I don't think Obamacare is so powerful that it changed working hours for the poor 3 years before it was written, and 7 years before it went into effect.

Ahh, but you do not see what is obvious to conservatives - that Obamacare is so awful that it's awfulness warps the space-time continuum allowing it to go back in time as far as centuries back to make the world a horrible place. Especially for those horrible people who might use Medicare expansion services (or, as conservatives call them, freeloaders) or might be able to stay on their parent's policy or might not be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions by fine, upstanding insurance companies (aka "job creators"). Yes, they've made the world a horribly awful place for conservatives. And you don't want to know what the Libertarians think.

No, really, you don't want to know.

It's called your local community college. It will teach you well enough to build anything you need to get through a zombie apocalypse. For more skills and certification, you'll have to find an apprenticeship program somewhere - that's a bit harder.

First, the "Manufacturing Skills Gap" report only comes out once every 5 years or so. The last one is from 2011.

The report says that only 5% of manufacturing jobs are un-filled. It also says that "only 31% of respondent-companies report having formal career development", and that "respondents indicate that access to a highly skilled, flexible workforce is the most important factor in their effectiveness."

So there's the problem. Manufacturing companies are asking for a pool of immediately available ("flexible") employees with specific skills, and less than a third of companies are trying to train their own. Even then, there's only a 5% shortage. They want government to solve the problem for them, instead of putting more money into training or apprenticeships. There's a need for basic shop education, but from the numbers, it's not a big need.

Welding is a very specific skill, learned through practice. It requires some visualization talent; if you can't whittle or freehand sketch, welding is a bad career choice, because hand welding is a precision freehand task. Welding training requires a modest amount of instruction and a lot of practice. If companies want better welders, they can hire beginner welders and train them up. This means a lot of people on the payroll busily burning rod and working up from making angle irons to welding two pipes end to end with a strong, leak-tight joint. (I suck at welding and free-form sheet metal, but can do machining and rectangular sheet metal.)

Don't go thinking that learning trade X or skill set Y or getting credential Z means anyone is set for life.

There are no simple fixes for the current situation where anybody's livelihood(*) can be reduced in value by automation. All the old middle-class certainties like:

- I own a house, which is an asset whose value will only go up
- I have a college degree, which guarantees me a middle-class job
- I have trade labor skills that have been valuable for many years, and will be valuable for the foreseeable future

are no longer certain.

(*) If you're lucky enough to have monetary assets of $500,000+ that you can invest conservatively, and are disciplined enough to live on only the proceeds, you're pretty safe.

Very few welders make $150K. The ones who do are the ones who weld expensively fabricated parts together under tough conditions and get it right the first time. They're probably welding some pressure vessel for a chemical plant, the weld will be X-ray inspected and the unit hydrostatically tested, and if there's a problem, a do-over is really expensive. Most welders aren't that good. Not even close.

$12-$18/hour is typical for average welders. Even then, most of the jobs are in construction, which means a layoff at the end of each project.

Newer mobile phones should have been IPv6 from the beginning. China mandated that years ago. T-Mobile is IPv6. (You can supposedly open up an end to end IPv6 connection between two T-Mobile phones). It's suprising that the cellular phone companies didn't fix this, since they have control of both network and handset.

That is really, *really* awesome.

I especially enjoyed FIRECalc's graphic view -- I mean, it's a simple calculation, but the visual impact of when you go into the red is extremely telling.

I loved those websites -- thanks for the pointers!

The biggest factors now are family structure, and geography.

No, the biggest factors now are wealth and income. However America is even more unwilling to talk about that than race. So yet again we get a smokescreen discussion obscuring the real issues.

Hey! I resent your characterization of Bill Cosby as a comedian!

He hasn't been funny for about thirty years!

The college admission "process" is so arbitrary and broken that doing pretty much anything to it would be an improvement.

That being said, I have a hard time believing in equality as a tenet of our country (even equality of opportunity) when the opportunities of a poor kid from the ghetto, a farm kid from small-town America, a middle-class kid from the burbs, and a rich kid from a mansion differ so greatly. Affirmative action was a way (no matter how imperfect) to attempt to address this issue. I wonder how long the myth of American "equality" can sustain itself when even ameliorative programs such as this are shut down with nothing offered in their place to address this issue.

QUESTION AUTHORITY
Listen to Authority's response
If Authority is right, accept it

Most people stop at the first step.

This is a lousy idea for a smartphone, but it has potential as an industrial automation and robotics controller. Those are built up from lots of little modules, but the mechanical and electrical standards are decades old, and systems are too bulky. Think of this as a replacement for Arduino "shields", too.

It's surprising that Apple didn't do this a long time ago. Checkout scanners have had sapphire-coated glass for a decade or more. I pointed this out a few years ago, and the Apple fanboys immediately replied that Gorilla Glass was good enough and sapphire was unnecessary.

It's embarassing how fragile Apple's mobile products are. But this, at least, will stop screens from being scratched by coins and keys. You can drag canned goods across a sapphire coated supermarket checkout scanner glass for a decade without much effect. Home Depot self-checkout scanners have sapphire coated glass, and they get everything in the tool department dragged across them.

Users are not the problem any more. Crap code is the problem.

C is the source of buffer overflows. Microsoft is the source of autorun problems, or "if it's executable, run it". PHP is the source of most SQL injection problems. Vendor-installed backdoors are the source of most router vulnerabilities. None of these are end-user problems.