OT - Basic Skills in Today's World

My father literally built his house -- cement work, plumbing, framing, siding, wiring, roofing, everything. I am somewhat embarrassed that I will probably hire my roof replaced. It comes down to 2 factors: he HAD to (no money); and I don't want to. I'm sure I could redo the roof if I really needed to. I used to do stuff like that all the time. Now I'm lazy (and old) -- and I want it done right, not cheaply.

(rest snipped)

-- Robert Sturgeon Summum ius summa inuria.

I lived in Alaska for 3 years and noted that lots of people build their own up there. They usually had no loans on the materials and built as they could - living in 5th wheelers or, when finished, their basements.

That's the way I feel about gardening. My parents were outside all weekend, every weekend (weather permitting). I paid no attention. Like you, I sure wish I had. Sue

In many cases those factors are changing. You may have the money to hire someone, but it is becoming increasingly difficult in some areas to find someone to hire who will actually do the job correctly. In more and more cases I'm finding I have to do a job myself to get it done right.

In once case I had an auto repair done several times by several different dealers (some under warranty) that all failed again in short order. I finally got fed up and did the job myself, found evidence of how incompetent they were while tearing into it myself and have not had a recurrence of the problem since I fixed it correctly myself.

Pete C.

Societal collapse is a macro-scale event. What happens to individuals within that society are micro-level events. Individuals win and lose all the time, even in a thriving society. Whole groups have been caused to suffer many times by rapid changes within a complex society, yet the society as a whole endures.

It sucked to be a technology worker during the dot-com bust or an aeronautical engineer when we retreated from manned space exploration. It also sucked to be a buggy whip maker during the advent of the automobile.

Jeff

Many did, others didn't. Many an extension cord snaked it's way over a neighbor's fence. Life went on. We improvised, adapted and overcame. It was rougher for some than for others, but the local economy is booming, tax coffers are swelling, and local unemployment is below 3%.

Jeff

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com... | It has always concerned me when the young amoung us are not taugh basic | skills such as how to change a tire, how to use a saw, how to...well | you get the idea...there are basic skills that one needs to deal with | the world we live in. Well this article shows what that lack of | training, due to whatever reason, means as they get older. | | When I drive through a neighborhood, it is a rare garage that has | anything like a workshop within it anymore....a reflection of the lack | of interest or knowledge of the homeowner to work with their hands? | | Do your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, the generation who | is succeeding us, have the basic skills that are needed in the world | today? | | TMT

The first thing that came to my mind was: You usually don't have to.

That brings us to my second point: If you don't have to, you'll never learn how. If you have to a lot, you'll even get good at it.

When I took driver's ed back in the 80's (okay, that puts me squarely in the middle of most of my peers nowadays, its seems) we had actual cutaway car components in the classroom. I had grown up sort of out in the country, so doing mechanical things weren't out of the ordinary for me, but my dad never taught me much, or not at least actual instruction that I recall. I think he was satisfied with me taking all kinds of stuff apart and figuring out how it worked, and even getting lucky in getting it back together again. If it worked afterwards, that was always a bonus. I think I just had the knack for things like that, and eventually wound up working on electronics in the service, where I had some problems with a used car I had. Took it to a mechanic, since I had no tools or skills, and got my own spark plugs back for ten bucks, in a car that only ran slightly better. That made me mad, so I got a manual and started collecting tools. Eventually solved the problem myself. That kinda told me that I could do whatever I set my mind to. Nowadays I have a small fleet of cars for my family and little time, or money, to maintain them all properly. If I would have had newer vehicles, I likely wouldn't have had to work on them as much, so whether that would have been better for me financially or not still remains to be seen. Folks used to ask me if I liked working on cars. "Only when I don't have to." is my usual response. Once my family and financial situation settled down, I got my piece of the American dream and bought a home. I used to be a whole lot better at this kind of thing, and could do a good job, but recently have started to try and balance what I can do, what I could do, what I'll really do, and it's really something I could do better. Having a major unfinished, unscheduled major home repair (rotted kitchen subfloor. Overhauled the cabinets since replacing them with equivalent quality was cost prohibitive, laid down new sub floor and underlay, but have temporary vinyl tile on the floor and counters now) I'm to the point where I have to come to grips with my abilities versus my time, and the cost of the two. I think many people are in that sort of situation, but for some, money is easier to throw at a situation, and for some, money is the thing they have the least, so they have to do it themselves, albeit poorly. I used to have a job that didn't stimulate me much mentally, so there was plenty of time to ponder things I wanted to do and so on. I have a very cool new job that sends me home wiped out mentally, so I rarely feel inclined to deal with that list of things to do. Haven't touched it in weeks. Gotta figure out where I can find the round tuits now that I used to have. I'm starting to have some sympathy with those folks, and I don't really have a single thing to blame it on. Sort of how things have turned out.

