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Old 10-14-2016, 10:53 AM
bg7
 
7,694 posts, read 10,528,591 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation View Post
I thought this forum would be the most appropriate place to put this.

I've noticed a couple things lately people have seemingly completely forgotten. I'm no expert in self-sufficiency, but some of the things I see out there are just mind-boggling.

Biggest thing I've noticed day to day is horrible tie-downs in pickups, or no tie downs at all. I saw a portable basketball goal recently upright in a small pickup, going to topple over at any time. I've seen so many items hanging loose out of beds, not tied off, or tied up poorly that this seems to have been forgotten.

I'm not an expert vegetable gardener, but have done about ten years worth of it until the last several years and I'm amazed at the number of people who don't know how to tie support for tomatoes or bean varieties that need it, have never canned or frozen anything, and let a garden basically go to waste.

Tying various knots with common garden twine, ropes, etc., seems to be a lost art. Again, no expert but I can keep things secure.

Any sort of plant/tree identification seems to be long gone. I met a woman in a park in Indiana earlier this year who didn't know a wild blackberry.

What skills are you noticing that seem to be dying off?
I noticed that tree and plant identification skills as well as the ability to live off the land naturally dropped precipitously when the dimwit colonial ancestors came along and basically killed off the Indians without learning much from them. This was compounded by the idiocy of our grandparents who ploughed up the ecosystem of the great plains which had been intact for tens of thousands of years and let it turn into a disastrous dustbowl for no good reasons whatsoever. Then you had the idiocy of their forefathers who poured so much pollution and sewage into New York Harbor that the killed the biggest, best and most productive oyster fields the world has seen. And so on. What a bunch of idiots came before.
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Old 10-14-2016, 01:04 PM
 
Location: Early America
3,102 posts, read 2,046,940 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MTSilvertip View Post
I went and paid for my degree, real college with a football team and everything important to a good education.
Grew up in a college town, can't say the performance of the students working around town ever impressed me, except for the number of them that made the paper each Monday after being arrested for underage drinking, drugs, driving under the influence etc.
After going through the system myself, I was amazed at how many useless classes I was forced to pay for and sit through just to give some idiot professor a job. "women's studies", "art history", "effects of the civil rights movement", "creative writing", balderdash. None of it had anything to do with Electronics or Engineering which is what I was there for.
Why would Bowling as a physical education course be a college level requirement??????

I can look at a painting or statue and tell if I like it or not, but trying to draw meaning from a jar with a crucifix in it, filled with urine, I don't find any "artistic" meaning to that at all.
All you had to do to pass those classes was show up for the tests, regurgitate the pabulum from the textbook the professor had written, and you passed.
Big deal. You didn't have to learn anything except how to work around the system by kow-towing to the premise of the classes which was indoctrination into a specific political mindset.

I did like the required History classes, and foreign language classes, but those I could see value in. 99% of the required courses had none.
You can scratch history off the list of worthwhile subjects at most universities today. Western history is now considered too offensive to study. It has gone the way of classic literature that has been deconstructed with anti-Western ideology inserted.

Many students, and many professors for that matter, don't read, study or even know about in many cases, primary sources that haven't been deconstructed and translated into a singleminded explanation of history. These explanations teach that Western civilization is the root of evil and must be destroyed before humankind can progress.

Some people don't seem to know what has been going at colleges, how bad it has been for the past few decades or how much worse it has become in the last 5-6 years. They may not realize that the absurdities began at the most prestigious universities. I know a few professors approaching retirement age. They are biding their time, hoping to reach retirement unscathed. Anything they say might be construed as aggression, racism or worse. They no longer enjoy their jobs because they aren't really teaching and haven't for years. They become more alarmed and defeated each year as the quality of students becomes poorer. They just want to get out and live their remaining years in peace, so they won't be doing anything about it.

When intellectuals become nonintellectual, they deserve to lose respect.
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Old 10-14-2016, 01:16 PM
 
Location: Eastern Washington
17,158 posts, read 56,898,950 times
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Learning to weld is not that hard, although that's like saying learning to play the guitar is not too hard. It depends on how good you want to get. And the same way, it's easier to weld well with good equipment.

To me, there is nothing like learning a skill like welding from an actual live teacher. There are some aspects like the sound the arc is making, ("You can make that sound without making a good weld, but you can't make a good weld without making that sound...") that are hard to express well in a U-Tube video. Although I have to admit the technology is always getting better.

