One consequence of organizing the end-of-semester vehicle safety check activity (see recent posts) has been that I re-acquaint myself regularly with the state of mechanical knowledge among Today's Youth.
Which is, to say the least, not very good.
As a former RAF engineer and scion of the great engineering city of Sheffield, England, this to me is as great a harbinger of the end of civilization as 400ppm. In fact, I'm happy to connect the two for you, if you ever want to listen to a two-hour rant.
The Cliff Notes: We're heading for hell in a hand-basket because we are too lazy to learn about complicated unpleasant things.
A similar level of mechanical disadvantage nearly cost the young lady in this NYT article $3,000 for a couple of ten-dollar radiator hoses and a set of struts that I can get delivered to my home for $49.95 off the Internet in two business days.
But at least she began to learn enough from the experience to avoid such things.
Read it and weep.
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I'm sorry to have to say that the number of spam comment postings has required that we turn off anonymous comment posting. There's been a massive boom in what seems like computer-automated spam comments with links to web pages that advertise cheap, nasty, bad-for-you products, mostly cigarettes.
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