Chiba Harbor Freight

I’m not exactly sure what this video demonstrates. There’s work ethic, of course. It’s an excellent example of the reduce, re-use, recycle ethos. It’s a testament to curiosity. The clerk studies about tools constantly because it’s interesting, and important for his job. There’s customer service. The battery tester from around the 12:00 minute mark, used to measure how many cycles of recharging batteries had already endured in order to price the tools fairly, is a primer on honesty and fairness.  Networking enters into it. There’s a bootstrap lesson at around 13:00 minutes. The owner of this shop explains it started as a different kind of business, and they tried used tools as a sideline, and eventually it became so popular that it superseded the original theme of the shop.

Ultimately, it’s just a slice of life from somewhere I’ve never been, and know little about. I’m always grateful for stuff like that. Way to go, Paolo from Tokyo. Regular news outlets and broadcast media never have any useful information, never mind interesting stuff to look at. ZooTube has become a fetid swamp of robot-generated slop. Finding something like this is getting pretty difficult these days.

The closest similar business in the US I can think of is the tool rental house, the kind of place I’m pretty familiar with. A jolly clerk is pretty rare in one of those, though. They tend to be fairly snooty in my experience, and for no reason. They care for their tools about as well as you see in the video, and at least know how to turn them on. They generally rent more robust tools than you see in the Japanese video. It’s doesn’t look like Harbor Fraught exploded in a good rental house.

No, truth be told, for the last couple of decades, in the US it was Craigslist that performed the same service you see in the video, without any semblance of service, of course. The market has now almost entirely been purloined by FriendFace Marketplace. If you’re in the market for a broken tool, sold to you in a parking lot in a sketchy section of town, Zuckerberg is your man. Stolen, broken tools, in many cases.

The United States is trying to make everything as impersonal as possible. We went from shopping in stores to supermarkets to warehouses to mouse clicks. Even the delivery drivers run away so they don’t have to talk to you. Your only chance at human interaction is interrupting porch pirates while they’re stealing your packages, and they’re famously introverted.

I don’t know if there’s anything that can be gained from watching that video. But I certainly noticed things that have been lost.

If You Fix Things, You Are My Brother: The 240Z

The 240z was an interesting car. Nissans were still called Datsuns back then, and along with Toyotas and Hondas, the badges were making inroads into the American market. American cars had gotten elephantine. Little Japanese cars got good gas mileage, were more fun to drive (a floor shift beats three on the tree anyday), and were cheap to buy. But it took a lot for American buyers to get over their aversion to Japanese cars. Some of it was patriotism. But mostly, it was simply inertia. People need a big nudge to change their long-held opinions.

The 240z was just that kind of nudge. It came out in 1969, and it changed American attitudes towards Japanese cars overall. Lots of people started driving pokey B210s and Honda Civics because the 240z made Japanese cars finally seem cool. The car looked like an Asian Jag, or any number of other European long-hood roadsters.

It’s not surprising to see someone restoring a 240z. It’s basically always been the kind of car worth a makeover. Fifty years on, it still seems as cool as it ever was, or even moreso. What is surprising to me is to see how good this panel beater is at his job. He lives in a land beyond meticulous.

More or less the first job I ever had was doing the needful in a body shop. We did quick and dirty repairs, using much more bondo than ingenuity. We sprayed paint like vandals. The fellow that ran it, whose lungs are probably long since an exhibit in some Don’t Do That Museum, made most of his money by pinstriping cars. He left work to me he probably shouldn’t have. If you’re currently driving a Vista Cruiser and the rear fixed windows fall into the rotted fenders when you go over a speed bump, I apologize unreservedly.  So I know bad well enough to know good when I see it.

I watched a bunch of related videos for this restoration. They’re delightfully free of sleeve tattoos and thrash metal soundtracks. There are lots of people banging on old cars on YouTube. This fellow stands out.

The Future of Software

Here’s how cars were made in 1960:

Here’s how they’re made now:

The only real work for humans in the modern factory involves judgment. They inspect what the machines have done to make sure it’s correct. Later on in the process, some people crawl around in the passenger compartment to install the electronics and the trouble lights I’ll be looking at when I buy the car second hand in fifteen years or so. It’s not automated, but it sure is mechanized to a fare-thee-well. Again, they are relying more on judgment and experience than a strong back.

It’s 1960 in software. People who push a little javascript around on a virtual desktop, in a fit of self-importance, call themselves engineers, and they think they’re immune to the same forces that made all those thousands of blue-collar workers superfluous in the space of a single lifetime. Open AI or LLMs, or whatever you want to call almost-thinking-bots are going to perform all the IT drudge work going forward. This is not conjecture on my part. This website uses seven plugins I installed that I coded using AI. They all work better than the human-coded plugins they replaced.

