the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor
One of the most jarring moments of my university education was in a physics class when I was given a device that measures gravity and was told “this cost the university sixteen thousand dollars, but the only glass blower in the world who could make the glass springs inside it died so it’s literally irreplaceable. If you drop it those springs will shatter. Go fuck around with it for a day and take some measurements”
As an engineer it's genuinely so fucked up that so many manufacturing arts have been lost to time. Not just ancient things; people talk about Damascus steel and Greek fire but we are literally incapable of manufacturing the Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines used on the first stage of the Saturn V.
So many of these skills are being automated or forgotten and while automation can be an incredible approach to mass manufacturing there are just some things that are not possible/prohibitively expensive to do without that skilled labor.
and like, come on. what a sexy occupation. I'll bet the glassblower sloppy toppy goes crazy
today, I realised the amount of knowledge lost when an education program ceases is incomprehensible
quite a significant amount of education programs about sexuality and disability don't provide a place to access information once grants stop, meaning energy must be needlessly expended obtaining knowledge which once existed
this cycle of knowledge generation and loss is present in so many areas of trade and academia
btw i learnt this in a library. the storage and passage of knowledge to others is important. use your local library
