Slashdot Mirror
The Nation Is Losing Its Toolbox
Hugh Pickens writes "Louis Uchitelle writes that in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don't want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer, as mastering tools and working with one's hands recede as American cultural values. 'At a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship,' writes Uchitelle. 'Craftsmanship is, if not a birthright, then a vital ingredient of the American self-image as a can-do, inventive, we-can-make-anything people.' Mass layoffs and plant closings have drawn plenty of headlines and public debate over the years, and they still occasionally do. But the damage to skill and craftsmanship — what's needed to build a complex airliner or a tractor, or for a worker to move up from assembler to machinist to supervisor — has gone largely unnoticed. 'In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,' says Michael Hout. 'People who work with their hands are doing things today that we call service jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like.' The damage to American craftsmanship seems to parallel the precipitous slide in manufacturing employment. And manufacturing's shrinking presence helps explain the decline in craftsmanship, if only because many of the nation's assembly line workers were skilled in craft work. 'Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house,' says Richard T. Curtin. 'They know about computers, of course, but they don't know how to build them.'"
I can build a computer !
Of course, Im 38
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Quite an achievement on an article so devoid of content worth commenting on. Hey, Baby-Boomers, if you're so pissed off with how the world's turned out maybe you shouldn't have pulled the ladder up after yourselves?
The Craftsman by Richard Sennet.
How are you going to put your own low-e argon gas between the panes?
A buddy of mine is a contractor, about as handy a man as you'll find, and he damn well does not build his own windows.
in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don't want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer, as mastering tools and working with one's hands recede as American cultural values.
Yes, I've also heard software developers complain that today you can use ExtJS 4 to instantly have a windowing option in your browser and now it's sad because all the UI guys are using something like this. These "prefab architectures" are so terrible because nobody actually writes JavaScript anymore. Well, I know how to put together a window sill, a window frame and put the pane in and everything (even know how to build the headers for load bearing regulations on houses). And I'll tell you right now my implementation of a JavaScript windowing system wouldn't be as slick or universal as ExtJS 4 just like my window would be pretty shitty compared to something prefabbed up. Both would cost my employers more time and money. I would wager that if you were someone that built houses for a living, you would be okay with someone else putting together factory made windows with a low defect rate. Unsurprisingly it saves you a bunch of money just like a lot of software libraries save me time and money.
Yeah, I can make a table. But I need a jointer and a planer and whole bunch of other tools. The barrier to entry is high. Or I can go down to Ikea and find some veneered particle board for comparative pennies. Welcome to capitalism.
'In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,'
Oh, right, your ancestors were the farmers. It was okay for you to move on to something more interesting like building houses and cities instead of devoting every waking moment to growing growing growing. Now we've moved on and it's time to mourn the loss of ... what exactly? Am I supposed to feel ashamed that all four of my grandparents were farmers and none of their 14 children are? Or that my dad was a carpenter and cement pourer and I'm a software developer? It's funny, none of my relatives guilt trip me like this New York Times writer that probably hasn't spent a day of his life working in a factory.
From the NYTimes author's bio:
Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 2002-03 and taught journalism for many years at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Before joining The Times, he worked for The Associated Press as a reporter, an editor and a foreign correspondent in Latin America. He and his wife, Joan Uchitelle, live in Scarsdale, N.Y. They have two grown daughters.
Hey, anybody know of a good factory job near Scarsdale for Mr. Uchitelle? Maybe one of those industrial revolution jobs with industrial revolution pay? Then I think I'll listen to him bitch and moan about how progress is losing our nation's toolbox. Afterwards, take him around to farms at night (you know, the ones where people are working after sundown and before sunup) and let everyone tell him their stories about how they were injured on the job. Every hard working farmer or carpenter has those stories. I still got all my digi
My work here is dung.
Ridiculously uninformed: http://thechive.com/2012/07/09/a-little-redneck-innovation-is-just-what-we-need-30-photos/
sounds like progress, why cut when you can buy precut.
It's getting hard to find anything but pre-pack import junk at Lowes and Home Depot. "Brass" fittings are cheaply plated steel that rusts when you look at it sideways, Kobalt tools are half plastic -- it's like a branch of Wal-Mart. If my local hardware guy doesn't have it, I mail order. The only things I go to Lowes for are immediate needs.
I'm 29 and I can repair things around the house just fine, thank you. I guess this article is talking about people younger than me, but I doubt many of them own houses...
We have plenty of tools in the American toolbox already. I will have to point out, however, that on a personal basis I am unable to use a stud finder, as it does not function properly when I am around it. Weird. Also, my friend has a pipe stretcher and a bucket of prop wash I have yet to see.
It's hard for a craftsman to know if he's violating a patent, environmental law, or something that will make a TSA knuckle-dragger feel is a weapon of mass destruction.
Car manufacturers seem intent on specifically requiring special tools for their cars, and use patents to protect them.
The DMCA, copyright, and patent laws make it neigh illegal to tinker with electronic devices you've bought, because some a$$hole in Holywood bought some corrupt legislators. I mean, discussed how to make America more competitive in a global IP marketplace.
Finally, cheap manufacturing from Asia has lead to a situation where it's cheaper to replace consumer products than to repair them. So how are many people going to learn repair skills on them? It's certainly not a valid career path in the U.S.
Just as people now believe that you can run perpetual Federal deficits, or that all children are above average, or that form is more important than function, or that you can borrow more money to buy a house than you can pay back, there's a growing disdain for people who point out that the emperor has no clothes. Tell people you work on your own car instead of dropping it off at the dealer? Subtle sneer. Drive a used car instead of a new one? Sneer. Study hard and get good grades? You're just a dork, and you're not cool. It's the same anti-science mentality that's been around for years, now broadening to the more practical skills.
It's also the Walmart mentality - why buy something for $100 that lasts forever when you can buy one a Walmart for $9.99 and replace it every six months?
Just as people no longer distinguish between news and entertainment, they can no longer distinguish crap from quality. Our cultural egalitarianism now covers everything - and since values are subjective, who are you to say that 1 person's skills are better than another? They're just different, right?
As a homeowner, the only decent work I've had done at my house has been by older, family-run businesses. Newer, younger contractors inevitably do a horrible job and require constant handholding.
Personally, I'm glad that I'll be dead in 40 years - the way things are going I think soon after that we'll be back living in caves.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The author's myopic view would exclude the myriad makers, Instructables authors, etc. that are every bit the craftsmen he laments about.
The tools of the 21st century are not cutting knives and hacksaws, sorry. Prefab is going to become easier and easier. Never mind slow and expensive Fab @ Home stuff - automated cutting machines and delivery networks will let you acquire custom-designed and -fitted furniture, flooring, etc. etc. as easily as you buy a book from Amazon today; snap your room with your smartphone, click buy flooring, and it's there on Tuesday at 9am for the price you'd pay Home Depot for some low-quality one-size-fits-all rubbish today.
Then people can spend their limited free time on other pursuits, which will again be given up 100 years hence, to the predictable wails of the luddites of the future.
Have you any idea how much work goes into making and designing production robots, computers and 3d printers? You forget about meta craftsmanship / craftswomanship ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
This is yet another in a long line of alarmist articles about the 'loss of' X or Y in our modern technological culture. What is being missed is that this state of affairs is exactly was Capitalism was meant to bring about, a day when we all have much more leisure time because automation and division of labour has made long hours of back-breaking subsistence working obsolete. What we should be asking is not 'how do we go back to hard work with our hands?' but how do we transition to a new model (a post recession model) which acknowledges that there is no viable reason for people to need to be working 40+ hours a week. We can then realise that we can work with our hands, enjoy DIY and reconnect with the land in a way that is about personal growth, community and coexistence, instead of commerce, because commerce takes less and less work to keep running. It's not a hippy dream, or a Socialist agenda, it's actually the victory of the Capitalist model being unable to see it's own success clear enough to embrace it yet.
Sorry, but they do.
Inevitable really. With a large service sector comes services. Services like having a kitchen installed or a carpet laid. I don't see it as a bad thing, if anything it shows a marginal increase in living standards.
As an aside, all these rose tinted submissions are getting silly. Before long it'll be "Slashdot. News for reactionaries, stuff used to be better."
Oh, man, I bet you're right. I bet that the new generation will fuck us completely. I also bet that never, in the history of the species, has an older generation believed that it was better than the youth.
Same with cooking. With so many pre-packaged frozen meals, fresh pre-prepared ready-to-cook meals at the grocery store, vacuum-packed foods, ubiquitous drive-thrus, and universal Take Out Taxi restaurant delivery, cooking is either a lost art or relegated to holidays and "I'm going to cook today" days. The gourmet kitchen has become the SUV room of the house -- a $50k expense useful for that one excursion spent off-roading or the one blizzard of 24".
Division of labor is a double-edged sword. More cynically, one might say it is seductive, tempting the populace into comfort in exchange for reduction of self-sufficiency, independence, resilience, and sustainability.
You need money to buy tools, and money to pay for a place to store them. You need a place to do your work, which also may cost money, and the time to do the work, and I have little enough time as it is. On top of all of this, if you do pay all of this so you can do your big project, will you use those tools again? When's the next time my DIY project needs the big table saw?
My father had the storage space, the place to work, the tools (some inherited, some bought, a few made). He did work for his family, friends, neighbors, community. I'd have loved to do that kind of work. But he lived in a different world, practically- My family are few now and scattered far and wide. My friends just buy whatever from IKEA. I don't even speak the same language as most of my neighbors. The community has rules about only hiring professionals.
I really miss it...
Robots
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I've been wondering what we'll eat, where we'll live, and what we'll drive in 20 years. Who will will be the farmers, builders, and mechanics? It seems the only people who have skills in the physical world are over 40! And the competent ones tend to be closer to 60. The 20 and below set don't seem interested in anything but pixels. The old folks deserve it though -- they've been complicit in this trend. Regulating and licensing craft work to extinction and over-caution for the young makes access to the physical world challenging while access to the "safe" virtual world is all too easy.
For those not familiar w/ these sites:
www.etsy.com --- marketplace for (mostly) handmade goods
www.inventables.com --- convenient laser-cutting, CNC milling and 3D printing
www.shapeoko.com --- the least expensive, reasonably capable hobbyist mill thus far
Lots of interest in ``Neanderthal'' (mostly non-power-tool) woodworking as well.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I had a conversation with my step-father a few months ago (he's 71) when he was talking about how when he was a teenager and young adult he used to tinker with his cars all the time, trying to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Now, of course, he never opens his car's hood. "Do you miss it?" I asked him. "Of course not," he said. "Those cars were garbage. They lasted half as long as the new models, and the reason we were always tinkering with them is that stuff went wrong with them so often that you couldn't afford to take it to the mechanic for every little thing."
The goal of an economy is cheap, plentiful goods.
If that occurs, then everyone will have more opportunity to pursue what ever hobbies they desire. Including making stuff they could otherwise purchase.
Look at the Maker community.
Also, my hobby is amateur radio. There are a lot of small cottage industry companies making things like morse code keys and HF screwdriver mobile antennas. They are doing some beautiful work.