To me it's sort of reassuring to be working next to a guy who CAN do what you are trying to learn, and realize he does not have horns and at tail, or other qualifications that you can't gen up for yourself.
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Old 10-14-2016, 01:28 PM
 
28,110 posts, read 63,531,084 times
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In another life I became a certified welder because I wanted to learn the skill...

It has served me well making repairs and for my hobby of restoring cars...

A steady hand and good hand eye coordination sure help.

One of the students was recently retired... worked for the Navy Yard and always wanted to weld... nice guy and great to have in class... he stopped after the first Semester as his hands were just too shaky...
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Old 10-14-2016, 01:45 PM
 
Location: Backwoods of Maine
7,487 posts, read 10,459,924 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SimplySagacious View Post
Some people don't seem to know what has been going at colleges, how bad it has been for the past few decades or how much worse it has become in the last 5-6 years.
You mean, there's more to it than just "safe zones" for the special snowflakes??
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Old 10-14-2016, 01:50 PM
 
5,686 posts, read 4,120,355 times
Reputation: 7413
Quote:
Originally Posted by SimplySagacious View Post
You can scratch history off the list of worthwhile subjects at most universities today. Western history is now considered too offensive to study. It has gone the way of classic literature that has been deconstructed with anti-Western ideology inserted.

Many students, and many professors for that matter, don't read, study or even know about in many cases, primary sources that haven't been deconstructed and translated into a singleminded explanation of history. These explanations teach that Western civilization is the root of evil and must be destroyed before humankind can progress.

Some people don't seem to know what has been going at colleges, how bad it has been for the past few decades or how much worse it has become in the last 5-6 years. They may not realize that the absurdities began at the most prestigious universities. I know a few professors approaching retirement age. They are biding their time, hoping to reach retirement unscathed. Anything they say might be construed as aggression, racism or worse. They no longer enjoy their jobs because they aren't really teaching and haven't for years. They become more alarmed and defeated each year as the quality of students becomes poorer. They just want to get out and live their remaining years in peace, so they won't be doing anything about it.

When intellectuals become nonintellectual, they deserve to lose respect.
What is your source for this? Breitbart?

This is the same ole rhetoric that is regularly thrown around but doesn't have an ounce of truth. What is your source for these sorts of claims? Have you actually been to a university and taken a course in the last 5-6 years?

The common idea that professors can't teach anything real anymore because students are too sensitive is simply false. A recent survey of over 800 professors found the following:

- Only 3.4% of professors had ever had a student request a trigger warning
- Only half of professors had ever used a trigger warning
- Most professors who had used a trigger warning did so on their own volition because they thought the material needed it
- The number one reason professors had used trigger warnings was because of sexual or violent material

The type of material professors gave trigger warnings for in the survey ranged from sexual assault and incest in novels to descriptions of female genital mutilation. These professors still taught this material, and I don't think them saying "Heads up, this is some violent stuff we're about to read" is out of line.

The idea that students today can't handle real teaching on these topics is also without merit:

None of the professors we talked to said that they had had a student try to get out of an assignment or skip a class because of topics that made them uncomfortable.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/...igger-warnings

Last edited by Wittgenstein's Ghost; 10-14-2016 at 01:59 PM..
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Old 10-14-2016, 02:42 PM
 
9,446 posts, read 6,549,098 times
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Being able to accept without malice that times change and people adjust.
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Old 10-14-2016, 04:03 PM
 
14,263 posts, read 11,573,591 times
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Being able to tell whether food is spoiled or still good. Seems like many people nowadays just look at whatever random date is stamped on the package, and if it was yesterday or earlier, they throw the food away.
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Old 10-14-2016, 07:06 PM
 
12,999 posts, read 18,851,211 times
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True about the smart phone. The other day I passed a couple with a baby carriage and the child was playing with a phone!
I think people are not as handy anymore. They throw out instead of repairing. Bicyclists who can't change a flat. Motorists who can't navigate without a Garmin. A lot of them can't cook without a microwave.
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Old 10-14-2016, 07:33 PM
 
1,571 posts, read 1,117,795 times
Reputation: 5129
As a hiring manager of engineers, I am amazed at how many graduates from universities have never built anything. I mean we are talking about engineers and they have literally never built, repaired or improved anything in their life. Not with their dad's tools, not with Lego's, nailing two boards together ...nothing at all. Engineers with all that book learning and theory they have in two and a half decades of life, never built a thing.
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