You obviously don't have kids. You can't trust a child's judgement because they don't have the experience to exercise good judgement. Your job as a parent is to look out for them while helping them develop.
A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.
They were always terrible, but I have fond pre-teen memories of saving up my allowance to buy components off the pegboard in the back and then failing to make anything that worked with them.
The only things worthwhile to get at RadioShack were electronics project components, breadboards, soldering equipment, circuit board etching stuff and so on. Once they threw that stuff under the bus in order to sell cell phones and $9 toys, the place went downhill fast.
I have fond memories of the manager letting me play with the computers for hours. Our Radio Shack was in the mall and I'd drop in and start writing programs on the TRS-80 display models while my parents were shopping.
The manager not only didn't kick me out (like the manager of the bookstore always did if I looked at a book for more than five minutes), he'd come over and teach me some things when he wasn't busy.
That sounds like a great example of the difference between people who love their job and see it as an opportunity to meet interesting people, and someone who hates their job and just grudgingly draws a paycheck.
25 years ago, I had a Honduran roommate who barely spoke English. One day he came home with a thrift store VHS on how to make longbows and he watched that thing over and over like it would tell him the meaning of life. I hope he finally got ahold of some yew wood and made one.
I mean, I've certainly watched Adam Savage and other youtuber's build random stuff on a lazy sunday morning, or as a background to getting some housecleaning or work done, or while I'm working on building my own random thing.
I find it pretty gratifying and I'm not even going into those videos to learn what they are specifically doing most of the time, but still often I'll pick up a technique or two.
My selfbow staves (four of them in case I fuck them up or want to try again) are currently in my friends garage over by the furnace drying, it's kinda the biggest bummer to making your own bow step 2 (1. Acquire a stave 2. Wait for it to dry (for many months probably)).
If you're going to cheat, way cheaper to put nitrous oxide in the tank and claim it's compressed air. 50% boost in oxygen content without having to engineer your engine to not burn when pure O2 hits it.
I used to write my undergrad history essays in rhymed couplets because I figured the grad assistant doing the grading would be grateful for a break in the monotony and it was faster and easier than writing an actual good essay. Probably wouldn't work in the LLM era, but it was very effective in the 90's.