Here are some examples:
http://www.n3znkeys.com/
http://www.k8ra.com/index_007.htm
http://www.tarheelantennas.com/littletarheel_hp
I'm pretty sure all of these started just building things for themselves. (I know the owner of the antenna company. So, I'm sure there).
I can do it all! OK, not really, but a lot of it.
I have instrumentation, tooling, software, materials, information, creativity. The particular set I have is different from many of my friends, and my skills are a superset of most, but we're far from being at risk of extinction from lack of skills in this country. Things can't be completely assessed from the Home Depot aisles.
For crissakes, the Antikythera Mechanism was made before 400 BC. Go look at that if you want to be humbled by the ancients. Consider that the pyramids were made without decimal positional notation or zero.
We moderns have sufficient skills we need to navigate our present time, and the primary goal is getting from birth to death, prolonging the interval as much as possible. Anything else is just extra.
Personally, I get joy from having knowledge, and my physics smarts let me do things safely that a lot of people can't even do at all, but not everyone needs them.
Don't even ask about my spectrum analyzer or time domain reflectometer. Home Depot my a$$. Amateurs.
no one who has worked on a farm says 'discer'. It's a disc.
It's true. I've been living a lie. Sure, I talk the talk and I might sound like I've worked on farms but it's all a sham. "Why do I do it?" Well, there's something about being able to tell all the Carnegie Mellon, Princeton and MIT graduates I work with that I spent my childhood picking up rocks and throwing bails. I keep a bucket of pig shit behind my house and sometimes I just smear that all over me before I hit the town. But it's all a lie. I'll step into the local bar and the women will take one whiff of that sweet fecal matter and come running to me. "What were you doing today, eldavojohn?" they ask as they swoon around me. "Castratin' pigs," I'll lie. And they will just fall all over each other to touch me. I know, it's all very glamorous but it requires a lot of research to go into detail about making two incisions to get the testicles out on the small male pigs and then wiping them down with antibiotic. Or injecting the blue crap into the female piglets' ovaries. Women just absolutely adore a man who knows his way around ending the reproductive cycle of pigs. Bring up that topic at a fine family dinner and even East Coast grandma is on the edge of her seat.
And the money. My god, the money I've made claiming to have worked on farms. I get $25,000 a night just to make an appearance at places and rub elbows with businessmen, musicians and diplomats. They would trot me out like a one trick pony and all ask me questions -- hanging on my every word. That too, has been all a lie. "Con man" would be a kind label for me now.
But you caught me. I never worked on farms growing up. I only brag about walking up and down scorching black earth, picking up any baseball sized or larger rock and returning it to the flatbed behind the tractor. But I've never done it. Never done it for hundreds of hours every summer between the hours of 5am and 11am daily. Never received $8/hour under the table nor the right to use some of their equipment at my folks' place. The details are there but the colloquialism of "discer" versus "disc" ruined me. I suppose this slip has been a blessing in disguise.
I'm glad you caught me before I cut off one of my own fingers so I could tell people I lost it trying to free up the gears of a frozen motor. All the Slashdot karma that would have gotten me and all the pussy that would have been so easily accessible with only nine fingers would have been great -- but it all would have been a lie.
Thank you, Anonymous Coward. Thank you for helping me help myself and own up to this horrible vile lie that has given me an undue elevated societal status.
My work here is dung.
When technology moves on, the end users learn to use the new tools and new materials, and only experts use the expert's tools to make the tools and materials for the every day man. But the experts do that much more efficiently and at a lower price than the normal people could do before.
There was a time when you could fix your own car, but that car would be so simple that it could only do 100 km/h, had no satnav, no ABS, no fuel injection, no mp3 player, no central locking system, no electrical windows, no indicators when something was wrong. And I spend my time to do something else (like spamming on /.), instead of tinkering on my car.
Nostaligia is a rubbish argument against technological progress.
Your children need to learn how to program a computer and what programming is. If not we will all become a nation of users. A computer is more than an iPad that you can't even change the battery in.
In the end, I feel way more comfortable knowing that I can plant a garden, roof a house, fix a car, assemble a rifle, reload my ammo, tie a hook, weld, solder, machine, and mix cement over trading stocks and coding computers. I have the skills to pass onto my children that will ensure them life's necessities. These skills are invaluable for us to survive.
Sure, other nationalities have no clue how to use a hammer. WAKE UP ! This kind of reporting only serves to perpetuate a misplaced sense of superiority. No good can come from it.
Have you even visited a tech hardware company? They're staffed to the brim with young men working as EEs and MEs designing all kinds of machines, including machines that build other machines.
This queue is a stack! Sure :-//
cb
In this technology age we live in, thing are changing very rapidly. Computer and Machine is merging with Humans, and that means we will have to take on new roles. Unfortunately there isn't enough for 7 Billion people to keep busy doing important work. I imagine large populations will be living like cattle, with nothing to do.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
We walked 10 miles to school, uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot. People today are so soft.
It's more like, why buy something that lasts forever for $100 that I'll use maybe 10 times over 2 or 3 sessions when I can buy a $9.99 one when I need it which might last until the second time, or not. Then I can save 80 or 90 bucks. And in the event the $100 lasts until I die, my kids will likely already have that particular item or even worse, they won't know what the hell it is or why I'm still carting the damn thing around with me 20 years later.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Thanks to our school system here in Québec the only thing they try to learn kids are 3 things, french, math and english language... that's it. Nothing else. I was lucky enough to have more diversity in my education as geometry, some class in lessons on how to work with a budget and everything about economics. I also had some class on making wood and metal objects and how to work with various tools around a workshop. Sorry, those names were in french but the description should be clear enough. Today, all they have is 3 major class and some credits on the side but that's it.
Lamenting the decline of Do-it-Yourselfers (DIY) is about on-par with lamenting the decline of horse-drawn plows, and saying it is some sort of American cultural underpinning is idiotic. Do you really think folks in the "roaring '20s" were all interested in working with their hands? Hell no, they were getting suddenly rich off the stock market boom, and bootlegging, and expected it would always be that way.
DIY was basically invented during the great depression. Man-hours were nearly free, so it made all the sense in the world to spend hours fixing your existing items, rather than calling in an expert, or buying a replacement. It went as far as folks partially or almost completely building their own houses. With the 2008 recession, there's been an upswing in DIY as well, but it'll just continue to decline as things get better.
These days, going nuts with DIY is insanity. If my $20 weed-wacker breaks, it will be replaced, as it's not worth the effort to fix it. The same is true for just about all electronics these days... it's only worth fixing if you know some school kid who can solder, and whose time is basically free.
People still need some mechanical know-how, or at least have someone in the family who does... Being able to fix simple issues with your own car (battery, alternator, power window motors, etc) is still profitable and convenient, as well as issues with your home and appliances (those $10 thermocouples go out every few years). But with car manufacturers having 10-year warranties that REQUIRE all maintenance and repairs be done by professionals, anyhow, and more and more people RENTING their homes, which have their own maintenance people, there are ever-fewer places where DIY knowledge is useful, nevermind necessary.
And I say all of this as a very capable handyman, who buys and fixes-up old houses, and maintains classic old cars...
Imagine he was, instead, saying that every American should be able to replace the bad capacitors on their PC's motherboard, and tell me if you'd agree... It's a nice skill if you've got it, but not a very profitable one, and happens to be increasingly impractical as prices fall.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm glad that I'll be dead in 40 years
- it's this type of mentality. You son of a bitch, you are supposed to live forever, your country depends on your ability to pay taxes, taxes is where all the action is at, how dare you?
You can't handle the truth.
My father could fix almost everything. No repairman ever came to my house when I was a child. I didn't even know there were such things as plumbers and electricians. He fixed TVs, washing machines and the family car. He built furniture, painted the house, fixed the plumbing and even cut our hair! He could run a lathe as easily as he could work an oscilloscope. Of course, having all these skills meant he never made much money. He insisted that we get educated so we wouldn't end up doing manual labor. So my brothers and I ended up with some skills and enough education to avoid digging ditches. Our children and grandchildren? Forget it! Some of them would have trouble changing a light bulb, but they have cell phones so they are "tech savvy". They have lost the ability to use tools and also lost the ability to earn enough money to pay for professional repairmen. Devo was right!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I own a house that was originally constructed in 1942. I purchased it from the estate of the original owner in 2004. Every single thing I have tried to do in the house has been thwarted by the previous owner's amateur attempts at home improvement. Electrical (four electrical boxes, knob & tube wiring under the attic insulation), carpentry (crooked doors, cheep 70's aluminum frame windows, bathroom floor supported by rusty screws and good intentions), plumbing (copper tubing to the attic furnace, automotive radiator hose for the u-bend on the tub drain). Every single thing has taken twice as long and cost almost twice as much as needed due to poor craftsmanship, kludges, and stubborn refusal to follow code or even basic principles of home construction.
Seriously. I wish he had just hired a professional.
-
This is progress. An individual human only has so much time to learn and gain experience. You can't be an expert in everything these days. Back when you lived off the land everyone pretty much knew how to hunt, gather, farm, build a shelter, fire, ect. You spent so much time doing all these things you didn't have much time to improve.
Economic specialization allows for people to become experts in what they do if other people value it. As a mechanical engineer I could design my own screws and threads for each application but I instead buy a standard drill, tap, and screws. Someone else has spent their lives figuring out how to make these things cheap and readily available so I can get on with my job.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
All it will take is the rest of the world to stop giving you charity, all this debt, that you are able to accumulate right now, you can't repay it.
So here is the path you are on: eventually the charity stops and you can't buy things that other people make with dollars anymore, you have to start producing something again. USA will be a net energy and raw material and food exporter at that point, but exporting raw materials, energy and food doesn't take 300,000,000 people, it takes a fraction, maybe under 10% of all people, maybe under 5%.
So there will be a huge number of people looking to do something on their own, but they won't be able to buy new stuff. Instead USA will also be selling its used to stuff to other people, who can afford it at that point, so USA will become a huge garage sale.
However this also means that there will be some revitalisation of "Toolbox" skills, you won't throw out that pair of shoes or pants, you'll fix it or you'll ask somebody to fix it. You won't throw away that TV, you'll be looking for ways to fix it, etc.etc.
It'll come back, of-course the standard of living will be much lower, but what are you going to do?
When I first saw Germany a few years back, I was struck at how poor the people are, much poorer than in USA and Canada it seemed. Well the reason for it is that they never actually lived on credit, instead they were the ones producing, and since the Euro steals their purchasing power, they were producing and then selling to all those who DID BORROW, like Greece, Spain, Italy, France, etc.
So borrowing and buying other people's productivity IS GREAT! It gives you a huge advantage, incredible quality of life, plenty of leisure and products that you didn't work for.
But the problem is, once the Germans stop subsidising the Europe (they'll stop eventually), once China and Japan stop subsidising USA.... what are the debtors going to do?
