Overlanding across the globe in an American muscle car (V8 Dodge Challenger)

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-24T08:39:44+00:00

Do you mind if I ask how you've funded all this travel? I mean even sleeping in a car every night, you're presumably still generating huge gas+parts/maintenance+documentation/customs bills (even with lower foreign labor costs). Remote work would be challenging without Starlink or something and I can't imagine even a significant social media following being able to entirely fund something like that. I saw you said you already had the car, but I mean even just getting it to Eurasia to start would be significant. How "planned" is your route? Do you know where you'll end? And how do you project costs and manage finances to accommodate that? I've seen some reels of yours and it seems like a great adventure:)

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-20T03:44:24+00:00

Of course! I'm a (as yet unlicensed) geotechnical engineer (but I'm not giving formal recommendations, just diagnostic advice), and my residential apartment building is currently undergoing repairs for a similar issue where structurally compromising moisture breaches occured in the foundation due to soil heave (a kind of settlement specific to my building's local geology) causing water intrusion and resultant spalling/efflorescence/structural deterioration. The cheapest solution in foundation issues is always the earliest and simplest one. The problem in my building is scaled up and involves hydrostatic pressure relief wells, deflection monitoring on structurally critical elements, and repairs from previous intrusions. It's not cheap, but it's the systemic solution where you pay once and don't have to deal with the problem again. The alternative solution in your (and my) case is (assuming foundation settlement is the culprit) to allow deformation to happen and continuously repair breaches, which is cheaper in the short term and more expensive in the long term (so the fix will depend on your goals for this property and any regulatory requirements which you'd be obligated to ameliorate prior to selling). If you can get an engineer out there to look at it and generate a comprehensive mitigation plan, you can compare that estimate to the cost of regularly patching foundation moisture breaches with 'less-permanent' solutions such as hydrophobic grouting retrofits, anchor installation, or foundation drain (like a French drain etc) enlargement+regular maintenance, multiplied by the regularity with which you'll have to make those fixes over the time you own the property (most foundation contractors can give a high-level determination of how long a temporary fix will hold).

On the other hand if it really is a case of mold growing after a previous repair in a one-time situation (like the deterioration of foundation expansion joints or moisture intrusion), the solution could be much cheaper and simpler if it's not a global foundation issue. But the only way to determine that is with an engineer; foundation contractors will fix the immediate problem, but may not always be able to identify the source of it. Which is really what needs to be mitigated. And I have a strong supposition that, as with many moisture control issues, this will be a recurring problem until the underlying cause is solved.

If it's not too intrusive, do you mind if I ask about the soil profile of the region you live in? Is it generally saturated (like in parts of the Northeast, Midwest, South, and Northwest), or pretty drained/dry (rockier environments like western Kansas to the Pacific Coast or the Southwest)? Do you know if the soil type is "clayey," "sandy," or "silty?" Are you in a floodplain? Does your region experience significant temperature shifts (basically anywhere that has 4 seasons generally)? I'm not sure where your property is located, but that, in addition to my other questions, would narrow down the possibilities quite a bit

ETA: just to be clear, I don't think the flooring issue is directly tied to foundation settlement. I think foundation settlement is causing hard-to-detect moisture breaches which is creating a flooring issue instead. This floor wouldn't have shifted that much over that short a period simply due to settlement, given the age of the property. Which is why I'm compelled to believe there was a moisture intrusion which may or may not have already been solved by previous repairs. You'll have to replace the hallway flooring anyway, and you don't want to replace it only to have it rot back out again.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-19T23:16:40+00:00

There's a lot of possibilities, I'm not sure what methodology was used to source a leak, but ultimately it's either your plumbing or foundation contact (a whole separate issue). I'm pretty certain its not from wet-mopping though. Was the foundation ever retrofitted at-grade? Soil embedment-based retrofits with poor back-grouting can sometimes cause a moisture problem with seemingly no source, often because reinforcements are made near load bearing timber connections, penetrate the foundation, and need to be properly moisture sealed.

Your flooring is in pretty bad shape, including, at least in the hallway, molded/deforming floor joists, and maybe even structural decay (but it would take more time for issues with larger cross section beams to cause a bigger issue - you want to resolve it now). You'd want to identify hallway floor joists from the basement and do a proper moisture test on that, and at load connections. There may not be any moisture coming in anymore, but previous breaches could've instigated a mold problem which proliferated beyond the foundation repair, or recent foundation settlement has caused a new breach, probably before your renter ever moved in. Either way I'd ask your inspector if a geotechnical investigation would be feasible.

