Tyler Durden: [to the police chief] Hi. You’re going to call off your rigorous investigation. You’re going to publicly state that there is no underground group. Or… these guys are going to take your balls. They’re going to send one to the New York Times, one to the LA Times press-release style. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not… fuck with us.

Put another way, you’re going to miss the guy who knows how the sewage plant operates a lot sooner than the schools superintendent.

Nowadays I expect car makers to weld the bonnet (engine cover) shut,
to keep hobbyists out of the engine room

Karen; those skilled tradesmen come from “somewhere else”. Kind of like how my mother, who grew up in San Francisco, recounts being shocked as a girl when she learned that vegetables were grown in dirt.

Jim: “In my trade as a machinist I regularly get blueprints from engineers that have no practical experience at all. Sometimes the parts they design are impossible to machine without breaking the laws of physics.”

Silly laws of physics I work in a new building and regularly hear analogous complaints from the electricians about the building’s architects. There are lights that simply cannot be changed when they burn out. Well, we could build a five-story scaffold in a narrow atrium over a stairway and around hanging artwork (don’t ask) but otherwise, it’s just impractical.

In a biography of Soichiro Honda, I read that Honda used to require engineers to work on the racing pit crew for a while before they could go near a drafting table. Hope they still do that.

Was my new kitchen installed by craftsmen, or “hobbyists”? Was the technician who finally figured out that my 10-year-old car had a nick in the wiring caused by a bad clutch install a “hobbyist”? These people are highly skilled workers! How can anyone in their right minds call them “hobbyists”????????

One district superintendent told the local paper that “hobby classes” were not part of the schools’ core mission.

What an incredibly short-sighted attitude. Classes like shop teach people skills that they can use later in life, if only to help themselves. They can also help people who want to be engineers and scientists become familiar with the physical world. It used to be that many engineers came from a farming background, where they learned how mechanical things worked from operating and doing maintenance on farm machinery. Nowadays, with corporate farming so prevalent, it’s hard to imagine rural youth get much of a chance to do that.

Of course, it’s getting to be that we don’t engineer anything in America anymore, but if we ever want to change that, it’s going to be a lot harder when young people can’t gain the practical knowledge of how things work.