According to the sources I could find online it typically takes 4 years to go from a fresh off the street apprentice to a fully-licensed journeyman. At least in the area I am, in there is already a shortage so finding work shouldn't be an issue. I don't know about the other trades as I haven't talked to anybody but an electrician about it.

I recently had a discussion with a contractor doing some work in our offices. I basically had to escort the guy all day. He was lamenting how difficult it is to get apprentices. He says he tries to make people understand that once you make journeyman you can make a decent living as an electrician and once you make master you can earn six figures. You learn a lucrative trade without incurring one cent in educational debt and they pay you from day one. According to him, they typically have something like half the number of apprentices they'd like to have. Which is causing the average age of their employees to get older and older. At his shop, he says most of the staff is 50+ now. Assuming the reality is anything like what he is describing it seems to me that there is a real need for better vocational training. It also occurs to me that the guys who are apprentices today are going to make a fortune when all these older guys retire and there are half as many skilled electricians around.

If the US ally was in an actual combat zone the drone might have been in use as an artillery spotter. At which point you have to consider the value of the missile vs. the value of the material and people in the target zone. It would also explain their urgency in shooting it down now with whatever was to hand vs. using a shotgun or something.

Yes, a surprising amount of stuff is still designed and made in the US, and very likely in Canada as well. Unfortunately, I can't find the article but there was a piece a year or so ago talking about how the US and Germany dominate the markets for a lot high-end industrial machines. What we don't make is a lot of moderately priced consumer goods. So when you go into a store it looks like nothing is made in America. When in reality there is a good chance those products were built in factories using machinery that was made in the US. The cost of doing business in the US makes it very hard to compete at the lower end of the market but is less of a factor when you are selling machines that cost millions of dollars per unit.

There are a lot of ways to get through school debt free if you are determined. In my case, I took as many credits as I could at our local community college. Then I transferred to another school to finish my degree. It saved me a ton of money and in my state, those credits are guaranteed to transfer to a state school. What I found was that even some of the non-state schools would accept pretty much all of them. So I had plenty of choices of schools to finish out at.

I was also able to get an entry level job with my associate's degree from the community college. So I was able to leverage my employer's education assistance program for the 2nd half of my degree. It took me almost 10 years to do all of this but I was able to graduate debt free while building up a lot of work experience and making a living. After graduation, I had no problem finding a job as I already had years of relevant work experience. It probably isn't for everyone but it worked for me.

I think it is going to take more than fixing the roads. I know in my area the state has neglected the roads for decades. It has gotten so bad in my county that the county is actually paying for road construction the state was supposed to pay for. Simply because we can't wait anymore for it. Going forward I think they are going to have no choice but to expand the existing roads. In addition, we are going to have to look at creating additional parallel routes in the most traveled areas. If you are going North-South here you have the main highway and the road it replaced. If anything happens to the main highway the road it replaced becomes a traffic jam. Then people are off onto the side streets.

I also think we are going to have to look at other solutions as well. We need to expand mass transit and we need to incentivize people to use it. I know here for much of the area Mass transit is just not an option. Even where it is an option it is shockingly expensive and disturbingly unreliable. I know people who use but even they comment that it isn't any cheaper than driving and it often isn't any faster. Add that the trains keep having fatal accidents and it isn't a surprise people are giving up and going back to their cars.

We are also going to have to look at how communities are laid out. Waze and similar technologies are only going to become more common. My area is fairly new, started construction in the mid 90's and is still being built. One thing I have noticed is that the whole area is built with wide arterial roads with almost no houses directly on them. Then the neighborhoods are built as a series of closed loops that let out onto the same street fairly close to each other. The only part that has any through streets at all is the very oldest section. Even there they are fairly limited. So Waze isn't going to route anybody through the houses because they are all basically on dead ends. The arterial roads are designed to handle a lot of traffic. Eventually existing areas will have to modify their roads to be more like that.

I am not going to say all unions are bad. If done properly a union should be a huge benefit to workers. Unfortunately, in the US many of them are basically scams designed to enrich the union officers as much as possible.