The only thing that will be really valuable for computer coding is going to be judgment. And if you’re wearing wool socks and sandals, a man bun, and a neckbeard, I’m afraid you’ve already demonstrated exactly how valuable your judgment is going to be going forward.

Kids These Days

Lots of ink spilled about kids these days. They’re either imbeciles who will never pay off their student loans, or they’re geniuses making mid six-figures at a FAANG outfit. Never anything in between.

But there’s a great deal of world between sullenly serving coffee and coding AI apps. I dislike the way the term “engineer” and “architect” has been purloined for computer programmers. I always preferred “code monkeys,” but no one ever listens to me. Anyway, the world needs many more practical, real-world engineers than we’ve got. It appears that Johns Hopkins University is producing some:

The challenge before Johns Hopkins University engineering students: Take a leaf blower, but make it quiet. Make it work as powerfully as ever, but do not allow it to emit the ear-piercing caterwaul that has gotten leaf blowers banned in some communities and cursed in many others.

Shocking their sponsors, their advisers, and even themselves a little, the students did it.

This isn’t one of those things that you read about that instantly disappears, either. It’s ready for prime time:

The design wowed Stanley Black & Decker officials, who can’t wait to start manufacturing and selling the new tools.

“It’s not just some cool theoretical thing that will sit on a shelf and never be heard from again—this is ready to be mass manufactured,” said Nate Greene, senior product manager at Stanley Black & Decker, who graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2017 with an engineering degree. “This is a really rare and dramatic level of success.”

The student team expects their solution could be adapted to quiet other similarly loud appliances like vacuums and hairdryers.

Good work kids. You’re sure to all find good-paying jobs when you graduate. And good paying jobs aren’t as good as being a Instagram influencer, of course, but somehow I think you’ll muddle through.

In a Surprise to Exactly Nobody, This Is From Switzerland

So, the Swiss want to repave a busy road. As you might expect, they go about it in a very Swiss way.

I’ve had to supervise the paving of a few short stretches of road, and lots of parking lots, so maybe I can tell you what’s going on in the video.

First, they’re scarifying the road. This is done by a big machine with lots of nasty teeth that can handle grinding away at little rocks suspended in emulsion all day. They’re removing what is called (in the US) the wearing layer of pavement. What’s underneath is sometimes referred to as scratch pavement here. I have no idea what the Swiss call theirs.

All the stuff they grind up will be recycled into more pavement. The grinding wheels on the machine are circular, so it leaves a bit of a curved ramp at the end of the run. A worker uses a handheld abrasive wheel to cut a slot at the same depth as the scratch pavement level, and then a guy with a jackhammer (pneumatic) cuts out the remainder to make a square place to butt the new pavement into the existing stuff.

Then a guy heats the edge of the old pavement with a propane torch, followed by a guy spraying emulsion. Asphalt emulsion is the goo that holds asphalt together, and acts as a kind of glue between old and new. Then they feed in a more substantial joint tape that’s also hit with a torch as it pays out.

Then they do something that’s sort of old-fashioned. They spray a heavy coat of emulsion over the whole surface, and then put what looks like recycled pavement over it. That serves as the sub-base, or scratch pavement. Roads used to be paved that way fairly often in the US. Just watch Cool Hand Luke to see it done by hand.

Then comes the actual pavement machine. It has wings that fold out to accept bituminous asphalt from a series of trucks, ferried by neat little front-end dumpers. That stuff (hot-mix asphalt) comes very hot indeed from the plant, between 300 and 400 degrees F. If you’ve ever seen a paving crew at work, you’ll often see them strap squares of plywood on their boots to keep the soles from melting when you walk on the fresh pavement. In the US, many dump trucks that carry pavement have heating elements in them to keep the temperatures up during delivery. Cold asphalt doesn’t spread or roll very well.

There’s some extra torch and shovel work at the join to the existing pavement. Then rollers roam over the hot pavement to compact and smooth the surface. A worker runs a gas-powered plate compactor over the edges to avoid having the rollers straddle the seam and risk breaking the existing edge.

And of course the most Swissiest thing about this very Swiss thing is that they built an articulating bridge on wheels that regular traffic can travel over unimpeded while the men work in safety underneath, and the bridge creeps down the roadway as the work is completed.

Sometimes, when I look out my car window, I don’t know where I live exactly, anymore. But it sure as hell ain’t Switzerland.

