get a popcorn popper pan. They are not expensive and well worth it if you like popcorn. You can buy bulk popcorn kernels, choose you oil and salt thus paying for the special pan in weeks - all while getting much better popcorn.
bluGill
To quit driving you need to live in a world where that is possible. Go to all the hearings about transit and speak up - make it clear you care about service not the distractions that so often get money. Trains are useful but don't let an expensive train to nowhere take money from the bus budget - but also don't blow your budget on more buses when you need a metro.
there is no place in the world where transit couldn't be better.
It has long been thought that cheap drones are too easy to counter long term and so they wouldn't last long as major battlefield forces (they will still have much use in minor battlefields). Doesn't help Ukraine though which is in the now not 10 years from now. Only time will tell how drones play out over time.
I've known more than one person who found a completely different career and never went back. You might take a job in Real Estate as one person I know did and discover you like it better and so all that time in school was a waste now that you know you don't want to do that. Or maybe not - you might take that job to make ends meet (as I once had to take a non-tech job) and decide you hate enough that you don't want to go back.
I've been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.
He can only charge what the market will bear. Since he has skills he can do the work fast and make a good living. However he cannot afford to invest in someone new who can't work as fast and thus could not make a good living. If a new guy would work for free for a couple years the new guy would be good and could get a good income - but I don't blame new people for not wanting to work for free and it is likely illegal anyway. Also while there is a good income possible, I wouldn't call it great, and so I'm not sure if it is worth getting into vs other options.
So yeah, he needs to charge more, but he can't because people will just do without masons if they charge more.
Having been around for a few decades now I can tell you that the job market comes and goes. Things have been tight before, and there has been more openings than people to work them many times in the past. I can't tell you when things will turn around, but odds are they will. (this is sadly not helpful if you are one of those currently needing a job)
The plumber wasn't making that much though. That $300/hr includes a lot of buisness costs - someone needs to pay for the fancy van they drive in, the office workers (which is often private equity backed and has a lot of office staff and CEO that you don't care about), advertising, and whatever other costs. Plus the plumber often only has 20 minutes of work in your house, but between jobs taking an unknown amount of time, and drive time to the next job they need to charge for a lot of time that they are not working.
Appendixes have been known medical problems for a long time. You can read books talking about it from the 1800s. One of the few things doctors could treat back then better than doing nothing (back before antibiodics and handwashing doctors were often worse than nothing)
there were many other things that could get you bacv then so overall apendix issues were not the most common causes of death.