No real money, no productivity. What to do? They'll find ways to export what they can - give back their consumer goods at garage sales, to the people who produce and who will have higher purchasing power once their gov't stops stealing it from them, sell their raw materials and energy and food they produce.
Become tourist destinations that are only affordable to the productive, while the rest the people in the country can't afford to stay in those hotels, resorts, etc.
The toolbox will be rebuilt, it's not a great thing by the way, it means there will be no choice.
You can't handle the truth.
"And there shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, and there will be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base, that has an attachmentâ¦at this time, a friend shall lose his friendsâ(TM)s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before around eight oâ(TM)clock... "
I don't have hobbies; hobbies cost money. Interests are quite free. - George Carlin.
I truely beleive the person who has the equipment either has a job in that field so they have the equipment for the job. The homemoaner (yes moaner) doesnt' have the tools so things that are premade make it more affordable. You know how much space all that equipment would take to really be fully equiped so you can do what ever job you need to have done? And the cost. I have a brother in law who went to school to be a mechanic. He had to buy all his tools and when he graduated he had most of what was needed to be a mechanic. It cost him over three grand.
Although I'm a comptuer programmer and have many more thousands in equipment for software and comptuer hardware which is my job and hobbie. My house is an interest of mine that only need things fixed everyonce in a while and when I want to "upgrade" I'll pay someone who has all the equipment already or if it's something small that will not kill me or my family I'll figure out how to do it myself and only buy the lowest and cheapest tools since I will only need them once or twice.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Oh you crazy kids...
We weren't pulling the ladder up after ourselves, we were incentivizing you to inherit your own damn ladder, just like we did!
Specialization benefits all of us.
Adam Smith explained it in Wealth of Nations.
The making of pins is (was) about 18 steps.
In a factory, 10 specialized employees can perform these 18 steps to make 48000 pins/day or 4800 pins/day/man, far in excess of the perhaps 200 pins/day possible to a single employee performing all stages.
Yes, this means necessarily that the 'straightener' eventually forgets how to do the other tasks, and yes, if the whole system collapses, the straightener is going to have to either learn how to do the other 17 steps or die for want of pins.
But in fact the utility gained over his lifetime of specialization is CLEARLY in excess of the marginal chance that the whole system collapses, and the extra work/risk at that point.
We benefit so broadly, generally, and regularly from specialization, that the individual cost/risk of NOT having those skills is infinitesimal.
While I agree with the OP and bemoan the loss of basic skills, I suspect that part of this comes from my youth during the Cold War - we always 'kept in mind' the consequence of trying not to be totally reliant on our civilization, as sometimes we might not be able to rely on it. Partly, I've learned to let this go. For years, I resisted a kindle, mainly because I didn't want to own books that would vanish when the battery died. Then it occurred to me - if I'm somehow UNABLE to get electricity for the month or more it would take my kindle to die...I'm so severely fucked, I don't really care about losing some novels. (Even writing that feels like some sort of confession...).
Personally, I LIKE knowing how to "do things". But I recognize that without practice, I truly suck in practical terms. Having the knowledge generally is the best I can 'afford' time- or resource-wise.
This doesn't mean that we should accept COMPLETELY losing our skills, but honestly, I can't get terribly worked up that I don't know how to perform some basic construction skills. If we're so screwed that I can't either a) buy a prefab, or b) find someone that can, well, we're in a rough situation and I'm not going to be TOO concerned about that windowframe, not so concerned I won't just board it over.
-Styopa
Feminism has something to do with it, but for completely different reasons.
Before feminism, men were expected to be masculine and spend all of their free time doing manual things. If you were a man and had no desire to do manual things, you were bullied, ostracized, and abused until you did them and pretended to enjoy them. Feminism has taught us that masculinity isn't the ultimate ideal, that a man doesn't have to be masculine in order to accepted. Nowadays, men who have no desire to do manual things simply do other things instead with no stigma.
As a genetic male who has no inclination towards being masculine or doing masculine things, I am most thankful that I live in a society where masculinity is no longer worshipped.
is expected to be handy with tools, some of them powered? Are you kidding? I see mow and blow crews doing yards in even lower class neighborhoods now. Do they still even teach woodshop in schools? Hasn't it been replaced by intro to Mandarin so that little Johnny will be able to understand the menu at the Chinese restaurant when he's 30? Plain and simple, 99% of Americans under the age of 60 don't want to do it them self.
I still do a ton of my own work, but some of it I get in too deep with. My car is currently sitting at the shop because I got pissed off and took an angle grinder to the bolts of my cat-back (when replacing the downpipe) before realizing that they were permanently welded in studs. Plus I also broke one of the exhaust hangers. Plus, all the tools I bought basically negated any savings I would've had over taking it to the shop in the first place.
Wow, this is such a complex topic, with so much to be said about it.
First off, from one of the links given: "All this adds up to an economy that generates just as much income, but with profits flowing into far fewer pockets than they did in the previous century". Yup, that right there is your disappearing middle class and your wealth-bloated '1%'. It seems that perhaps all of those people who fought, and are still fighting, the globalization movement, were right when they said that it would destroy jobs and lives in their own country. And yes, globalization was inevitable. But a lot of people in high-tech, (many of them Slashdotters), heaped laughter and scorn upon the 'deluded' 'reactionary' anti-globalization movement. If they had instead taken time to listen to the concerns and think about the problem, we might be in a better place today. And no, communism doesn't work, but it's easy to see why people are attracted to it. When the general population is either broke and unemployed, or working two jobs or more to maintain a lifestyle that's barely above subsistence, resentment of the 'fat cats' who have so much more and do so much less work to get it is inevitable.
Second, and again from the same link: "Katz argues that this will be crucial for those with only high school educations, who will need to learn a “high touch” trade—like personal trainers, kitchen designers, and home health aides—where personal interaction is critical." My apologies in advance to people working in those fields, but I was irresistably reminded of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Golgafrincham hairdressers, phone sanitizers, ad execs etc. Is North America destined to becom a continent of middle men?
Third, if we costed our manufacturing according to sound economic principles instead of the voodoo economics we currently practise, most of this stuff wouldn't be nearly so big a problem. We are stealing from future generations - not even borrowing, (because that would require a re-payment plan and the means to pay it back), but outright stealing. We exhaust the earth's resources by pulling raw materials out of the ground, yet with those materials we manufacture goods that fail, or are otherwise disposed of, in 6 months or a year instead of after a decade or several. Re-cycling these discarded items is inefficient and energy intensive, and causes further pollution and contributes to climate change. Sure, this makes more 'profit' for shareholders, if we ignore the fact that we're impoverishing future generations, and literally making it impossible for large numbers of them to merely survive, never mind thrive. If we were being appropriately responsible to the generations that will come after us, we would make goods locally to be consumed locally, (because the total energy consumption of that is so much smaller), and we would make them to last, because that would leave behind that much more for our children, grand-children, etc.
Fourth, from a purely immediate survival standpoint, how much sense does it make to export critical skills to other jurisdictions? That leaves us utterly vulnerable to the whims and possible enmities of other countries and cultures. America is serious about securing uninterrupted and uninterruptable access to oil and gas, but what good does that do if America doesn't have the vehicles, industry, and infrastructure to make use of that oil and gas?
We're screwing ourselves, and the '1%' are fiddling while we all burn.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Where's that toolbox?
I am quite sure I left here just by the border and...
F**k it!
Damn you Mexico!
I have a friend who is rebuilding his house almost fully by himself. He had some help and on a few occasions had someone else do something he could not figure out himself or just was not able to do on his own (like tile work or working in the small crawl spaces of his attic attic) but other then that he has been DIY for several rooms of his house and done it all very well.
I blame Feminism
Then you're a nutcase.
Income has gone up, time has gone down and things have got cheaper. There's less need to fiddle with stuff, so now, only people who want to do it.
Of course since income has gone up and things have got cheaper, the stuff available to people who like tinkering is astonishingly good.
Trying to blame that on sexism almost certainly means you're a mysigonistic loser. You probably hate women because you can't get a relationship. And that's all down to your defective personality.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Find a different example. You can run perpetual Federal deficits when you print your own currency.
Much as I can't stand the guy, I agree with Dick Cheney that deficits just don't matter that much in a global economy with sovereign coin and international trade.
My guess is that in the next decade we'll see a global debt write-down and sort of a worldwide Chapter 11. Then it'll start again.
Watch how quickly the panicked talk of Federal deficit goes away if the White House changes parties. The debt won't go away, but it won't be such a big problem suddenly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem is that raw materials are seriously expensive. The tools to build things are also ridiculously expensive. Hell a half decent cordless drill is $189. Blame the dollar or canada.. Don't blame the kids though. Building things is a hobby. Being handy around the house requires you to practice to some degree with building things. It's an expensive hobby though that requires some amount of space to do. For people who don't have the time/space/ or interest in a hobby like this it makes a ton more sense to just pay a guy who knows what he's doing to buy the materials and do the job right the first time. It also helps the economy because if everyone did all their own building and handy work there would be a lot of people with skills that were not worth anything. Of all the problems in America this is probably the least of all to worry about.
Uhm. What?
Wasn't one of the benefits of assembly line technology the fact that you could get away with using unskilled or lesser-skilled employees? Precisely because they didn't NEED to know how to assemble the entire product themselves. They just needed to know one or two steps of the whole process.
Don't you just LOVE revisionism?
Now, I'd LOVE to be able to build my own furniture. But, am I going to invest the thousands of dollars for said equipment?
No.
Mainly because I live in an apartment and don't have the space or necessary power available to me to support something like that.
Plus, my neighbors would bitch up a storm if I ran something like a table saw in the evenings.
Moreover, I wouldn't use it enough to make the investment worthwhile.
I own a drill motor and a circular saw currently. The drill sees use every couple months. The circular saw was used once, about 10 years ago, shortly after it was bought. It hasn't been touched since.
So I'm what? Going to go out and get myself a table planer? A drill press? A bandsaw? And start putting tables and chairs together?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Personally, I'm glad that I'll be dead in 40 years - the way things are going I think soon after that we'll be back living in caves.
Hurry up and die then you boring old fart.
...... although if you care to look around on your way out, you might see lots of kids working hard 'n' learning practical skills.
- it's this type of mentality. You son of a bitch, you are supposed to live forever, your country depends on your ability to pay taxes, taxes is where all the action is at, how dare you?
Nah, his mentality is the right one. It's the one the government uses: most of the politicians in government will be dead in 40 years, so they'll squeeze as much as they can today, making the most profit for themselves.
Same thing with private businesses. The CEOs will be dead in 40 years, so to hell with investing and creating new businesses, to hell with making things the market wants, and to hell with improving the economy.
And even every day people think like this. Ask people what would they do if they won the lottery (of a very large amount). Ask them if they'll keep working like Steve Jobs did. Most wouldn't. They'll buy that car/yacht/mansion of their dreams. They'll go on vacation. The last thing they'll think of is continuing to produce and be happy little gears that keep capitalism working.
Take this trend back to where it starts... kids.
