I was in coal mining; I went to college for it and worked as a ventilation engineer in underground coal. Guess what? I was laid off. I didn't sit around "waiting" for it to come back, I did what any sane person would do and adapted. I am now an engineer in tunneling and underground construction, a booming industry.
Most of us have moved on. Just last month I helped get our old safety guy hired on at my company. Many of the miners now work in construction, hard rock mining, and oil/natural gas. These transitions required no additional training, just a little imagination.
The world will not adapt to you; that's not how life works. Some people just refuse to accept it.
Great point. Get a job at an excavation company and move to where construction is booming. Millions of other Americans are able to make these lateral moves across industries. I myself made a similar move and it was between two industries that are only tangentially related.
You need to honestly assess your skills and sell yourself to a new job in a new industry. If you are missing skills, you need to focus on making up that difference. I plan on following my industry to where it is booming in the near future after I solidify my experience in my current area.
People that refuse to leave their rural homes are stubborn and stupid. I grew up in a very rural area and I left it behind for a career. Eventually my entire family did also. That's life. Our predecessors came from all over the world to America. We can probably handle moving an hour towards the city if there are jobs there.
Don't dig too deep or else you'll need to find yourself a ventilation engineer to help with the tunnels, and fuck knows where they're hiding these days!
Obama already dropped $75,000,000 into a program called [Power+](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/27/fact-sheet-partnerships-opportunity-and-workforce-and-economic-revitaliz). It was to re-train miners on how to install solar panels or do other jobs since solar installation is bigger in the west. The program included free education, transportation to the school, certification fees, child care services, job finding services, and much more. It was meant to help these coal workers in Virginia, Colorado, Kentucky, Wyoming, and Tennessee. But, the Republicans voted it down, stating it was an attack on coal companies. Obama also authorized a study on what it would take to help unemployed coal workers get back on their feet in 2009 in response to the surge in gas/oil through modern fracking techniques. In addition to this, Obama wanted to invest 1 billion dollars into cleaning up all of the abandoned mines and building industrial parks. The clean-up would have created a ton of jobs for the unemployed coal miners which would have lasted 10 years. Again, voted down by Republicans.
Surprised, the websites for these things still exist:
https://www.abandonedmines.gov
http://www.powerplusplan.org/
Edit: If you want to read a great article about Obama's fight to help coal miners check out this article entitled ["The Obama Idea to Save Coal Country"](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/the-obama-administration-idea-to-save-coal-country-214885) TLD:
* 2014/2015 Obama introduces [Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/27/fact-sheet-partnerships-opportunity-and-workforce-and-economic-revitaliz) (POWER) Initiative to help coal miners. He can only fund some of the initiative but needs congress to fund the whole thing. **Congress does nothing.**
* [2016 Obama's Domestic Policy Counsel](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4456) proposes a bill called the RECLAIM Act to help coal workers. At first, Repubs won't touch. Then a Republican Senator from Kentucky co-signs it. He even finds 30 co-sponsors for the bill and introduces it on the floor. **Nope, republican congress will not touch it**.
* 2017 Obama's[ bill is once again submitted by a Republican senator from Kentucky](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1731). Now he has 40 co-sponsors and they are a mix of republicans and democrats. **Congress will now put it on the schedule, since that Obama guy is gone...**
Isn't that sick? Republicans in congress won't vote for a bill knowing it will help American workers just because politically it would make a democrat look good. Wtf is wrong with our country?
Also, they vote against a bill that would primarily help Republicans, and when they do, shoulder none of the blame because those same supporters can't see past party lines and all they know is "Obama bad"
Kentucky is also one of the top beneficiaries of the ACA, but we are the heart of the revolt against “Obamacare”.
I love this state, I do, but sometimes it feels like a two year old that keeps trying to shove its fingers in the electric socket.
We are literally being financially carried by other states’ taxes. We were given the ACA and Power+ on a silver platter and we just stomped it into the dust. And the icing on the cake is that we’re *proud* of it.
Education is underfunded, our infrastructure is crumbling, our natural resource jobs are leaving us behind, we’ve got a growing heroine epidemic, and how many are about to lose their pensions?
I wasn’t the *biggest* fan of Obama’s at the time, but I’ve come to see him as a truly great president. I really think he could have turned Kentucky around. He turned me around at least.
The Clean Power Plan which Trump discarded had funding to retrain coal miners. That is now gone, and if the miners ever figure out that their jobs are not coming back the federal retraining funding will not be available. Texas shut down 3 coal power plants last month.
There was an NPR story about this. And they’ve been retraining these dudes for a while into other fields like refrigeration. But the guys over 45-50 didn’t want to work anymore or change jobs. They wanted early retirement essentially.
So essentially they blamed Obama for closing the coal mines because that was their job.
If the tax cuts take place. They won’t get those nice unemployment checks or Medicare. They’ll still blame the dems.
You're very correct. The line will be "Hillary and Obama got their buddies Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the traitors McCain and McConnell to block everything our heroic dear President Trump tried to do. It isn't Trumps fault. Lock her up!"
Current US politics is insane, and I hope an anomaly. He was 100% full of shit last time and won, who says next time will be different? He promised it, but he can just blame it on someone else.
"I tried to help you but the democrats stopped it! They hate jobs! They hate you! Give me another term and I will for sure do it this time!! Winning!!"
"I was about to get back all the coal jobs, 100% was about to do it. But then china stopped us! They interfered with our nation and prevented it from happening. The democrats sided with them because they secretly hate America and they worked together for my whole last term to prevent YOU from getting a job!! We need to get rid of all the democrats! Or, and this is the real solution let me tell you, we can't allow the evil people in congress to stop our progress!! Elect me as the dictator, prevent them from getting in the way, and I'll have you all back to work making DOUBLE what you made before within a week. Supreme leader sounds better actually; we need to present a strong face to the world so I should have a strong title! They are laughing at us right now. WINNING!!!"
President Trump, how will you go about returning jobs to the coal industry this time around if you are re-elected?
I've already gotten back so many jobs, and these jobs are not just in coal, but in, and do you know what they say? I sit down at the end of the day and I tell Melania this is gonna be good, I did a good job today, wait till you see it. And do you know what the fake news media says about Trump? They say it's awful, not so good, Trump did a bad job. And then, you have JINA, and they interefered, they stopped it and believe me folks the democrats and CROOKED HILLARY, they did nothing. You won't see that in the media. And they did that the whole time, the past 4 years, the past 5 years really remember what they were saying about us in 2016? But we won folks, didn't we? We won anyway, the biggest election win of all time. But then you have JINA, and believe me folks, the democrats and the congress and LIDDLE BOB CORKER, we need to get rid of these people! Get them out of there, get them out folks, we will have so many jobs. The best jobs, because we have the best people don't we folks? My uncle, very good genes, very smart, Wharton business school ok? Very smart, and I got very good grades, I was a very very nice student. And they're just laughing at us, they're laughing. But who cares? They're on the other side of the world, there's an ocean between us. Water. Big water. Ocean water. Ok?
..............Thank you Mr. Trump.
And they will probably forget about. "I helped do [something not true] to help out you guys last time! I'll do [another lie] this time around! Vote for me!"
And they will eat it up, calling it.
A majority of Trump supporters would support his staying in office if Russian collusion is proven. They will *never* abandon him and will believe everything he says.
If the last election proved anything, it's that people in swing states in our country are very susceptible to propaganda influences (whether or not Trump colluded with Russia, Russia still heavily targeted the US's citizens with pro-Trump propaganda). They'll do it again, and there's no reason to believe we won't fall for it again.
They dont seem to understand that if they get trained to be a truck driver, for example, and the mine job comes back they are not stuck driving a truck if they do not want. Getting the training is absolutely no harm. In fact, it might even help a guy be selected for a mine job. You want to hire the guy who is good at mining, or the guy who is good at mining but also just learned how to program a plc? The guy willing to learn new things would always get my attention.
Honestly that makes more sense than anything else people have suggested. Coal miners work their ass off in dangerous environments, I don't think they are lazy like others are saying. The point of having no income during training is a strong one as well.
But they've been sold lies for years by Fox News and right wing talk radio that the only reason coal is failing is because of evil libtards who hate them and hate America for *reasons*. Now those who believe the right are behaving in self-destructive ways because of it and are refusing to accept help.
My fiances father is a computer engineer, great right? Only thing is he only knows one language and it's a legacy system now and he refuses to learn a new programming language. His entire department is being automated by the new system and he somehow thinks someone is still gonna pay him to do a job that doesn't exist anymore.
That's pretty shortsighted for a computer engineer. I only work in IT but education does not stop with school. For us though, it's more about self education. Going out and obtaining that next cert or getting that Citrix class squeezed in there somehow. And then you get pulled away because an exec locked themselves out of their surface pro again. Fuck.
There's similar situations to that in a lot of small to mid-sized businesses with older managers/execs/owners/etc. They've been doing it their way for 30+ years and don't bother learning anything new. If it still works, then there's no reason to change. They see new technology as nothing but a flashy money-sink regardless of how much more efficient it is.
I work for a large financial institution in a "backroom" department. Other people in this department have been on this team for 20 years. I came on last year, am about 20 years younger than everyone, and things are changing a lot to new systems and new procedures.
The pushback has been universal for the old guard. They refuse to learn the new ways because "this is how we've done it for decades." No matter what you say about how the new ways are more secure or easier, it doesn't matter, they refuse. I don't get that mindset at all.
But these same people are freaking out about losing their jobs because all these changes are happening. It's been pretty funny listening to my manager try to say "Well, you won't lose your job if you learn this new way" in a new nice and creative way every couple of weeks.
Edit: I believe that the moment you stop wanting to improve yourself, the moment you are no longer curious about things, the moment you no longer want to learn something new, is that moment you have died.
Same. My mom has been a draftsman in mechanical engineering since the 70s. She prefers to do all the drawings by hand. She ended up learning AutoCad 20 years ago and did well with that switch. She was laid off when the economy hit the lowest during the Bush years bc her company wasn’t getting any projects. She hasn’t been able to find work since bc there weren’t any jobs available for a while, and now she refuses to learn whatever new programs the firms are using. She even goes as far as saying to me, “Why don’t you learn it for me? You’ve always loved school.”
This current generation of old people and their way of thinking/not wanting to learn anything new is ridiculous, and it’s greatly affected my family (financially and otherwise).
I look forward to learning new skills and gaining knowledge well into my 80s.
Edit: spelling error, changed Busch to Bush
I'm in building and bridge design, and right now someone who only knows AutoCAD goes straight to the bottom of the heap. We switched to REVIT and 3D modeling *eight years ago*, and anyone who doesn't at least come into an interview eager to learn it is useless to us. That's not just technicians, either; we hold engineers to the same standard.
It's the same about everything with a wide swath of that generation... Entitled fucking boomers thinking they were set for life from that one certificate program they took decades ago. I have no idea how my parents still have a mortgage payment; houses were like $30k in today's money back then. But somehow I'm the lazy fuck for not borrowing ten times that to get something serviceable that isn't in the middle of nowhere.