We sort of went through this awhile back. Americans existed happily on the east coast, crowded into cramped cities, when the US government started offering free land west of the Mississippi. I'm sure each family that headed out had a book or two that explained how to make a living in the middle of nowhere with little more than what you could have carried with you in a wagon. Likely even explained what to bring in the wagon, too.

Sort of got me thinking about a series of how-to books for stuff, but most of that is on the web now, since that's the first place most folks go for information, even if it's really generic and useless to the rest of us. Perhaps what needs to be out there is a non-condescending tome about how to find/acquire the core skills that most of us take for granted when we tackle a new task, such as righty tighty, doing a visual, gathering information first, and so on. That bit is missing from every book I've ever read on how to do stuff, but how to approach such a subject is actually a whole lot harder than it sounds.

==================== While increasing technologies may indeed provide options, redundancies, etc, these are of use only if people know (1) they are available, and (2) how to use them.

While increasing societal "complexity" is a separate issue, the rapidil accelerating decline in trust and trustworthiness is not and it is THE critical and most problematic in the so-called symbolic manipulation [interesting word choice] areas such as stocks, bonds, pensions, insurance, and currency trading.

Unka George (George McDuffee)

...and at the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: ?A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.?

Rudyard Kipling The Naulahka, ch. 5, heading (1892).

======================= You are very fortunate in that your schools appear to be run by educators and not administrators. The students and community are fortunate in that the board members are acting in the best interest of the majory of the students and community and not responding to the latest fad or buzz-word.

My guess is that you leadership is very senior and approaching retirement. When your educators are replaced with administrators that conduct per pupil class cost evaluations, legal risk evaluation of possible injury, and avoidance of things that make noise or a mess, your vocational programs will die the death of

1,000 cuts. I note in passing that far more students are injured and injured more seriously in contact sports than vocational education.

Most universities have dropped their Industrial Arts teachining options because of the falling demand for their graduates.

Fearless forecast -- as your vocational programs are scaled back, your student retention and completion problems will increase. Following normal administrator logic, additional vocational programs will be eliminated to make funds available for retention/completion activities and remedial education that are then required to keep the now totally academic programs filled.

Unka George (George McDuffee)

...and at the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: ?A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.?

Rudyard Kipling The Naulahka, ch. 5, heading (1892).

| Oh my God! Does this mean all my woodshop classes for next year | (2006-07) at the high school where I teach have been dropped? Does this | mean I am now out of work? Are my fellow IA teachers who teach masonry, | auto shop and computer repair also out of work? Do we now hold our | department meetings at the unemployment office? | | The scenario you present might be true in some places, but not in all. | I have been asked (along with a few of my cohorts)to work on a funding | grant to expand our vocational offerings in our school, and maybe the | district as a whole. | | Glen

In the Seattle area, the aerospace community has been complaining for several years about just that, and it isn't until the concrete heads in the legislature realized they were chasing all the skilled labor and shops out of state have they realized what a skill shortage there is. A day late and a dollar short, but better late than never. Unfortunately, when I hired on at Boeing, with a million others barely able to breathe, they trained me on company time. Got a whole lot of useless folks in the process. This time, they're training the new hires on their time, for two weeks. A coworker of mine got hit in the head by a fast moving rivet die. Seems the gal she was teaching thought it was okay to put the die in the gun while holding the trigger down. Absent the retainer spring, of course. As soon as she did it the second time, just minutes later, they told her to take a hike. That's why they're doing it differently this time around, as the dead wood gets weeded out quickly. They aren't kicking people out for not having the skills, they're removing them for not having a trainable attitude.