The area hobby shop went out of business a few months back. Now we're just left with the "hobby aisle" of a few stores. Typically that amounts to some crafts, small plastic model cars and/or airplanes, maybe some Estes rockets, etc. Heaven help you if you want powered model cars or airplanes, etc. When was the last time you saw a Chemistry Set? (Aside for any possible poison danger, when did you last see promotion of the mindset needed for a chemistry set?)
Yes, there are resources online, but there's nothing like a kid in a hobby shop. These are the kids who grow up and build the "Losing Its Toolbox" culture.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Additionally, this doesn't take into account that some people just should NOT be trusted with power tools.
My uncle for instance. Took a thumb off in his table saw.
Needless to say, my father and I completed his home remodeling for him.
And he took the other off a few years later in a minivan door.
Or another uncle, who took HIS thumb off in a hedge trimmer.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think the best way to combat the loss of craftsmanship and sustainability is to encourage urban homesteading. We as a society need to encourage people to nurture the land around them, to plant gardens to feed their families and the nature in their ecosystems, to build workshops to make crafts and maintain their dwellings, and to share this knowledge with their children and neighbors to keep a pool of sustainable knowledge alive. I am a programmer and maintainer of a data center by day, but I am heirloom gardener, plant and wildlife biodiversity advocate, and workshop tinkerer the rest of the time. I share those passions with the people I connect with in the hope that they will take those seeds of healthy living and spread them to other communities.
Erm.. how long has it been since you went to school? Or is that hearsay?
I've been through the public education in Quebec about 10 years ago, and had the same classes as you. Of course you also forget history, ethics, music/drama/arts, biology, physics, chemistry... I was even lucky and had Spanish. My sister graduated this past summer. Okay, true, now they removed économie familiale and that workshop class I forgot the name of, but overall? It's been mostly the same.
Yes, as time passes and society changes, some skills are lost. Just like we have less artisan woodworkers and metalworkers than a hundred years ago, maybe in a hundred years you will have less people that know how to put a computer together using off-the-shelf parts. Our world and society changes, and while I sometimes find myself in the "back in my days..." camp, saying the newer generation is going to shit is pretty inaccurate, and unfair to them.
Without changes the same can happen to tech.
Cut down on HB1 and outsourcing (cutting off the entry level just leads to people who can't get skills to get started)
We need more hands on training maybe even apprenticeships. CS just techs the theory parts and then people have a big skills gap. It's like having some know about how to build a car at the high level but not knowing how to work on it or how to use the tools needed to do the job.
While my twin daughters were growing up (they are 18 now) the Home Depot used to have hands on craft days on weekends where dads (and moms) could bring their children to build simple wood projects using simple hand tools (mostly hammers, but also sandpaper, glue, and sometimes a handsaw and a non-power hand drill). The projects were prefab trinkets such as bird feeders, garden whill-a-jigs, bookends, etc. My daughters enjoyed the mornings we spent there and got a feel for using simple hand tools. I don't know if the Home Depot is still running these events, but it was a good idea. One of my daughters is now enrolled at BU in the engineering college (she starts this fall) and has already built a radio kit we got from Edmund (cheap kit, we still have to get it working!), I taught her how to use a soldering iron. She also built robot arm from a kit.
...for the first time in his life just to see what aisle numbers he should put in his New York Times op-ed piece.
I bet this douchenozzle fit in just fine in his Saks Fifth Avenue loafers and his $300 skinny jeans from Barney's on Madison.
Perfect example of ritzy intellectual douchebags looking down their noses, preaching to the common man that he should feel bad for ever leaving his cave.
This article is so kitsch, I don't even think he's a hipster. He must be a new and unidentified species. I propose the classification H. douchetelle.
What there is, however, is a criminalization of it. No homeowner can simply mod his own house without having at least one non-trivial license and having some Powers That Be sign off on his work. Good old fashioned neighborhood barn raising has effectively been criminalized by endless building codes, licenses, and procedures that must be followed, and the appropriate bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hfees paid to make everyone happy.
This mountain of bureaucracy is the consequence of several things, but primarily the Industrial Age population boom and the incredible mobility it brought to civilization. Since people can now move with such ease and there is so much more competition for places to live, moving frequently is exactly what we've been doing. The consequence was that with structures no longer remaining in families and instead changing hands between strangers so frequently, there was increased risk of fraud and misrepresentation of the condition of those structures; in response, new laws and building codes and and a legion of bureaucrats to enforce them came into being. Guess who ultimately pays for all this new bureaucracy?
Not only do we have to pay the people who staff this mountainous bureaucracy, we've also lost the ability to simply perform good-faith modifications to our own homes, much less build them. We might sell the home later to a stranger, we might do a poor unsafe job, or we might misrepresent what we did and what state it's in.
We're paying a lot as a society for those few possibilities, aren't we?
Louis Uchitelle needs at attend a Maker Faire -- it was there that I regained hope in the American spirit of ingenuity and the ability to make anything out of anything.
Of course, that ability isn't limited to the USA, the net is littered with stories about African kids in poor villages that manage to make generators out of bike parts or have managed to turn junk into pieces that provide services for their community.
However, the hacker community is the one place where innovation is happening -- too bad the authorities frown on doing things your own way, and that laws are in place to prevent reverse engineering.
If anything, Louis Uchitelle should look to Congress to see where craftmanship is being stifled. Kids can no longer build plastic models because they can't buy glue, they can't whittle because they aren't allowed knives, they can't do anything except sit in front of the TV. It's all been made illegal -- to 'protect' the children.
That's why no one knows how to do anything anymore, because all the valuable skills you learn as a kid are now forbidden due to safety concerns. And then when you grow up, all you're left with is the Home Depot way of doing things.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Means that when/if the time comes, I'll have skills that others won't and therefore I am more valuable. I'm certainly not going to moan for an imago of a society that was never completely true in the first place. And in the meantime I will readily take advantage of crafted items that can be retailed to me for far less than I could obtain the parts for wholesale. (Except when I'm doing projects I like for the sake of doing them.)
Do we also mourn that the ability to skin dinosaurs for meat is a dead art?
A few years ago I replaced all glass (windows, sliding glass doors, etc.) with triple pane, argon filled, and they also have a UV film on them. The difference (after also adding 18"+ of attic insulation) is unbelievable.
Like so many of you, I'm an IT geek, had my first computer when I was 4 .. but my dad also let me hang around while he fiddled in the garage (he was an engineer) and I developed the confidence (no so much the skills, per se) to tackle pretty much anything.
.. and guess what? .. it isn't that hard. The city inspector was baffled that it was DIY and I had all the licenses. It probably cost me a little less than paying someone to just come do it, but in the end, now I know how to do it again, and I have the tools .. so the couple weeks of "vacation" from work was worth it. How did I learn how to do that? .. Youtube, mostly.
.. don't be afraid to get dirty.
Sure, there were plenty of times I got in over my head, like when I tried to rebuild a transmission at 15 and had to take buckets of parts to a mechanic because I couldn't get it back together. I did do that successfully again a few years later, having learned from my mistakes.
As for "skilled trades", my most recent one is I installed a complete HVAC system, including all the sheet metal work to fabricate my own ductwork. Now I've never oxy/ace brazed before, but I studied for the EPA test and got my license to handle refrigerant (easy), bought a torch kit and regulators as well as vacuum pumps and gauges, practiced a bit
Really
The main problem with that mentality is that you're not thinking long-term. It's the same mentality that is being applied to all aspects of things- including your job.
If you're concerned about still carting the thing around sell/barter it to deal with it if you don't want it anymore. We've enough cheap crap choking the landfills from the disposible culture you're promulgating with this mentality you're defending. Much of that cheap Chinese stuff doesn't really do a good job for it's intended purpose and you end up throwing it away.
On a personal rant. I'm currently renting an apartment. Not too expensive, but not lower class either. In any case, I'm paying through the nose for a lifestyle I choose. Well, my recessed cabinet microwave finally died. It took the complex close to a month to order a new one and install it. When I came home after work to welcome the new installed unit, I noticed what a shit installation job it was. Part of the wooden frame looked to have been pulled apart with the claw of a hammer. Broken bits of wood all around the moulding. The support base wasn't mounted properly too. Apparently the clearance issue could have been solved if these "handymen" just removed the rubber feet at the bottom of the new microwave. It's so obvious it was a dual purpose design. How they couldn't figure it out is beyond me. But then again, the did manage to fuck up the wood pretty well. Go figure.
I'd fix it myself, but I keep reminding myself that it's not my home.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm guessing the article draws a connection between manufacturing and craftsmanship? Well I don't think it's that valid, one, I like most do work around the house. I've learned wood working and metal working on my own because as an EE who works with electronics, I can handle the other stuff. No we are not loosing our 'toolbox' it's still there at home.
I am a 23 year old software engineer. My mentor is a 73 year old software engineer. Aside from him being a far superior software engineer than me, do you know what the main difference between the two of us is? 50 years of experience. It takes decades to become a true master of anything (and screw Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours is way too conservative). Young people go where the jobs are. Who wants to go into the auto industry right now? If I could make 100k as a mechanic, then I would be one. Until then, I am perfectly fine working with pixels (which happen to have significant real world impact. Not all of us make iphone games for a living).
Printing money is side-band form of taxation. That's because it's devaluing our savings all while giving the government the power of first spending rights; and often not wisely. It's been said that we are now in a 12% year of inflation because of it. Nice! (not).
Life is not for the lazy.
In another 25 years, most manufacturing is some variation of 2d printing, using software. Both mass production and craftsmen will find themselves using very similar tools.
Now get off my virtual lawn!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I ordered some special-order sliding patio doors at Home Depot recently, and I'm paying to have them installed (next week). I've worked on over two dozen Habitat for Humanity house building projects, I helped when my parents added on to their house when I was a teen, and I have a good supply of my own tools (some of them handed down from my grandfather, who was a contractor). Why am I paying someone else?
As for complaining about self-stick flooring or pre-hung windows, WTF? Does this guy make his own plywood too? Guess what; builders have been using such materials for many years. It is quicker and easier, and in many cases allows for a nicer finished product (because a factory can generate a pre-finished piece that is nicer than even most professionals could fabricate on-site).
IT is becoming a reality.
I showed a guy once how to make a bow lathe from garbage at a camp site, and used a nail as a cutting tool and turned a stick into a pretty looking dowel/pen handle. He looked at me as if I was a magician. This is utterly basic stuff, like boy-scout 13 year old level.
I'm just glad that people are getting dumber, it means I'll be living the easy life picking up the resources of the dead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't find much need for home farriery and blacksmithing, nor for making and repairing saddles and harnesses, all skilled crafts, but I use the products. I did fix my own car in the past, but I don't do that now: others do it better. As the fraction of the population needed to perform a skill declines, of course fewer people will be able to do it. That's not inherently bad. Sure, there's a lot fewer machinists out there now than there used to be in pre-CNC days, and it is a problem that there's not a path from entry level (sweeping up turnings) to master through intermediate skills. BUT, it's not like the basic machining skills and knowledge of material properties is *lost*.. it's just known by fewer people.