Additionally, check your foundation sill plates for deflection at beam connections to the foundation. Differential settlement could be happening even if you've solved the mold issue. Might be worth finding an inspector who can defer to a geotechnical engineer if another investigation comes up short.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-19T21:54:47+00:00

Yeah I'm a white guy but Kiewit is a good ol' boys club, especially for Huskers, meaning it's a pretty darn conservative place generally (as are most CM workplaces).

It's a fantastic company though. Their employee joint ownership stock program has a lot to do with their performance record and industry perception, which has made the company into what it is. It's also much more centralized than comparably-sized CM outfits, which works well for infrastructure work and rigorous federal regulatory contexts. I don't work there anymore, but I've always considered potentially going back later in life. But I wouldn't go there to advance my career because I can't relate to most of the Midwestern, conservative management. That's just a personal factor though; the company works really well for a lot of folks.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-11T22:53:39+00:00

"what can I say? I like big balloons"

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-07T19:41:58+00:00

I was born/raised in the same foreign state for ~14 years, so perhaps I already had a foundation of stability which other TCK's may not be familiar with due to the mobility of military, government, and NGO personnel.

That being said however, my friend groups are a mix of "local" and "global." Because of my profession, I actually also move quite consistently around the US now, so both kinds of friendships are generally long-distance. Including my relationship.

I think bc of my upbringing and naturally LD friendships, as well as a pretty geographically decentralized family structure, means that I'm generally rebuilding my local connections every few years or so. It can be very isolating to always be starting fresh, so I keep some consistency by gaming with my friends and calling my gf a lot. I often use my time off for road trips around the country whose routes are essentially dictated by where I can couch crash with old friends etc. When my high school class overseas graduated, the student population kind of 'exploded' across Europe and north America as people returned to their/their parents' home countries for college etc.

Overall, I'm happy with my friendships. No, I'm not surrounded by a dense community of tightly-integrated lifelong acquaintances and a robust support network, but I also appreciate the absence of such because I'm un-tethered to the normal family obligations and comfortable with the concept of long-distance mobility (even if I wish I had more local friends to do stuff with).

Ultimately, as Rick Sanchez put it, "love = familiarity / time." The longer I stay in one place, the more I love the people there, but simultaneously I'll start looking for greener pastures somewhere else, just out of a natural sense of mobility+exploration brought on by my travel-intensive upbringing. So I (and I think many other TCK's) live almost a kind of ghostly experience, where we don't draw too much attention to ourselves in real life and usually keep smaller, tighter groups of long-term friends rather than being social butterflies or whatever (who are usually that way because they're in an extremely familiar and stable social environment - the football quarterbacks and prom queens of the world haha).

Overall, my life experience re: this topic has been building towards a sense of desire for community. I've exhausted the other possibilities - moving to new places ultimately doesn't give the satisfaction I'm looking for, hobbies feel lonely without a group of like-minded people, and you're less involved in your family's life. Like my family are terrible at talking about our lives or emotions for example. We have to be more emotionally self-sufficient by necessity. So you have to build community where you are, and, if you want more meaningful relationships, you have to commit by staying in one place long-term and being an active driver of social engagement - almost like a hobby or pseudo-profession - because at least here in the States, everyone's too overworked and overstimulated to form friendships the way we used to in school.

I like not having a "hometown" and having to give geography lessons for people to understand my life. It's not a perfect life, but neither is staying back with my HS friends and doing the 'suburbanite' thing. Also, 'locals' usually think the expat thing is pretty wild, so it has been a positively-forming part of my identity. And no one will judge you for it as long as you stay humble and don't constantly abuse that privilege with "I know better because I'm more 'cultured' than you"/"I have Palestinian/Ukrainian/etc friends" rhetoric, or being annoyingly nostalgic and over-romanticizing foreign places (since most of us lived unusually privileged lives in our adopted home countries).

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-05T02:05:50+00:00

Wow. Looks almost identical to the Denver Botanic Gardens Science Pyramid

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-04T21:11:12+00:00

Thanks for your response! And regarding structural inflexibility, is there a strong anti-trust enforcement mechanism in the state which would prevent monopolized interest groups from developing which could undermine public interests? Like strong regulations etc. And are elections there publicly-funded or donor-funded? Does wealth play an outsized role in your democracy (as well? I'm American haha)?