I recently got a very cool new job. One of the reasons I got the job was the last line on my resume: "With the right attitude all skill deficits can be overcome." That impresses the hell out of folks, especially when your attitude seems to match the resume. (I once had the honor of bringing onto my crew an older Greek lady who had no skills but just the exact attitude I wanted. She worked her ass off and made the folks who had been around for years look like amateurs once I taught her what she needed to know.) I had also showed them pictures of some machines I had recently built, which the interviewers (a structured interview with several folks there) were almost fighting over. They wanted someone who could "do things" instead of just talking about stuff. My fingernails being a bit chewed up and slightly dirty helped a bit, I suspect.

Was the electricity out for six months? Nation wide? It is possible.

Now consider yourself being without fuel for 3 or 4 months or much longer. You merely made best of a minor inconvenience. If real trouble came that shut down fuel production for months you too would soon feel the effects.

Yes, I would. But would it mean the end of American society? I don't think so. I know how to do for myself without many things. Moreover, I've seen many a disaster come and go, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, 9/11, etc, up close and personal. It's my job. One thing I have learned is that our society's coping mechanisms are quite robust.

Jeff

(snips)

Sometimes it doesn't. At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome had a population of around 1,000,000. By the late Middle Ages, that was down to less than 10,000, and wolves were roaming the streets. Various other societies have gone through collapses that were as bad, if not worse. Contrary to what we like to think, things can, in fact, go Very Badly. There is no reason to suppose that we are somehow immune.

I'm not talking about going through an economic shift, but an economic/societal collapse. Different story...

-- Robert Sturgeon Summum ius summa inuria.

Yep. No society is immune from collapse. My point is only that technologically advanced societies are much less so. So, do you think anyone alive at the height of the Roman Empire was still alive to see those wolves roaming the streets? No. It took a very long time indeed, for Roman society to decline and fall. It didn't suddenly collapse within a portion of a single lifetime, like, say, the Incan Empire.

Time to define our terms, I think. So, what does an economic/societal collapse mean to you?

Personally, I expect American society to die with a whimper, not a bang, over a span of many generations, in a way that is not readily apparent to many who are living through it.

Jeff

Do follow along. My point is that primitive societies tend to be more monolithic than more technologically advanced ones. This makes them more vulnerable to sudden collapse from a single or cluster of just a few factors, internal or external.

Very good. Now, see if you can figure out what types of societies are best equipped to make major adjustments to drastically changed circumstances.

And #3, resistance to, or inability to, make the necessary adaptations, often led by those who are profiteering off the collapse or the conditions leading to it. Sound familiar?

Yep.

Jeff

================================= In academic terms this is called an error of composition. Society is not a monolith, and is becoming less so all the time.

Some segments of society and areas of the country may well be able to "cope," but these will *NOT* be the same for all problems. It is well to remember in this context "cope" does not mean a continuation of the current soccer-mom "high conspicuous consumption / air conditioned" life-style to which they are accustomed, but rather survival as in "staying alive."

Historically, there were two successive and compounding errors that produced national disasters on this scale.

#1 the failure to accurately and timely identify the problem(s); and #2 was the incorrect identification of the causes (there may well be several).

Minority groups have always been popular scape goats, but ignoring the moral factors, punitive actions / pogroms have never cured anything, and have generally made the problems worse by diverting time/effort/attention away from the real problems/causes.

Unka George (George McDuffee)

...and at the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: ?A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.?

Rudyard Kipling The Naulahka, ch. 5, heading (1892).

On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 17:52:56 -0700, Robert Sturgeon wrote:

======================== This was addressed at some length in my dissertation in Appendix A -- THE LINEAR AND ACCRETION MODELS OF ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

I attach the section on empire below as the most applicable, however W. W. Rostow's observations/comments about "Newtonian Science" in Stage VI --Renaissance also directly apply.

Note the [short] discussion where technical methodology is regarded as magic [symbolic manipulation?] and the bad effects this produced.