I'm sure that in 1900, there were a lot more people who knew the ins and outs of shoeing horses than there are now. But there weren't many who knew how to change a tire on a car. 100 years from now, I would expect that "tire changing" will be like horse shoeing (or running a coal fired steam engine). There will be people who do it, but it's not "mass knowledge"
The mass knowledge in 2050 or 2100 will be something else. Something we cannot actually conceive of today, any more than the electrician of 1910 would anticipate fixing a computer or microwave oven of today.
Well, first thing is I do try to keep things regardless of how much I paid for it. So that $9.99 thingie will likely just sit in a drawer or in a box for years. Heck, I'll likely just buy a second one because I can't find the first one until I move and am going through the boxes in the basement.
Leading to that, if I keep it all, I'll just need a bigger house or a storage place for all the gear (or I'll be on 'hoarders'). So what's the cost difference between having a bigger house (and bigger bills over the long term) over pitching the cheap item?
And sure, I can get it from a yard sale or craigslist for $50 and maybe sell it for $50, but it's still $30 or so more expensive than if I just bought the cheap item that worked for what I needed at the time and I don't have to go through the process of locating one on craigslist and then selling it later. Time isn't cheap either.
Which is not to say I do that for everything. I'd be hard pressed to think of a "cheap" thing I bought from Wal*Mart (or other cheap place). It's been a while since I needed to save a few bucks on something and I'm just as likely to get it from Goodwill or something than buy it new or make it myself. Most of the cheap Wal*Mart stuff I get are consumables. Heck, I even buy and use bar soap vs the body wash stuff just because a bar of soap will last 4 or 5 times longer than a bottle of Suave body wash.
Heck, what would you get that's cheap at Wal*Mart vs a more expensive item? Bookcases maybe? Perhaps I'm not your target audience here.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'm hoping for gas price shocks high enough to halt importation for a while.. or perhaps China could start invading neighboring countries. Talk about excitement!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Just as people now believe that you can run perpetual Federal deficits, or that all children are above average, or that form is more important than function, or that you can borrow more money to buy a house than you can pay back, there's a growing disdain for people who point out that the emperor has no clothes. Tell people you work on your own car instead of dropping it off at the dealer? Subtle sneer. Drive a used car instead of a new one? Sneer. Study hard and get good grades? You're just a dork, and you're not cool. It's the same anti-science mentality that's been around for years, now broadening to the more practical skills.
It's also the Walmart mentality - why buy something for $100 that lasts forever when you can buy one a Walmart for $9.99 and replace it every six months?
Just as people no longer distinguish between news and entertainment, they can no longer distinguish crap from quality. Our cultural egalitarianism now covers everything - and since values are subjective, who are you to say that 1 person's skills are better than another? They're just different, right?
As a homeowner, the only decent work I've had done at my house has been by older, family-run businesses. Newer, younger contractors inevitably do a horrible job and require constant handholding.
Personally, I'm glad that I'll be dead in 40 years - the way things are going I think soon after that we'll be back living in caves.
I work in the metal fabrication industry for a business that has been around for 102 years now. In the 30's and 40's our shop had over 300 employees. Now we have 15 and have had around that number since 1977. I agree to an extent that it's the perception that is part of the problem with working in this industry. I tell people I do welding, machining, and forming and I get looks as if 'why?'. The truth is I'd rather work with my hands on metal than sit in front of this computer all day. I know enough about computers to work on them as a job, but I don't see the point in it. It's not something I want to do when I get off work. Therefore it's not something I truly enjoy. Fabricating drawings at work simply gives me ideas on things I can do outside of work. I've made car parts, motorcycle parts, brackets, computer cases, electrical boxes, ovens, counter-tops, back-splashs, porches, mailboxes, etc etc etc. I use what I do outside of work and personally I feel that is what a job is great for. Using what you know to make a living but also to help yourself out when needed. It's one reason I don't understand working with computers or even working in a factory assembly line. I don't understand how it's enjoyable or why you would want to do it.
Lowes and Home Depot have their purposes, such as working on a house, but when it comes to any type of industrial work no one goes to Lowes or Home Depot. Those retail shops are great for tools, but not for any sort of raw materials or hardware of any sort. Also, as much as people hate to believe it, you can find hardware much cheaper at your local handyman shops than you ever could at a Wal-Mart or Home Depot store. If you try to buy raw metals at these stores you're paying almost a 300% markup in price over what a local fabricator can get the material for.
As I said before, I think a large part of it is perception of these jobs. I think the bigger issue is the older generation failing to teach the younger generations. Most new employees we've had cannot even read a tape measure. They don't know what a thirty-second is. That is not the failings of the younger generation but the older generations thinking their kids do not need to know these skills. After a few years working here we have some employee's that are incredibly skilled welders and do a much better job than some of the guys who have been here for 40+ years. I do not think that age is the issue when it comes to 'horrible work', I think it's the lack of education on what was once 'common knowledge' that these kids are receiving.
DIY is about creativity, reading.and knowing your limits. Certainly if you have never used a saw or anything that can cause injury then you probably shouldn't use it, but I think that people should understand the basic principles of mechanics, electricity, plumbing, and carpentry. I have a welder, numerous tools (power / hand) and have done extensive home and car improvements / repairs. My time is not free, but then again neither is $$$. I would rather learn something new that is within my limits and use my time to explore and do than to spend money that I can use for something else that is outside of my limits...like a new motherboard.
It's been said that we are now in a 12% year of inflation because of it.
It's been said, and often by people who ought to know better. Of course, arguing with them usually goes about like this...
Q: What prices specifically have gone up 330% since 2002, grandpa?
A: Blrgh, grumble, Obama, socialism, deficits, buy gold now.
0 1 - just my two bits
If you're that upset now, you might want to consider dying a bit sooner than 40 years. I would hate to see how much more cynicism will contort your once innocent, nigh human face. /sarcasm
Seriously, I thought it was only me who felt this way. I've got about 40 years left myself, and will likely be only too happy to go when my times comes - where we're all going... nothing good down that way.
Sometimes, IKEA is weak in ways that are not obvious unless you have some experience with tinkering.
When I bought a (rather simple) desk two years ago, I've looked at IKEA too. They had a rather cheap one made of 25mm (1'') particle board with plastic "varnish" and metal table legs. Sounds not so bad, the desk at work is similar and you know you can climb on it?
Now look at the way those table legs are attached. There is a small metal disk at the top of each leg, with holes for five small chipboard screws that go into the board. So you have considerable lever action when someone pushes the thing sideways, and screws in chipboard come loose a lot easier than in wood. Too much wiggling and the thing will eventually collapse.
I ended up buying a model from a supplier of office equipment. Three times as expensive but worth it.
C - the footgun of programming languages
In economics this is called "gains from specialization". You don't need to know how to design the hard drive inside your computer because you have a higher value use, using that computer as a tool to do your higher paying, more valuable to society job.
On the one hand the folks who romantically remember the past as the good old days have a point. But on the other hand those manufacturing workers were exposed to hazardous chemicals with little or no protection, equipment that killed a few people a year, and long hard work hours resulting in a harsh personal life filled with alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, child endangerment, and the like.
Evolution matters.
In some ways things are better for those that are working. The real objection comes from another economics term "dislocation costs" which among other things is the loss of a range of industry's and workers that did crafts and tasks that have been exported as a cost savings or regulatory compliance measure. This is largely caused by Federal tax policy as a catalyst to accelerate such changes so the government itself can maximize its revenue by speeding the evolution to higher income tasks and less capital intensive tasks, since capital is deductible and durable. They like labor better because each hour is "used up" immediately.
Just by getting the government tax schemes out of business which represents only about 15% of income tax receipts anyway, decisions real people make would trump decisions the IRS, congress and the executive make. I would favor that.
And we can keep most of the evolution in workplace safety and such, perhaps with substantially fewer fees and prescriptive mandates.
JJ
If your goal is efficiency, then pre-fabricated, pre-framed, "slip-in" window units are much more energy efficient than expecting typical homeowners to properly miter, seal, and mount a window into their house. Sure, framing your own window may conjure up romantic, 19th-century images of quality hand craftsmanship. But those notions won't go far to pay the heating bills or halt global warming caused by all of the wasted energy lost through these drafty windows. Prefabrication and efficiency are better for everyone. If you want romance, start a hobby building coffee tables.
Used to be. The money supply hasn't changed in a long time. We have room to "print money" without raising inflation.
That's why you hear people, serious people, talking about the $1Trillion coin. If you don't believe me that money is no longer tied to physical laws, just think about the fact that the derivatives market, which is based on purely virtual "value" (in other words, when you put money in the derivatives market, it does not become equity), is worth over $250Trillion, which is more than the combined GDP of the entire planet. Where is that "wealth" coming from? Where is it going? What does it mean?
The old rules don't apply to multiple floating currencies all floating independently. For example, right now the government can borrow money at an effective negative interest rate. When you're in a period of sluggish growth, it's foolish NOT to borrow money at -0.5% as long as you give the borrowed money to people to spend, instead of to bankers to set on fire.
Unfortunately, the "Give the money to bankers to put into a big pile and light on fire"- approach is the operative rule of the day, since the bankers are making up the rules.
The economy can recover even though there is a very high debt. It cannot recover, ever, until there is money in peoples' pockets. The job situation will never improve until people have money to spend. Since everybody's wages are going down (and their benefits and accumulated wealth), there is no reason to have new jobs.
This spiral is going to continue until this notion of "austerity for the poor, socialized wealth for the rich" is put aside. And eventually, it's going to even become very unpleasant for rich people. You can't have the elite of society, the biggest corporations and guys like Mitt Romney paying zero taxes (or negative taxes) and not have social collapse. The rest of us don't have enough money to keep society afloat.
[and yes, Mitt Romney paid zero taxes (or negative taxes) for many years, which is why I believe that his tax returns are being buried. Remember, Romney wanted to be John McCain's vice-president and supplied him with 10 years' worth of his tax returns. McCain's people got a look at them and immediately chose Sarah Palin over Mitt Romney because Romney's returns would blow the entire "we're over-taxed!" argument out of the water, and currently that is all that party has to run on. My guess is that in 2009 Mitt Romney took advantage of the "amnesty" that was offered in '09 where people with off-shore money in illegal tax havens could repatriate it without criminal penalties. That's why he will only release 2010 onward.]
You are welcome on my lawn.
And none of them are farmers, builders, or mechanics.
Unfortunately, with the discovery of more and more oil reserves, fuel will continue to be one of the few things that is reasonably inexpensive, while the effects of burning it will raise the prices of nearly everything else, in a nasty positive feedback loop, until the system breaks.
I can see the fnords!
My take on the author's viewpoint is that he is convinced everyone working at Home Depot are not American citizens.
I'm used to calling the specialization of the workforce 'progress'. All the way back to the invention of agriculture and domestication of animals, requiring fewer people to sustain the same productivity has been overall a huge benefit for humanity.