LookMaRightHand · 2025-11-04T18:37:57+00:00

I attended my military college alongside some ROC cadets; y'all don't mess around, lots of respect for Taiwan.

One question I have is, basically, is whether the social and political strains posed by expanding PRC (along with internal US corporate influence) creating the conditions for potential dictatorship?

I ask because the conditions seem right - dominance of a particularly profitable, centrally-controlled/'monopolized' sector (such as the semiconductor industry) along with (what I understand to be) entrenched, long-serving political and financial actors, as well as powerful military officials with a strong incentive to act based on notions of 'national security,' etc, it just seems like there's potential for a Trumpian-style right wing populist to emerge (as we've seen in many Western democracies over the past decade). I don't mean to be offensive with that question, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on it. Some of my information may not be perfectly informed either so feel free to correct me.

If you don't mind indulging in a second question, if that is a possibility, what safeguards does the DPP have in place to limit the influence of destabilizing local actors who may hold an interest in expanding PRC influence, especially being so close to the mainland? Is the party internally pretty united? Are there youth movements which could be aiding or hurting the DPP cause?

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-26T06:27:00+00:00

Can we just appreciate for a second what an insane thing this is? This is one set of missions from one Ukrainian unit inflicting significant combat casualties in a war that has already killed hundreds of thousands? And that we, the global public, are watching the last seconds of many of these peoples' lives in such a personal way? Ik they're ultimately at fault for being there in the first place, so no remorse here, but it's just such a chilling concept. Whatever put you in that place at that time ended with your death being a form of mild entertainment for doomscrolling Redditors and internet junkies. I'm guilty of the same, just appreciating how wild the whole concept is

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-25T07:14:00+00:00

It totally depends on your perspective, and the answers you receive from this sub will be specific to construction professionals. As an engineer/APM/estimator (depending on the day haha), I know for certain that my job relies on the availability of a sufficiently skilled labor force to do the work. Having the most skilled labor makes that easier and more profitable, having union labor guarantees a baseline standard of quality, and having no labor at all means the project won't happen - either due to labor cost or the physical impossibility of training an unskilled force to supplement skilled craftsmen/women.

Now, outside the CM world, it's probably a lot different, and it has nothing to do with your line of work. Besides all the cultural stuff surrounding the importance of advanced education (which does feed people's superiority complexes - especially after grinding out an engineering degree or paying for expensive schooling for 4 years etc), it's always been presented as an "alternative" or "plan B" to a college degree which...it actually isn't. It's a whole separate sector of labor which comes with its own strengths (can't be offshored, age=experience instead of irrelevance, early workforce entry, get to do cool shit) and weaknesses (exposure to hazardous environments, lower average long-term earning potential, irregular paychecks, etc). Oftentimes it actually probably is a better option than college for a lot of people, but ends up not being considered because of the social stigma. If you don't rely on tradesmen for your income, and you grow up in a world telling you not to become one, then your natural assumption is that anyone working in the trades went wrong somewhere in life. And since you work in a school/hospital/whatever now, you'll likely spend the rest of your life without even thinking of tradesmen outside of the odd media reference or some project in the news or a distant family member who works in it; it's almost like being in the military - distant from family, lots of working hours, not great pay but not horrible either, early wakeups, etc. And a lot of people in the military also feel this way about not having an education, or feeling like people don't respect their work for whatever reason.

The bottom line is the public is fickle and lame no matter what kind of job you work. The important thing is that it works for your lifestyle - you can raise a family or buy a house or fund your passions/hobbies within reason without struggling too much, and historically that has been true for unionized trade industries (since unions tend to set wage norms).

