The beauty of living in a civilization where everyone specializes in this or that, is you don't have to understand the intricacies of every piece of technology in order to enjoy the benefits of it. "What Ignoring Plumbing And Its History Says About Modern Civilization." Who's plumbing is being ignored? As far as I can tell, the plumbing is being taken care of. If I open the yellow pages under 'P,' there's going to be no shortage of plumbing professionals. Sure, internet search works too. Even back in the day when the plumbing infrastructure was being put into place for the first time, not every citizen- in fact I'll go as far as to say most citizens had no clue about how plumbing works. That's not how this actually works; it was a civilization of specialists then, it is a civilization of specialists now. Anyways, what I'm getting at here, is we all don't need to become plumbing professionals because this article author is on a rant. When I hand someone a gadget I made, I don't get angry when they don't understand how it works. I do get super happy when someone asks and is willing to listen to me talk about it, though. Of course I've pondered how the plumbing in general, the example in the article, enough to understand the bare-bone basics. I don't even need to know these things in order to operate the tap and get water. The author's arguments about how the average person not knowing infrastructure details somehow reflects bad on us as a modern civilization in the article doesn't make any sense to me. There's PLENTY of other fucked up things about modern civilization, to focus on this particular feature of it is stupid to me.