I had this exact same thought lol. Figured someone in the comments was ahead of me XD

I’d be wary of the trades as well. I am now an engineer, previously a welder. Unless you operate your own business, a trade is super unlikely to match the standard of living that a couple JDs would be used to. Also, most EU countries have very regimented training and qualification systems for tradespeople that start when you’re pretty young.

In the US, there is a labor shortage of skilled tradespeople and manufacturing workers, so there is a huge push to get more people into it. The nasty secret though, is that there is a labor shortage because pay has not been rising and benefits are a joke.

Corporations push high school kids and laid off tech workers towards the trades with promises of good prospects, high wages, and solid benefits. The reality though, is that most of them will end up trapped in mind numbing dead end jobs where their labor and emotional/physical health will be exploited until they aren’t useful to the company any more.

Manufacturers in particular are extremely reluctant to give their floor workers a bigger piece of the pie. So expanding the labor pool is an important long term strategy to ensure that wages stay low and that they can continue exploiting their workers as efficiently as possible.

Not trying to be a bummer, but I’ve lived both sides of this. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers, chambers of commerce, etc have a very strong and widely accepted narrative when it comes to the manufacturing labor shortage, so I think it’s extremely important to spread a counter narrative when I can.

On the positive side, there are some really simple things that can be done to help alleviate the labor shortage: increase pay and benefits. We finally started to see a tiny bit of that during covid, and I’m hopeful that the trend will continue. It’s frustrating though that it takes a near collapse of industry before manufacturers will even consider raising compensation.

Yeah, it’s the little niche communities that I’m sad about:

An arborist spent 4 years helping me take care of an elm tree. They’d PM me every May to ask how it was doing, and I’d start another thread and send them pictures so they could tell me how to fix the roots or change the guy wires or prune the branches. When it got complicated, another arborist popped out of the woodwork to offer a second opinion and more advice.

I helped a person on oscilloscopemusic breadboard a little 2 channel opamp buffer/amp so they could use a CRT to make shapes from music instead of needing to buy a scope.

I won’t miss reddit, but I will miss interactions like that.

I’m sorry but I’m going to have to charge you $20 million for that curl on the reddit site :P

Kickass name/instance combo btw.

Somebody on reddit had a massively huge list of every sub that’s going dark, both sfw and nsfw. I can’t find it right now though :/

I agree with what both of you are saying about the antagonism of the community writ large, but I am going to miss the small subs. There are dozens of them I subbed that have 500 or 1k users and are really tightly focused communities. They still have that feel from 2010ish reddit.

I’m ready to close the book on reddit as a whole, but I really will miss r/heavyseas and r/obscuremedia and r/theocho and r/desirepath etc.

That was my first thought as well. There are often a couple huge subs about variations of a topic, then a constellation of smaller subs about more niche aspects of that topic, or circlejerk versions. People naturally gravitate towards the largest one and swerve away from it if the mods go crazy or if it gets brigaded.

Nature finds a way. I sub all of them and then I unsub if I get too many duplicates.

Cool.

Ah cool thanks! Do you know what the cutout mates up with? I see in your screenshots that they’re all keyed various ways, I’m guessing they went into some kind of punch machine or something along those lines?

Edit: best I found is from here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1859307

To facilitate the reassembly of the articles in customers groups, tag holders are provided, and to make confusion impossible, these holders are provided with characteristic admittance means, the tags having similar characteristic admittance means so that only-the tags of a certain number (and therefore of 'a certain customer) may be assembled on the holder having that number.

Makes it sound like there was a sort of rail that matched the cutout to mistake proof putting one person’s tagged clothes bags back together after they were laundered.

I did try a reverse search on Google, but it only gave me padlocks for some reason. Another poster found it though, thanks.

Yeah, it’s a little odd. On the desktop site, I can search “https://lemmy.ml/c/whatisthisthing” or “!whatisthisthing@lemmy.ml”, then I get no results, wait about 2 minutes, search again, and it’ll pop up so I can join it. On Jerboa, I can search and search and it never opens.

If a community is already on your instance though, I think you can open the sidebar and subscribe from there.

I didn’t realize there was one, thanks! I just figured out how to subscribe to external communities earlier today, so the link will get me there.