On Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 12:08:49 AM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:04:28 -0500, Tim McNamara
wrote:

On Wed, 06 Sep 2017 15:05:20 +0700, John B wrote:
On Tue, 05 Sep 2017 17:01:31 -0500, Tim McNamara
wrote:

On Mon, 04 Sep 2017 12:49:06 +0700, John B
wrote:

Apprenticeship used to be a method of learning a trade. Abraham
Lincoln, I believe, "read for the law" which was realistically an
apprenticeship program.

It eventually became a term used to describe a learning period for
the manual trades (one might call them) and then the manual trades
became obsolete. Does anyone get up in the middle of the night to
knead tomorrow's bread? Or dig a ditch by hand?

Yes to people getting up early to make tomorrow's bread. We have
dozens of bakeries around here with people doing exactly that.

Ditches seem to be dug with mechanized equipment rather than a shovel
these days, and that's probably just as well. That kind of labor ends
up being destructive to the laborer.

Destructive? Exercise? Swinging a pick for eight hours a day. Or doing
any other manual labour. How so?

Seriously? Have you only had desk jobs? Hard labor jobs like digging
ditches, swinging a pick, repeated heavy lifting, etc., routinely cause
damage. Back problems, arthritis, etc. In my career I have seen
thousands of people disabled by the long term toll their careers took on
their bodies. The taxpayers, BTW, are paying for their nursing home
placements.

No, as I wrote in another post, I was raised on a small farm in New
England where just about everything was done by hand. Run a water
line out to the barn" You need a six foot deep trench to get below the
frost line. My father used to pay someone to mow the field and the
rest of the haying was done by hand. You want a new barn? Well get a
hammer and saw and build it.

That's nothing. We never had a color TV! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

The paradox of physical labor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4681272/ Construction laborers have a higher obesity rate than librarians.

-- Jay Beattie.