My brother works for a union company and is a member of the union. He has observed over the years that many of the union's actions are much better for the union and the union officers than they are for the union membership. The problem in his view isn't the idea of the union, so much as the fact that many of the union members really don't understand these contracts being negotiated on their behalf. What most of the members know of the union's actions is from the union newspaper which only ever reports glowing successes. So you have an employee base most of whom don't understand the deals negotiated on their behalf and whose only information to judge their leadership is from a newspaper written by that leadership. So when election time comes around they invariably pick the guy that the leadership nominated for the job. Other people run but the pretty much never win. As long as that is the case US unions will continue to be extremely corrupt.

As far as Tesla and Mr. Musk go if they don't want to be unionized they only have two real options. One is to pay enough that the union can't really promise their employees enough to make them vote for a union. The other option is to move to a right to work state. As far as the union sending in a guy to stir up trouble he is going to have to understand that is how they operate and that will continue. He's just going to have to accept that and take measures to make people not want to vote for a union.

I have T-Mobile as my provider. Their coverage has gotten much better over the last two years. I still find areas where I have nothing, though. Especially down in coastal North Carolina where my mother lives. Verizon's network is clearly better as their network seems to be everywhere and it has at least tied for best performance.

When I compare the performance to the cost I can see why people take Verizon and I can see why people take T-Mobile. I had AT&T before T-Mobile and when I changed my bill, including financing a phone, was half what it was under AT&T. Also when operating in my area I get fewer dropped calls and generally faster performance than I did with AT&T. I can see how Verizon justifies their cost over T-Mobile. I have considered changing to Verizon myself just to have coverage when visiting family. I am having a real hard time seeing how AT&T justifies their cost compared to their service quality. Perhaps they are great someplace I don't go? In the areas, I do go T-Mobile works better and costs substantially less. I'd argue that Sprint actually does a better job of making their costs match up with the performance and coverage of their network than AT&T does.

I looked it up. None of the ships to bear the name Enterprise in Star Trek defined their class.

Ships with the name Enterprise were, in historical order from the main Star Trek timeline, of the NX class, Constitution class, Constitution refit class, Excelsior refit class, Ambassador class, Galaxy class and Sovereign class

Now that is an amusing vision. I can see a warship entirely lit up in neon with giant golden letters spelling out TRUMP on the side. On the upside it will probably having onboard gambling and an excellent buffet

Their communications are directly relevant to the investigation of what they are being accused of. When you commit a crime there is the actual act for which you'll be charged. Then there is often the separate charge of conspiracy to commit that act. Law enforcement is going through their communications to see if there was a conspiracy to riot.

Basically if you just showed up, planning to be peaceful, and got pissed off and spontaneously started throwing rocks in a fit of rage that is often a less serious charge than if you and your friends plotted before hand to show up and start throwing rocks. At this point accessing their communications is directly relevant to the investigation and will very likely be a determining factor in how they are charged.

You can buy insurance against lost business as well as insurance to replace your physical property. So it could actually protect him to some degree against some of the impacts of downtime. From his description of the impact of lost business I'd say that is something he should talk to his insurance agent about. They may also have recommendations on physical security as many plans offer discounts if you follow their recommended guidelines.

My former employer never came out and said it publicly but that is what they did. Also once they started hiring H1B staff we never got another decent raise and pretty much every year from then on we had benefit cuts. When the company got into financial trouble the layoffs were almost entirely from non-H1B staff. So what you are describing is pretty much exactly what happened there as well. So there are at least two companies that did that and I suspect we’d find a lot more.

The company I work for now issues people special travel laptops for international travel. They are imaged specifically for the trip with only the applications and data the person needs to do the specific job they are traveling for. When they get back any data that needs to be preserved is pulled off and the machines are reimaged. Things like this and just the general high risk of laptop loss in international travel are the motivations for doing all that. It used to be there was a small list of countries we did that for now their is a small list of countries we don't do it for.

In the article it says he is looking to pay himself a reasonable salary and to hire one additional full time programmer to assist with the development. Basically he wants to get back to the situation he had pre 2012 before his funding ran out and he had to lay off his staff. It sounds like after this he probably is OK for the time being. Though he is going to need to maintain similar levels of funding going forward if he is going to be able to hire staff.

It seems to me that the more interesting question is how many of the other important open source projects are in the same position? Is there a better way to fund them? I mean this guy made his funding goals by getting the media to talk about the situation back in December. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable model.