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Michael Bloomberg: You Can't Teach a Coal Miner To Code
theodp (442580) writes "Gigaom reports that while speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Summit on Wednesday, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he gives 'a lot of money to the Sierra Club' to help close dirty coal plants, but added that as a society we have to 'have some compassion to do it gently.' Subsidies to help displaced workers are one option, said Bloomberg, while retraining is another option. But, in a slight to the tech industry's sometimes out-of-touch nature with workers outside of Silicon Valley, he said retraining needs to be realistic, 'You're not going to teach a coal miner to code,' argued Bloomberg. 'Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great. I don't know how to break it to you... but no.'"
Coding is not for everyone, and simply putting everyone into tech-training is not the answer (it will just create another problem).
...requires foundations laid down in the 5th and 6th grade of school, mostly math, but also the interest and desire to learn. Some people get it, some don't get it. So it's more accurate to say that some coal miners may be able to learn to code: Watch out for those blanket generalizations, they bite back.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
You can't teach an old dog new tricks
Yes, they're not going to be designing algorithms, but there is plenty of grunt work to do too. There is a reason the term 'computer janitor' exists.
Not only is it hard for people to learn new skills later in life, but coding is something that requires a certain aptitude. Sure, some coal miners might be able to learn how to code, but I would think very few of them could. If they could, they wouldn't be working in a coal mine. There's plenty of people who chose programming as a career and yet still can't program their way out of a paper bag (fizz buzz), I don't think the chances of most people from non-technical fields are good at all.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
cause we all know there aren't enough project managers who could coal mine
The point I take from it is it's silly to think that all you do to fix the skills/jobs gap it so send people to school. Some people will have the ability to make huge transitions in careers, but most will be looking for equivalent work. It's how sociology works. You have to look at demographics and odds, not best wishes and theories.
That being said, I hope this is a lesson to communities, cities, and states that throw all their economic eggs into one industrial basket. No matter how good the gettin' is, you're screwed if that industry takes a big hit.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
How is this shocking? People have different temperaments, skills and interests.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
We should consider clean coal plants and dump Bloomberg not so gently. CAGW is a scam....
Bloomberg as always is full of it. Coal miners aren't dumb people, they are far from it. I suggest you try and find the Spike TV mini-series entitled "Coal." You will learn quite a bit about mining coal from it.
sudo mod me up
Enough said. As more and more people become familiar with it, people would realize how easy it is to code. The standard canard has been women don't code, or they don't code well. We have hired women coders and they do as good a job as men.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'd like to interpret Bloomberg's statement to mean that it isn't realistic (or even desirable) to expect every blue-collar worker to be able to retrain in a highly technical field. Sure, some would be able to make that transition, but it's like asking programmers if they would have the desire to become physicians. It's not that people aren't smart or dedicated enough to do it, so much as it is the idea that a career in the tech sector is not some universal solution to everyone's job woes.
I also think that people who advocate such statements (very often, they are CEOs of tech companies) tend to have ulterior motives: they want to be able to pay their workers less money for more (and higher quality) output. While you might not blame them for having such a goal, I find it disingenuous how they wrap this desire up in some feel-good, altruistic sounding wish for more coders, more people to learn programming and computer skills, as if this is something that will create jobs. It doesn't work that way. Instead, it increases competition for existing jobs. These companies keep complaining about how there aren't enough skilled workers to fill the positions they have, but what they really mean is that there aren't enough *CHEAP* skilled workers. That's why they push this propaganda about H1B, teaching programming to kids, and fantasies about coal miners taking off their hardhats and learning Python and C#.
if you are transitioning from one skill/job to, say, software, you'll probably be over 30, and maybe over 40.
just tell me this: who would hire an aging programmer, just starting out, when you can more easily abuse immigrants and h1b's who are young and will work overtime for free and deny the value of a personal life?
we have a major problem with companies not being socially responsible. they don't care that an aging population is being wholesale REJECTED by corporate america and worse than that, local US born and raised citizens are second class, now; with imported labor or outsourced labor being first class.
an idea: give tax incentives or other incentives for companies that go out of their way to hire locals/americans and even bigger bonuses to companies that go out of their way to hire older (over 35, cough) people. not saying you punish those companies who don't; but you give them extra benefits so as to motivate them.
companies only look out for their bottom line. they would sell their mother into slavery for a higher share price. the only way to keep a balance of social responsibility and prosperity is to give incentives, to guide better behavior.