While the average person is getting less hands on the internet has assisted the DIY types to be able to do even more. With sites like Instructables and forums like Garage Journal anyone has a wealth of information at their fingertips. Just the other day I needed to know the required specs for a 1 hour fire wall in my garage. 10 years ago I would have been in a library trying to find the building code. Now 5 minutes of work on Google and I have the answer.
Special tools? 5 minutes on amazon and you have the tool on the way. Don't have the money, there's 5 people who have a youtube video showing how to make your own or the trick to use a kitchen utensil to replace that $500 special tool.
Why make everyone wait, kill yourself now. There are plenty of people out there that want to live, and you're taking up space.
That is not at all what feminism is about. Feminism is about allowing women to have equal footing as men in society. Feminists are much more likely to encourage women to learn DIY craftsmanship than to discourage anyone else from doing it. IF there is any true drop in men "doing manual things" it has a lot more to do with men lacking in drive/curiosity along with basic economics (more knowledge workers that can afford to have someone else fix the sink, etc.). As both a man and a feminist, I find your comment completely brain dead.
We're going to lose our next big war because of this.
The United States has won pretty much all of its wars due to the combination manufacturing ability on the homefront and the individual craftiness of its military personnel in the field.
We're quickly becoming a nation of fat, stupid gamers who do not know how to make anything.
I guess I wasn't lucky where I was then (and you make me feel so old lol)... my school board sucked I guess. Not sure if it's the same to every school board but I know they are all regulated by the same gov so they should have the same ruleset but i know they got a different budget depending on where they are. Different city got different needs so I guess mine wasn't too high on their list.
The new generation isn't going to shit but they will have a harder time that's for sure as there's more electronic device and lots of manual labor are replaced by machines or devices done without any human interaction. To my view and own experience, I know that the younger generation around me knows more about electronic devices and computers than building they're own shed for example.
Undoing a couple of mods as I felt I must post after reading the majority of this discussion.
As Heinlein said in "Time Enough for Love":
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
I personally believe we lose more than we gain by specialization and over-specialization. Yes, it makes some portions of society flow better, be more efficient but overall I believe that it breeds slow decay and/or a caste society where inequities beyond what we see now exist. Teach your children, your friends children, your younger cousins, and friends to critically think, to do something you can do that they can't, and in response get them to teach you something they can do (or know) that you cannot do or do not know. Raise everyone around you UP and quit trying to tear them down and suddenly, your life and those around you improve. If they insist on continuing down the path of tearing others down to raise themselves up, Darwin them out of your circle. Let nature take its course. Continue to learn and pass on what you have learned to others that you care about. It can only help, everyone including yourself.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Damn! You got $8/hr?! Sign me up! My job was to re-position irrigation pipe manually at 5am in 18in. of mud in chest-high wheat so laden with morning dew that by noon I was sodden and muddy down to my underwear. I got paid by the pipe *section*, which worked out to less than $3/hr if I worked fast.
Other'n that, my reaction to this article is yours: people who lament our loss of connection with the land or machinery or whatever have never *done* it. Automation and increasing productivity are good things. They mean we can do more in less time.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Still is. You should re-read what Alan Greenspan has been saying about getting off the gold standard.
It changed after getting off the gold standard. Actually, for a very good reason that involved international commerce. So ultimately I agree with getting off it. Unfortunately our new found fiat currency was ripe to be abused. And it has been and continues to be.
Actually we are in a phase of stagflation. But should our economy recover, get ready for a nasty case of inflation. Payback is a bitch! We are ALL going to pay for it. BTW, notice how expensive food has been getting lately? Perfectly normal and expected.
Life is not for the lazy.
Have you tried to get anything fixed on your US house by a trades person? Then you should know that something is not right with the skill level of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, ..., the kind of people that supposedly go and get their tools and suplies from a place like home depot.
First, every potential contracter disses the work done by his/her predecessor. It's always wrong and not to code, etc.
Second they leave a mess during the work and after, hiding trash and debris behind walls, etc.
Third they use and install antiquated technology (sometimes dictated by the local code but often not). Go and look at electrical installations or plumbing in Europe and you'll see the difference. Occupancy sensors for bathrooms, fans that run +10 min after the person leaves, toilets mounted flush into the wall, ...
And 12 mo after the work is finished, you start seeing the cracks, peals and how things come apart
Not to mention that most can't write a proposal, create (or even read) a sketch of the work (I'm not talking about an engineers drawing, but a simple 3D sketch) and have a hard time communicating delays, etc.
In other words, the education and the standards of craftsmanship is pretty low. "This old house" is not the norm in the builders business.
Except that isnt actually happening and this is just some whining idiot pining for the "old days" meanwhile American craftsmanship has entered a golden age.
I'm hoping for gas price shocks high enough to halt importation for a while.. or perhaps China could start invading neighboring countries. Talk about excitement!
If you look at South America and other places around the world, you'll see that China has some large operations extracting resources. There's some conflict over them cutting exports of rare-earths / metals needed for many high tech products, and some territorial conflicts as well. Japan, China, Vietnam and others are finding island / ocean areas with precious resources suddenly very important. And even though there has been a great deal of isolation of North Korea, they're talking with the South over mining those important materials. Watch news from foreign outlets (streamed, on some public stations, on free-to-air satellite, and on some paid satellite/cable)
Through two corporations he owns, Mitt Romney owns about 9% of a major Chinese electronics manufacturer that many former US appliance manufacturers outsource from. If you've bought a Mr. Coffee coffee maker, he's made money on it IN CHINA. So it's not just profiting from labor cuts in the U.S., but having a stake in profits from where the work went as well. (This is from BEFORE the period when his people claim he left and wasn't in control his corporations even with 100% of the stock)
The recent successful efforts to keep the U.S. auto industry healthy were important not just for the direct employment, but all of that at the many related suppliers. But in the electronics industry, just try setting up an operating manufacturing something. Even if you have a high-enough margins to handle U.S. labor costs, or robotics to trim those, good luck finding many components made in the U.S. to use. Even Japan, which has had multiple electronics companies merge into single entities for such things as RAM production, has seen dangerously high loses that aren't sustainable for long.
Some new reports are claiming that the wealth held in offshore banks and corporations such as those operating out of the Cayman islands adds up to the total GNP of the U.S. and Japan combined . If the extremely wealthy in the U.S. can't pay at Reagan era tax levels, they could at least invest in developing in U.S. production instead of profiting from its demise.
We've lost most component manufacturing ability, it's not surprising to see the same thing happening to tooling. Search for something on Ebay and see what shows up these days. It's mostly new from China, or surplus from someone in the U.S. who went bankrupt.
Stop the purchasing of elected officials. Ban paid radio/tv political advertising.
A city kid might ask, "what are these 'woods' and 'streams' you speak of'? As well as a -safe- parking lot, baseball field, or place to play hide and seek. My image of a 'latch key' kid is one who is stuck at home between the time school ends and their parents' work ends, because there is nowhere else safe to be.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
If you're not 40 yet then you were born -after- 1972. It think by most people's definition, you are NOT a 'child of the 70's'. Toddler years don't count. I personally think of myself as a 'child of the 80's' because my -high school- and -college- years occurred in the 80's. The 70's hardly were 'formative' years for me: I was too young to be much impacted by 70's culture. And I am -well past- 40.
There is an important argument missing here. The underlying assumption so far discussed is that everything is "normal". What about when stuff hits the fan? I've lived through nearly dozen disasters, both man made and natural, of varying severity. Remember, STUFF HITS THE FAN, and the authorities cover they're own cowardly behinds first (and mostly only)! If you have neither tools nor skills then you have very few options. Those who think that the other people around them will be willing to share with those who have nothing to contribute are brain dead. In disaster, there is no share and share alike. All sharing is quid pro quo. If your are liked by those around you, and the disaster isn't too bad, you may be allowed some "credit". However, the eternal unskilled parasite can go pound sand. Furthermore, those who think that they can recourse to force, the people with skills, tools and the foresight to have them already have you beat. They are armed, prepared and practiced. Trust me, I've been there. So argue all you want about the need for manual skills and tools during good times. The result not with-standing, when the stuff hits the fan, your own skills and tools are your best and most reliable friends.
I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good - it's hard to match the precision with which even Ikea furniture is made.
It depends on the quality you are shooting for. If you want a cheap bookcase made of cheap material, then buying a complete unit is better. Spending time working with cheap materials usually isn't cost effective. There is a point where if you have premium materials, you can turn out something which would normally have a very premium price. I made a set of Japanese room dividers (oak) for about $200; the professional one of the same materials was more than $400. Now, you could buy some cheap room dividers for $100, but the ones I made are oak with replaceable paper. Unless they are sold or destroyed in a flood or fire, my great-great grandchildren will probably inherit them.
There is a separate discussion about having something which is too overbuilt, but for me, sturdy and long-lasting furniture is worth the cost.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
We lost our connection with the land? There's a garden out back that says different. We aren't handy any more because Home Depot sells pre glued tiles? S'funny, those pre glued tiles probably enable a wider range of people to do their own work.
There are a LOT of poeple in Home Depot, and they don't look like professional carpenters, plumbers, etc. Lots of folks are doin' it for themselves, if only to save a buck. Plumbers are expensive.
This whole thing is stupid, and to then somehow connect our lack of DIY manliness to the loss of manufacturing jobs is.... even more stupid. Those jobs went overseas because the bosses thought they could make a bigger buck doing so. It had nothing to do with how handy American workers are....
This sounds like an old man remembering the fuzzy "good old days" full of nostalgia and bemoaning how terrible it is now. Go Away. Things are fine. People make things. People do things for themselves. Not everyone, sure.... but that's not new.
There are people still people who make things. They fix rather than replace, they customize instead of settle for what's available. They build the future they want to live in. Come to Detroit and see Makers in action.
http://www.makerfairedetroit.com/2012/03/26/1563/
Want to know why some people don't build their own stuff? Because they don't want to! Same reason some people buy tomatoes and zucchini at the store instead of growing their own. And the same reason why a lot of you will have a pre-fab MP3 player instead of building one yourself. Once you factor the time it takes to learn a skill, whether carpentry or gardening or soldering and coding; and the cost of equipment, like drill and saws and bits and blades or pots and dirt and fertalizer or a soldering iron and programming cable and IDE and breadboards; and divide that cost by the number of things you are going to produce, it doesn't add up. So if someone wants just a bookshelf, should they buy $10 of lumbar and screws and a $100 drill and do it themselves? Or should they buy a $15 flat-pack and just put it together? They look at it and work out the cost of the drill over how many things they can expect to assemble with it. Sure, maybe they get that part wrong and don't think of all the other bookshelves they'll need because the cheap one falls apart. Or maybe they value the time spent learning carpentry and want to do something else with it.
What is the next complaint? That Makers are so busy printing enclosures that nobody is bending and welding sheet metal anymore? That no one forges their own hinges now, and everyone just buys them? Or remember the "good old days" when people assembled their hi-fi from the best parts available, and now no one builds or codes their own MP3 players. Computers used to have just a BIOS and a maybe little scripting language, now you buy this beige box and get a whole OS and games, why isn't anyone typing in games from magazines anymore?