Men at Work

That’s some real hustle on display, backed up by long experience, I’ll bet. There are at least four men visible on that crew, and they all know what they’re about at all times. I believe that the unofficial word for their jobs is roughneck, but everyone on a rig like that is not all doing the same job. There are derrick hands, and drillers, and floorhands, and motormen, and roustabout jobs on rigs like these. I don’t think any of these guys is technically a roughneck. I think these guys would be called floor hands. Maybe one of them is a derrick hand. One might be a motorman.

Cruising around the intertunnel, I find that the salaries these guys make don’t vary a lot with their different job descriptions.

You can work offshore if you want to bump up your salary some.

The fellows in the video might lose a finger if they’re a little slow getting out of the bight of the chain, but at least they’re not likely to drown in the bargain. It’s a nice, sunny day on the rig in the video, but I imagine their game doesn’t get called on account of rain, or snow.  They’re all smiles, and working super-efficiently, but I’ll bet they grimace and tough it out on plenty of bad weather days, too.

There is only one way to earn the respect of men like this. Pull your weight. That’s it. Don’t show up late, or drunk, or high, or fiddle with a phone, or daydream. Know your role, and stick to it. Don’t clown around, except maybe at lunch. Hustle, especially when it really matters. Prepare for the next thing as soon as the last thing is finished.

No one’s getting rich here, except whoever owns the hole in the ground. It would be vanishingly easy to get hurt, or even killed, if you took your eye off the ball, or the guy next to you did. They are useful people, and worthy of our admiration.

The world pays guys who torture a little Python code into a phone app $350k a year, and these guys 1/7 of that, because the world didn’t ask me beforehand.

How Real Men Play Tetris

I’ve actually performed this same job several times. I have not, however, performed it like that. You have two choices, of course: Tough on the back, or tough on the knees. In the long run, it doesn’t matter which you choose, because when you wear one out, you switch to the other one, and wear that out too.

When The Tractor Cab Looks Like NASA, Find a Good Terranaut

I know I’m supposed to be some kind of impressed with your college degree from Flyover Directional State University, but there must be something wrong with me. I’m not. It’s nothing personal. I don’t have a college degree. Feel free to look down your nose at me, if you can see past your nose ring. Me? I try to take people as I find them.

I guess I should qualify that opening remark a little. I assume there are still future thoracic surgeons floating around out there. People are still graduating with degrees in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, or computer science, aerospace engineering, or something similar. They make things like that tractor in the video and the satellites it’s talking to. But we’ve recently seen exactly how superfluous a PHD at the end of your name is in the soft sciences, never mind a BA. And yet, there’s a pandemic of snootiness from college grads towards guys like you see in the video. Ick. His hands are dirty. He can’t be too bright.

Listen to how intelligent, productive, and articulate this farmer is. He never hesitates, never stumbles, never mumbles. He understands everything going on in that cab, and outside it, too. He is feeding thousands of people with his efforts. He even tracks the decreased yield per acre when the seed placement goes out of tolerance. The video is a 19-minute soliloquy of resourceful, worthwhile activity.

There’s an old joke in Caddyshack, I think, a movie I’ve never seen. A nasty person makes a cutting remark to an average guy, “That’s OK, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” I’ve heard it spoken many, many times. Each and every time I’ve heard it, my eye twitched, because I’ve worked cheek by jowl with plenty of ditch diggers. Even twenty years ago, they were laying out those ditches using a satellite and lasers. I can assure you that no person I’ve heard repeat that remark would be remotely qualified to be a ditch digger, because they weren’t smart enough to start with, never mind physically and mentally tough enough.

People should have some respect for things they don’t understand. The modern college education makes damn sure you don’t understand damn near everything. The fellow in the video might even have a college degree, who knows? If so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him any.

Git Er Dun

I don’t know the provenance of this image. If I did, I’d drive to wherever this guy is, and shake his hand. I’d probably want to wash my hands directly after, but by gad this guy needs an attaboy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the gewgaws in the image, I’m here to help. As far as I know, a Vortec engine is from a Chevy of some sort. I’ve never owned a Chevy anything. I supposed I’d drive one if you gave it to me and asked nicely, but for the most part I’ve never been interested. I could just about put up with a split-window ’63. If you have an extra one lying around, feel free to mail it to me. But my affection for that model is only because it was one of the cars that came with my Aurora slot car set.

I don’t know what that pipe is doing on a Chevy. It looks like some form of exhaust gas recirculation or something similar. Well, this dude didn’t have a replacement part, or is just my kinda guy, I don’t know, but he’s used several PVC plastic plumbing fittings and a couple of Fernco fittings to replace the original.

It brings a tear to my eye. A Cuban mechanic would approve of that, and might even try it himself, or would if they had indoor plumbing down there. Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got. Words to live by.