NASA wants more Moon shots and Mars shots

But here on the ground, we don’t have people who can use wrenches to shut and open valves. 

From Gun Free Zone

“Colonial CEO admits workers who knew how to operate the pipeline manually are mostly retired or deceased.” – AntifaBook.

We are seeing this all around us every day.

I can tell you that in engineering it is a problem where fundamentals have been lost in favor of transitioning to technology.

I had a conversation not too long ago where someone was very surprised I was a heat treater under 40.  Almost all of materials science has gone to semiconductors and silicon technology and meta-materials.  There is very little “turn iron ore into pig iron, pig iron into steel, steel into parts” taught in materials science anymore.  The attitude has been “that’s all being done in China and India cheaper so why bother knowing it, we should focus on the advanced stuff.”

Then the shit hits the fan, a boat get stuck in the Suez canal, the Chinese lose control of a virus that restricts international trade, and all of a sudden we need domestic steel production and the only guys who know how to operate an oxygen blast furnace all have one foot in retirement.

The skills gap is real and it is hurting us more than we realize.

And just because this is a personal bugaboo of mine on a very similar topic of skills being replaced by technology: iron sights.

Optics are great and I’m glad they’ve become as cheap and plentiful as they have, but that’s no excuse not to be able to shoot irons.  Optics are glass, glass is more fragile than steel.  Batteries die.  Learn to shoot with iron sights.  If you can do that, you can always shoot optics, but being able to shoot optics doesn’t mean you can shoot irons.

Learn to shoot irons.

https://gunfreezone.net/the-skills-gap/