Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.
That is one huge advantage I bet you’d see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they’re doing.
That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
We don’t need wage labour in order to have experts.
I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.
Anarchist plumbing is a terrifying concept.
Shit flows down hill, why do we need a hierarchy to make that work?
Ah, you nailed the secret in the first sentence!
That is one huge advantage I bet you’d see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they’re doing.
That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.