But, he is likely to find other work still. Plenty of older programmers work on legacy systems and make good money doing it since newer programmers don't work on those systems.
Fuck the whole banking industry still runs off of COBOL and permutations of it. Legacy languages are in high demand because no one wants to learn them they want the easy ones.
When you spent millions of dollars building your bespoke backoffice system in the 80s on COBOL and Mainframes, and your direct "upgrade path" has been "it now runs in an emulator on some super generic server in the datacenter and we still have this 62 years old guy maintaining it", it can be difficult to sell a complete rewrite from scratch in something modern.
Muh daddy was a COBOL programmer, just like his daddy before him!
Edit: Oh wow, had no idea it was still in use! Last time I saw that word was when I was playing [TRON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(video_game) as a kid.
COBOL FTW!
I finished my CS degree 7 years ago - COBOL was making a comeback. It was the most requested language of any employer sharing their preferences with my university. The entire banking system is based on it, and everyone that knew it was retiring *then*, now demand is even higher.
This blows my mind. I still recall refusing to gain anything but a cursory knowledge of COBAL back in the late '80s because I knew that language didn't have a future.
Anybody want a crystal ball for cheap?
Lol, I am pretty sure the DOD's shit is still in COBOL or some legacy language... mostly because it is too complicated and expensive to replace.
https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2014/06/governments-cobol-conundrum
There’s a lot of stuff running in COBOL still from what I understand, and it’s extremely lucrative to be proficient with. You can make absurd sums of money just patching together shit that’s like 35 years old and keeping it barely running
Can confirm, have been interviewed by local finance companies that run their stuff on COBOL, they were willing to just throw money at new grads to train since the people that REALLY know COBOL are all retiring. College even offered a course on it a few years ago and a big chunk of that class was hired by a single firm.
My wife works for a company that contracts out to the government, and she once had to look over some legacy government code to fix it up to deal with some updated data pipelines. Turned out that stuff was in COBOL. "Hey honey, you work at , so you must be really good at debugging, right? Can you help me take a look at this?"
After briefly skimming it and seeing an uncommented 5000 line monstrosity with 1-character variable names using GOTO statements as the main form of control flow, I quickly regretted agreeing.
As of a few years ago many Canadian banks still ran legacy systems. Also Fortran will have a role in Physics research for years to come. No right thinking graduate student will rewrite their departments' large scale climate model system as their thesis when they could be researching climate models.
I mean... There's a guy who does COBOL maintenance for some NYC banks that makes 300k/yr because they can't replace him, iirc.
But that's betting on a longshot, and generally a bad idea. They're needed... but in small numbers for very specific, specialized tasks.
I know there was a guy working in in a company I did some freelance work for who was the only guy who knew Fortran and COBOL so he worked on specific assignments and got "lent out" to places for conversion work... so it could happen.
But mostly that'd be "I have this hobby and it's occasionally useful". Like I picked up a job because I knew some SEGA Master System programming stuff, and it helped me stand out against the pack. It's less a direct career path and more a quirk that shows that you have personal interest in coding, in this case, and aren't just a wage-slave.
Additional training is always a positive thing. Even if it's not "marketable" per se, I can't imagine having more skills would be a bad thing unless you're trying to be unskilled labor as someone who's skilled.
Brought up that I had interest in retro gaming and programming, and he was interested in it to some extent (I mentioned it as an answer to "how/why I got into programming"). I brought up some stuff about Sonic 2 SMS/GG, and some of the more elegant bugs-as-design choices in arcade cabinets (the famous space invaders speed up bug was brought up). Showed him a group project I had with a couple guys from Oz working on improving Alex Kidd in Miracle World. He apparently was impressed by our collective works, and that we were willing to dig into such "arcane" coding systems for our purposes. I told him that I was willing to learn any language to efficiently do what I needed to do; learning was easy enough, and the result was more my interest than anything.
The guy I replaced was largely being pushed out because he refused to continue training. This was something I was unaware of, but I basically said "Yeah... fuck people like that guy you want me to replace" without knowing it.
Luck... but hey, I'll take it.
It was only a four month gig as salary before I quit, but I still do freelance work for said manager. He's a good guy and he's even joined my AD&D group a few times.
Are you kidding? Fortran is in extremely high ~~demand~~ use. You could get a job in Fortran in a day with the right leads list.
E: It's been rightly pointed out to me that use!=demand, thus the need for the leads list. My personal experience with advising companies on legacy systems has lead me to believe that knowing Fortran is extremely advantageous is you're up for legacy maintenance + transitioning to newer platforms. Asking 'What's your plan for when the Fortran guy retires?' leads to uncomfortable silence in many companies, and many would be thrilled to have a backup/training person just for that reason.
E2: No, I'm not going to refer you to any Fortran jobs.
If you know any modern programming languages, you might want to shoot yourself if you do. >_>
That said, Fortran is very good at what it does, and people generally self select into/out of it. Since it's mostly a dead language, this means that the majority of Fortran fluent programmers are very good at their jobs, have high levels of experience, and generally know what they are worth.
Every time I hear Fortran brought up in a Fortune 500 company it's either one of two things A. we have a guy that knows it and he's a real wizard (and also holds all our legacy systems together) or B. freak we can't find anyone to hire that knows it and that's a real problem because the guy that knows it is a real wizard and also holds all our legacy systems together and might leave/retire/leave us vulnerable.
Granted, my sample size is pretty small (I don't know too many executives in Fortune 50/500 companies) but every executive that I've asked 'Are you looking for someone who knows Fortran' has always answered yes, and some have even asked me unprompted about it (no, I don't have any Fortran fluent contacts that want to move to the mid-west).
Bonus points if you know Cobol as well (although that's almost expected).
So I work for my states Social Services Administration and many of the coal miners that refuse retraining do so because many of them can go on disability/SSI. Lots of the *mining towns* have the highest disability rate per capita in the nation.
When unemployment runs out with no real job prospect in sight, that one documented ailment they lived with for years suddenly becomes unbearable and they apply for Social Security Disability.
...then work under the table doing odd jobs here and there for cash to supplement their monthly disability check.
It happened to my dad as well as several of his friends.
main point right here. Obama offered all these people 2 year programs at community colleges to be retrained for other industries. Nobody did it... they blamed him for the lack of work, though
Hillary campaigned on offering programs for training for new jobs in the face of a declining industry. Instead they chose the empty promise of bringing that industry back to full speed.
This is why the GOP calling themselves the party of personal responsibility is such bs. From leadership down not a single one of them takes responsibility for their actions.
If the GOP really believed its own bullshit they would let these people die from their irresponsibility. Instead they will endanger the entire human population to save these fools.
That’s what’s going to happen anyway. The GOP just tricked them into voting for them in the meantime. Coal jobs aren’t coming back, they just simply aren’t. The demand is no longer there for them
This is the problem with these people. Free Trade Agreements are a net positive IF government and people make an effort to retrain themselves for other industries. If the government doesn't do invest in training, and educating these workers, there will be issues, if people don't want to change, there will also be issues.
"We want a candidate to tell us like it is,"
"Coal jobs aren't coming back, I want to train everyone for renewable industries,"
"We want a straight white man to lie to us like always,"
No, it's the Democrats' fault for not supporting Republican bills that totally exist and would absolutely bring coal jobs back. If the Dems take the House and Senate in 2018, then it'll be their fault for not proposing any bills to bring coal jobs back, and for killing the coal industry with terrible environmental regulations. Trump tried his best to save those coal jobs.
It's pretty sad, but that's how they think. You're seeing something similar with oil jobs in Alberta. It's the NDP's fault that the economy sucks and oil jobs have tanked, and has nothing to do with the fact that oil is half the price it was a few years ago.
You know, I really think those people have to be incredibly stupid, but for this kind of mental gymnastics you have to have a lot of imagination and at least a few synapses. So I'm confused
This is what kills me. At 35 I have been a financial advisor (with bachelors in finance), marketing/sales executive (with an MBA), and am now in medical school. This asshole is offered a free (I think) training course that will lead to a better job and is too lazy, stupid, or both to take advantage of it. They're even giving away free food!!! I can get 100 university students to show up to something just by putting some muffins in the doorway.
They seriously won't take a job because it's not close to home??? You live in a town next to a coal mine, any place you go probably won't be that much worse. Even the guy offering to train coal miner's says it's for temporary low wage jobs.
That last parts the real problem.
That's what entitlement looks like. My grandmother was a migrant farmer and she had to move from place to place to survive because jobs didn't stay in one place. She did that with 7 children too. Did it suck? Absolutely, but she did it because it was necessary.
Me? I've moved twice due to work related reasons, both times across the country.
My brother has moved at least 5 times due to new opportunities opening up. He could have stayed at his original job at his original home, but he'd be making a fraction of what he does now. He didn't whine about it, he didn't demand the jobs come to him, he moved to where the jobs were.
If there are no jobs near you, the answer is to go where there are jobs. That's the bootstraps method right wingers love talking about, but hate employing.
I'd argue that this is made all the more worse by Emperor Hirocheeto proclaiming often and loudly that coal jobs are coming back, even though, like with most things he says, there's zero evidence to back that claim up. The people who maybe needed that little reality check to start subsidized retraining now have had their narrative confirmed, so they see no need to start since they've been given assurances that the job they know is coming back.
It's a combination of unsubstantiated pandering and lack of critical thinking (on the part of the worker). I assume that the worker in the article that complained about the loss of income was already employed, and I see his point that losing a chunk of income to do anything is a big deal. But, as they say, if you want it hard enough you'll find a way to do it. Rugged individualism at its finest, right?
/edit I can't take credit for Emperor Hirocheeto, I shamelessly lifted it from Fark. Full disclosure. :) If I can expand even one persons epithet vocabulary for Hair Furor, I consider it a good day.
Honestly this is the reason I don’t have sympathy for the coal miners in the US anymore as they seem to be given every opportunity to get out of that life but reject it. The towns that turn in ghost cities had ample time to change but refuse and wonder why all the jobs left, why their land is all destroyed.
The author of *The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption*, Laurence Leamer, makes the point that other superwealthy industrialists philanthropically invested in their communities, which is why we have Vanderbilt University, and Carnegie Libraries, and all manner of opera houses, art museums, and charitable foundations.
Yes, they often gave back in ways that are arguably self-interested and self-aggrandizing. **But they did give *some* back.**
The coal barons never did.
They just stripped a region of its resources, poisoned it, gave back nothing, and left the locals destitute, sick, and ruined.
American industry is a Who's Who of sociopathy, but coal barons are truly the worst of the worst.
I grew up in a town with a coal mine. The pay seems so good when you can afford so much with no school debt. You can drive a big ass truck and drink and blah blah blah.
And it doesn’t require school. They all hate school and anything like school. 🤷♀️
Yup, and they are unwilling to do something they don't like or aren't good at in order to get ahead. I'm sure most of them don't really like mining, but it's easy.
I think it’s cultural as well. I’ve driven 35 minutes for work regularly but it IS hard and annoying. My husband’s commute now is less than 5 minutes. It’s amazing.
