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posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 06 2017, @05:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.

the Good Housekeeping Institute's recent publication of a dishwashing guide for all those young people (2 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK) who have never learned the ancient art of washing up. In a nutshell, use hot water and rubber gloves, pre-scrape and soak dirty pans, change your water halfway through, and wash in the following order: glasses, mugs, cups, saucers, side plates, dinner plates, cutlery, serving dishes, pans, roasting tins.

While not knowing how to wash dishes is kind of a big deal, it's the whole idea of not being to handle oneself as a versatile, independent adult that is most concerning. Young people lack a wide range of practical skills these days, as revealed in a recent study by YouGov. More than half of young people (18-24) do not know how to set up utility bills upon moving to a new place; 54 percent cannot replace a fuse in a plug; 34 percent can't reset the fuse box after a switch has tripped; 37 percent do not know how to defrost a freezer; and 11 percent is clueless when it comes to changing lightbulbs. (You can see the entire sad list here.)

So what? There's an app for that.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Friday October 06 2017, @08:39PM (4 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Friday October 06 2017, @08:39PM (#578319) Journal

    If you live in a town / small city you're still urban. You may interact with more rural dwellers,

    You mean you may actually condescend to speak to the Farmer selling produce at the Saturday Morning Farmer's Market?

    The difference is much deeper than that.
    If you live in an apartment building, flat, condo, you expect the building and the people who manage it to take care of you.
    You don't mow grass, (hell you probably never walk on grass), you don't paint, you don't fix leaks, replace flooring, change a faucet washer, or snake your own toilet. You call somebody, then ridicule the butt crack after he leaves. You have no tools of your own beyond the wrong size screw driver.

    If you live in suburbia or in the countryside you expect to take care of the house. You do all those necessary things, maybe even occasionally move an outlet or install another. Not only do you have a lawn mower, you also know how to maintain it. You can mend a fence, or build a new one. You have the tools, and you know how to use them to do most home maintenance tasks. You've probably put up shingles, done some plumbing, poured some cement, dug a garden, trimmed your trees. Maybe you call someone to do big jobs or jobs requiring costly tools, or dangerous work.

    Dependency and skill-deficit starts at the edge of town and grows increasingly more severe as you work your way inward. You can measure it by counting the buildings with more than two floors. When the neighborhood is composed mostly of buildings 3 stories or higher the basic ability of permanent resident's to take care of their selves and surroundings has fallen essentially to zero.

    The more high-tech the world appears, the more low skilled the occupants are.

    Cities exist to keep excess population out of the way of industry and farms.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:35AM (#578412)

    > Cities exist to keep excess population out of the way of industry and farms.

    Is this really what it's come to? Originally I believe cities were for mutual defense. When the industrial revolution started up, factories were built in cities because everyone had to walk to work.

  • (Score: 2) by WillR on Monday October 09 2017, @02:00PM (1 child)

    by WillR (2012) on Monday October 09 2017, @02:00PM (#579265)
    "If you live in suburbia or in the countryside you expect to take care of the house."
    Maybe in "the countryside" (which, again, is huge but doesn't have all that many people living in it), but in suburbia everyone has a lawn service (and a plumber, and a fence guy, and a tree guy and so on and so forth) now.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday October 09 2017, @10:08PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday October 09 2017, @10:08PM (#579454)

    The key thing you are missing is that as a rural person, you also rely in very tangible ways on the cities. However, because you don't actually see what they're doing, it makes it easier for you to pretend you don't need them.

    Some examples of this:
    - Any time you buy something from a store, you're relying on that store's distribution network. That network is often run out of offices in or near cities and has warehouses and distribution centers in cities, because cities are nice centralized locations for finding lots of people willing and able to work for your office or warehouse.
    - Any time you buy something mail-order, you're relying on the postal services to get them to your house. And guess where the postal service is managed? Sure, your local mail carrier is a nice enough guy you went to high school with or something, but he's getting the towns' mail mostly from a distribution system he doesn't manage.
    - Any time you use a credit or debit card for any reason, you're using a city-based financial system.
    - Tools and materials you used to put in that new electrical outlet or whatever were made in factories in, wait for it, cities. Probably Chinese cities these days, but cities nonetheless.
    - That network management center you are relying on to connect the Internet? Yup, that's in a city, too.
    - The power company that is almost definitely keeping your house running (unless you're running a Tesla roof/battery system or something)? City-based.

    It's really easy to be living in your house on a rural road somewhere thinking "I don't need anything besides my land and my family and my stuff". I know because I live in a house on a rural road somewhere. But the simple fact is that that impulse is not true, and never has been. For example, if you read some of that 19th century pioneer literature, and you'll see references after references to relying on neighbors for all sorts of things and going into town to buy stuff from the general store that homesteaders couldn't make themselves.

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