Because we have better things to do with out time. Me, for instance, I like building my own bookshelves and painting and lacquering my desk, and fixing old cameras. You want kids to be good with tools? Raise your taxes and put woodshop and technical classes back in schools. And make sure to add back in some technology and music too, while your at it.
This is going around that the USA has lost the good manufacturing jobs to China. (Really the USA lost them to Mexico, then they lost them to China, but that is a whole different topic.) The "manufacturing jobs" thing comes around every election cycle.
What is a "good manufacturing job", seriously. Who, posting here, wants to put bolts, with lock washers through a transmission housing into an engine block, for 8 hours a day, 45 minutes lunch and two 15 minute coffee breaks? Do that all day, every day for years. Then get moved up to putting on body panels, all day, every day for years.
It is a crap argument. Alcoholism was rampant, Henry Ford railed against it, because people hated working on an assembly line.
I am now in my 40's, but if you are in your 20's, would you like to assembly iPhones every day? Put in the circuit board, three holding screws, next! For a cheap wage?
When the alternative is subsistence farming, as it used to be in the USA, and still is somewhat in China, it is a good gig. If you have any option, you are not going to a "good manufacturing job".
My home-owning years have coincided with the existence of the World Wide Web, and I would say with certainty that I do more things with my hands because of this. In a pre-web world, I would just "outsource" any home-maintenance projects to professionals I suppose, since I wouldn't have the know-how to even get started. But when good online discussions, videos, step-by-step guides, etc. on home maintenance projects are a google away, I am much more confident and better equipped to tackle projects myself.
so many examples of this:
a) the airbus pilots on the plane from Brazil to France that crashed into the sea and killed everyone because the airspeed indicator failed and the plane went into a flat spin that the pilots lacked basic flying skills to recover from, thanks to heavy dependence on computer autopilot.
b) most high schools no longer offer auto shop
c) most grade schools no longer teach cursive writing
d) most kids not only don't write code (vbasic, c++, js, whatever) but they don't even know what 'code' is.
e) most of my young neighbors would never swing a hammer or wield a shovel, not because they can't but because they have better more entertaining things to do
f) high school kids now would rather work for minimum wage in a 'cool' place than make a lot more money doing construction labor
"Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house" I soooo like this statement !
" I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good"
I noticed this as well. However, if you want something of *good* quality, it's still cheaper to do it yourself.
If all you want is a couple slats of beaver-puke with some laminate to hold up books, which will look ugly over time with nicks and sags, then WalMart or maybe Home Depot is likely a cheaper solution, even over making it yourself.
If you want something that made of good, solid wood, then it's still often cheaper to do it yourself. Oak, or even pine makes a much nicer bookshelf, and if you're like me and have heavy book etc then unlike the WalMart equivilent it won't start to bow the shelves in the middle after a few months.
These days it seems that - depending on the product - cheap quality is cheaper to purchase than fix or build you own, but decent-grade or higher-quality stuff still demands a fairly high price. Look at the cost of solid-wood bookshelves or entertainment centres at a home furnishing store (or online)... that stuff ain't cheap but it'll (hopefully) look nicer and last longer.
As for the manual dexterity... I'd wonder how that factors with kids who play a lot of video-games etc, as I'd imagine one of the few benefits is finger-dexterity.
Just as people now believe that you can run perpetual Federal deficits, or that all children are above average, or that form is more important than function, or that you can borrow more money to buy a house than you can pay back, there's a growing disdain for people who point out that the emperor has no clothes. Tell people you work on your own car instead of dropping it off at the dealer? Subtle sneer. Drive a used car instead of a new one? Sneer. Study hard and get good grades? You're just a dork, and you're not cool. It's the same anti-science mentality that's been around for years, now broadening to the more practical skills.
It's also the Walmart mentality - why buy something for $100 that lasts forever when you can buy one a Walmart for $9.99 and replace it every six months?
Just as people no longer distinguish between news and entertainment, they can no longer distinguish crap from quality. Our cultural egalitarianism now covers everything - and since values are subjective, who are you to say that 1 person's skills are better than another? They're just different, right?
As a homeowner, the only decent work I've had done at my house has been by older, family-run businesses. Newer, younger contractors inevitably do a horrible job and require constant handholding.
Personally, I'm glad that I'll be dead in 40 years - the way things are going I think soon after that we'll be back living in caves.
this. All of this. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Disclaimer: I do all my own car work ALL OF IT. I don't shop at WalMart, I have built a barn by hand from trees I cut and then sawed with a rental mini-mill, i build robots in my free time, and although I don't code well, I do code.
That may apply to cars, but how about for toys and electronics, etc?
I still have a bunch of stuff left over from when I was a kid that's in a box in the attic. Toy cars, action figures, lego, mechano. My sister has a bunch of dolls etc. What did break was usually fixable by a bit of superglue or epoxy (not recommended for younger children that still like to chew on stuff)
Aside from lego, what will survive from our kids toys? A bunch of the stuff I've found *arrives* broken, much less survives a year.
How about computers? Yeah, the old stuff was a pain and required manual jumpers to assign IRQ/DMA's. It was heavy and clunky. It cost a lot.
But damn, a lot of it is still around when the newest Dell/HP is a burned out wreck. In fact, some of the more expensive PC's are the most likely to die. I've seen tons of computers crammed with tons of RAM, fast CPU, etc etc and the cheapest PSU imaginable, virtually guaranteeing that they'll smoke out in a year or two.
When people ask me what (desktop) PC's to buy, I generally try to find some place that will do a build and make sure to put in a decent PSU. The local place here may charge a bit more than a prebuilt Dell, but they offer a 3yr warranty for stuff assembled in-shop and you can make sure not to get crap components inside.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
why buy something for $100 that lasts forever when you can buy one a Walmart for $9.99 and replace it every six months?
Because I have $20 in my pocket, I need that $10 item otherwise I can't make money and I need to make the other $10 get me two weeks of food. Six months from now, I will be in the same boat and s till unable to get the $100 version that doesn't break.
Something I read during the big 600m MegaMillions thing: Most people who win the lottery blow through the entire sum in under 5 years and come out with debt to boot.
Feminism is no longer about equal rights. It hasn't been about that for ages.
Feminism is about female superiority, pure and simple. Feminist=Female Chauvinist.
#include <disclaimer.h>
Income has gone up, time has gone down and things have got cheaper.
Please let me know when and where this happened? My father was a WWII vet, worked as an engineer, and put two kids through college while my mother took care of the domestic responsibilities on the homefront. My father was also very gifted working with his hands in his free time. As kids we always had enough money to go on vacation at least once each year, often times to distant locales such as Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia. The appliances they bought back in the 1950's and 60's are still working and I now own and still use them. I am now an engineer myself, my wife works full time, and we both bring our work home most nights. I have to travel for business several times each month, there's little time to prepare meals so our food bill is higher than my parents home cooked cuisine. The appliances and other products I buy are much cheaper today, but I have to replace almost everything I buy quite often because the quality and workmanship is crap. My kids play mostly with the toys I grew up with (that I didn't throw out) because the toys I buy my kids today are such cheap crap that they break and can't hold up to childhood play conditions. All the research and labor studies show that today Americans work more hours than any other nation and any other time since the Great Depression. So no, compared to 30 or 50 years ago, things are NOT better. Perhaps I have a higher income because my wife works, but there are no overseas vacations on our foreseeable horizon and I have serious concerns about how I'm going to pay my kid's college tuition.
I am into motorcycles, and it's something you either get or don't. But this is a good video to watch and listen to.. it's more about losing the can-do spirit than specifically being a farmer or building your own house. I too grew up on a farm but I also have a computer science degree (from '93) and I try to apply it to that as well. It's why I've been exclusively a Linux user since '98.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdNEJAFfFLA
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That was like 40 years ago.
Not nasty at all. Right now peoples' wealth is shrinking because there is no benefit to saving. Money in the bank shrinks.
If you're going to base an economy on eternal growth, then you want to have about five times more inflation than we have right now.
That has nothing to do with the budget deficit. It doesn't even have that much to do with the food producers input costs. The prices go up because the corporations want more profits. What used to be considered a successful level of growth in a business is no longer enough. If you made a 50% profit this year, you are expected to make 60% next year. The notion of infinite growth in profits has more to do with what you're calling inflation than anything the government or the Fed is doing.
If a company reports record earnings this year, making profits that are fantastic, they are expected to top that next year. I'm sure you can understand that there are limits.
Regular people are expected to accept no growth in wages, no growth in savings interest, etc. Corporations are expected to have, no, they are entitled to have a continuously steepening growth curve. Bonuses have to be bigger next year. We're starting to see the instability that occurs at the boundary.
And with every increase in income disparity, society gets sicker in every single way the health of a society can be measured.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You have a cordless drill and a circular saw? Hell, that's more than what we had back in my day, and we sent man to the moon! Or to a really good Hollywood special effects studio - but dammit we knew how to work with our hands and that's a pretty good accomplishment, wherever it was we sent those space men to.
Cordless drill?
Uh. No. Drill motor.
Granted, I need to plug into a wall to get it to run, but I don't have to dink with batteries.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A fatherless nation loses the skills a father teaches.
Not to come off as a right-wing "family values" nut, but it's true. If you don't have the value of work instilled in you as a child - including a do-it-yourself mentality - you're not likely to have the drive to do those things as an adult. Parents set the example. With many fathers either being absentee for the past 20 years due to work or having the "pay it done" mentality which started to become more prevalent in the 1980s, it's no small wonder.
I was raised by an engineer father (who, coincidentally, was raised by his eldest sister). My dad was always fixing and upgrading things around the house (plumbing, walls incl. sheetrock, window installation in the basement, landscaping), engineering terrain improvements for the (large) property like drainage and mass composting, or building new things (at almost 60, he just built his first self-supporting non-mortared stone wall that's 6' tall and 20' long - it took him since last fall to complete).
Personally, I'm not nearly as skilled at many of the things my father does, but I've already done a lot (at 30): I've done every single step of building construction, from framing and roofing to plumbing and electrical - except for foundation laying. I'm familiar with laying cement. I can build a brick wall. I have never taken my vehicles to the mechanic (except on a trip, in an emergency, during the winter) - skills I taught myself and learned from others.
That said, I have the proclivity to try to do things I really don't have the time to do because I want to be able to do them. ( It has caused no small degree of marital friction. :P ) I have a window replacement project coming up (probably next spring - I still have to re-roof this fall), and I will be looking at pre-framed windows. It is easier to install a pre-framed window into an old wall when the wall isn't square and you've got to rebuild the wall anyway, and it saves a significant amount of time. Paying a small premium for that pre-fabrication is worth it, many times. I've bought the "wall spackle in a can" a couple times, and I've mottled the spackle onto the wall by hand as well - both times due to the economy of time.