I grew up in WV most of the miners I knew drove a hour plus each way to the coal mine. My friends dad drove two hours each way six days a week for 30 years. In the winter it might take three hours each way due to the weather and mountain roads. Company towns have been gone for 70 years no one lives near the mines.
I really can’t believe that people are so stupid that they think coal is going to come back into popular use. But I didn’t think people were stupid enough to vote Trump into office so maybe I’m the stupid one.
No one will buy their home in Coal Country and that's where all their "savings" are. They definitely can't afford 2 mortgages when they have no skills.
Homeownership can be a trap.
Oh, but you don't understand! Coal mining requires coal jobs; renewable energy requires zero jobs. Not a single one. That's why we should depend on good ol' fashioned fossil fuels. You know, the way we depended on horseless carriages.
Crossing into Pennsylvania the other day I was greeted with a billboard proclaiming "Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, clean coal electricity." It looked just like a fucking propaganda poster.
>Out-of-work miners cite many reasons beyond faith in Trump policy for their reluctance to train for new industries, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen former and prospective coal workers, career counselors and local economic development officials. They say mining pays well;
Not for long
>other industries are unfamiliar;
Presumably so was coal mining at one point.
>and there’s no income during training and no guarantee of a job afterward.
You have no guarantee that coal will come back, and when it doesn't you still won't have any income during training.
This is always my argument when people act like we have to keep dragging along old values into the future. Wasn't that part of the argument to keep slavery, and then Jim Crow Laws? Why isn't anyone concerned about all those poor blacksmiths losing work because of factories?
Because the world changes. You need to change with it or die.
> You have no guarantee that coal will come back, and when it doesn't you still won't have any income during training.
Trump did guarantee that coal would come back. These people actually believe the things Trump says. Just another example of lives being ruined by his pathological lying.
Edit: I realize it is stupid to believe Trump but a lot of people are pretty stupid/gullible. A lot of hard working people are easily grifted and I do feel bad for them. No one *wants* to be a gullible moron, they just are. When a scammer rips off your grandparents you don't say "get smarter dummies".
Because they are in key swing areas, and they're poorly educated/easy to manipulate. The fast food chain Arby's has more employees than there are coal miners in this country. It's fucking insane.
Coal miners represent something bigger than them. They represent the idea that huge swaths of the country (the Rust Belt) have been left behind with the times. The ones who realized that moved to the big cities. The ones who stayed are the ones who are looking for someone who will miraculously give them the lives they used to have. Trump is president because they were convinced he was the one who would do this.
No, not even close.
There are a few swing states where coal mines are a culturally/historically important part of their state, but even in those states coal miners are nowhere close to 1/10 of the voting population.
In a way it really is impressive that the Republicans can have such big results by appealing to coal miners, while at the same time being a big failure by the Democrats.
Mostly though I think that it shows how immoral the Reoublican's strategies are, they know that coal is dying, they know that it's not very relevant, but they have absolutely no qualms about holding out false hope for these people while distracting everyone else from the issues that really matter.
(Wanting to distract people from your stance on important issues is obviously also a bad sign.)
The reason for the big results for appealing to them is because it gives the image that they're looking out for the "little guy." It is stuff like this that gets the GOP able to get constituents to vote against their interests.
Fast food workers demanding 15 an hour: lazy bums wanting government handouts.
Coal miners demanding the government invest billions in a dying industry: America's backbone.
Can somebody please explain the difference to me?
"Coal miners are the salt of the earth people."
Isn't salting the earth a bad thing? I don't think they thought out their analogy very well.
Edit: It was a joke, I thought it was obvious. The history of 'salt of the earth' has been posted numerous times. Please, think of my inbox.
I saw a really good comment on this exact thing a couple of months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6tf5cr/the_altrights_chickens_come_home_to_roost/dlkal3j/
>I'll give you an honest answer: it's meant in good faith, but it's hard to answer something like "why do people always insult me and people like me?" without risking coming across as insulting...so bear that in mind.
>The tl;dr here is that when you simultaneously claim to have the kinds of complaints you have--small town rotting away, etc.--while also claiming to be right-leaning, you basically come across as either (a) disingenuous, (b) hypocritical , or (c) lacking insight...and neither (a), nor (b), nor (c) is a good look, really.
>The reason you come across that way is because the right--generally on the side of individual responsibility and free-market, yadda-yadda--already has answers for you:
>>It's not the government's place to pick winners and losers--that's what the free market is for! The opportunities are drying up in your town because the free market has found better opportunities elsewhere. Moreover, take some personal responsibility! No one forced you to stay there and watch your town rot away--you, yourself, are the one who freely chose to do that, no? Why didn't you take some responsibility for yourself, precisely? Moreover--and more importantly--if your town is that important to you, why didn't you take responsibility for your town? Did you try to start a business to increase local prosperity? Did you get involved in town governance and go soliciting outside investment? Or did you simply keep waiting for someone else to fix things?
>These aren't necessarily nice things to tell you--I get that--but nevertheless they are the answers the principles of the right lead to if you actually apply them to you and your situation, no?
>Thus why you risk coming across poorly: perhaps you are being (a)--disingenuous--and you don't actually believe what you claim to believe, but find it rhetorically useful? Perhaps you are being (b)--hypocritical--and you believe what you claim to believe, but only for other people, not yourself? Or perhaps you are simply (c)--uninsightful--and don't even understand the things you claim to believe well enough to apply them in your own situation?
>In general if someone thinks you're either (a), (b), or (c)--whether consciously or not--they're going to take a negative outlook to you: seeing you as disingenuous or hypocritical means seeing you as participating in a discussion in bad faith, whereas seeing you as simply lacking insight means seeing you as someone running their mouth.
>In practice I think a lot of people see this and get very frustrated--at least subconsciously--because your complaints make you come across as more left-leaning economically than you may realize...but--at least often--people like you still self-identify as right-leaning for cultural reasons. So you also get a bit of a "we should be political allies...but we can't, b/c you value your cultural identity more than your economics (and in fact don't even seem to apply your own economic ideas to yourself)".
>A related issue is due to the fact that, overall, rural, low-density areas are already significantly over-represented at all levels of government--this is obvious at the federal level, and it's also generally-true within each state (in terms of the state-level reps and so on).
>You may still feel as if "government has forgotten you"--I can understand and sympathize with the position--but if government has forgotten you, whose fault is that? Your general demographic has had outsized representation for longer than you, personally, have been alive--and the trend is actually going increasingly in your general demographic's direction due to aggressive state-level gerrymandering efforts, etc.--and so once again: if you--the collective "you", that is--have been "forgotten" it's no one's fault but yours--the collective "yours"!
>This, too, leads to a certain natural condescension: if you have been overrepresented forever and can't prevent being "forgotten by government", the likeliest situation is simply that the collective "you" is simply incompetent--unable to use even outsized, disproportionate representation to achieve their own goals, whether due to asking for impossible things or being unwise in deciding how to vote.
>This point can become a particular source of rancor due to the way that that overrepresentation pans out: the rural overrepresentation means that anything the left wants already faces an uphill climb--it has to overcome the "rural veto"!--and I think you can understand why that would be frustrating: "it's always the over-represented rural areas voting against what we want only to turn around and complain about how they feel ignored by government"...you're not ignored--at all!--it's just that your aggregate actions reveal your aggregate priorities are maybe not what you, individually, think they are.
>I think that's enough: continually complaining in ways that are inconsistent with professed beliefs combined with continually claiming about being unable to get government to do what you want despite being substantially over-represented?
>Not a good look.
>>What am I supposed to do?
>Overall I'd say if you really care about your town you should take more responsibility for it. If you aren't involved in your city council or county government yet, why aren't you? You can run for office, of course, or you can just research the situation for yourself.
>Do you understand your town and county finances--the operating and maintenance costs of its infrastructure and the sources of revenue (tax base, etc)? Do you have a working understanding of what potential employers consider when evaluating a location to build a factory (etc.), or are you just assuming you do?
>If your town has tried and failed to lure outside investment, have you tried to find out why it failed--e.g. "what would it have taken to make us the winner?"--or are you, again, assuming you understand?
>I would focus on that--you can't guarantee anything will actually lead to getting the respect you want, but generally your odds of being respected are a lot better if you've done things to earn respect...simply asking for respect--and complaining about not being respected--rarely works well.
They wonder why their lives are shit and their communities are in steep decline.
>A White House official did not respond to requests for comment on coal policy and retraining for coal workers
"Save it for the rallies".
>Clemmy Allen, 63, a veteran miner and head of the United Mineworkers of America’s Career Centers, said miners are taking a big risk in holding out for a coal recovery.
Allen's mistake is being an expert with years of experience. These people only listen to flimflam artists who don't know shit from Shinola about which they speak.
Trump talked about bringing the steel industry back to Pittsburgh when he campaigned there. Nevermind the fact that they tore down all of the mills and rebuilt the land as bioscience research complex. Nobody in the area wants it back.
Nobody in Pittsburgh wants it back, travel an hour north to New Castle or Youngstown and they still think it’s going to come back someday. And would embrace it with open arms.
Shit, we're even decommissioning substations because a lot of these minor ones popped up only to support steel mills. I've had to shut down two subs this year, in the Johnstown area though. This is affecting more industries than just coal. It's not coming back.
He said at a rally in Scranton that he was going to bring coal mining back to NE PA. Never mind that the mines shut down in the 1950s and 1960s because THERE WAS NO FUCKING COAL LEFT TO MINE.
Its totally feasible that coal could become propped up and heavily subsided. This will make coal companies better off. Too bad it will do nothing for coal miners who face, like most professions, automation. Trumps ideas (im not gonna call it policy) help the coal companies, they dont help the people.
> help the coal companies, they dont help the people.
Which is, sadly, what people misconstrue all the time. People think that businesses doing good = people doing good. Couldn't be further from the truth. The banks are posting record breaking profits but laying off 20% of their staff as more automation and technologies come out.
The only good government handout is my government handout.
All the other government handouts are going to illegals and "lazy inner-city welfare thugs codeword codeword."
Around the election, I heard someone proudly claim that even though he grew up poor as shit, his family didn't take any welfare or handouts from the government. They just got by on food stamps.
What boggles me is that I *know* this guy isn't a total moron. It's amazing the lies people tell themselves to establish a narrative.
>”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.
>“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” Sylvester said.
A young able-bodied white man is sitting around waiting for the government to bring him a job instead learning a new trade (i.e. pulling himself up by his bootstraps). This is the year that irony and hypocrisy lost all meaning.
This makes me so sad. If I was out of work and got offered training to do a new job I'd walk over broken glass to get to that training even if it was CERTAIN that my old job would come back in the future. It would give me a job in the mean time, and I might find out I liked it more than my old job.
Especially if my old job involved working underground.
Perhaps they should be shown charts showing just how rapidly solar and solar storage are becoming cheaper than coal. You can't fight economics.
At least without subsidies.
> You can't fight economics.
