OT - Basic Skills in Today's World

Not very common in Florida, unless you build it above ground, then bring in lots of truckloads of dirt to make it look like its sitting on a small hill.

When I bought this house eight years ago, I couldn't even find a realtor who even knew what a workshop was. One listing claimed to have a workshop, so I got directions and went to see it. The "Workshop" was two feet of 1" * 12" particle board over the dryer in the laundry room. I went back to the realtor's office and read him the riot act in front of everyone there, including other people looking for homes. I asked him if he had been married so long that he had forgot what it was like to have the space to do what he wanted, when he wanted. Finally, he asked, "Just what the hell are you looking for?" I smiled and told him that I wanted a house suitable for a single many with hobbies. A 150 square foot house, and a 3000 square foot shop. he told me that i would NEVER find it in Florida, because no one wanted a workshop. He was wrong. I found a home with a 30' * 40" garage, a 18' * 28' storage building, a 12' *

12' "Workshop", a 12' * 12' laundry building, a 12' * 24" one bedroom cottage, and a three bedroom home with a large family room and a small library.

All for under 40K, and it should be paid off in a few more years. ;-)

A friend of mine found a nice place with a work shop.... An old chicken farm. 5 buildings 60 feet wide by 150 feet long with good roofs, and construction, with a nice house. Total cost was 200K. Oh I forgot, 14 acres of land too. This was in lower NY state.

John

=============== I am not sure how obvious an "s" on Gibbon is. I hope this did not interrupt the flow too badly when you were reading the section.

Dissertation was for EdD Oklahoma State University, 1999 (Stillwater, Oklahoma) Occupational and Adult Education

I was one of the last two graduates from that department/discipline. The other was a very good friend from Brazil and we still email about vocational/technical education in our countries.

Several problems.

I used endnotes and these don't come over [well] when doing a cut-n-paste to "text only" newsgroup postings.

I have made three moves since graduation and when I finely got around to converting the formatted and proofed MS doc file [done by some very talented dissertation typists] into pdf format for posting on my web site after I retired and had time, I discovered that several parts of the final file were unreadable, so had to use my unformatted block left working files. The appendix was one of those sections.

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

That's a really great idea. Only downside that I can think of is that (at least around where I grew up), those buildings typically had openings half-way up that easily opened for fresh air during the warm months. Not sure they were very weather or air-tight. Also, do you know whether they had concrete or dirt floors? But for a relatively small amount of remodeling, one could have a woodshop, a tractor restoration shed, a metalworking shop --- (Dang, I'm out of hobbies and still have two more buildings to go; I guess one could be used by the family for storage).

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I need a few Hercules monochrome graphics cards, some small footprint

486light pentium mobos (4-8meg ram max) and a half dozen monchrome monitors.

I repair several brands of CNC equipment, PC (dos) based..and they use the above. Getting hard to find mono monitors

I can personally use some SCSI hard drives, no smaller than 10 gig. The (cant remember the connector name) that looks like IDE

My email addy..drop the no spam if its on this one.

I can pay modest amounts plus shipping to California.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

"When we invent it, what colour would you like fire to be?"

"Everyone lived happy and fulfilling lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease caught from an infected telephone...."

Steve

Congratulations on your achievement.

Jeff

Brings to mind a place that went up for sale around here about 15-20 years ago: 10 acres on a corner, 4BR ranch house, two-story workshop with loading dock and crane, three other concrete block outbuildings, all heated, free gas from well on property. Previous owner was a contractor of some sort.

Few bid on it. The realtor said because the owner had committed suicide and there were silly rumors about it being haunted.

I told a blacksmithing colleague in Ft. Wayne, Indiana about it. His comment: Haunted? So what? If there's a ghost there, the sonofabitch better have a hammer in his hand during working hours! What he does after that is his problem long as he doesn't disturb my sleep.

Place finally went for ~60,000, about half or less what it should have brought. Same nice folks are still there and haven't said anything about being bothered by ghosts.

They do have a tendency to consume a fair amount of spirits on weekends however.

(snips)

That's possible, and most likely. But...

