Comment by Animats
7 hours ago
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.
People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.
In my graduate engineering program you could always tell who came from high caste families and who came from low caste families by how they performed in the lab.