One of my wisest friends is encouraging her son to skip college and learn a trade. Her thinking: living a sustainable lifestyle means growing your own vegetables and fruits, baking your own bread, and fixing your own pipes. Her hopes and dreams were eerily foreshadowing of the great national kerfuffle over Joe the Plumber. Now everyone's thinking about plumbers. And seriously: learning a trade instead of pouring tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into college (often to get jobs that pay tiny wages; raise your hands publishing assistants, private high school teachers, and social workers!) makes financial sense. Not only are plumbers, electricians, and general contractors recession-proof careers, you're paid while you're training. What could be better?

This week, it seems, everyone's thinking about plumbers:

• Even better than being a plumber? Being a green plumber. You'll make more, and you'll be set to take advantage of the dollars flowing toward services that are eco-conscious. Treehugger calls green plumbing "one of the hottest new jobs in the green economy." Green Plumbers must take a 32-hour class for accreditation.
• The New York Times' Green Inc. blog asks if "Joe the Solar Guy" may not be a better Everyman for the next four years. The newest addition to the well-paid trades?

This week eBay announced it would stop selling ivory products -- even antiques. The idea is to make sure there's less of a viable market for ivory -- and help cut the demand that leads to more elephant killing.

The decision comes just before the International Fund for Animal Welfare issued a report Killing with Keystrokes that shows how illegal trade in animals and animal parts goes on right in the virtual public square -- online auctions.

IFAW looked at 183 publicly available websites in 11 countries for six weeks and turned up
7,111 online auctions for species that shouldn't be traded. The vast majority were for trade in endangered species, specifically elephant ivory, but also included live birds and some other animal products.

An editor of mine used to say that he could tell if someone was new to financial journalism because they would eventually suggest a story on barter as the next big thing. Luckily I'm blogging, not journalizing, now so I can mention Swaptree.com, which wants to be the Ebay or Amazon of people sending each other the junk they don't use anymore.

Swaptree is trying to be a true barter site. There are plenty of barter lite sites out there. There's Tradeaway.com, FrugalReader.com, and others that specialize in music. They mainly use some kind of point system (so it's just another version of currency) or charge per listing. Or both. There is the old fashioned Yankee Swop in Yankee Magazine, but it has the desperate quality of those personal ads looking for someone the writer saw on a train in the rain. You just can't believe the specific right person will read the ad and fulfill the wish. Will the guy who owns "Yankees memorabilia picture" really find an owner of a 1974 Buick LaSabre willing to trade? No, probably not. That's why we have currency.

Swaptree does aim to be a little different. You simply list a bunch of stuff you want and a bunch of stuff you want to get rid of. If any matches up--or even matches in a three-way triangle swap--you'll hear about it. But because there's no point system all your stuff is basically worth one point. You can't swap two cruddy paperbacks for one good hardcover; Swaptree can't handle that. You can only do one-for-one swaps. I put some items on there, but I think I'll still end up just stacking my old books in my building lobby to see if my neighbors want them.

Is it any wonder that the economies of the Asian manufacturing behemoths are beginning to wilt? Should we be surprised by the downwardly revised economic outlook for Japan? Does China's burgeoning inflation rate give us pause to ponder the reasons why? Ha! They're getting what they got coming to them. They asked for it and they have done it to themselves.

Since the 1940's the Asian manufacturing block has built its economies upon the backs of hard working Americans, aided mostly by American corporations seeking out their sustenance hungry work forces which were willing to work for just pennies a day. Now, it's coming back to bite them in the rumps. Cry me a river, won't ya?