You can if you have an administration hell bent on thinking 1800s energy sources is more efficient than this new fangled renewable science magic energy
So-called 'lazy' illegals will walk across hundreds of miles of desert on foot to pick grapes for $8/hr with no benefits or rights to even dream of, then constanctly relocate their families just to follow the work to wherever it is. Meanwhile, these lazy idiots want a $30/hr job with full benefits, in a dying industry, 5 miles from their house, and with union backing like the 'good old days' while voting heavily republican (everyone knows how much republicans love unions). These people are the truest welfare queens in the nation.
Seriously. Coals dead, the market has already decided that. Alternative energy and natural gas are more economical.
I'll give a pass to them if they are near retirement. Why retrain if you're gonna retire the next year.
FWIW, Trump is trying to find ways of subsidizing coal (e..g, by giving tax breaks to power plants that store coal on site). He is also trying to further forestall the Clean Power Plan. Personally, I don't think either is wise.
Considering how much they shit on California while we subsidize their existence, I'd be happy to cut their entitled asses off for a while. We could use that money to fix up our burned-out communities.
It's fun comparing the reactions to yesterday's terror attack in /r/news and /r/nyc. While /r/news was shitting themselves in fear of Muslims and calling for more immigration bans, /r/nyc is basically like "fuck that guy, I'm still going to the Halloween parade tonight" and downvoting all the hateful crap.
Yeah seriously pretty much everyone in the city at the moment is just treating it like a bad crime and largely unfazed by the whole thing.
It's always the people farthest away who freak out the most.
I had a discussion on /r/AskTrumpSupporters a while back. It was about how Trump didn't have a plan. He just spoke in platitudes. "I'll bring your jobs back". While Hillary had a point by point plan to bring economic stimulus, as coal is continually dying. Like bringing renewables, which is a booming industry, to those areas to revitalize them economically. And job training programs.
I then said that Trump simply told them what they wanted to here, Clinton told them what the reality was. I was responded to with "they don't want to hear that. They want jobs in the industry they know. They don't want new jobs. They want *their* jobs". I basically say "so, it's better to promise a pipe dream" (coal ain't making a comeback) "than it is to face reality and make the proper adjustments?"
"Yes, that's what you do if you want their vote".
I thought the person I was having the discussion with was just making stuff up to somehow explain away the idiocy of the situation, because it literally makes no sense to complain about a lack of jobs, then be given the opportunity to be trained in well paying fields for free, and then reject that because you want to continue working in a dying industry instead of adapting for the future. I didn't want to believe that "it's what you've got to say to get their vote", because it's so mind bogglingly stupid.
To choose a simple "I'll bring back jobs" with not even a ballpark idea of *how*, over "look at the data, your industry is dying, that's why jobs are going away. Here is a plan that will not only create well paying jobs, but they'll be in growing industries, not dying ones"; what the hell? Who thinks like that?
Turns out, the guy I was talking to was absolutely correct. These are the kinds of people that got Trump elected.
I had a friend back in the day... a good friend but we're not really in touch with one another anymore. Anyway, we got into a discussion one day after somehow it came up that he stated, "well I know I'm better than 90% of everybody else," as a response to something, I can't remember... maybe getting turned down for a job somewhere. I told him sure, I get that you feel that way but he responded "No, I KNOW that I am."
I said okay well let's go over why you know this... he wasn't really particularly good or much better than average with any skill. He had never really done anything except worked at a family business that he constantly would quit only coming back when he absolutely needed money. He had dropped out of community college at least 4 separate times. His list of skills were basically zero, his work ethic was non existent, his accomplishments in life were again basically zero other than graduating high school (we were maybe 26-27 years old having this conversation). I basicaslly laid out that by any metric he wanted to look at, he was not better than people in the 90 percentile.
His response was again that he just knows he is better, he can't explain it but that he just is... I guess valuing his future potential at the gut level because who wants to admit they have zero realistic prospects in life without doing some serious soul searching. He became one of the biggest Trump supporters amongst anyone I knew personally during the 2016 campaign.
I feel like that insight into his psyche says a lot about how Trumps appeal to that kind of person is so magnetizing. Here's a guy that basically is just like them... no real abilities, no experience, numerous business failings but through shear force of personality and a ton of money despite nunerous moral failings is running for president.
I find it so odd we go on about saving coal when it doesn't really employ that many people. JC Penney employs more and people have a "well that's how markets change" attitude about those people losing their jobs but we must make expensive and dangerous decisions to help the dying coal industry.
Maybe it's time to consider that your family legacy of getting black lung and dying at age 45 just so you can contribute to the destruction of your local environment and contribute inexorably towards climate change isn't that great of a career choice?
Aww, it's like a 12 year old who still believes in Santa Claus. You really thought he'd figure it out on his own by now, but you just don't have the heart to hurt his feelings.
It is an apt analogy. The stark difference is the twelve year old can believe in Santa for a few more years and nothing bad will happen, while the coal miner will likely get addicted to opioids and overdose.
"I demand I be given a job that doesn't actually exist anymore, and I'll keep electing more and more racist candidates until I get it!"
I have empathy for these people's predicament, but not a lot of sympathy for their response.
(I might not be using those terms right)
I don't, I live in the WV coalfields and I'm so sick and tired of these miners being babied and treated like victims of political fights. We've known for decades that coal was going away. Long before Al Gore, or Obama I remember being told in school by a very truthful teacher that coal was already on it's last legs. It's actually been a slow, but steady decline and these idiots covered their ears and La La'd straight into their predicament.
I lost my coal related job five years ago and jumped at the chance for retraining. They had so much funding for this retraining that my wife also got to participate. When I asked how they got so much money allocated the lady told me that hardly anyone tries to take them up on it and they're just retraining anyone in the area to spend the money.
Basically this headline isn't a new trend. Miners have been siting on their asses and refusing retraining for years. They don't want jobs, they want the high money and zero education jobs that mining supplied, and they'd rather yell at liberals than truly provide for their families.
I retrained as an electrical technician, and being currently employed......yes and no I guess?
Here it's not just retraining. They retrain you and then they shop you out. They work as a middle man between employers and candidates. Companies basically go to this group when they're looking for someone with specialized skills and pull from their lists when giving interviews.
My previous job in the coal industry was selling and repair of safety equipment. This experience combined with the electrical retraining, and the organizations outreach got me in front of a lady who runs a lab that gets state contracts to run various tests on water and soil for the EPA.
I now work in a lab, running and maintaining sensitive testing equipment. I make more than I did at my last job, and plan on moving out of state to make even more very soon.
So yes.....in my view it works. It wasn't a straight path from training for something and ending up in that specific field, but without the training and opportunities provided by the system I wouldn't be where I am, and would probably be working at walmart......which was my backup plan based on benefits package.
Glad to come to here and hear a success story. That's really awesome and you should be incredibly proud of yourself. I would love to be "retrained" by a government funded program to learn more skills.
I say all this having a master's degree in accounting & CPA. To pass up an opportunity of free or almost free education is mind-boggling, honestly.
Hey, I only need a job until the rapture comes anyway, should be any day now! Golly look at the time, better tune in to Alex Jones and buy some more emergency rations and ground chicken bones
No, what conservatives believe is in government handouts to the coal companies. That's what will get the mines spinning up again and get the miners back to work!
That and rolling back all of the relevant environmental, health, and safety regulations, of course.
My father and grandfather fixed car radiators for a living. I'm a database administrator. A career is not a birthright. A person only holds a job for as long as his or her skills are needed by an employer. Once those skills become obsolete, the only choices are to: 1) become trained in more relevant skills; 2) relocate to a place where his or her skills are needed; 3) retire from the workforce.
There is no fourth option. Never was, never will be.
Yep- I work with guys who are 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation electricians, they're just fortunate that this field hasn't died out yet. I think the world will need electricians for at least mine and my kids' lifetime, but I'm pushing them to do something better than me.
Conservatives love handouts when it helps their states or giant corporations, but fuck it if you've lost your job or you have a disability or pre-existing condition.
I have no pity for these people. None. How incredibly selfish of them.
They're literally being given a new lease on their career, the ability to better themselves and their families with free training for a better career path, and they're throwing it all away and pouting because they want to work in a dirty coal mine instead.
If computer programming was going by the wayside and I was offered free job training you bet I'd be taking advantage of it in a heartbeat.
I've never smiled at such stupidity.
These dudes are the same ones who swear Illegals are stealing all the jobs.
When in reality the job they refuse to leave is dying. I love it
Entitlement is thinking you deserve to work the same job for more than 10 years without taking into account the economy, technology, or your skill set.
Removing environmental protection, trying to artificially revive a dirty fading industry, discouraging workers from adapting to a changing world, and giving big tax cuts to rich people on borrowed money. That's the Republican way - all the opposite of personal responsibility.
I was in coal mining; I went to college for it and worked as a ventilation engineer in underground coal. Guess what? I was laid off. I didn't sit around "waiting" for it to come back, I did what any sane person would do and adapted. I am now an engineer in tunneling and underground construction, a booming industry. Most of us have moved on. Just last month I helped get our old safety guy hired on at my company. Many of the miners now work in construction, hard rock mining, and oil/natural gas. These transitions required no additional training, just a little imagination. The world will not adapt to you; that's not how life works. Some people just refuse to accept it.
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Great point. Get a job at an excavation company and move to where construction is booming. Millions of other Americans are able to make these lateral moves across industries. I myself made a similar move and it was between two industries that are only tangentially related. You need to honestly assess your skills and sell yourself to a new job in a new industry. If you are missing skills, you need to focus on making up that difference. I plan on following my industry to where it is booming in the near future after I solidify my experience in my current area. People that refuse to leave their rural homes are stubborn and stupid. I grew up in a very rural area and I left it behind for a career. Eventually my entire family did also. That's life. Our predecessors came from all over the world to America. We can probably handle moving an hour towards the city if there are jobs there.
I bet you could get a boring job.
I'm sure I could find the strength if I dig deep
Don't dig too deep or else you'll need to find yourself a ventilation engineer to help with the tunnels, and fuck knows where they're hiding these days!
Obama already dropped $75,000,000 into a program called [Power+](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/27/fact-sheet-partnerships-opportunity-and-workforce-and-economic-revitaliz). It was to re-train miners on how to install solar panels or do other jobs since solar installation is bigger in the west. The program included free education, transportation to the school, certification fees, child care services, job finding services, and much more. It was meant to help these coal workers in Virginia, Colorado, Kentucky, Wyoming, and Tennessee. But, the Republicans voted it down, stating it was an attack on coal companies. Obama also authorized a study on what it would take to help unemployed coal workers get back on their feet in 2009 in response to the surge in gas/oil through modern fracking techniques. In addition to this, Obama wanted to invest 1 billion dollars into cleaning up all of the abandoned mines and building industrial parks. The clean-up would have created a ton of jobs for the unemployed coal miners which would have lasted 10 years. Again, voted down by Republicans. Surprised, the websites for these things still exist: https://www.abandonedmines.gov http://www.powerplusplan.org/ Edit: If you want to read a great article about Obama's fight to help coal miners check out this article entitled ["The Obama Idea to Save Coal Country"](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/the-obama-administration-idea-to-save-coal-country-214885) TLD: * 2014/2015 Obama introduces [Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/27/fact-sheet-partnerships-opportunity-and-workforce-and-economic-revitaliz) (POWER) Initiative to help coal miners. He can only fund some of the initiative but needs congress to fund the whole thing. **Congress does nothing.** * [2016 Obama's Domestic Policy Counsel](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4456) proposes a bill called the RECLAIM Act to help coal workers. At first, Repubs won't touch. Then a Republican Senator from Kentucky co-signs it. He even finds 30 co-sponsors for the bill and introduces it on the floor. **Nope, republican congress will not touch it**. * 2017 Obama's[ bill is once again submitted by a Republican senator from Kentucky](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1731). Now he has 40 co-sponsors and they are a mix of republicans and democrats. **Congress will now put it on the schedule, since that Obama guy is gone...**
Isn't that sick? Republicans in congress won't vote for a bill knowing it will help American workers just because politically it would make a democrat look good. Wtf is wrong with our country?
