1. Have a specific skill you can do quickly that required training (EG summarizing medical or legal documents).

2. Find a decent paying task that you can do really fast. You get paid for what you do … so if you’re not fast, you’ll be making like $2 an hour (EG, finding contact numbers on websites).

I really didn’t enjoy all of the nastiness associated with this post. I usually find useful information in the comments section – like additional comments to accentuate the information in the post. Although I admit the post that started it all was not what I come here for either…

Can anyone put down their hatchets long enough to comment on Mecanical Turk? I just took a look at it for the first time and it (1) didn’t look like I could even make anywhere close to $10 per hour and (2) would there be the possibility of getting scammed by the organizations offering the work? I don’t really understand how it works. I would appreciate comments from other people who have tried it (I know Trent did discuss it in an earlier blog).

Thanks and happy holidays.

It seems to me that over the last 20 or 30 years, America has developed an increasingly snooty attidtude toward the trades and the military, and I think that’s a shame. I have several friends who are electricians and cabinet makers, and they have six figure incomes. The median family income in my neck of the woods is $40k, so they’re doing very well. In fact, on a good year, they make more than I do as an attorney.

Barring some huge leap in technology, we will always need plubmers, electricians and auto mechanics. With Americans becoming less “handy,” the need for these tradespeople’s services increases, as does the amount they can charge for their services. A skilled, hard working tradesperson can do very well for him/herself.

As an added bonus, tradespeople tend to have very nice homes because when a tradesperson wants to remodel, the only cost he/she has to pay is the material cost. Even if the tradesperson doesn’t have a specific skill like tiling or carpentry, he/she surely has a friend with the skill.

If a child has the natural talen to enter one of the trades and wants to do so, I would never discourage him/her from doing so.

Having real world skills, ie knowing how to do something useful, is never wasted, but some college courses are a waste of time. A college degree is not a ticket to a prosperous life – the statistic that made people think so came from an era when most people going to college were from well-off families. These days it is the absence of a college degree that bars many from jobs they could perform very well.

That said, the value of a college course comes from 2 real benefits: 1) A systematic (and therefore timesaving) introduction to what others have thought and written about what makes a life worth living, and 2) an introduction into the various ways of framing a problem (how one asks a question has a strong impact on the possibilities one can see for its answer – or, as Maslow said “If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see all problems as nails.”)

I say this as someone who is multiracial and grew up in an area with a lot of neo-Nazis (and suffered greatly because of it). If commenters can’t distinguish between culture and race, then they are (IMO) too ignorant for the discussion.

I enjoy your blog immensely and am so glad that it has grown from solely PF to include a wide range of beneficial advice.

I also agree with Auntielle, I would love to be able to donate money because of the value I receive from your blog. However, I understand and applaud your reason for not adding a paypal link.

I love TSD! Thank you, Trent!

I suppose my point is culture and race should not be confused.

“I like Mary’s comment. Johanna and Sarah have a lot of comments on how you should think and blog, respectively. I’d take your own advice and ignore them.

Keep up the good work!”

I agree, on all counts (including Mary’s original comment)!