I can give you another scenario: 5 or 6 120 kt nukes go off in NYC, LA, DC, Chicago, Seattle, etc. (Hezbollah, Al Qaida, etc. have "won".) The investment, banking, and fed gov systems go into paralysis. No banks open, no stock markets, no commodity markets. No way to maintain the electrical grids, because of no way to pay the workers and suppliers. No way to restart the financial markets, because most of the leadership and workers in NYC are dead, and the buildings are in ruins, and the financial infrastructure won't be rebuilt for years, if ever. Then what's left of the fed gov (most of the leadership already being dead) starts distributing the billions (or is it trillions?) of dollars in paper money they have stored up for just such an emergency. Then the worker bees in places like Denver and San Jose figure out that they aren't going to get paid, and if they do get paid, it will be in money that is losing its value faster than a 1923 German Mark. Then you go to your standard rioting, looting, killing, and general collapse of society. Millions of dead bodies start piling up, and the population of the U.S. is rapidly heading towards half or less of what it was a couple of months before. State and local governments start devolving from fed gov control and issue their own currencies, which don't hold their value either. Local warlords start... well, you get the idea.

I'm not suggesting that is likely, or even the most likely result of that nuclear attack scenario. What I am saying is

-- assuming that it can't possibly happen is a mistake. It has recently happened, to lesser extents, in societies which have suffered lesser shocks. A good example is the former USSR, which has gone through a monetary collapse, a severe population decline (the life expectancy is now only about

60), a social collapse, with alcoholism becoming even a bigger problem (contributing to that life expectancy decrease) and with millions of pensioners becoming impoverished as their state pensions' values evaporated along with the value of the ruble. And all they had to shock them was an inefficient social/economic system, a failed war in Afghanistan, and a nuclear power plant disaster. Extrapolate the results from my 5 or 6 nukes scenario, and you easily get to a near-total societal collapse. For fictional depictions, see: The Postman, Road Warrior, etc.

It wouldn't be like the transition from buggy whips to Model Ts. It would be a transition from the complex, highly ordered Information Society to a chaotic world of scarcity, destruction, and death. Another poster summed it up succinctly in another thread -- no cops.

-- Robert Sturgeon Summum ius summa inuria.

I, too, live and work in SoCal, and you are correct in saying that VocEd is the exception rather than the rule, but I merely wanted to point out that there are some good VocEd programs out there, and some are growing and flourishing. There is such a demand for our Wood classes that sessions of Wood are offered after regular school hours, and the Masonry and Auto classes are filled to capacity with many more wanting the classes than there is room for students.

In response to another gentleman's comments later on, our principal is nearing retirement (as am I), but our three previous principals were also devoted to VocEd. We will have a new superintendent next year, and I hope that this individual has the same commitment as the previous super.

As a side note, the community college near where I live (I don't know much about the CC near to my job) has an excellent Wood program, even periodically offerring a guiter building class.

Glen

My last job was at Microdyne which built telemetry equipment for the aerospace industry. I was hired as a test technician on the module line. I was told I only had six weeks to prove that I could do at least

80% of the average work done by everyone else on the line, and that I would work with another tech as a trainer for the full six weeks. I started on a Wednesday morning. By the Friday afternoon of that week my training was terminated and I was assigned a test stamp. The following Monday afternoon a "Committee" showed up at my bench to "Order" me to slow down, that i was already producing more work than anyone else in the department, and "You will slow down, if you know what was good for you." I smiled and thanked them, then told them that if they didn't want to look bad, they had three choices: 1: Learn to work faster. 2: Learn to work smarter. or 3: Get out of my way because I was hired to do a job, not to win a popularity contest. Then I offered to teach them to be better techs and they laughed at me. One asked "How can you teach us anything?" I shrugged and said, I don't know, but if I can do the job better and faster after just three days, you might be surprised. ;-)

They informed me that I was rude, arrogant, and opinionated. Within a couple weeks they started to ask questions. I answered, and got stupid looks, but they did what I suggested, and they came back with big smiles to tell ne it solved the problem. They didn't know that most of my electronics work had been mission critical jobs, ad you didn't have time to waste, so you studied the manuals and schematics ahead of time so you knew how it worked.