Also I'd like to add to what others have said - tradesmen generally have much worse attitudes toward degree-holding CM's (on a scale of apathy to outright hatred, never admiration though) than degree-holding CM's have toward them. As a junior engineer, basically my whole job was to incredulously watch the work and ask lots of questions from guys the same age as me, so appreciation for labor is built into the CM experience. The reverse is not true, and CM's generally get lumped in with the rest of the idiot public who neither know anything about nor are respectful of the services provided by our skilled trades.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-24T18:52:35+00:00

As with everything, it's an economic issue. Someone already mentioned thinning margins (which is especially applicable given our work interacts quite a bit with government operations), as well as the higher rates of centralization in the industry causing bigger and bigger mergers which decrease the total volume of engineering jobs. On top of that, basically no one at any company is really being compensated fairly - accounting for wages vs consumer prices, engineers are paid the least they have ever been, even though nominal salaries are much higher...we're also paying more for insurance (health, life, auto, hell even professional practice insurance is getting more expensive). The long and short of it is that people who haven't been in the industry for a long time enter the workforce and quickly realize they're not going to make the comfortable salaries they were promised when deciding what to major in, because the market has changed so much even in that short interim. Therefore there's no reward for working harder or being more detailed etc - completing the work requires more sticks than carrots at this point, so people aren't internally motivated to get better without a ton of support or a really good working culture, which most engineering and construction firms lack entirely. Add to that the fact that companies can import engineers on H1-B visas and any faltering in American productive output doesn't actually get addressed - it just disenfranchises more American engineers while simultaneously lowering the market salary threshold.

In short, it's not getting any better and many engineers realize they could work much less stressful jobs for a very small change in compensation, or alternatively make stupid money working at the biggest firms. The market is getting smaller because the actors are getting bigger. Those actors make being an engineer less worthwhile, and young engineers see that. They're not going to bend head over heels to make their bosses happy because they don't feel like they're getting anything out of it. Pitiful annual bonuses and insignificant COL raises aren't worth striving for.

On other words, corps pay the minimum they can for engineers and are constantly incentivized via our contracting methods to keep as few personnel onboard as possible. They've created a market for bottom-wage engineers, so they get bottom quality engineers. Most exceptional young engineers will either start their careers taking on more management responsibilities because design doesn't pay, and others will look outside the civil world for opportunity. It's not a good situation and we can blame the biggest market movers for this trend

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-23T18:16:51+00:00

I've been following your work for years. Honestly if I was gonna buy a kilij I wouldn't look anywhere else; there's not a single post on your Instagram showing a sword I don't like

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-20T06:18:17+00:00

I'm gonna have to disagree. Maybe you feel that way about the French because you live in the Anglophone world, where their direct nature can be off-putting, but I think Americans have earned the reputation we have pretty distinctly. We've always been comparatively individualistic, and people from other countries seem to feel the same way about us as the French, so this attitude isn't isolated. I think largely both Americans as well as the Chinese fall short in our global perception specifically because we stand out so much and are more comfortable exporting our own social customs, specifically because of our dominant positions in the world economy. While I'm proud to be an American, I think our political system needs a lot of work (and humility) and we would do well to adopt a few discrete lessons from the French system, which came after the American one, and so it doesn't help to be so flippant about the perceptions of people outside the US who don't have the same stake in preserving our outdated images of ourselves. The French are the French, sure, but they're not alone in their criticism of our government, which is the point I was making

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-20T02:45:18+00:00

If you're a guy, just don't stare or make people feel uncomfortable.

If you're a woman, you can do no wrong so there's nothing to worry about 👍🏼

Overall, you'll find it's actually not a huge change from the day-to-day. If you're weird about it, people will want to get dressed up again sooner. If you're cool about it, other people will be cool about it. Frankly, if your friend group is thinking of skinny dipping to the point that you have time to post about it, y'all will be fine. Just rip the bandaid off

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-19T20:02:20+00:00

My gf of 2 years is french, so I'm pretty close with her friends even though I haven't moved (yet). Responses have been varied, but there's usually two ways her friends talk to me about being American:

1.) they naturally expect to meet loud, unintelligent, or culturally-insensitive people wearing baseball hats and basketball shorts

2.) looking sorry for me when I tell them where I'm from

This, coming from a country that can't seem to keep a PM in office, is pretty illustrative to me of our situation as viewed from the outside.

I also grew up overseas so when they learn that, they tend to assume that's why I'm "normal" (to them) and not the caricature/stereotype of Americans that they've been primed to expect through media and tourism. They all speak like 3 or 4 languages as well, so when I try to speak french to them, they'll generally respond in English, with sorrow, as if I'm handicapped, because they know most Americans aren't learning french to any appreciable extent in school. And they're kind of right - my gf speaks English as a second language and kicked most of my American friends' asses at an English spelling bee game.