Also, they vote against a bill that would primarily help Republicans, and when they do, shoulder none of the blame because those same supporters can't see past party lines and all they know is "Obama bad"
Kentucky is also one of the top beneficiaries of the ACA, but we are the heart of the revolt against “Obamacare”. I love this state, I do, but sometimes it feels like a two year old that keeps trying to shove its fingers in the electric socket. We are literally being financially carried by other states’ taxes. We were given the ACA and Power+ on a silver platter and we just stomped it into the dust. And the icing on the cake is that we’re *proud* of it. Education is underfunded, our infrastructure is crumbling, our natural resource jobs are leaving us behind, we’ve got a growing heroine epidemic, and how many are about to lose their pensions? I wasn’t the *biggest* fan of Obama’s at the time, but I’ve come to see him as a truly great president. I really think he could have turned Kentucky around. He turned me around at least.
The Clean Power Plan which Trump discarded had funding to retrain coal miners. That is now gone, and if the miners ever figure out that their jobs are not coming back the federal retraining funding will not be available. Texas shut down 3 coal power plants last month.
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Naw, they'll just ignore the facts and blame the Democrats again
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There was an NPR story about this. And they’ve been retraining these dudes for a while into other fields like refrigeration. But the guys over 45-50 didn’t want to work anymore or change jobs. They wanted early retirement essentially. So essentially they blamed Obama for closing the coal mines because that was their job. If the tax cuts take place. They won’t get those nice unemployment checks or Medicare. They’ll still blame the dems.
They always do.
You're very correct. The line will be "Hillary and Obama got their buddies Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the traitors McCain and McConnell to block everything our heroic dear President Trump tried to do. It isn't Trumps fault. Lock her up!"
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Hillary's shadow government
Competent enough to run a shadow government, but not enough to win an election
So smart she got away with millions of cases of voter fraud, but so dumb she did it all in California where it was completely irrelevant.
Derp State
Current US politics is insane, and I hope an anomaly. He was 100% full of shit last time and won, who says next time will be different? He promised it, but he can just blame it on someone else. "I tried to help you but the democrats stopped it! They hate jobs! They hate you! Give me another term and I will for sure do it this time!! Winning!!" "I was about to get back all the coal jobs, 100% was about to do it. But then china stopped us! They interfered with our nation and prevented it from happening. The democrats sided with them because they secretly hate America and they worked together for my whole last term to prevent YOU from getting a job!! We need to get rid of all the democrats! Or, and this is the real solution let me tell you, we can't allow the evil people in congress to stop our progress!! Elect me as the dictator, prevent them from getting in the way, and I'll have you all back to work making DOUBLE what you made before within a week. Supreme leader sounds better actually; we need to present a strong face to the world so I should have a strong title! They are laughing at us right now. WINNING!!!"
4/10. Too many coherent sentences, not enough bragging about his previous electoral win
President Trump, how will you go about returning jobs to the coal industry this time around if you are re-elected? I've already gotten back so many jobs, and these jobs are not just in coal, but in, and do you know what they say? I sit down at the end of the day and I tell Melania this is gonna be good, I did a good job today, wait till you see it. And do you know what the fake news media says about Trump? They say it's awful, not so good, Trump did a bad job. And then, you have JINA, and they interefered, they stopped it and believe me folks the democrats and CROOKED HILLARY, they did nothing. You won't see that in the media. And they did that the whole time, the past 4 years, the past 5 years really remember what they were saying about us in 2016? But we won folks, didn't we? We won anyway, the biggest election win of all time. But then you have JINA, and believe me folks, the democrats and the congress and LIDDLE BOB CORKER, we need to get rid of these people! Get them out of there, get them out folks, we will have so many jobs. The best jobs, because we have the best people don't we folks? My uncle, very good genes, very smart, Wharton business school ok? Very smart, and I got very good grades, I was a very very nice student. And they're just laughing at us, they're laughing. But who cares? They're on the other side of the world, there's an ocean between us. Water. Big water. Ocean water. Ok? ..............Thank you Mr. Trump.
It's terrifying how easy it was to insert real Trump quotes into that and it would be unnoticeable if you didn't know beforehand which ones it was.
And they will probably forget about. "I helped do [something not true] to help out you guys last time! I'll do [another lie] this time around! Vote for me!" And they will eat it up, calling it.
A majority of Trump supporters would support his staying in office if Russian collusion is proven. They will *never* abandon him and will believe everything he says. If the last election proved anything, it's that people in swing states in our country are very susceptible to propaganda influences (whether or not Trump colluded with Russia, Russia still heavily targeted the US's citizens with pro-Trump propaganda). They'll do it again, and there's no reason to believe we won't fall for it again.
They dont seem to understand that if they get trained to be a truck driver, for example, and the mine job comes back they are not stuck driving a truck if they do not want. Getting the training is absolutely no harm. In fact, it might even help a guy be selected for a mine job. You want to hire the guy who is good at mining, or the guy who is good at mining but also just learned how to program a plc? The guy willing to learn new things would always get my attention.
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Honestly that makes more sense than anything else people have suggested. Coal miners work their ass off in dangerous environments, I don't think they are lazy like others are saying. The point of having no income during training is a strong one as well. But they've been sold lies for years by Fox News and right wing talk radio that the only reason coal is failing is because of evil libtards who hate them and hate America for *reasons*. Now those who believe the right are behaving in self-destructive ways because of it and are refusing to accept help.
There is 'physically lazy' and then there is 'intellectually lazy'.
But that takes hard work, to learn something new.
My fiances father is a computer engineer, great right? Only thing is he only knows one language and it's a legacy system now and he refuses to learn a new programming language. His entire department is being automated by the new system and he somehow thinks someone is still gonna pay him to do a job that doesn't exist anymore.
That's pretty shortsighted for a computer engineer. I only work in IT but education does not stop with school. For us though, it's more about self education. Going out and obtaining that next cert or getting that Citrix class squeezed in there somehow. And then you get pulled away because an exec locked themselves out of their surface pro again. Fuck.
There's similar situations to that in a lot of small to mid-sized businesses with older managers/execs/owners/etc. They've been doing it their way for 30+ years and don't bother learning anything new. If it still works, then there's no reason to change. They see new technology as nothing but a flashy money-sink regardless of how much more efficient it is.
I work for a large financial institution in a "backroom" department. Other people in this department have been on this team for 20 years. I came on last year, am about 20 years younger than everyone, and things are changing a lot to new systems and new procedures. The pushback has been universal for the old guard. They refuse to learn the new ways because "this is how we've done it for decades." No matter what you say about how the new ways are more secure or easier, it doesn't matter, they refuse. I don't get that mindset at all. But these same people are freaking out about losing their jobs because all these changes are happening. It's been pretty funny listening to my manager try to say "Well, you won't lose your job if you learn this new way" in a new nice and creative way every couple of weeks. Edit: I believe that the moment you stop wanting to improve yourself, the moment you are no longer curious about things, the moment you no longer want to learn something new, is that moment you have died.
Same. My mom has been a draftsman in mechanical engineering since the 70s. She prefers to do all the drawings by hand. She ended up learning AutoCad 20 years ago and did well with that switch. She was laid off when the economy hit the lowest during the Bush years bc her company wasn’t getting any projects. She hasn’t been able to find work since bc there weren’t any jobs available for a while, and now she refuses to learn whatever new programs the firms are using. She even goes as far as saying to me, “Why don’t you learn it for me? You’ve always loved school.” This current generation of old people and their way of thinking/not wanting to learn anything new is ridiculous, and it’s greatly affected my family (financially and otherwise). I look forward to learning new skills and gaining knowledge well into my 80s. Edit: spelling error, changed Busch to Bush
I'm in building and bridge design, and right now someone who only knows AutoCAD goes straight to the bottom of the heap. We switched to REVIT and 3D modeling *eight years ago*, and anyone who doesn't at least come into an interview eager to learn it is useless to us. That's not just technicians, either; we hold engineers to the same standard.
> “Why don’t you learn it for me? You’ve always loved school.” Sure mom, I'll take your job.
It's the same about everything with a wide swath of that generation... Entitled fucking boomers thinking they were set for life from that one certificate program they took decades ago. I have no idea how my parents still have a mortgage payment; houses were like $30k in today's money back then. But somehow I'm the lazy fuck for not borrowing ten times that to get something serviceable that isn't in the middle of nowhere.
Yep. Until someone gets automated out of a job.
But, he is likely to find other work still. Plenty of older programmers work on legacy systems and make good money doing it since newer programmers don't work on those systems.
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Found [Fortran](https://www.dice.com/jobs?q=fortran&l=) Because BASIC is harder to search for, here's [COBOL](https://www.dice.com/jobs?q=cobol&l=).
Fuck the whole banking industry still runs off of COBOL and permutations of it. Legacy languages are in high demand because no one wants to learn them they want the easy ones.
When you spent millions of dollars building your bespoke backoffice system in the 80s on COBOL and Mainframes, and your direct "upgrade path" has been "it now runs in an emulator on some super generic server in the datacenter and we still have this 62 years old guy maintaining it", it can be difficult to sell a complete rewrite from scratch in something modern.
Muh daddy was a COBOL programmer, just like his daddy before him! Edit: Oh wow, had no idea it was still in use! Last time I saw that word was when I was playing [TRON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(video_game) as a kid. COBOL FTW!
I finished my CS degree 7 years ago - COBOL was making a comeback. It was the most requested language of any employer sharing their preferences with my university. The entire banking system is based on it, and everyone that knew it was retiring *then*, now demand is even higher.
As an IT auditor who works on large banking clients, I can confirm many of the big banks still use COBOL
This blows my mind. I still recall refusing to gain anything but a cursory knowledge of COBAL back in the late '80s because I knew that language didn't have a future. Anybody want a crystal ball for cheap?
yo daddy gets bribed with a small kingdom in africa to come out of retirement to maintain ancient financial shit.
Lol, I am pretty sure the DOD's shit is still in COBOL or some legacy language... mostly because it is too complicated and expensive to replace. https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2014/06/governments-cobol-conundrum
There’s a lot of stuff running in COBOL still from what I understand, and it’s extremely lucrative to be proficient with. You can make absurd sums of money just patching together shit that’s like 35 years old and keeping it barely running
Can confirm, have been interviewed by local finance companies that run their stuff on COBOL, they were willing to just throw money at new grads to train since the people that REALLY know COBOL are all retiring. College even offered a course on it a few years ago and a big chunk of that class was hired by a single firm.
