Being Accepted 2016-12-09

[Warrl]

About Skylar's grants: early in my JUNIOR year of high school I went to the counselors' office to talk about college finance. That wasn't particularly too early. What do you think the odds are that the red tape has thinned out in the nearly four decades since?

[Dave]

What do you think the odds are that the red tape has thinned out in the nearly four decades since?

Heh. With parents in some places beginning to maneuver for slots in the preferred schools, about after a week after the baby is delivered and comes home from the hospital? These days, I sorta expect that some parents-to-be wait until the college grants are approved, before they even get pregnant with the kid in the first place!

[Sgt. Howard]

Both of my boys are going trade school, learning how to build things and fix things. There are BS and MS degrees here in the Okanogan flipping dead animal parts over a grill at the local McGreasy's...

[FreeFlier]

Trade school is a good way to go . . . there are a lot of good jobs going begging because people have been brainwashed into this stupid idea that only a white-collar job is worth having.

Never mind that a skilled tradesman makes more money than a lot of white-collar jobs.

--FreeFlier

[Dave]

Trade school is a good way to go . . . there are a lot of good jobs going begging because people have been brainwashed into this stupid idea that only a white-collar job is worth having.

Never mind that a skilled tradesman makes more money than a lot of white-collar jobs.

Agreed.

The idea that everybody should have a college education is well-meant (education is, in general, a very good thing) but what's often taught in college can turn out to be pretty damned useless. More important than college per se, I think, is practice and training in learning... and a lot of that can take place just as well (or even better) in a working environment, outside of the classroom. As Twain said, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."

Deprecating the idea of skilled-trade apprenticeships was a mistake, I think.

Now, someone in a skilled trade has to work just as hard as a BS/MS/PhD to keep up with the state of the art - learning new aspects to his/her trade, as the older ones fade away due to fashion and automation and technological advancement. Education really should be a life-long thing.

[Just Old Al]

Never mind that a skilled tradesman makes more money than a lot of white-collar jobs.

Agreed.

Education really should be a life-long thing.

Yea verily on both. I have over the years taught many a degree holder to do something useful in engineering because their degrees were essentially unemployable.

That last statement should be engraved on the walls of every institution of education.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Both of my boys are going trade school, learning how to build things and fix things. There are BS and MS degrees here in the Okanogan flipping dead animal parts over a grill at the local McGreasy's...

Back round the end of WW2, my dad was planning on going into the building trades like 80% of his male relatives.

My grandfather put his foot down, hard.

"You go to college and get a degree - there hasn't been twenty years straight in my lifetime that there hasn't been a crash in the building trades." So dad became an accountant with a BS (or would accounting be a BA?) from University of Illinois, and he never lacked for work all his life.

(Grandpa Weber was something five numbers from being laid off as an electrician at Chicago Edison during the Depression.)

[AnotherFairportfan]

As Twain said, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."

If you wanna get laid, go to college. If you want to get an education, go to the library."

[FreeFlier]

Never mind that a skilled tradesman makes more money than a lot of white-collar jobs.

Agreed.

Education really should be a life-long thing.

Yea verily on both. I have over the years taught many a degree holder to do something useful in engineering because their degrees were essentially unemployable.

That last statement should be engraved on the walls of every institution of education.

What use is a degree in Shakespearean literature? Or in 17th century Basque poetry?

Of course, I did know someone who had a degree in something like that, because he loved it . . . OTOH, his second degree was Compsci, and his third was going to be Electrical engineering, possibly with a fourth in Mechanical Engineering . . . Math came easily to him.


But don't get me started on mechanical engineers graduating in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Useless twits . . . no idea at all how things were made!

(The current MEs are much better: we only have to teach them the oddities and specializations.)

--FreeFlier

[scantrontb]

But don't get me started on mechanical engineers graduating in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Useless twits . . . no idea at all how things were made!

(The current MEs are much better: we only have to teach them the oddities and specializations.)

--FreeFlier

yeah i know what you mean. when i was in the Navy, they were JUST starting to come out with a plastics waste processor that was a glorified trash compactor... you dumped in plastic trash and it melted and compressed it into about a 12 to 14 inch diameter disc about 2 inches thick... i saw a few pictures of the R&D site for that thing... it was mounted on a platform about 8 feet off the ground, with a nice stairway up to a cat-walk 360 degrees around the thing, and you could walk completely under it as well... OK, good for the guys DESIGNING IT, but impossible for the guys n' gals that have to ACTUALLY work on it because it was always installed in a space that had BARELY two INCHES of side-to-side clearance and barely just enough room at the top to open the lid and almost NOTHING at the back of the unit... now the rant: the reason: there was a thermostat sensor that was placed in the side of the pressure vessel on the direct opposite side of the "front" of the machine, that once it's been put into place on the ship, you could no longer physically get to, unless you completely, and i do mean COMPLETELY disconnected ALL power and control wiring, UNBOLTED the machine from the foundation, and THEN had Riggers lift the ENTIRE 300+Lbs UNIT off of it's foundation and move it into the aisle-way JUST to unscrew the COVER PLATE to the sensor...!! literally: that cover-plate was so close to the bulkhead that you could not even get one of those ninety-degree angled screwdrivers in the gap between the head of the screw and the wall because the screwdriver was too LONG for the space available!... they have since corrected that screw-up, but still. the idjit's at the R&D site kept on insisting that "Why are you people complaining, WE can get to it!, why can't YOU!??"... they truly, honestly, had no bloody clue that it was never mounted in a wide open, accessible-from-ALL-sides location and that we physically COULDN'T access that spot until they were forced to come out to the ship and see for themselves (and handed a screw driver and told 'Go ahead!, take the cover plate off for yourself!!" )

[AnotherFairportfan]

Do not talk to me about having to service Navy equipment.

