Wind turbines used to absorb a power surplus?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think it is. We are now flooded ruled and shouted down by ArtStudents™

The economy and society will collapse under its own weight and there wont be any competent engineers left to fix it.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Times are changing. They even let wimmins be ingineers now.

[Rod Speed]

Not gunna happen. There were enough engineers to fix the

2008 implosion of much of the world banking system fine.

[John Larkin]

At least we understand that critters that don't breed go extinct.

So the question is whether engineering talent is heritable. Of course it is.

[John Larkin]

And even people who can't spell.

[Jasen Betts]

So about 10 times too big to go in the vaccine hypodermic needle.

[alan_m]

I think from recent events you will find no-one fixed anything in the banking system. In 2008 it was exposure to some Micky Mouse financial products that started the runs and 2023 it's likely to be exposure to the collapsing Micky Mouse cyrpto market.

[alan_m]

Those pet chips were designed decades ago when mobile phones were the size and weight of a couple of house bricks and were limited in functionality. Electronics and nano technology has moved on considerably since then :)

[Cindy Hamilton]

Assuming there are genetic components in engineering talent (and I'm not saying there isn't), it's possible that epigenetic factors determine whether those genes will be expressed.

[Jeff Gaines]

Nothing "goes" extinct, critters that don't breed "become" extinct.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is less genetics than familiarity. I came across a study done in Apartheid S Africa where they evaluated competence in basic industrial practice. Overwhelming the people who did best irrespective of race were those whose parents understood and could handle machines. It is terrifying how STEM inept I have seen intelligent bright children become whose parents were ArtStudents. They expect to fail.

[John Larkin]

That's just part of how DNA works. The epis are mostly heritable too.

If learned skills are epigentically inherited, which they likely are, engineering talent will really run in families, like math and music and athletics.

[rbowman]

That always was the case. RPI had sort of a remedial English class for some of the freshmen and it wasn't geared toward foreign students.

My brother, who was the actual rocket scientist in the family, couldn't spell for sour owl shit. You didn't want him to be the guy painting slogans on the missiles.

[rbowman]

Yeah, like my family. Like many working class families the first kid to go to college was going to be an engineer.

[rbowman]

The common wisdom when I was in school was if you wound up with an Indian lab partner let them handle the paperwork. They were extremely good with theory and a danger with a screwdriver. At least at that time upper middle class Indian kids didn't spend their childhood working on the family jalopy like most American kids who wound up in an engineering school.

I assume that has changed since the '60s as India developed diverse industries. The talent is there but wasn't encouraged by the British colonialists. India is building better Royal Enfields that the Brits ever did :)

[John Larkin]

I think the caste system associated manual labor (which includes manipulating physical objects, even on drawings) with lower classes. So we got a lot of superb Indian theorists and fewer actual product designers. I don't know if that is still the case.

A guy near here has a new Royal Enfield. Is that made in India? It's beautiful in the classic British thumper style.

It's interesting that you don't see the electronics diversity or semiconductor industry in India that you see in China. The Indians do tend to be good at magnetics.

[The Natural Philosopher]

A neighbour here is the worts driver I have ever been driven by. He is or was a Brahmin. I gave up seeing him after my attempts to be kind were accepted as simply his due as a higher caste being than myself. Fuck that.

I had an Indian car mechanic for a while. Utterly superb, would *make* parts from scrap to get old cars going. We used to sit and drink beer together. I miss him.

[Cindy Hamilton]

Welcome to the 21st Century. I'd bet $21 that most U.S. engineering students didn't spend their childhood working on anything besides their video game scores.

Just ask older engineers who have had to work with those fools.

[alan_m]

Agreed, but the other big one in the same week to go down had assets in crypto. Trillions have been wiped off the value of crypto in a matter of months and at one time this was purchased with real money. Even with the failure of FTX (valued at 32 billion and then to zero in a few months) it's come to light that that fund managers from more respected companies probably didn't perform any due diligence before investing. You cannot lose when the bubble is expanding but when it bursts...

Yes, I haven't been following that one too closely but it seems the problems may have been there before 2008.

[Rod Speed]

alan_m [e-mail]> wrote

What was fixed at the time was the liquidity crisis.