Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.

As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.

Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.

As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.

But the other trades are not so bad.

If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.

I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.

If you are comparing to going to college $3000 startup cost is a joke.

Yeah, the costs just aren’t that high. I’d say that adding a trade to my children’s accomplishments probably in total added about 3-5k to the cost of their education. In some cases, the educational component of the trade actually earned them money in the process. In the grand scheme of things, the cost is negligible.

I have no idea where this guy got $3k as a startup cost. Most mechanics pay more than that just for the mechanic's toolbox without any tools in it.

$10-15k is a more realistic number for an auto mechanic, and many of them have $50k+ into their tools.

Oh, you can spend 50k on tools, of course. You can spend as much as you want.

But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.

Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.

It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.

Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.

In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.

Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.

Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.

$3k seems extremely low unless you're offering only a subset of services. Things like tire machines, alignment racks, and even just a smaller/non-shop air compressor is pricey. If you want to contract at a shop that has those, they typically want an ASE cert too

Being a mechanic is a lot like being a hair stylist. In many cases they're paying for a bay at a shop, and bring their own tools, in exchange for not having to do any of the business operations.

So many things have turned into gig economies.

My optometrist wants to retire. Nobody wants to buy the (very successful) business. New graduates (only two took the state boards last year. Two.) want to work regular hours and go home. No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.

They just want a gig. Do their expert thing and go home.

At the art fair downtown I noticed many of the stall operators are quite old. I quizzed a couple - same answer. They can get a partner in the (kiln, woodshop, metalshop etc) but not in the business side, selling at fairs. Nobody wants to do that.

Even retail - my sister had a chocolate shop. Her employees were business students! But when she wanted to retire, none of them, zero, wanted to take over the business. They wanted to exercise their speciality at some big firm.

The western world of business has changed beyond recognition since I was young.

The problem isn't that no one wants to do it, its that the math doesn't work out.

If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.

For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.

>No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.

Just like everything else these days the middle option is rendered economically useless by cost (time or money or both) of all the overhead and the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless you're employing dozens.

While I get that it's fashionable to peddle it that way because it confirms the HN audience's biases the overwhelming majority of mechanics are paid flat rate same as they would have been 50yr ago.

Renting a bay is the kind of thing a business owner does. Like a gas station with a 2-bay garage will be owned by a landlord who leases it to a tenant business. Perhaps the same or different business than is operating the convieience store.

You are describing being an automotive repair shop owner. A mechanic may work on cars, or they may work on generators, pumps, valves, augers, or any number of other kinds of industrial machinery that services a vast field of critical infrastructure. Most applications for mechanics are on-premise not in a shop… it’s just there are so many cars that we think of automotive mechanics as representing the field.

That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.

In the long run it's detrimental. The longer you delay earnings, the less time you have for it to compound.

If earnings are the main point of your life, that makes perfect sense.

I bet that a substantial majority of people's long term goals involve money to some extent.

Want to live in a van and surf all day? You do actually need money for that, particularly if you want to do it indefinitely.

Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier.

For example;

If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.

If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.

It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.

Earnings aren't the main point, but they're a necessary point for everything else that does matter.

Sure, and optimizing earning potential along with tactical flexibility is arguably the best way to maximize that potential. Having a trade as a backup skill gives you tactical maneuverability that allows you to be a more effective negotiator and to take beneficial risks. Negotiating power alone is worth any costs.

> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.

I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.

Just because you don't see fhwm, doesn't mean they don't have them or need them. I would bet your state/county requires electricians to have a license, and your mechanic is likely ASE certified.

That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.

The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.

While I agree with the sentiment, population density tends to make regularization more important. In a smaller community, social proofs are highly effective. Less so as people become more commodified.

Go ahead and hire someone without a license, who cares, but if your livelihood depends on that trade, it’s probably a good idea to get a license, when the alternative is fines or worse.

Its trivial to hire unlicensed folks. Its even more trivial for any insurance company to void warranty case in case of ie electrical fire, flood from work by unlicensed plumbers etc. You do you, not everybody is living in the race-to-the-bottom mode.

Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.

This is why my house is uninsured and built totally without licenses or code inspection. Fuck paying out to some assholes just so they can void it as soon anything goes wrong.

I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.

Most people are incapable of assuming such responsibility as you described.

They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.

So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.

The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.

I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.

Lol $30k profit? On what? Good luck selling the place when it required inspections for the new owners to mortgage and insure it.

Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.

Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.

Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.

I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.

Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.

You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.

But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.

Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.

And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.

> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.

Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.

Yeah, the GP's argument seems to be self disproving - the people doing this stuff on the shady side aren't able to make a living on it as they're barely scraping by.

"but that's an exception not the rule."

No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.

Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.

In rural areas where people know one another, people like yourself get sniffed out before they reach the ol boys network. If you're known as someone who seems like they would like codes, licensing, and inspections then these opportunities won't even appear to you, which works out well for both parties.

People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.

A lot of work gets done outside of that framework, and licensing in many places is not all that onerous. It depends on the location and the field, and there is a difference between the commitment level of learning a trade as a backup and personal development step and getting really serious about making money in that trade.