(I'm over 50, have been looking for work for a while now, and I'm getting nothing; no interviews and certainly no offers. I have a lot of experience and a good work ethic, but it does no one any good if the companies routinely dismiss anyone with more than 2 pages of resume experience, since they are seen as 'too expensive' to hire).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The headline misquotes Bloomberg. He didn't say you *can't* teach a coal miner to code, he said you won't. And he's right. While it's certainly *possible* for some older adults to radically change their career paths into tech jobs, the majority of us lack the motivation and mental flexibility, and society doesn't want to spend the money to help us make the switch. It's just not going to happen. Bloomberg's overall point is dead on: we need to come up with ways to allow people to gently move into new careers that make the most of their talents, rather than just firing them, throwing a Javascript for Dummies book at them, and expecting them to become the next Zuckerberg.
That said, Bloomberg's got a pretty 19th century view of what coal mining is. Since it's all done with heavy machinery and robots these days, it's a pretty technically demanding job.
I don't know about Bloomberg in particular, but it now seems almost common wisdom among the elite that college isn't for everyone and now skills like programming aren't either.
While those words are true, what they mean in practice is that 'not for everyone' means 'not for the poor and working class' (poverty is a strong predictor of college eduction). I bet Bloomberg's kids go to college and he wouldn't doubt his non-technical buddies' ability to learn to code based on their job descriptions
What happened to the American Dream? Where is the land of opportunity, where anyone can succeed if they work hard enough? Apparently, Bloomberg et al believe that only the elite live in that land and that we should abandon that dream for the working class and poor. Why don't they just accept their places?
...hope that I never have to learn how to mine coal. Despite what Heinlein said about specialization, I'm much better at writing code than at mining. (And yes, I did a little recreational mining a couple of decades ago when I was into mineral collecting as a hobby.)
Possible . With a lot of effort a team of bright minds could teach hulk hogan to do some java . But then , who's gonna fight the undertaker??
There isn't that much coding work in the world. High demand is not infinite demand.
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There's no reason to train every worker to "code", we don't suffer from a lack of coders, we suffer from a lack of "developers", and no 6 week software bootcamp is going to turn someone with no programming experience into a developer. Besides, the average coal miner is probably not going to want to sit in front of a computer all day (many in my family work in the heavy construction industry, and I am 100% certain that although you could probably teach my brother to code, you're not going to be able to teach him to sit behind a desk all day).
But there are plenty of other jobs that you *could* teach a former coal miner to do -- not everyone in the economy needs to be a coder any more than everyone needs to be an auto mechanic just because we all (well, mostly) drive cars.
Bloomberg has a valid point. It's also the reason most people can't be fashion models ("he's so hot right now").. There is also something to be said for nerdly predispositions and interests, which goes a long way in determining whether someone can become a successful coder.
On a more general note, Bloomberg has struggled far more to "earn" his billions and has seen far more of the world than Zuckerberg, who in turn strikes me as an incredibly naiive, deer-in-the-headlights, I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-here, I-just-won-the-nerd-lottery sort of person: his proclamations simply don't carry that much weight.
I'd rather write
Host files at midnight
Than pass my days
Hacking at lignite
BURMA SHAVE
cat
You think this could have been said some thirty years ago?
Actually, I do remember on a Charlie ROse show, Charles Murray said something like: "Not very many people with 80 IQs can be successful mathematicians." [1]. He then went on to say, "Fortunately most people with 80 IQs don't want to be mathematicians."
Of course everyone was trashing Murray at the time.
[1] Not to conflate coal miners with people with 80 IQs.
That's kind of like calling a chemical engineer a chemical worker (ie the guy rolling drums around and pumping things into tanks). SCM is a rigorous school and he was probably exposed to a lot of engineering themes useful for IT.
love is just extroverted narcissism
So retrain them to mine tantalum and rare earth elements. I'm sure we can get "Mined in the USA" and "Conflict-free certified electronics" going, amirite?
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Let's try to evaluate this in a non-partisan grown up way. By coding, Bloomberg is referring to America's move to eliminate all blue collar work by sending it abroad to China and Brazil, and to create great opportunities for academic pursuits, financial services and intellectual property. If there was a strong manufacturing sector, miners could be retrained to work in factories, with all the health benefits over mining, but those jobs got exported to make the multi-national companies richer and more powerful. Since large companies now own the American political process, all political efforts are concentrated on making the rich more rich at the expense of the working people.This doesn't end well.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
I think Bloomie meant than any one job category isnt going to a panecea for unemployement. That is you cant teach and motivate everyone to be coders or health workers or roustabouts. However, its dumb to say that any one particular profession cant learn another. A given miner may could become a great programmer. But not all of them.
Zuckerberg says you can teach anyone to code.
Mayor of NYC says you can't.
News at 11.