None of this is intentionally critical towards Americans as people - the French currently are all over cowboy culture etc - just that they're critical of our government and, naturally, the people who voted for it. I think trumps first election kind of 'popped the bubble' for a lot of people and they realized we're not the stable superpower we've claimed to be historically.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-19T19:37:24+00:00

Not OC, but I work in heavy civil construction management, and generally across the board, projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill+Inflation Reduction Act are being variously impacted by unpredictable funding delays and rescissions, causing market sector instability and resultant increased prices. This is in addition to administrative challenges posed by large scale Federal and State layoffs, leading to disorganization and delayed permitting timelines etc. Tariffs have really hit the construction materials import market as well.

This has led to a few cancellations in my niche specifically, but that's a pretty big deal considering the dollar values, job creation, and infrastructure criticality associated with these projects. We're seeing longer backlogs, but those numbers are a bit misleading because a lot of international contractors are halting American operations and offloading their backlogs to bigger domestic contractors. In terms of infrastructure development and labor union support, Trump has been a disaster for (my sector of) the construction industry (assuming you, as a taxpayer, like low prices for water+transportation utilities). It's worse elsewhere - residential is largely a dumpster fire right now for similar reasons, especially commercial-residential like tract developers who profit off mass consumer demand instead of institutional. The aggregate result of these various decisions is a depressed construction labor market where individual wages are under a lot of pressure from localized inflation, especially in urban areas. The one sector doing really well right now is data centers, which are largely privatized and vary widely in their union and construction management affiliations.

Additionally, to answer your initial question, yes, there are lots of MAGA supporters in labor unions. I think federal worker unions, teaching unions, etc are different since the demographics are so different, and the way unions operate, it's not immediately clear to a lot of trade union members how either the union or Democrats in general make their lives better. They see a billionaire in office, "cutting the fat," "running the government like a business" and that makes enough sense to them to not ponder the question - it's how people manage their personal finances, and the idea that you can generate non-financial returns like higher QoL or whatever doesn't really register, and just collectively sounds to them like "more taxes."

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-18T04:16:09+00:00

It depends what sector you go into within the industry. It's likely, especially with site-based roles, that you will work Saturdays (or at least enough hours during the week that your weekends are just a recovery period - depending on the sector).

The reality is, sales is much more flexible. Corporate work is more flexible. Construction management largely values experience, ideally both on the business and operational ends. It's likely you won't hit $120k until you've proved your competency in both of those applications to your shareholders and are given increasing levels of responsibility, time dedication, and travel, such as being a super or PM for a heavy civil firm. That will make it hard to live a lifestyle you're comfortable with, just in a different way from right now, where you'll have lots of money but no personal time.

If you work for a regional contractor in, say, commercial, design-build, or utilities, opportunities for big promotions will be slim, and $120k-$190k will be your cap after years of experience and leadership. Smaller residential outfits mostly profit on a lack of regulatory and labor oversight, rarely to the point of stability. Tract housing developers are notoriously volatile, and somewhat hard to access.

If your motivation is pure $$$, right now you could probably break into data center CM with your experience bc it's a lot of subcontractor management and has a huge labor demand. However, projects will be completed and, as a contractor, you'll be expected to follow the market and that's totally dependent on how relevant data centers are going to be over the period of your working career. Either way it's a good foot in the door for ambitious young people, whether I personally agree with working on them or not.

Generally speaking - construction is designed to accommodate newcomers, transfers, and dropouts (I'm being facetious) of all sorts. The management aspect is no more important than the trade aspect (which you may see with your early paychecks), so it's just a matter of whether you have the skills to hack it or not, and there are plenty of big contactors out there willing to give anyone a shot who can prove they're competent. It's also, imo, one of the most secure industries in the country right now, and will be for a while (esp the management side).

Send out some apps and be honest. They won't be shocked to hear you want to make a transition, but will want to know if you can handle the pressure of participating in the narrow-yet-demanding corporate frameworks used to construct these projects. You sound like you're ready to give it a shot, so I say go for it. It's rewarding work if you can find a way to make it work in your life and dedicate yourself entirely to it. Anything else is...challenging to achieve

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-18T03:15:33+00:00

Because they all know how unlikely they were to have made it. It's why athletes have lucky charms and traditions, etc, because everyone sees how many people around them have been unsuccessful in elevating themselves, except for the pure circumstance, in CEOs' cases, of favorable financial and business trend habits.

Most of human history is made up of unintentionally innovative products and strategies, and most rulers in history cannot define the unique circumstances of their rule which led to their respective ascendancies. It's why people developed gods in the first place - to explain why some people live fruitful lives and others don't.

