they’ve been ranked #1 since that 1993 game.

A lot of trade schooling is very tough work. One of my cousins went through welding courses/certification and I saw how much crap he had to master and remember.

There’s still never been a winter storm that killed dozens of people while on their commute like that. All those people who died on 128 stuck while snow piled up around them. Only other commute that comes close in the past 40 years is 12/13/07...blizzard of 78 was like ‘07 except if the snow didn’t taper off that evening and just stayed heavy for another 24 hours and much higher winds.

Yes it is. Very valuable education too. But the trades have been demonized for so long that it’s been tough to shake the stigma. The narrative is definitely starting to turn but it doesn’t flip overnight. There will be more attacks against them because of how much money is at stake.

There’s a ton of money at stake in keeping the narrative about college going. Encouraging everyone to take out government guaranteed loans has been one of the biggest windfalls ever for colleges in the past couple decades. They don’t have to worry about any of those loans getting repaid since they are guaranteed...all up front money for them. Zero incentive to make tuition more affordable. When we were discussing the narrative in the 1980s/1990s earlier, another aspect back then was that college was more affordable than now...even when taking account for all other inflation.

I literally watched that 500mb loop at about the 7:30 mark at least 10 times. That is such an epic progression. Still haven’t seen one match ‘78 yet. Some honorable mentions with Dec ‘92, Apr ‘97, and Mar 2001 but they can’t quite match the big daddy.

Yep. Need a lot more Mike Rowes going around. There’s a lot of very good careers waiting and many of these skilled trade also open avenues for entrepreneurship which has been on the decline in the US for 30 years. Part of the problem is that people like Rowe then get attacked for being “anti-education”...which is obviously a nasty smear tactic. There’s plenty of room for both. College isn’t for everyone. Having more people go into trades would actually incentivize colleges to lower their tuitions too or at least stop the obscene inflation in tuition.

We usually reserved that one for the Harvard or Yale snobs. Cornell was the “ditch digger” of Ivy Leagues.

How is that not an onion article. You definitely have to worry about coronavirus spreading outdoors in high winds at 29,000 feet.

Engineering as a whole was hit pretty hard in the recession...not a total shock as a lot of construction projects and plans halted. It may have played a role though in lower engineering degree numbers in the subsequent years. There's been a pretty big increase in the number of natural sciences degrees though. Again, these things will probably ebb and flow as people adjust to the demand and pay incentives. Skilled trades are on the way up again but still have a long way to go to meet demand....so we'll probably see a relative boom there over the next decade or so. Engineering will prob come up again some as job prospects for them become more and more attractive with the current shortage. It definitely does suck for a lot of these students who had to make decisions about a career in that recession and post-recession period. It probably cost them hundreds of thousands (if not more) in career earnings coming into the job market at the wrong time.

Also be aware of the volatility....these aren't like high liquidity blue chip stocks. There are whales that can move this 20% or more. This is basically gambling....sure, there's some upside, but always understand the risk and volatility and your bankroll.

There was a joke at Cornell that the "Hotel-ies" (as they were called) were the dumbest kids there but would be making the most money once graduated. One kid I know a couple doors down from freshmen year was hired as a manager at Four Seasons right out of school....nice gig for a 22-23 year old.

Your generation also got into the job market at the worst time....anyone trying to get in during that 2008-2015 period really got screwed. Bad recession and slow recovery. College is still a good investment on the whole (esp for the STEM fields), but it's not for everyone and shouldn't be.

That is excellent. I love the old school radio broadcast in the background.

Yes this is true....and a lot of that has to do with networking and opportunity through those schools. I went to an Ivy League so I know a lot of the types you are talking about. They do some school-sponsored internship at some prestigious company and then they are in. A lot of these companies basically try to set up pipelines from those extreme top end schools even if they don't publicly admit it. If that opportunity fails for the ivy league grad, they have plenty of acquaintances from their college who can get them in somewhere too.

He'd be better off putting all 5k on red at the roulette wheel at Oxford Casino than his lawn.

Biology is a STEM degree so it's definitely going to be useful and offer good job/income opportunities.

An interesting variable too is the percent of degrees that each field made up the total back then. Like in the 1980s, engineering degrees were a higher percent of bachelor degrees than now and psychology/sociology degrees were a lower percent. Engineering is a far more lucrative field than many other types of degrees, so there was some incentive to get those degrees. The pay gap was also larger back then for college degrees and skilled trades, but that has been reversing quickly in recent years. The lack of skilled tradesmen is driving up the income potential in that sector.

Incentives will eventually shift the narrative but sometimes it takes a while. The stigma of the skilled trades runs deep from the 1980s/1990s....our generation remembers it well. "You don't want to end up as a plumber, do you??!". Who's laughing now...the plumber pulling in 6 figures with little/no debt or the barista who has a bachelor of arts degree with 6 figures of debt? Mike Rowe (The Dirty Jobs dude on Discovery channel for those who don't know) has been a good force in advocating and making visible the benefits of going the skilled trade routes. He goes around and talks to high school students all the time. It's starting to reduce the stigma of not going to a 4 year college.

Record low maxes have become more frequent at ORH in the past 20 years versus the previous 20 (there were 67 record low maxes at ORH 2000-2020 but only 57 in the 1980s/1990s)....but so have both record high mins and record high maxes. The record low minimums have seen the biggest dropoff.

Keep in mind that those early ASOS precip buckets were sometimes a total catastrophe in snowstorms. I think ORH has some sizable storms in those first several years of ASOS that were like 30 to 1...total joke. The second April ‘96 storm was pretty sizable so BDL prob got at least 5-6” in that one alone. The first one was smaller but 8”+ from those two storms seems totally reasonable to me.