If you want to see the entire thing, or scan excerpts goto

references cited are in the bibliography

Enjoy

Stage IV -- Empires There is no sharp dividing line between a large city state and an empire, however it can be posited that when a city state begins to impose its rule on other linguistic and ethnic groups, especially if it imposes taxes for this "service," it has become an empire. This stage tends to produce large entities such as the Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman and Chinese, possibly because of the existence of well-trained and efficient specialists in governance / administration and military science. It appears that the policy makers of a stage 4 society tended to engage in and promote activities which cause their society to become too centralized, too specialized and too highly concentrated to be sustainable. Generally considerable technical progress is made in the pragmatic sense. That is that while certain procedures were known to produce certain effects, these are regarded more as magic spells or procedures than as a cause-effect relationship which can be systematized or integrated. Examples of this are the conversion of iron into steel and the tempering of the steel to provide sharp, durable weapons. A major contributing factor to the decline and destruction of a specific empire may have been the tendency to regard any technical knowledge as a family or guild "trade secret" which was to be protected to maximize profit. Thus while a family or guild knowledge of pragmatic procedures may allow the production of complex and sophisticated products, it also tended to restrict the diffusion of such procedures and products into other areas and thus limit the rate of change and improvement. It is unfortunate that in many cases moral and ethical considerations have been introduced into this discussion as these tend to produce considerably more heat than light. (For example Rousseau 1712-1778 and Gibbons 1737-1794 ) What seems to be the general case is that all cultures are subject to random stresses. These stresses can be an invasion, an internal revolution, a famine, a plague, a new social theory, a new religion, etc. Cumulative environmental effects also appear to be important. For example, some writers have posited that a major contributor to the decline in some stage III societies was the depletion of available natural resources such as arable land for food and timber for building ships and fortifications. The less developed transportation systems and technologies would have caused societies in this stage to be more vulnerable than would societies in the later stages. There appears to have been little realization of the importance of using sustainable agricultural techniques, reforestation and the productivity of and thus the need for the protection of wetlands. Indeed, some of the major "public works" of antiquity and the medieval period was specifically the draining of swamps and marshes. Long term climatic changes could also have a similar decisive effect.[Wright, K.] Additionally, geographic changes such as the shifting of the course of a river or the silting of a harbor are also known to have caused the abrupt economic decline if not collapse of ancient city-states. It also seems apparent that the more perfectly an organism, and by extension a society or culture, is adapted to one set of conditions the less well it will be adapted to a new or changed set of circumstances, and it is observed that the older an organization the less "flexible" it is. A further consideration is that most societies in stage III historically tend to engage in behaviors which cause extensive amounts of animosity and resentment. These animosities include but are not limited to envy of their flaunted wealth, hatred of their affectation of political and intellectual superiority or simply a desire for revenge for military defeat. While the historical record is not completely clear on this point, it appears that most stage IV societies succumb, not to a single factor but rather a combination of simultaneous factors. That is to say that while an empire may have successfully coped with famines, plagues, invasions and internal revolutions in the past, they are unable to cope with all of these at the same time. This is especially true if their nominal allies and vassals have been biding their time for the proper moment to obtain revenge. Each of the characteristics that helped create an empire then becomes a characteristic that assists in its downfall. The concentration of governance and military science into the hands of a few, albeit highly talented, specialists means that if these few people can be isolated or incapacitated then the entire society is paralyzed. The specialization by large numbers of the population in specific trades means that they are extremely vulnerable if the demand for their specific knowledge/skill no longer exists as they no longer have the means or knowledge to feed themselves and their families in the sense of subsistence agriculture or hunting. Economic devastation of large numbers of people, what ever the cause, generally results in revolution. Responsible or not, the existing social structure and leaders are held answerable for the disaster. The concentration of people into large cities, while promoting trade and generally improving the perceived quality of life means that to control the city, all that must be done is to control the food (or water) supply and as there is no need to breach the fortifications, advanced technologies such as siege engines and catapults are not required for their capture. This means that a stage IV society or economy is vulnerable to organized and warlike peoples such as the Huns, Goths and Mongols even though they may lack "technology" or "culture." The separation between the "thinking" and "doing" classes tended to grow more pronounced over time. In most empires slave holding tended to become more pronounced, thus further debasing the status of labor, gainful employment and useful physical (other than military and sports) activity. Another factor may also be that the specialization of occupations has resulted in the development of a large mass of people with no more military capability or "will to resist" than a flock of sheep. Slaves, almost by definition, are forbidden to own arms or even learn the "arts of war ," thus making this segment of the population useless in the military sense. This means that as soon as the "professional" military segment of the culture is no longer available, for what ever reason, the culture is instantly vulnerable to even small para-military groups, even if these are not particularly well armed, trained, or led.

Unka George (George McDuffee)

...and at the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: ?A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.?

Rudyard Kipling The Naulahka, ch. 5, heading (1892).

[snip]

How did your dissertation advisor feel about such obvious proofing errors? What was your dissertation for, and when and where was it accepted? Published? Just curious.

Jeff