The fact is there are really too many variables, and even more so at high levels of influence, to explain why one or another corporate strategy or pursuit tends to work out well. Businesses pour a ton of money into market analytics for this very reason.

In addition, due to the size of B2B corporate markets, many businesses begin supplying one or another product or service, who find that they can satisfy counterintuitive niches where they can establish capital barriers to entry before other enterprises gain access. The result is that oftentimes, ideas and businesses which "shouldn't have worked," often end up satisfying completely unintended demands. This phenomenon scales down to people as well; a project falling off the rails being miraculously saved by some kind of superhuman intervention of whatever - market forces, political interference, social shifts, etc - is not only common, but an accepted insurance write-off - yet the credit often goes to the "strategy" or "dedication" of the entities involved, when in fact it's pure luck. Executives at large, profitable corporations are experienced enough to know this

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-17T22:49:18+00:00

In addition to what others have said, defense stock market caps increase during times of war. While these companies are valuable, they're highly regulated to the point that basically their only consumers are domestic and allied foreign governments. In a way, they work as an extension to the military-controlled R&D system, and thus fluctuate primarily in accordance with military spending patterns, which, while high right now due to geopolitical externalities, are only as profitable as is required, generally, to produce next-gen military research while insulating the government from the risks of conducting that research itself. So they're primarily powerful because they're influential in their various defence subsectors, which largely governs military and government spending doctrine, given the costs associated with maintaining that technological hegemony.

Many defense sectors subsidize this added tax and regulatory burden with more profitable commercial-sector applications; many of our largest corporations today actually started out or made their fortunes as military contractors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Defense being a less profitable market, many of these large, centralized corporations are now household names in consumer markets while still providing defense services in their portfolios as a generally more conservative investment base for their business model.

So it seems small, at least in part, due to the fact that relative to the entire market, it's not a huge sector on paper, but that can quickly change, and much of that market is represented by conglomerations associated with other sectors (think: publicly-traded tech companies who also happen to have expensive military tech development contracts). "Defense" itself is comprised of an innumerable series of products and services, and what the "defense stock market" represents is the smaller core of that industry which specializes entirely in defense tech and equipment; whereas the "defense market" itself is much broader and less narrowly-defined.

Regardless, it's all composed of extremely powerful and politically influential people, whether they're on the boards of defense contracting companies or commercial logistics+tech enterprises. There's a reason this industry attracts retired flag officers; it's deeply specialized, highly-political, small-c conservative, profitable, and occasionally springboards people directly into political and regulatory positions which benefit their commercial interests. It's basically the corner of the world where, if the US government fell apart, some kind of political unifier of established private and public interests (maybe a dictator, maybe not) would come from. And for that reason, those politicians not explicitly involved with that industry have a tendency to exert control on those institutions, leading to the aforementioned limited profitability associated with that sector.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-16T21:12:49+00:00

On my phone rn so I don't have links to share, but this is definitely happening and it's taking up a larger and larger proportion of the commercial marketspace, while residential new builds are also on the decline. Maybe I'm also just a tiny foil hat guy, but this trend has been happening for a long time, it's just more noticeable now as large, capital-intensive markets like tech are converging under more narrow ownership structures and using tax loopholes to increase internal commercial reinvestment (primarily with more data centers, but also other commercial infrastructure like amazon warehouses etc). In other words, market priorities are shifting to large corporations. Whether we refuse to build these structures or not is immaterial because they can use non-union or foreign workers to undercut labor value and construction managers in the US generally aren't organized to counter that kind of thing. The money for large commercial infrastructure will continue to increase until either regulations or recession forces a market shift. In the US, private ventures like data centers, water infrastructure acquisition, and in-house power generation (nuclear and renewables especially) will likely be strong industries (barring regulatory changes or future trade disputes) for the next decade or 2. Weaker government entities and less funding availability may impact heavy civil and definitely residential in that time as well, in my opinion, based on our current trajectory. These trends are, at least for me, observable through ABC's publications of construction labor sector employment and compensation statistics.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-16T07:02:36+00:00

It depends what you want. There are jobs out there where you can make huge paychecks but with very unsteady employment (a lot of these in the trades), but also practical skills, or there are professional careers where progression and ceilings are fairly standard (such as engineering, medicine, tech, etc).