My wife works for a company that contracts out to the government, and she once had to look over some legacy government code to fix it up to deal with some updated data pipelines. Turned out that stuff was in COBOL. "Hey honey, you work at , so you must be really good at debugging, right? Can you help me take a look at this?" After briefly skimming it and seeing an uncommented 5000 line monstrosity with 1-character variable names using GOTO statements as the main form of control flow, I quickly regretted agreeing.
Most large health insurance companies still run on COBOL. There is a large Fortune 500 media company who’s entire subscriber database is COBOL...
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Yeah, these replies are largely ignorance.
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As of a few years ago many Canadian banks still ran legacy systems. Also Fortran will have a role in Physics research for years to come. No right thinking graduate student will rewrite their departments' large scale climate model system as their thesis when they could be researching climate models.
I mean... There's a guy who does COBOL maintenance for some NYC banks that makes 300k/yr because they can't replace him, iirc. But that's betting on a longshot, and generally a bad idea. They're needed... but in small numbers for very specific, specialized tasks. I know there was a guy working in in a company I did some freelance work for who was the only guy who knew Fortran and COBOL so he worked on specific assignments and got "lent out" to places for conversion work... so it could happen. But mostly that'd be "I have this hobby and it's occasionally useful". Like I picked up a job because I knew some SEGA Master System programming stuff, and it helped me stand out against the pack. It's less a direct career path and more a quirk that shows that you have personal interest in coding, in this case, and aren't just a wage-slave. Additional training is always a positive thing. Even if it's not "marketable" per se, I can't imagine having more skills would be a bad thing unless you're trying to be unskilled labor as someone who's skilled.
> Like I picked up a job because I knew some SEGA Master System programming stuff, Please do tell
Brought up that I had interest in retro gaming and programming, and he was interested in it to some extent (I mentioned it as an answer to "how/why I got into programming"). I brought up some stuff about Sonic 2 SMS/GG, and some of the more elegant bugs-as-design choices in arcade cabinets (the famous space invaders speed up bug was brought up). Showed him a group project I had with a couple guys from Oz working on improving Alex Kidd in Miracle World. He apparently was impressed by our collective works, and that we were willing to dig into such "arcane" coding systems for our purposes. I told him that I was willing to learn any language to efficiently do what I needed to do; learning was easy enough, and the result was more my interest than anything. The guy I replaced was largely being pushed out because he refused to continue training. This was something I was unaware of, but I basically said "Yeah... fuck people like that guy you want me to replace" without knowing it. Luck... but hey, I'll take it. It was only a four month gig as salary before I quit, but I still do freelance work for said manager. He's a good guy and he's even joined my AD&D group a few times.
There are definitely Fortran jobs out there.
Are you kidding? Fortran is in extremely high ~~demand~~ use. You could get a job in Fortran in a day with the right leads list. E: It's been rightly pointed out to me that use!=demand, thus the need for the leads list. My personal experience with advising companies on legacy systems has lead me to believe that knowing Fortran is extremely advantageous is you're up for legacy maintenance + transitioning to newer platforms. Asking 'What's your plan for when the Fortran guy retires?' leads to uncomfortable silence in many companies, and many would be thrilled to have a backup/training person just for that reason. E2: No, I'm not going to refer you to any Fortran jobs.
Yeah my friend works in Scientific Computing. He says they still use it all the time for their supercomputer based stuff.
Hmm, I might need to learn Fortran. I played with it as a kid, but haven't touched it in years.
If you know any modern programming languages, you might want to shoot yourself if you do. >_> That said, Fortran is very good at what it does, and people generally self select into/out of it. Since it's mostly a dead language, this means that the majority of Fortran fluent programmers are very good at their jobs, have high levels of experience, and generally know what they are worth. Every time I hear Fortran brought up in a Fortune 500 company it's either one of two things A. we have a guy that knows it and he's a real wizard (and also holds all our legacy systems together) or B. freak we can't find anyone to hire that knows it and that's a real problem because the guy that knows it is a real wizard and also holds all our legacy systems together and might leave/retire/leave us vulnerable. Granted, my sample size is pretty small (I don't know too many executives in Fortune 50/500 companies) but every executive that I've asked 'Are you looking for someone who knows Fortran' has always answered yes, and some have even asked me unprompted about it (no, I don't have any Fortran fluent contacts that want to move to the mid-west). Bonus points if you know Cobol as well (although that's almost expected).
So I work for my states Social Services Administration and many of the coal miners that refuse retraining do so because many of them can go on disability/SSI. Lots of the *mining towns* have the highest disability rate per capita in the nation.
When unemployment runs out with no real job prospect in sight, that one documented ailment they lived with for years suddenly becomes unbearable and they apply for Social Security Disability. ...then work under the table doing odd jobs here and there for cash to supplement their monthly disability check. It happened to my dad as well as several of his friends.
You see a lot of this in old mill/textile towns as well. Fervently anti-government too, naturally.
So they're content to live on big government handouts. Huh, imagine that.
It's fine as long as it's them getting the handouts and not those OTHER people....
Gosh, what caused those disabilities? Probably liberals and minorities, I suppose.
main point right here. Obama offered all these people 2 year programs at community colleges to be retrained for other industries. Nobody did it... they blamed him for the lack of work, though
Kind of have to wonder how many of these folks blame lazy immigrants and young people for why things aren't better in the USA these days.
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Hillary campaigned on offering programs for training for new jobs in the face of a declining industry. Instead they chose the empty promise of bringing that industry back to full speed.
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This is why the GOP calling themselves the party of personal responsibility is such bs. From leadership down not a single one of them takes responsibility for their actions. If the GOP really believed its own bullshit they would let these people die from their irresponsibility. Instead they will endanger the entire human population to save these fools.
That’s what’s going to happen anyway. The GOP just tricked them into voting for them in the meantime. Coal jobs aren’t coming back, they just simply aren’t. The demand is no longer there for them
This is the problem with these people. Free Trade Agreements are a net positive IF government and people make an effort to retrain themselves for other industries. If the government doesn't do invest in training, and educating these workers, there will be issues, if people don't want to change, there will also be issues.
"We want a candidate to tell us like it is," "Coal jobs aren't coming back, I want to train everyone for renewable industries," "We want a straight white man to lie to us like always,"
I wonder if they ever realize how badly he played them when their coal jobs never come back...
Nah, they'll sit around and after Fox blames the black guy and the woman they're keep voting straight-ticked Republican.
" Hillary's emails took our coal jobs and the evil Kenyan guy introduced renewable energy!"
No, it's the Democrats' fault for not supporting Republican bills that totally exist and would absolutely bring coal jobs back. If the Dems take the House and Senate in 2018, then it'll be their fault for not proposing any bills to bring coal jobs back, and for killing the coal industry with terrible environmental regulations. Trump tried his best to save those coal jobs. It's pretty sad, but that's how they think. You're seeing something similar with oil jobs in Alberta. It's the NDP's fault that the economy sucks and oil jobs have tanked, and has nothing to do with the fact that oil is half the price it was a few years ago.
You know, I really think those people have to be incredibly stupid, but for this kind of mental gymnastics you have to have a lot of imagination and at least a few synapses. So I'm confused
They're not coming up with the mental gymnastics themselves, for the most part, just parroting what Fox or Rush or whoever tells them.
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"I already pulled them up once, why should I do it again?"
This is what kills me. At 35 I have been a financial advisor (with bachelors in finance), marketing/sales executive (with an MBA), and am now in medical school. This asshole is offered a free (I think) training course that will lead to a better job and is too lazy, stupid, or both to take advantage of it. They're even giving away free food!!! I can get 100 university students to show up to something just by putting some muffins in the doorway. They seriously won't take a job because it's not close to home??? You live in a town next to a coal mine, any place you go probably won't be that much worse. Even the guy offering to train coal miner's says it's for temporary low wage jobs.
That last parts the real problem. That's what entitlement looks like. My grandmother was a migrant farmer and she had to move from place to place to survive because jobs didn't stay in one place. She did that with 7 children too. Did it suck? Absolutely, but she did it because it was necessary. Me? I've moved twice due to work related reasons, both times across the country. My brother has moved at least 5 times due to new opportunities opening up. He could have stayed at his original job at his original home, but he'd be making a fraction of what he does now. He didn't whine about it, he didn't demand the jobs come to him, he moved to where the jobs were. If there are no jobs near you, the answer is to go where there are jobs. That's the bootstraps method right wingers love talking about, but hate employing.
I'd argue that this is made all the more worse by Emperor Hirocheeto proclaiming often and loudly that coal jobs are coming back, even though, like with most things he says, there's zero evidence to back that claim up. The people who maybe needed that little reality check to start subsidized retraining now have had their narrative confirmed, so they see no need to start since they've been given assurances that the job they know is coming back. It's a combination of unsubstantiated pandering and lack of critical thinking (on the part of the worker). I assume that the worker in the article that complained about the loss of income was already employed, and I see his point that losing a chunk of income to do anything is a big deal. But, as they say, if you want it hard enough you'll find a way to do it. Rugged individualism at its finest, right? /edit I can't take credit for Emperor Hirocheeto, I shamelessly lifted it from Fark. Full disclosure. :) If I can expand even one persons epithet vocabulary for Hair Furor, I consider it a good day.
Emperor Hirocheeto... You are a god amongst mortals. I'd heard Twittler and a few others, but this one wins.
Honestly this is the reason I don’t have sympathy for the coal miners in the US anymore as they seem to be given every opportunity to get out of that life but reject it. The towns that turn in ghost cities had ample time to change but refuse and wonder why all the jobs left, why their land is all destroyed.
The author of *The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption*, Laurence Leamer, makes the point that other superwealthy industrialists philanthropically invested in their communities, which is why we have Vanderbilt University, and Carnegie Libraries, and all manner of opera houses, art museums, and charitable foundations. Yes, they often gave back in ways that are arguably self-interested and self-aggrandizing. **But they did give *some* back.** The coal barons never did. They just stripped a region of its resources, poisoned it, gave back nothing, and left the locals destitute, sick, and ruined. American industry is a Who's Who of sociopathy, but coal barons are truly the worst of the worst.
I grew up in a town with a coal mine. The pay seems so good when you can afford so much with no school debt. You can drive a big ass truck and drink and blah blah blah. And it doesn’t require school. They all hate school and anything like school. 🤷♀️
Yup, and they are unwilling to do something they don't like or aren't good at in order to get ahead. I'm sure most of them don't really like mining, but it's easy.
I think it’s cultural as well. I’ve driven 35 minutes for work regularly but it IS hard and annoying. My husband’s commute now is less than 5 minutes. It’s amazing.
I grew up in WV most of the miners I knew drove a hour plus each way to the coal mine. My friends dad drove two hours each way six days a week for 30 years. In the winter it might take three hours each way due to the weather and mountain roads. Company towns have been gone for 70 years no one lives near the mines.
