Readit Newsblacksmithing you need a forge, which immediately takes up more space and is somewhat more likely to start a fire. an anvil, and tongs, and hammers. its also a lot more physically demanding, even if you use a power hammer.
your #2 and #3 are pretty key. most importantly most fabrication jobs are much happier to get quick work with reasonable precision using stock shapes. once you start talking about real free-form hot shaping you're immediately going up at least 10x in price/time. welded table base - $500. handcrafted wrought table base - $10,000.
really its that metalwork is mostly functional (fences, stairs, railings, walkways, enclosures, stainless for commercial kitchens, pipefitting, etc). its very difficult to stay in business as a actual craftsman making well-designed objects. architectural metal is probably the easiest in (wall coverings, nice looking railing and stairs, lamps, and other decorative elements). and there its still dominated by fabrication processes (machining and welding of stock shapes), although nicer materials like bronze start to have their place.
edit: you know I left this thinking I was missing something and I realized what it is. welding you make shapes out of like-shapes. like making drawings in figma. I don't think a lot of people have what it takes to learn to be a really good freehand artist. and even if you have the skill, being able to design those kind of organic arbitrary shapes so that they are emotive and attractive is another step up. do you want a piece of art which is a direct expression of the concept held by the artist? or do you want a 3x5' 32" inch high workbench for 1/20 the cost?
Let me just clarify one thing: you can reasonably do _arc_ welding in your garage, not torch welding. Source: my house burned down once due to the guy next door torch welding in his garage.
Lisp’s most successful commercial period was during the 1980s during an AI boom. Companies such as Symbolics, Texas Instruments, and Xerox sold workstations known as Lisp machines that were architecturally designed for running Lisp programs. They had corporate and institutional customers who were interested in AI applications developed under Lisp, including the United States government. Lisp was also standardized during this time period (Common Lisp). Lisp even caught the attention of Apple; Apple had some interesting Lisp and Lisp-related projects during its “interregnum” period when Steve Jobs was absent, most notably Macintosh Common Lisp, the original Newton OS (before C++ advocates won approval from CEO John Sculley), Dylan, and SK8.
However, the AI Winter of the late 1980s and early 1990s, combined with advances in the Unix workstation market where cheaper Sun and DEC machines were outperforming expensive Lisp machines at Lisp programs, severely hurt Lisp in the marketplace. AI would boom again in the 2010s, but this current AI boom is based not on the symbolic AI that Lisp excelled at, but on machine learning, which relies on numerical computing libraries that have C, C++, and even Fortran implementations and Python wrappers. Apple in the 1990s could have been a leading advocate of Lisp for desktop computing, but Apple was an unfocused beacon of creativity; many interesting projects, but no solid execution for replacing the classic Mac OS with an OS that could fully meet the demands for 1990s and 2000s computing. It took Apple to purchase NeXT to make this happen, and under Steve Jobs’ leadership Apple was a focused beacon of creativity with sharp execution. Of course, we ended up with Smalltalk-inspired Objective-C, not Common Lisp or Dylan, as Apple’s official language before Swift was released after the end of Jobs’ second reign.
Some other factors: 1. Lisp was truly unique in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but it required expensive hardware to run. It would be hard to conceive of a Lisp running well on a 6502 or an 8086. Something like my NeXT Cube with a 68040 would do a much better job, but those machines cost roughly $6500 in 1989 dollars, out of reach for many developers.
2. By the time hardware capable of running Lisp acceptably became affordable, other languages started offering certain features that used to be unique to Lisp. Wanted garbage collection? In 1995 Java became available. Want object-oriented programming? You didn’t even have to wait until 1995 for that due to C++. Want anonymous functions and map()? Python’s popularity took off in the 2000s. Yes, Lisp still offers features that are not easily found in other languages (such as extensive metaprogramming), but the gap between Lisp and competing popular languages has been narrowing with each successive decade.
Ulysses is only good because Joyce was a coomer.
Candide is actually good and more people need to read it.
The others you listed are post modern neo Marxism or drug abusers which will teach your kids to hate your teacher and the whole idea of education. Why not just throw on “pedagogy of the oppressed” to put the final nail into the coffin of your kid giving a fk about what your teacher teaches (“sorry, I’m not doing your homework you colonizer shitlord, I refuse to participate in the banking model of education”.
- Candide
- A Peoples History...
- Manufacturing Consent
- Dharma Bums
- Naked Lunch/Western Lands
- Infinite Jest
- Something Thompson, Campaign Trail '72 maybe.
They all pretty much sit within a European/American spectrum of "worthy" works - there is a dominance of caucasian male thinking embodied within this list: it's not very broad, even with the odd hat tip to a Bronte sister and Maya Angelou. Nothing from 80% of the World's population, all rooted in a classical Western school of writing theory. Dull.
I also have a concern that they aren't a great foundation for a young person approaching adulthood trying to understand their place in the World and their own beliefs and values about themselves and the World they live in.
As you would expect of adult literature, some of them have sex and sexuality as themes that are explored by protagonists, subplots and subtexts. While this is something we should expect literature to play a part in, and it is of course healthy for adults to consider their own feelings relating to sex and sexuality based on their own contexts and needs through art forms like literature, I'm not sure throwing that at a 9th grader feels quite right. Maybe it is. I think it depends on the child.
The worst crime here though, is that this list is composed of books that are only considered good by the "educated" literarti.
There aren't many page turners that will keep a younger mind engaged and excited. There's only a few that stand out as an opportunity to let a curious reader explore their changing selves through the context of an interesting imagined World - the only real point of literature - in a way that will stimulate and excite their curiosity for the World they are actually growing up in.
And y'know, I'm a huge Shakespeare fan (I live in London, regular attendee of Shakespeare productions from all the usual companies), but this is leaning into some weird material. All 154 sonnets? Much Ado, Hamlet & King Lear, but no Romeo & Juliet or Macbeth? Huh.
Also, I see you, Ayn Rand fans. I see you. No. The Fountainhead is not a good book, she isn't a good writer, and the philosophy she espoused is not justification for you behaving the way you do. Don't try and get grades 9-12 into your little weird cult, you unsympathetic self-absorbed weirdos.