When you have 1-2 hours a night after family and 5-10 hours on a weekend, doing something like "replacing a window" takes a long damn time - more than a weekend, probably, if you've never done it before and need to get all your supplies as well. This does not bode well if you've gotten the window out already (due to, say, a tree falling through it or ants eating the window supports due to the wood being damp, which you inadvertently discovered while painting). It happens. :)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think that's great and I'll seek out such advice and take it into considerations; making me legally bound to adhere to every jot and tittle of that advice goes beyond helping me make my home safe and becomes an unreasonable intrusion into my private life.
It is not advice.
It is a legal requirement.
It is about everyone who enters your house.
If the only thing you give a damn about is the pay out from the lawsuit, you are not going to be welcomed as a neighbor.
It is about every one who has a financial stake in your house.
The mortgage lender. The insurance company.
My wife compliments me onhow I can 'fix anything' around the house. Sometimes, that's replacing the part, sometimes it's making a new part.
I have this Herman Miller Scooter table, wicked nice to use, but it came with the black laminate tabletop. I'll get over to the local lumber house and pick out a nicer piece of wood, shape it, finish it, drive some insert nuts in so it will be stronger, and have a nicer table. I have no idea what I'm doing, except it make sense.
I'm watching this Maker movement - and I want a 3D printer. Absolutely. I may never design anything, but I'm thinking these will get a lot better very quickly.
My great-grandfather was a farmer. He fixed stuff because he had to, or hay would rot in the field along with the potatoes and corn. My grandfather drove trucks, and he fixed stuff because he had to or he would not get paid. My father delivered dairy goods to residential clients - milkman, though that doesn't cover all the products he delivered. he fixed stuff cause he still lived on a farm. Ive been a tech most of my working life.
I fixed small appliances etc, because I was too cheap to just buy a new one.
I service the brakes on both my vehicles, flush the cooling systems, replace broken stuff. I send them out for oil changes because that is a fluid I don't care to deal with, and if the brakes wear badly or aren't quite 'right', in it goes to be sure. The Saab is a real challenge. The Explorer is easy.
I fixed calculators, dictating machines, typewriters, various office equipment for a living.
I bought my first PC when I was 32, tore it apart repeatedly, backed up, restored, reformatted hard drives, messed with it for 4 years straight.
I took my first PC service call when I was 36. Installed my first Novell server 9 months later, on a Token-Ring network, courtesy of an insanely great presentation at a Networks Expo in Boston, and a nice man who taught is about T-R. No fear.
I 'graduated' through Novell to NT servers, Linux (from the book 'the Internet CD' - yes, Slackware 0.9), helped run the corporate ISP, did wireless backhauls, and all of it with little or no classroom training. I took three Novell courses, andf an abbreviated MCSE course. No certs, just working at it.
I loathed the Windows problems with viruses etc. that resulted in a wipe and format. It seemed incredibly lazy to me, but it was also the only way.
And I'll be fixing stuff because I cannot imagine being dependent on plumbers, electricians, roofers, HVAC techs, etc who have to charge too much money to cover the overhead.
I see kids all the time tossing stuff because they don't care to figure it out. My contemporaries regularly complain about the cost of getting things around the house fixed - I encourage them to learn some skills, it's not that hard.
But I WANT a 3D printer. Amazing. These are our future. Move manufacturing to the edge where it works.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Because the derivatives market itself is zero-sum - but you already knew that, I'm sure. If the underlying loans, companies, etc. go south, of course people will lose money - but the economy itself will lose no more than the value of the defaulted loans - the 250 trillion value in derivatives cancel each other out because of the fundamental structure of derivatives - they're sophisticated insurance, or bets, if you prefer, where one side of the contract wins and one side loses.
The problem with derivatives is that they lead banks to take on exorbitant levels of risk, believing themselves to be immune to the negative effects of defaults, not that they exist.
But thanks for all the conspiracy theories about Romney. By Slashdot standards, that clearly makes you a wise man, to be jocking the democrats so hard.
You ought to learn how the stock market ACTUALLY works, before you start shouting about how corrupt and evil it is.
Blue chips. Dividends. P/E Ratios. Profit margins. Look 'em up. There are literally THOUSANDS of counter-examples to your specious claims about how "all companies care about is continuously increasing growth." Literally. Thousands.
Something I read during the big 600m MegaMillions thing: Most people who win the lottery blow through the entire sum in under 5 years and come out with debt to boot.
And the reason is obvious when you think about it - lottery winners suddenly are Rich (and are expected and encouraged to live the lifestyle associated with Rich - big houses, cars, boats, presents for all your many relatives and friends, parties, etc.), but they don't have the income to support the lifestyle, so once the money's gone, it's gone.
The joke up here usually goes: "He won two million dollars, so he bought a million dollar house, and a million dollar boat, and a million dollar car..."
The total value of the stock market is dwarfed by the total value of the derivatives market.
In 2008, the total value of ALL of the world's stock markets came to less than $40 trillion. The total derivatives market is estimated as high as $791 trillion dollars.
Derivatives: Look 'em up. They are not equities, they don't represent any investment in any company. Money in the derivatives market does not create jobs, it does not add value.
I'll settle for one if you can provide it. Look it up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Jeez, where do you live? Here in Texas, even among the moneyed class (to which I belong) and middle class (from whence I came), this attitude does not exist. When I tell my one percenter friends I built the raised beds in my garden, they marvel and respect me more. When I tell my blue collar father I fixed my garbage disposal, he holds off on calling me a sissy boy for a day. :)
In my experience, the only people who have the toxic attitude you speak of are members of a small subset of the nouveau riche, who are obsessed with wealth-signaling functions.
This may come as a bit of a shock, but a person can still buy hand tools. I don't think a hand saw, hammer, nails, wood glue, sand paper (or a hand plane if you want to get fancy) are going to set you back thousands of dollars. Even adding some chisels and a rabbit plane shouldn't bump the price up that much.
Yet we're talking about big manufacturing in the US.
Bob McAmishguy aside...
And have you actually built anything more than a rough wooden box with hand tools?
Even with a full woodshop ad your disposal, fabrication takes time.
Unless you just don't care, and wanna throw together any rickety POS that'll fall apart as soon as the glue cracks and the nails heave.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The way you deal with selling to the next owner while allowing people to live how they want to live is to file the inspection report in the same office that deeds/mortgages/liens get filed. Then it will show up in a title search before a sale. That lets the next owner and their mortgage lender know if there are code deficiencies, and they can reject the purchase, adjust the sales price, or require repairs before buying. Many home sales already involve inspections and bonds (like for termites), so the building code history is just another thing to check.
Note: just because it was built to code at one time, does not mean it has not degraded since then, you still need to inspect a house to see if it is in good condition now.
Absolutely not. Wikipedia estimates the value of the derivatives market at $791Trillion. Twenty times the worth of all the stock markets in the world. More than the GDP of all the countries in the world.
If it was "zero sum" how could it have grown to that level. If it was "zero sum" there wouldn't have been such an enormous incentive to manipulate LIBOR.
I can't figure out why you'd say it was zero sum. Maybe you're taking a narrow view of what instruments classify as derivatives.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you look at the "...losing its' toolbox" article you will see the browser sidebar in the right lists twelve articles about real estate, finance, debt, American finance laws and international debt and finance problems. Finance is the engine of force driving many decisions regarding home built versus store bought projects.
Most build or buy decisions regarding a home are affected by a desire to keep the home resale price as high as possible. Mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive most home project decisions. Regarding craftsmanship or the lack of it, mortgage debt and resale price considerations drive the priorities and choices made when projects are undertaken.
I bring this up on Slashdot to propose that a better America is an America with 40% less debt. Herewith begins a radical proposition:
What I would like to see is an America with about 40% lower prices for homes and apartments. Houses should sink down to "fire insurance bare shell rebuild price" and mortgage debt shouldn't go on for more than 16 years and all the repair and maintenance work should be done with a 100 year lifetime.
In that kind of an economic setting there would be plenty of room for a wide variety of super quality beautiful projects and there would also be plenty of room for people using their homes as simply a place to live while they do their writing, composing, painting, pottery, gardening, child raising and retireing.
Or, maybe - just maybe - you have no fucking clue how derivatives actually work, and acquired what little you do know (the "zomg panic" mentality) from reading too much zerohedge.
Yeah, I'm betting that's more likely.
Wow, I had no idea Rush Limbaugh was trolling here these days. Ask any informed feminist and they will give you a nearly identical definition to the one I provided. Go back to your troll hole please.
There are a LOT of people in Home Depot, and they don't look like professional carpenters, plumbers, etc.
It's a redneck thing. Recently I saw a mother and 9-year old son at a Home Depot. The kid was carrying the smallest size Husqvarna chainsaw. Aw, how cute. His first chainsaw.
the below average wiz is hard to find here, and if one exists i think he would get hijacked by foreign companies anyway. When it comes to construction, repairing and your general handywork i know at least five six people in the two or three streets round here making a living, from small home improvement to cabling to garden design and maintenance, planting, fixing cars ... some on the books, some off the books, you're not a real person hear if you don't know how to build a brick wall ... the biggest problem would be to get them to leave their cosy hobbit hole but i guess money talks the same talk everywhere
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
in 1994 i left the construction business for two reasons:
1-- the quality of materials was dropping and the industry response to the problem was "you bought it, now it's your problem". It had become more and more difficult to find wood that was properly kiln dried, tile that was reliably cooked so that it would break straight (use a saw, not a cutter) etc. ( i just don't want to bitch about it any more, ya know what I mean?)
2-- the people in the business who were any good were getting out, or dying. My Rockmason was 76 years old and working with a replaced hip (Cecil Worsham, that was a real rockmason, not one of the trendy types you find now, he and his dad helped build the walls and bridges on the skyline drive and the blueridge parkway in the blueridge mountains of virginia), my brickmason was in his 70's as well ("y'know boys, when I was your age I could do it all night, now it takes me all night to do it!") My plasterer was one of the last true master plasterers (He had worked on major government buildings around the mall, museums, the mint, he couldn't even remember them all "these nowadays boys just don't want to work anymore. They are happy with good-enough, i can't abide no good-enough"). I had a few finish carpenters who might not have drunk themselves to death yet, and my old lead carpenter who could sink a nail with two strokes using any hammer, any side (even the claws) is still working, sometimes. But they are a dying breed.
Another story: my first partner had an uncle/ cousin maybe who had been an instrument maker for the Apollo program. Yeah, he MADE the instruments by hand that they took to the moon and back. When he retired he was able to devote his time to his hobby. Filling his basement with a complete train system using hobby gauge (HO) trains, track and accouterments that he made from scratch. Not just some stinkin' paper-mache mountains, he made the effin' trains himself, and all the parts that went into them. Think about it. That is what we have lost, and it is a major loss. Sure, I am teaching my kids to do some simple stuff, but where are the role models like these men? When I was building my ham radio set in the 60s there were lots of crusty old guys around to help and turn to, they are gone now.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Two ideas her:
1. We are not "losing" jobs: our "leaders" are intentionally tossig them out.
2. In my case, there was on one wo was "handy" and could teach me any of these things.
FYI