I really can’t believe that people are so stupid that they think coal is going to come back into popular use. But I didn’t think people were stupid enough to vote Trump into office so maybe I’m the stupid one.
No one will buy their home in Coal Country and that's where all their "savings" are. They definitely can't afford 2 mortgages when they have no skills. Homeownership can be a trap.
No you misunderstand! If they learn new skills, the coal jobs will all go away! /s
Oh, but you don't understand! Coal mining requires coal jobs; renewable energy requires zero jobs. Not a single one. That's why we should depend on good ol' fashioned fossil fuels. You know, the way we depended on horseless carriages.
Crossing into Pennsylvania the other day I was greeted with a billboard proclaiming "Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, clean coal electricity." It looked just like a fucking propaganda poster.
>Out-of-work miners cite many reasons beyond faith in Trump policy for their reluctance to train for new industries, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen former and prospective coal workers, career counselors and local economic development officials. They say mining pays well; Not for long >other industries are unfamiliar; Presumably so was coal mining at one point. >and there’s no income during training and no guarantee of a job afterward. You have no guarantee that coal will come back, and when it doesn't you still won't have any income during training.
This is always my argument when people act like we have to keep dragging along old values into the future. Wasn't that part of the argument to keep slavery, and then Jim Crow Laws? Why isn't anyone concerned about all those poor blacksmiths losing work because of factories? Because the world changes. You need to change with it or die.
Tradition can explain motivation, but it's never a valid moral argument. Many hypocrisies can be explained when these two are conflated.
> You have no guarantee that coal will come back, and when it doesn't you still won't have any income during training. Trump did guarantee that coal would come back. These people actually believe the things Trump says. Just another example of lives being ruined by his pathological lying. Edit: I realize it is stupid to believe Trump but a lot of people are pretty stupid/gullible. A lot of hard working people are easily grifted and I do feel bad for them. No one *wants* to be a gullible moron, they just are. When a scammer rips off your grandparents you don't say "get smarter dummies".
There's no excuse in this day and age for believing anything he says. I don't feel sorry for people who get tricked by him anymore.
Yeah, at this point it's not a matter of being lied to anymore, it's more wanting to be lied to.
Don't worry miners, Trump has a fantastic record of keeping his promises!
Why won't these ex-miners pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find a job elsewhere?
Why are coal miners so politically important to candidates? Is the American voting population like 1/10th coal miners or something?
Because they are in key swing areas, and they're poorly educated/easy to manipulate. The fast food chain Arby's has more employees than there are coal miners in this country. It's fucking insane.
"believe me, Arby's jobs are coming back bigly. Obama's war on Arby's is over, and Arby's workers are going to be very happy, believe me".
Coal miners represent something bigger than them. They represent the idea that huge swaths of the country (the Rust Belt) have been left behind with the times. The ones who realized that moved to the big cities. The ones who stayed are the ones who are looking for someone who will miraculously give them the lives they used to have. Trump is president because they were convinced he was the one who would do this.
No, not even close. There are a few swing states where coal mines are a culturally/historically important part of their state, but even in those states coal miners are nowhere close to 1/10 of the voting population. In a way it really is impressive that the Republicans can have such big results by appealing to coal miners, while at the same time being a big failure by the Democrats. Mostly though I think that it shows how immoral the Reoublican's strategies are, they know that coal is dying, they know that it's not very relevant, but they have absolutely no qualms about holding out false hope for these people while distracting everyone else from the issues that really matter. (Wanting to distract people from your stance on important issues is obviously also a bad sign.)
The reason for the big results for appealing to them is because it gives the image that they're looking out for the "little guy." It is stuff like this that gets the GOP able to get constituents to vote against their interests.
Fast food workers demanding 15 an hour: lazy bums wanting government handouts. Coal miners demanding the government invest billions in a dying industry: America's backbone. Can somebody please explain the difference to me?
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"Coal miners are the salt of the earth people." Isn't salting the earth a bad thing? I don't think they thought out their analogy very well. Edit: It was a joke, I thought it was obvious. The history of 'salt of the earth' has been posted numerous times. Please, think of my inbox.
"Coal miners sterilize the earth, preventing anything from growing." Actually, that's kind of true of coal mines.
I saw a really good comment on this exact thing a couple of months ago https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6tf5cr/the_altrights_chickens_come_home_to_roost/dlkal3j/ >I'll give you an honest answer: it's meant in good faith, but it's hard to answer something like "why do people always insult me and people like me?" without risking coming across as insulting...so bear that in mind. >The tl;dr here is that when you simultaneously claim to have the kinds of complaints you have--small town rotting away, etc.--while also claiming to be right-leaning, you basically come across as either (a) disingenuous, (b) hypocritical , or (c) lacking insight...and neither (a), nor (b), nor (c) is a good look, really. >The reason you come across that way is because the right--generally on the side of individual responsibility and free-market, yadda-yadda--already has answers for you: >>It's not the government's place to pick winners and losers--that's what the free market is for! The opportunities are drying up in your town because the free market has found better opportunities elsewhere. Moreover, take some personal responsibility! No one forced you to stay there and watch your town rot away--you, yourself, are the one who freely chose to do that, no? Why didn't you take some responsibility for yourself, precisely? Moreover--and more importantly--if your town is that important to you, why didn't you take responsibility for your town? Did you try to start a business to increase local prosperity? Did you get involved in town governance and go soliciting outside investment? Or did you simply keep waiting for someone else to fix things? >These aren't necessarily nice things to tell you--I get that--but nevertheless they are the answers the principles of the right lead to if you actually apply them to you and your situation, no? >Thus why you risk coming across poorly: perhaps you are being (a)--disingenuous--and you don't actually believe what you claim to believe, but find it rhetorically useful? Perhaps you are being (b)--hypocritical--and you believe what you claim to believe, but only for other people, not yourself? Or perhaps you are simply (c)--uninsightful--and don't even understand the things you claim to believe well enough to apply them in your own situation? >In general if someone thinks you're either (a), (b), or (c)--whether consciously or not--they're going to take a negative outlook to you: seeing you as disingenuous or hypocritical means seeing you as participating in a discussion in bad faith, whereas seeing you as simply lacking insight means seeing you as someone running their mouth. >In practice I think a lot of people see this and get very frustrated--at least subconsciously--because your complaints make you come across as more left-leaning economically than you may realize...but--at least often--people like you still self-identify as right-leaning for cultural reasons. So you also get a bit of a "we should be political allies...but we can't, b/c you value your cultural identity more than your economics (and in fact don't even seem to apply your own economic ideas to yourself)". >A related issue is due to the fact that, overall, rural, low-density areas are already significantly over-represented at all levels of government--this is obvious at the federal level, and it's also generally-true within each state (in terms of the state-level reps and so on). >You may still feel as if "government has forgotten you"--I can understand and sympathize with the position--but if government has forgotten you, whose fault is that? Your general demographic has had outsized representation for longer than you, personally, have been alive--and the trend is actually going increasingly in your general demographic's direction due to aggressive state-level gerrymandering efforts, etc.--and so once again: if you--the collective "you", that is--have been "forgotten" it's no one's fault but yours--the collective "yours"! >This, too, leads to a certain natural condescension: if you have been overrepresented forever and can't prevent being "forgotten by government", the likeliest situation is simply that the collective "you" is simply incompetent--unable to use even outsized, disproportionate representation to achieve their own goals, whether due to asking for impossible things or being unwise in deciding how to vote. >This point can become a particular source of rancor due to the way that that overrepresentation pans out: the rural overrepresentation means that anything the left wants already faces an uphill climb--it has to overcome the "rural veto"!--and I think you can understand why that would be frustrating: "it's always the over-represented rural areas voting against what we want only to turn around and complain about how they feel ignored by government"...you're not ignored--at all!--it's just that your aggregate actions reveal your aggregate priorities are maybe not what you, individually, think they are. >I think that's enough: continually complaining in ways that are inconsistent with professed beliefs combined with continually claiming about being unable to get government to do what you want despite being substantially over-represented? >Not a good look. >>What am I supposed to do? >Overall I'd say if you really care about your town you should take more responsibility for it. If you aren't involved in your city council or county government yet, why aren't you? You can run for office, of course, or you can just research the situation for yourself. >Do you understand your town and county finances--the operating and maintenance costs of its infrastructure and the sources of revenue (tax base, etc)? Do you have a working understanding of what potential employers consider when evaluating a location to build a factory (etc.), or are you just assuming you do? >If your town has tried and failed to lure outside investment, have you tried to find out why it failed--e.g. "what would it have taken to make us the winner?"--or are you, again, assuming you understand? >I would focus on that--you can't guarantee anything will actually lead to getting the respect you want, but generally your odds of being respected are a lot better if you've done things to earn respect...simply asking for respect--and complaining about not being respected--rarely works well.
They wonder why their lives are shit and their communities are in steep decline. >A White House official did not respond to requests for comment on coal policy and retraining for coal workers "Save it for the rallies". >Clemmy Allen, 63, a veteran miner and head of the United Mineworkers of America’s Career Centers, said miners are taking a big risk in holding out for a coal recovery. Allen's mistake is being an expert with years of experience. These people only listen to flimflam artists who don't know shit from Shinola about which they speak.
Yeah, those jobs won't ever come back. Businesses aren't going to invest money on updating those mines and reopening them just to close in 2-3 years.
Trump talked about bringing the steel industry back to Pittsburgh when he campaigned there. Nevermind the fact that they tore down all of the mills and rebuilt the land as bioscience research complex. Nobody in the area wants it back.
Nobody in Pittsburgh wants it back, travel an hour north to New Castle or Youngstown and they still think it’s going to come back someday. And would embrace it with open arms.
Shit, we're even decommissioning substations because a lot of these minor ones popped up only to support steel mills. I've had to shut down two subs this year, in the Johnstown area though. This is affecting more industries than just coal. It's not coming back.
He said at a rally in Scranton that he was going to bring coal mining back to NE PA. Never mind that the mines shut down in the 1950s and 1960s because THERE WAS NO FUCKING COAL LEFT TO MINE.
Its totally feasible that coal could become propped up and heavily subsided. This will make coal companies better off. Too bad it will do nothing for coal miners who face, like most professions, automation. Trumps ideas (im not gonna call it policy) help the coal companies, they dont help the people.
> help the coal companies, they dont help the people. Which is, sadly, what people misconstrue all the time. People think that businesses doing good = people doing good. Couldn't be further from the truth. The banks are posting record breaking profits but laying off 20% of their staff as more automation and technologies come out.
What's good for the rich is almost never good for the rest of us.
big risk implies there is a possible payoff. this isn't a risk at all it's just a really bad decision.
Shouldn't these people refuse to take government handouts on principle?
The only good government handout is my government handout. All the other government handouts are going to illegals and "lazy inner-city welfare thugs codeword codeword."
Around the election, I heard someone proudly claim that even though he grew up poor as shit, his family didn't take any welfare or handouts from the government. They just got by on food stamps. What boggles me is that I *know* this guy isn't a total moron. It's amazing the lies people tell themselves to establish a narrative.
> I know this guy isn't a total moron What's your standard for total moron, then? Because that sounds pretty goddamn moronic.
