Billy Beck, talking about tractors:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is about managing the immutable reality of mechanical systems. People can bullshit each other — and even themselves — over concepts in all sorts of ways. When concepts are forged in steel, that becomes impossible. You don’t get to bullshit your way around a 5/8″ bolt. You just don’t. When you’re dealing with a flywheel pilot bearing, no mental substitutions — whether from sloppiness or outright psychosis — will suffice: that bearing is only what it is, and your mind had better be right about everything about it.
Robert Pirsig once wrote a very ridiculous book, but he wrote it about a very serious subject.
There is great philosophy in machines.
Accompanied by some heart-warming shop photos. 
[Hey, Billy! I've done a couple of head rebuilds, and my question is, where are you getting the gasket sets for this beast?]
I was standing in front of a green hooded idling number of about half the age of Beck’s specimen, while the man I was there to do business with slowly hand pumped diesel into the fuel neck from a large tank out behind his corn crib. Over the rumble, he pointed to the name plate at the prominent place on the nose and asked, “Ever see one of those before?” The plate said, “Deutz”, and I allowed that I hadn’t. He said it was a three cylinder, air cooled.
…
[He] remarked, “I’d like to buy a new one of these, but they don’t make them anymore.”I asked, “Did they go out of business?”
“No. They just can’t make them. The government says they have to be water cooled, now.”
And that opened up whole new areas of conversation.
I’ve whacked out about half of that; see the whole thing for the flavor.
I’ve done volunteer teaching of fifth grade science labs. They stopped doing that;it was too damn much trouble, too messy, too loud.
I don’t know how much science got through, but if I managed to get across the faintest glimmer that the universe does what it does, and not what you think it ought to do, I succeeded.
Anybody who thinks economics doesn’t follow that same principle is advocating ruin, death, and chaos.
