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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I think the idea you’re looking for is apprenticeship. And I think they did start teaching kids to do useful things early. But it seems at least from my reading that the activity started at 7 and didn’t get serious until later.

Without licensing, how can an average homeowner tell the difference between a plumber whose work will catastrophically fail in 6 months and one whose work is unlikely to do that?

A plumber whose work catastrophically fails in six months will be sued and will go out of business.

For the sake of argument: that’s after six months of doing shoddy work at dozens of job sites, plus however long the court cases take.

Ehh, depends on the kind of electrician and plumber, and what those electricians and plumbers are actually doing. There are a lot of plumbers and a smaller number of electricians(and an even smaller number of HVAC techs, although I’m calling anything with Freon outside of the realm of what a homeowner can do even if good with tools) who do solely easy residential service calls. But most have a body of knowledge out of reach for the average homeowner which they have to call on at least occasionally.

You cannot put vehicle automotive Freon gages on a home air conditioner, they won’t fit.

although I’m calling anything with Freon outside of the realm of what a homeowner can do even if good with tools

Before they made you get a license, and for a lot of people long after, homeowners did do their own work with Freon. It's not rocket science, it's just reading gauges.

Metering devices were different in 1990. TXV’s genuinely make measuring Freon more complicated.

I agree it isn’t rocket science- I could teach you to do it in an afternoon and trust you to do it right after a couple days supervision- but at that point you are no longer an ‘average homeowner’.

And understanding the proper use of vacuum pumps and fittings; there's a few decent gimmicks and tricks to doing it right rather than right-enough and to minimize lossages. Similarly, there's some relatively subtle mistakes you can make with home wiring, especially older installs.

But they are learnable, especially these days where there's pretty good video tutorials everywhere online.

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