As adorable as that is, hunger and cold have ways of asserting themselves.

Define “credentialism?”

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.

The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…

“The way to get a job.”

The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.

Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.

I keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.

The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.

This shit about “become a well-rounded individual” also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out “EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER.”

No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.

We cling to this idea that “You are young. This is school time. You learn until you’re adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work.” Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.

Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills…this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.

No, the Decepticons are not misunderstood as the good guys. You are giving the Transformers series WAY too much credit.

First of all, let’s address this lie about decades and decades of woke comic books. That’s mostly marketing for the MCU that the movie industry has told you. Some comic books from some publishers some of the time have had social justice allegories. Stan Lee did it a lot. That was far from the standard; elsewhere in the industry you’d find nationalist propaganda like Captain America or just…DC spent a lot of time just doing salacious shit for the sake of salaciousness. Batman has been anything from goofy shit for children to a grimdark showcase of mental illness. Wonder Woman was an excuse for one author to write about his bondage fetish.

That’s not where Transformers came from. Transformers was a toy line first; Hasboro imported a line of Japanese toys and then created comics and cartoons around them as a marketing exercise. In the Ronald Reagan 1980’s. There’s a lot of people who have correct memories of Transformers being about a team of virtuous, American-made automobiles lead by a Red, White and Blue Peterbilt^® in their glorious fight against the fundamentally Evil, dark-colored foreigners. And those eye rolling The More You Know segments the Gubmint makes em do.

So, explain why you think this is anything other than a waste of time for engineering students?

Ben Rich, aeronautical engineer and second head of Lockeed’s Skunkworks after Kelly Johnson mentions Harvard Business School in his autobiography. He was apparently sent to a program they taught there for professionals already working in industry to become more business savvy. Kelly Johnson sent Ben Rich to this program, and when Rich got back, Johnson asked him what he learned. He said “Okay let me show you.” and he turned to the blackboard and wrote “2/3 HBS = BS” on the blackboard.

And with a hypothesis.

Who figured out this is a thing that works?

Would it have been a meme 20 years ago?

White collar engineers? Paying attention to blue collar techs? That’s the plot of the next Andy Weir novel, isn’t it? A hilariously naive notion of people working together to solve problems? Sounds like his work.

I couldn’t solve all the world’s problems if I was given this power, but it would make people who are damaged in the same way I am laugh for a couple months out of the year.

There needs to be a required summer semester of engineering school called “being a mechanic.”

Okay college boy, put on a shirt with your name embroidered on it and come out here into the shop. Yeah it’s 110 degrees in the shade, you’ve got your buddy Tom Midgly Jr. to thank for that. Now take this wrench and take that bolt out. Oh it doesn’t come out because the oil pan is in the way? I wonder whose fault that is. No, we’re not gonna let it cool before dropping the oil pan, the customer is in the lobby. Yeah. It is 240 degrees. No, it doesn’t all drain out through the plug, there’s a half quart that doesn’t come out. Yes, you’re getting that on you. Don’t get any of it on the interior of the car when you back it out. Now take off the oil filter. Yes, you’re gonna burn the back of your hand on the exhaust manifold. You’re taking every Toyota oil filter off this summer. You’re gonna hold the burn mark on the back of your hand up like Tyler Durden.

Oh you’re going to be an aeronautical engineer. c’mere boy, we’re gonna take the wings off a 152 Aerobat, you get to pick the spar bolts out of the catalog, we’ll safety wire the control cable turnbuckles through those little inspection ports you types are so stingy with, and then we’ll take the bird you just reassembled up for a couple two or three hours of spin training to see if ya done it right. You ever do a snap roll? I’ll teach you more about the aerodynamics of maneuvering flight in 1.5 seconds than your physics professor did in a semester. Eat bananas for breakfast, they taste the same coming up as they do going down. And buddy they’re coming back up. Because of the special jug bolt wrench I had to buy, I’m gonna pull at least one breakfast back out of your face using nothing but stick and rudder.

In English:

Braising: A method of cooking meat moist but not immersed in a fluid, often broth or wine, in a tightly sealed vessel over low heat for a long time, often used to soften tougher cuts of meat by rendering connective tissue into gelatin. “Roasts” are often braised. Compare with stewing, in which meat is cooked immersed in a fluid; contrast with barbecuing in which meat is cooked at low heat for a long time in a vented chamber flooded with smoke from a wood fire.

Brazing: A method of joining two pieces of metal by hard soldering using bronze as a filler material. The base objects are heated to cherry red, flux is applied to eliminate any oxides and bronze filler is applied to wet the surfaces and when cooled strongly bond them. Contrast with welding where the edges of the base materials are heated to melting and the puddles allowed to flow together such that when cooled they form one object. Brazing is often done when joining dissimilar base metals which cannot be successfully welded.

I like how they left “Lima” alone.

Long Live Buffalax!

Stirrup jeans are a thing.

That would be amazing, an automotive scarlet letter. Require them to sew a D for Drunkard on their shirts, both bumpers and both doors.

Pilot here, over been in the habit of using 12 hour for local time and 24 hour for zulu time. “12:45pm, 1745z”