Observations and notes - things I'm noting that will turn up in future work, in different ways and means. It helps to write them down.

These aren't presented as any sort of concrete thoughts meant to be important to anyone. They're just things I've seen and wondered about. I.e. half-baked noodlings that I store in the back of my brain, that may or may not be useful down the road, but if so writing the current thoughts will help me pick them back up again later. I hope only that when I reach for them in a story, these ideas are there to be played with.

Maybe. My brain could also just as well regurgitate it here and never use it again.

That said:

The muddy-boots engineering world looks to have a few interesting dynamic changes going on. Get on a plane, ignore the loud talkers who're only interested in getting to the drinks service, and watch and listen for those wearing steel-toed boots and carrying their hard hats. Especially the younger ones, those who look to be maybe on their first big-kid gig, or just a few into it. Notice the differing faces than you might expect, the different origins and, most of all, stories. As compared to last generation's faces and stories.

How's that going to look, ten, twenty, thirty years down the line? What kinds of impacts and stories will be there, how will they look and sound and think when these muddy boots engineers are training and hiring the next round? What kind of projects and where are they located, and what sort of stories are they going to be telling, in steel and pipe and dirt?

Next one:

Hiring for many jobs, out away from population centers, doesn't look like it's constrained by total population, so much as it's constrained by the population who can pass a background check and a piss test on demand. In small towns and low-population regions, that the total available local number who can do both of those things, and are interested in working out of the air-conditioning, is relatively small looks to be having a pretty significant effect on which muddy-boots jobs can be staffed effectively.

The same dynamic exists in the major population centers, broadly extending out past the exurbs, within the hour+ driving range, but the total available population that passes the piss test and the background checks and doesn't mind working outside is larger at least. It's still a constraint, and you can see the effects on staffing nonetheless. The broadening legalization of marijuana appears unlikely to change the piss test portion of the proceedings anytime soon.

Since there's no equivalent of BAC for cannabis/THC that would be broadly immunizing in terms of liability for, say, a pilot who puts a plane full of people into a lake, or a railroad engineer who derails. So, the patchwork of local laws plus unknown and, at current, essentially infinite liability for jobs DOT related (essentially any job not retail or medical or educational or similar areas adjacent, in other words) means that there's going to be a Lost Generation coming that are barred from entire industries.

And this won't be a whiff of froth on the body of the cappuccino Lost Generation (Hemingway etc), either, this looks to be something on the order of 60 percent of the population (who've smoked pot at work, according to the DJ and who knows whether that was a correct reading of whatever he was looking at), assuming the radio station survey I heard this morning is anything like representative. I'm not sure I believe it's that high, pardon the expression, but I could reasonably guess thirty percent at least that would be in trouble if you handed them the plastic cup and pointed them at the bathroom. In certain age groups, a lot higher.

Let's say it's twenty, thirty years down the road, being generous, before all the kinks get worked out and some broadly acceptable liability-assuaging parameters for marijuana use are established. That's an entire set of overlapping generations with precious few forklift operators, truck drivers, pipeline operators, plant operators, pipefitters, welders, etc. in their experience or circle.

Amazon's fulfillment center just up the road from me, I'm told, uses a completely autonomous forklift/warehouse stacking system combination. There are welding robots for big fabrication jobs. I watched a fully assembled pumping station waiting for wire hoisters to clear the road ahead of its haul truck this morning; it's headed to the municipal water station a couple miles over from my house. They'll set it in, run the pipes, and probably have it going through its pre-runs and start-ups in a week at most.

A job that would have been minimum, say, three months in a rush. With an electrician and helper, a pipefitter, couple of helpers, couple of iron workers, half a dozen concrete hands, a welder and helper, hot-shotters for the pumps and parts... Lot of jobs unseen. The slab's already been poured, I'm sure, so the concrete job's still there, the wires have to be run, and they'll need all that crew for "Just in Case", but the city won't have to hire them just for that one job, they'll use their permanent hires and fly them in for the couple weeks needed.

I'm not sure yet that I completely buy the "robots are takin' all our jobz" bit. But I do see a lot of open questions. A lot of stories coming that don't look like what we know now, or what our parents and grandparents knew. I said the municipal water service still needs the pipefitter, the welder, the iron worker. They'll always need them.

However: Next generation, a pipefitter and her helper will also have a couple robots, for grinding and cutting, while the fitters do something closer to what a foreman does now. Next generation's fitter is going to be doing a lot more high-level stuff than this one's; today's journeyman and tomorrow's apprentice are going to share a knowledge base, but they'll have a completely different level of capabilities.

And tomorrow's fitter will need it. If she's doing the work that two or three would have done yesterday, since 60 percent of the population couldn't get the job even if they wanted it.

Right, where's this headed? What sort of stories? In the cyberpunk world, who's beholden to corps and employers more? Those who can get a job broadly? Or those who can only get a certain subset of jobs? And how will a generation that's already begun to work outside of a regular employment (ie. the gig economy compared to the post-war standard) approach this world? How's the hierarchy react when there's a dominant labor pool, both necessary and available, that knows how to tell the suits to fuck right off? But that dominant labor pool is, at the very same time, a shrinking minority of the overall working population?

How does the hierarchy treat the welder who knows she can flip them the bird and go to the competitor, versus the IT worker and the administrative assistant that are effectively locked in? Or, at least, aren't necessarily going to be challenging the engineer or the welder for their job? IT isn't currently subject to this, are they? But at the very same time, the big Tech world is working like hell to make sure that IT in the next generation doesn't require a dedicated, on-site IT staff, they want everyone to be IT tomorrow, i.e. everyone to be comfortable enough with the tech so that a dedicated IT administrator isn't necessary day-to-day...