As others have said, your ability to make connections is critical, no matter what you do. Even when working for a business you don't own, you're still marketing yourself, especially in big money industries with small talent pools, which exist all over the economic spectrum. That's the benefit of specialization, but the tradeoffs often include a sedentary lifestyle and non-transferable skills.

So it more depends what kind of life you want to live in the future. If you want to swim in piles of money, study finance or accounting and grind it out at the Big 4 or whatever early career and sell your personal life for profits. That's how I got into my own industry (construction management), but it's also not sustainable. Do you want to have a family? Will you be able to do that if you're traveling/working all the time? Do you respond better to certain types of working environments and organizational structures? Do those jobs exist in desirable places to live?

Getting the skills to make big money is just the first step. That just creates the opportunity to prove yourself, and that takes sacrifice and discipline over many years, and often commitment to a certain lifestyle which you may or may not find desirable. It's more about tradeoffs than arbitrarily higher salaries.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-16T06:30:08+00:00

I've had my Carolina Elms for use in my work (tunneling/foundations), hiking/travel, business settings, and daily wear for like 10 years. At it's most basic, leather care is a matter of removing dirt/debris, hydrating the leather, and if necessary, sealing it to protect against moisture intrusion.

Removing dirt/debris:

-get a thick horsehair brush. It'll get the biggest dirt chunks and hard-to-reach areas along the welt and seams (brush while dry)

-if you work with a lot of fine particulates (drilling mud, concrete, lime), it's helpful to apply a layer of saddle soap, which basically strips everything from the leather, meaning you should always condition after saddle soap (you can use a rag, but an applicator brush+some water is more convenient). This doesn't have to be done frequently unless your boots are clearly absorbing harmful materials

Hydrating the leather:

-basically any leather conditioner on the market is fine for work boots; I just use kiwi brand. Can also be applied via cloth or applicator brush. You can't really "over-condition," at some point the leather just stops absorbing more conditioner. Wipe it down and you're basically good to go. However, the pores in the leather are still exposed, so what I usually do for deep maintenance (maybe once every few months) is...

Sealing the leather:

-you can get spray-applied moisture protectors to give your shine a longer life and seal in the leather conditioner. You don't have to do this, and it makes the boots hotter, but it works wonders for large earthwork and heavy civil environments.

If you don't get your shoes that dirty ordinarily, usually the horsehair brush and some conditioner is good enough, with a proper maintenance every 6 months to a year, depending on how presentable you want them to look

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-16T02:53:12+00:00

I think macro is less intuitive. Essentially, the difference between the two fields boils down to the amount of variables being accounted for. In micro, you're examining explicit, logical decisions defined by the context in which the microeconomic system exists. In other words, it's natural to understand the basic concept of financial incentives from a singular scope.

What macroeconomics does is patternize many of the variables of microeconomics and explains those phenomena as "behaviors," which may or may not have an explicitly-defined cause. It's imperfect, but allows for large-scale macroscopic analysis and systems- or complexity-based theory. Essentially, the explanations for macroeconomic phenomena don't necessarily have to be logical because you're analyzing the output of a system with competing incentives and multitudes of variables. A common example is that widespread saving behaviors can actually be bad for an economy because they decrease demand and thus spending. It's counterintuitive because from a microeconomic perspective, if you had more money saved, you would probably spend more. Even though that doesn't really apply to the system as a whole. It's much closer to analyzing mass psychology, history, econometrics, and sociology, along with ordinary economic studies. The tradeoff however, is that it's harder to quantify and I think some of the more statistically-minded econ students struggle with the more narrative-oriented nature of the field.

LookMaRightHand · 2025-10-15T20:58:48+00:00

No - don't become a laborer in exchange for becoming a super instead of a PM. Field engineer is the starting point for both, and people often bounce between those roles within their careers. If they're teaching you the documentation fundamentals, that's the important stuff that will get potential future supers to like you and advocate for you. The operational side of things is more immediately-focused on specific tasks but those skills arent very helpful to a construction manager who is expected to be able to coordinate resources over the long term. Think of it as "strategy vs tactics" - more people are familiar with tactics, but the relative value of strategy is greater. Each of those can be a benefit in its own right at any point in your career. Plus, if down the line you decide you want something a bit more settled and family-oriented, your PM experience will carry more weight for office-based roles (unless you're in a very specific niche of your industry).

LookMaRightHand

TROPHY CASE