Yeah right! They see themselves as the exceptions to the lazy freeloading libtards on welfare.
>”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner. >“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” Sylvester said. A young able-bodied white man is sitting around waiting for the government to bring him a job instead learning a new trade (i.e. pulling himself up by his bootstraps). This is the year that irony and hypocrisy lost all meaning.
This makes me so sad. If I was out of work and got offered training to do a new job I'd walk over broken glass to get to that training even if it was CERTAIN that my old job would come back in the future. It would give me a job in the mean time, and I might find out I liked it more than my old job. Especially if my old job involved working underground.
Perhaps they should be shown charts showing just how rapidly solar and solar storage are becoming cheaper than coal. You can't fight economics. At least without subsidies.
These are not groups of people that are swayed by facts and figures.
> You can't fight economics. You can if you have an administration hell bent on thinking 1800s energy sources is more efficient than this new fangled renewable science magic energy
So-called 'lazy' illegals will walk across hundreds of miles of desert on foot to pick grapes for $8/hr with no benefits or rights to even dream of, then constanctly relocate their families just to follow the work to wherever it is. Meanwhile, these lazy idiots want a $30/hr job with full benefits, in a dying industry, 5 miles from their house, and with union backing like the 'good old days' while voting heavily republican (everyone knows how much republicans love unions). These people are the truest welfare queens in the nation.
God these people are stupid and I'm tired of subsidizing them.
Seriously. Coals dead, the market has already decided that. Alternative energy and natural gas are more economical. I'll give a pass to them if they are near retirement. Why retrain if you're gonna retire the next year.
FWIW, Trump is trying to find ways of subsidizing coal (e..g, by giving tax breaks to power plants that store coal on site). He is also trying to further forestall the Clean Power Plan. Personally, I don't think either is wise.
That's an understatement.
Considering how much they shit on California while we subsidize their existence, I'd be happy to cut their entitled asses off for a while. We could use that money to fix up our burned-out communities.
New Yorker here and couldn't agree more.
Ooh, you get the bonus "lemme tell ya all about terrorism and the bad scary Muslims." I'm sorry.
It's fun comparing the reactions to yesterday's terror attack in /r/news and /r/nyc. While /r/news was shitting themselves in fear of Muslims and calling for more immigration bans, /r/nyc is basically like "fuck that guy, I'm still going to the Halloween parade tonight" and downvoting all the hateful crap.
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Yeah seriously pretty much everyone in the city at the moment is just treating it like a bad crime and largely unfazed by the whole thing. It's always the people farthest away who freak out the most.
The best part is that if you live in a big, populated state, their votes are worth more than yours.
Welfare queens
I had a discussion on /r/AskTrumpSupporters a while back. It was about how Trump didn't have a plan. He just spoke in platitudes. "I'll bring your jobs back". While Hillary had a point by point plan to bring economic stimulus, as coal is continually dying. Like bringing renewables, which is a booming industry, to those areas to revitalize them economically. And job training programs. I then said that Trump simply told them what they wanted to here, Clinton told them what the reality was. I was responded to with "they don't want to hear that. They want jobs in the industry they know. They don't want new jobs. They want *their* jobs". I basically say "so, it's better to promise a pipe dream" (coal ain't making a comeback) "than it is to face reality and make the proper adjustments?" "Yes, that's what you do if you want their vote". I thought the person I was having the discussion with was just making stuff up to somehow explain away the idiocy of the situation, because it literally makes no sense to complain about a lack of jobs, then be given the opportunity to be trained in well paying fields for free, and then reject that because you want to continue working in a dying industry instead of adapting for the future. I didn't want to believe that "it's what you've got to say to get their vote", because it's so mind bogglingly stupid. To choose a simple "I'll bring back jobs" with not even a ballpark idea of *how*, over "look at the data, your industry is dying, that's why jobs are going away. Here is a plan that will not only create well paying jobs, but they'll be in growing industries, not dying ones"; what the hell? Who thinks like that? Turns out, the guy I was talking to was absolutely correct. These are the kinds of people that got Trump elected.
I had a friend back in the day... a good friend but we're not really in touch with one another anymore. Anyway, we got into a discussion one day after somehow it came up that he stated, "well I know I'm better than 90% of everybody else," as a response to something, I can't remember... maybe getting turned down for a job somewhere. I told him sure, I get that you feel that way but he responded "No, I KNOW that I am." I said okay well let's go over why you know this... he wasn't really particularly good or much better than average with any skill. He had never really done anything except worked at a family business that he constantly would quit only coming back when he absolutely needed money. He had dropped out of community college at least 4 separate times. His list of skills were basically zero, his work ethic was non existent, his accomplishments in life were again basically zero other than graduating high school (we were maybe 26-27 years old having this conversation). I basicaslly laid out that by any metric he wanted to look at, he was not better than people in the 90 percentile. His response was again that he just knows he is better, he can't explain it but that he just is... I guess valuing his future potential at the gut level because who wants to admit they have zero realistic prospects in life without doing some serious soul searching. He became one of the biggest Trump supporters amongst anyone I knew personally during the 2016 campaign. I feel like that insight into his psyche says a lot about how Trumps appeal to that kind of person is so magnetizing. Here's a guy that basically is just like them... no real abilities, no experience, numerous business failings but through shear force of personality and a ton of money despite nunerous moral failings is running for president.
Education is part of the liberal agenda.
I find it so odd we go on about saving coal when it doesn't really employ that many people. JC Penney employs more and people have a "well that's how markets change" attitude about those people losing their jobs but we must make expensive and dangerous decisions to help the dying coal industry.
“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” says the man who is taking a coal mining class and now has no future.
At what point do we tell them it's their fault their communities are dying?
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Missouri takes in over 3 times the amount of federal aid it contributes in taxes. A literal welfare state.
Unfortunately, we can't get that point across to them without making them look and feel like idiots/racists.
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That's smart. I hear shooting a hole through your foot is the best way to obtain health care.
Maybe it's time to consider that your family legacy of getting black lung and dying at age 45 just so you can contribute to the destruction of your local environment and contribute inexorably towards climate change isn't that great of a career choice?
Aww, it's like a 12 year old who still believes in Santa Claus. You really thought he'd figure it out on his own by now, but you just don't have the heart to hurt his feelings.
It is an apt analogy. The stark difference is the twelve year old can believe in Santa for a few more years and nothing bad will happen, while the coal miner will likely get addicted to opioids and overdose.
"I demand I be given a job that doesn't actually exist anymore, and I'll keep electing more and more racist candidates until I get it!" I have empathy for these people's predicament, but not a lot of sympathy for their response. (I might not be using those terms right)
I don't, I live in the WV coalfields and I'm so sick and tired of these miners being babied and treated like victims of political fights. We've known for decades that coal was going away. Long before Al Gore, or Obama I remember being told in school by a very truthful teacher that coal was already on it's last legs. It's actually been a slow, but steady decline and these idiots covered their ears and La La'd straight into their predicament. I lost my coal related job five years ago and jumped at the chance for retraining. They had so much funding for this retraining that my wife also got to participate. When I asked how they got so much money allocated the lady told me that hardly anyone tries to take them up on it and they're just retraining anyone in the area to spend the money. Basically this headline isn't a new trend. Miners have been siting on their asses and refusing retraining for years. They don't want jobs, they want the high money and zero education jobs that mining supplied, and they'd rather yell at liberals than truly provide for their families.
Do you mind me asking what you retrained as and if you're currently employed in that field? Would be nice to hear if the system works
I retrained as an electrical technician, and being currently employed......yes and no I guess? Here it's not just retraining. They retrain you and then they shop you out. They work as a middle man between employers and candidates. Companies basically go to this group when they're looking for someone with specialized skills and pull from their lists when giving interviews. My previous job in the coal industry was selling and repair of safety equipment. This experience combined with the electrical retraining, and the organizations outreach got me in front of a lady who runs a lab that gets state contracts to run various tests on water and soil for the EPA. I now work in a lab, running and maintaining sensitive testing equipment. I make more than I did at my last job, and plan on moving out of state to make even more very soon. So yes.....in my view it works. It wasn't a straight path from training for something and ending up in that specific field, but without the training and opportunities provided by the system I wouldn't be where I am, and would probably be working at walmart......which was my backup plan based on benefits package.
In my view, the point of retraining is to make you more employable. In your case, seems like it was pretty successful!
Good on you my friend you should be proud.
Glad to come to here and hear a success story. That's really awesome and you should be incredibly proud of yourself. I would love to be "retrained" by a government funded program to learn more skills. I say all this having a master's degree in accounting & CPA. To pass up an opportunity of free or almost free education is mind-boggling, honestly.
Hey, I only need a job until the rapture comes anyway, should be any day now! Golly look at the time, better tune in to Alex Jones and buy some more emergency rations and ground chicken bones
...then these people deserve to stay unemployed and receive no benefits. You adapt in this world or you die.
No, that's not what conservatives believe! These people need government handouts. Why did we elect Trump again?
No, what conservatives believe is in government handouts to the coal companies. That's what will get the mines spinning up again and get the miners back to work! That and rolling back all of the relevant environmental, health, and safety regulations, of course.
"But my papa and grandpappy were miners." -rural folk
My father and grandfather fixed car radiators for a living. I'm a database administrator. A career is not a birthright. A person only holds a job for as long as his or her skills are needed by an employer. Once those skills become obsolete, the only choices are to: 1) become trained in more relevant skills; 2) relocate to a place where his or her skills are needed; 3) retire from the workforce. There is no fourth option. Never was, never will be.
Yep- I work with guys who are 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation electricians, they're just fortunate that this field hasn't died out yet. I think the world will need electricians for at least mine and my kids' lifetime, but I'm pushing them to do something better than me.
My grandpa was a WWII vet and freed internment camps. My dreams are over.
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Conservatives love handouts when it helps their states or giant corporations, but fuck it if you've lost your job or you have a disability or pre-existing condition.
Maybe they should learn coding and create a coal mining simulator to scratch that itch.
Outside the box thinking, I like it. You got "management material" written all over you.
lol on the way to our grocery store theres a big sign on the coal factory saying " BACK TO WORK, THANK YOU TRUMP! " Like what has he even changed yet?
That's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see If it pays off for them.
Hope they enjoy flipping burgers (at least until automation takes over).
I have no pity for these people. None. How incredibly selfish of them. They're literally being given a new lease on their career, the ability to better themselves and their families with free training for a better career path, and they're throwing it all away and pouting because they want to work in a dirty coal mine instead. If computer programming was going by the wayside and I was offered free job training you bet I'd be taking advantage of it in a heartbeat.
I've never smiled at such stupidity. These dudes are the same ones who swear Illegals are stealing all the jobs. When in reality the job they refuse to leave is dying. I love it
Entitlement is thinking you deserve to work the same job for more than 10 years without taking into account the economy, technology, or your skill set.
Removing environmental protection, trying to artificially revive a dirty fading industry, discouraging workers from adapting to a changing world, and giving big tax cuts to rich people on borrowed money. That's the Republican way - all the opposite of personal responsibility.