I rememeber a UHF transceiver in Viet Nam that had a problem with its fan - to get to that we had to remove the frequency synthesiser completely.

Half an hour to disassemble the thing.

Five minutes to fix the fan problem.

An hour to reinstall and realign the synthesiser.

==================

Of course, at a couple of places where i worked (one was AMI), i got to be the guy who got handed prototypes that needed modification, to make sure that what the engineers said to do was feasible.

Usually it was.

Sort of.

==========

Those experiences lead me to advocate that NOTHING gets released for production until the engineers who designed it build the first five themselves, by hand, using the tools that techs will have to service it with in the field.

[FreeFlier]

At the time, it was not only possible to graduate with an engineering degree without ever taking a shop class, it was normal. Most major engineering universities didn't even offer shop as an elective . . .

The inevitable result was they had no idea how to build something, so they designed things that were hideously expensive to build . . . if they could be built at all.

We figured it took between two and four years to beat all of the nonsense out of them . . . if it could be done at all. (Some it couldn't . . . and a distressing number of those are now in management, or have been.)


In my degree program, OTOH, one of the favorites was to have the student design something . . . then go into the shop and build it. You learned in a hurry that way . . .


And one of the things I'm quite proud of was having the man trying to build something I'd designed call me up and say "<FreeFlier>, I'm not seeing how you mean to build this. With you, I know you have something in mind, but I'm not seeing it." I'm quite proud that I had the kind of reputation that led him to assume that I knew what I was doing. (Granted, I should have given a suggested assembly sequence, but that's not something we normally do. In this case, I should have, because it was a tricky sequence.) Once I explained the key step, he understood everything else immediately. Working with Dan* was great.

--FreeFlier

[Sgt. Howard]

Never mind that a skilled tradesman makes more money than a lot of white-collar jobs.

Agreed.

Education really should be a life-long thing.

Yea verily on both. I have over the years taught many a degree holder to do something useful in engineering because their degrees were essentially unemployable.

That last statement should be engraved on the walls of every institution of education.

How about this- "The truly educated never graduate"

[Just Old Al]

At the time, it was not only possible to graduate with an engineering degree without ever taking a shop class, it was normal. Most major engineering universities didn't even offer shop as an elective . . .
--FreeFlier

{Twitch, twitch, twitch...}

Don't start me up. Rule 1 to new engineers, "LOOK at the problem, LOOK at the environment, THEN decide what yer gonna do about it!"

{Twitch, twitch, twitch...}

Al

[FreeFlier]

One result was a casting with a totally enclosed cavity.

Another was a spring-loaded locking pin . . . with no way to install the pin, and no way to retract it once it had locked. (and it was supposed to be retracted every cycle . . .)

Another was assembling a unit having angular tolerances of one-tenth of a degree from angles having a tolerance of two degrees.

Another was building an assembly that's going to routinely be flown halfway around the world from steel because steel is cheaper than aluminum . . . (that one was from one of the former engineers who had been kicked upstairs into management in the hope of eliminating incompetence . . . that manager is not longer with the company, thank god.)

--FreeFlier

[Catawampus]

I remember looking over a proposed anti-tank weapon that some engineer was trying to sell to the military. The procedure for use of the thing started off with drilling pilot holes in the enemy tank's armour for the shaped charge's mounting screws to go into. He was thoughtful enough to suggest a certain model of power drill, at least.

[AnotherFairportfan]

I remember looking over a proposed anti-tank weapon that some engineer was trying to sell to the military. The procedure for use of the thing started off with drilling pilot holes in the enemy tank's armour for the shaped charge's mounting screws to go into. He was thoughtful enough to suggest a certain model of power drill, at least.

Oi.

[Dave]

I remember looking over a proposed anti-tank weapon that some engineer was trying to sell to the military. The procedure for use of the thing started off with drilling pilot holes in the enemy tank's armour for the shaped charge's mounting screws to go into. He was thoughtful enough to suggest a certain model of power drill, at least.

That definitely sounds like catching a bird by putting salt on its tail.

Not just any bird, either. More like a cassowary, or perhaps a Phorusrhacos.

[Sgt. Howard]

Ever change sparkplugs on a Chrysler? ANY Chrysler?

[Dave]

Ever change sparkplugs on a Chrysler? ANY Chrysler?

Are those the ones where you have to drill holes in the firewall, drop the transmission, and lift out the engine with a hoist and a couple of shoe-horns to get access to the plugs?