They finally realized I wasn't bragging about my skills, that I had worked very hard to develop them, and that I willing shared them with anyone willing to learn.

I was there a little over four years, and ended up working with almost every part of the company because of my, "It will be done. Done Right. Done on time. Done on budget." attitude. On day my boss commented, "You just won't take NO for an answer." I smiled and said, "You're right, and I won't take YES, if I don't believe them."

Management kept coming around with new "Quality Statements" we were supposed to memorize. I shoved the printout back into the HR manager's hands and told him I wouldn't lower my standards for anyone. He turned red and asked, "Well, What is your standard?" I grinned and told him that "I do the best possible job with the tools and materials available, and strive to do even better." His jaw dropped, and he walked away muttering under his breath. ;-)

I was a volunteer advisor for the electronics program at the Lake County Votech, until they decided to shut the course down and replace it with a computer repair course. The "Instructor" was the school system's IT director, and he was teaching with bad materials from the XT days. No one had made the boards he was teaching about for over 10 years, and he was having to read it from a ratty old library book, because he didn't know what he was doing. All he knew was how to admin a small Novel network.

We've got a two car garage with two doors, but we never "park" the cars in them.

I or my son will pull a car into one of them to work on it, but as far as regular parking goes, there's so much stuff stacked up against the walls (plus a couple of lally columns down the centerline) that squeezing through a barely openable car door inside the garage is such a PIA that we just park outside.

But we still use a garage door as our usual entry/exit to the house, 'cause it's much closer to where we park than the front door is, and it has "keyless entry" via a push of the garage door opener button inside the car.

Jeff

They sure do sound like my idea of hell.

I've always held the opinion that my property rights extend as far as my property line and my neighbors should be free to do anything that's legal they want to their property as long as it doesn't create an imminent danger or an audible, foul odored or a physical intrusion over the property line.

If my next door neighbor decides he wants to paint his house to look like it's covered with tartan plaid with a black and white striped chimney or forgos cuttting his grass for two months, so be it. I can probably screen out the view from my side if I'm so inclined.

In fact, that's just what I did two years ago when my next door neighbor had some major improvements done to his home which left me looking at a pretty ugly looking "rubble wall":

The bushes I planted in 2004 have grown so they now just about block out all view of the messy job his contractors did.

To my neighbor's credit, when he saw me schlepping those arborvitae bushes home in the trunk of my car three at a time and planting them over several weekends, he came over and insisted on paying for them. He wouldn't take "no" for an answer so we settled on his writing a comparable sized check to a local charity we support. Everyone won that way.

Jeff

Talk about ugly on an ape.

Give those arborvitae about 10 years, you will probably wish you had never planted them.

Lew

Possible but highly unlikely. In the Pacific NW lots of the electricity is hydroelectric. Other places are coal, or natural gas. What do you see as possibly causing a nation wide power outage?

Dan

You got that right. I can understand why some people buy into these, and I know people who live in just such communities. They mostly love it because they like everything in its place at all times. Homes they are not. Very sterile atmosphere. But they like the golfing, mah jong marathons, and soy burger cookouts, so, whatever winds yer clock.

I just bought a home with two acres at the end of a road in a very rural Utah town. Nothing but BLM land all around that won't be developed in my lifetime. Or probably in this century. It does have some zoning restrictions, but they mainly apply to building permits, setbacks, and common sense items that affect others. That is why I bought there. The people I know who live in HOAs wouldn't consider living there, but they don't have to.

Whatever winds your clock.

Steve

Destruction of power lines. Right now there are disruptions and everything is working. OK. If several producers go out and lines go down you could see a system that is over taxed and totally fail. It happened years ago in New York, a few years ago, or maybe last summer in the Midwest, and it happens in California. There would be no extreme hurry to repair as energy shortages are a palatable excuse to drive up prices. Both the energy companies and oil companies are enjoying this scenario right now.

Gosh, BP is shutting down its Oil pipe line today and already prices for gasoline are going up.