I think we really need to get Morgan Freeman's take on this issue.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I spent a decade as a coal miner in my youth. I even earned a license as a blasting supervisor. And I can code. I don't code for a living, but yeah, I can code. I find the implication that coal miners are somehow too dumb to learn anything else mildly offensive. Many coal miners are the product of a family that has done the same work for generations, and just kind of inherited the job. Same with farmers. But that doesn't mean they are incapable of doing anything else.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
I can code in multiple languages on multiple systems and have been doing it for a shit load of years .. and right now I am sitting in front of OSX, Windows 7 and Debian systems.
But suppose my choice of career was suddenly cut short for some reason (the singularity?) what would it take for me to learn a bunch of manual skills in order to become a productive member of society? And to learn them to the same skill level I have now?
Basically I would be fucked as I have spent all these years adapting to intellectual challenges that rely on understanding arcane facts about specific systems, and then shuffling that knowledge around to find oval solutions to problems. I chose this career path because I was not enamored with the idea of manual labor. Actually I take that back .. I chose this career because I was enamored with the intellectual challenges. So I know I would suck at being a coal miner or a machinist or a welder or barrista compared to people who willingly have taken on those career paths.
The mythical coal miner to coder transition would suck for the same reasons that me being a coal miner would suck
So in general I agree with Bloomberg
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
He doesn't need to know how to do anything. He's a manager.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you retrain coal miners to code, all you're doing is increasing the already-superabundant supply of coders, reducing their value on the jobs market.
No, no it's not. The rationalization used by slave owners was that everyone - adults and children alike - would be unable to learn to do anything else because of inherent limitations in their capabilities. The argument put forth here is that adults may be unable to learn to do one specific job that may require not only years of training, but also a familiarity with the underlying math and technology - a familiarity that they may lack. Nothing whatsoever implies that the children of current coal workers couldn't become excellent programmers, or excellent managers, or excellent architects, etc., and so they should be indentured into coal work, too. Nor does this imply that current coal workers couldn't become good mechanical engineers, or mechanics, or architects, or artists, just that some of them could never become good programmers.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Indirectly. You can really get something of value to society out of him when you harvest his organs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> Jobs are determined by us wanting to do things.
The desire, *and* the resources. I may want an indoor pool, but if I can't afford it, and neither can anyone else, there's no indoor pool market.
That's why an economy that's constantly drained of its money, withers. Once we fix the forces draining ours, employment won't be the issue it is today. That's why I love Ratigan's classic rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... He outlines the problem well. Not perfectly, but well.
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Bloomberg didn't say that you can't teach any coal worker to code, just that you can't teach every coal worker to code, refuting Zuckerberg's Marie-Antoinette-style "let them write code" statement.
Only the Zuck sounds like an out-of-touch elitist in this case; Bloomberg is making a legitimate point that the retraining process is more complicated than that because it has to be tailored to the skills and interests of each person. The article summary is misleading, and the headline is outright wrong.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
It seems like an attempt to paint coal miners as dumb or dim witted. Couldn't be further from the truth. Actually few coal miners can afford to be dumb if they want to see a few more birthdays.
So I'd wager it would be quite possible to teach coal miners to code, I've never tried. What I do know, from experience, is that it's impossible to teach managers to produce any useful code.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously, GPE can convert the coal to methane at a costs of around 6-7/MMBTU. That can be sold to Europe and Asia. And yes, Europe will buy it since Russia is now holding them hostage. And in Asia, it will sell for 3-4x what it costs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That being said, I hope this is a lesson to communities, cities, and states that throw all their economic eggs into one industrial basket.
That one basket represents a complex historical mix of geography, manpower, markets and resources. If you have mineral resources you mine and process metals. If you have coal, oil or natural gas, you process coal. oil or natural gas. There is no easy transition to a mixed economy.
Do you notice how the people trying to teach everybody to code are business schmucks who just want more cheap labor? Yes, please, everybody, learn to code so you, too can be replaced by H1-B visa workers because you won't work in San Fran on $40k/year.
They are not trying to help us by teaching everyone to code. They're trying to depress our wages even more.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
They are all great skills to know, but there's only so much mastery a person can obtain.
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
Which is why communities lock in. My point is you still need to invest in a mixed economy while you can and NOT when you have to.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
He was the head of Data Systems Development at Solomon Brothers. When that company got bought out, he started a company selling Bloomberg Terminals, which were extremely innovative. He parlayed that into the Bloomberg News service. He grew up middle class with no family connections or a leg up, and now has $33B. That doesn't happen to dumb people.
I find the implication that coal miners are somehow too dumb to learn anything else mildly offensive.
Where, exactly, was that implied, outside of a few AC d-bags that you're not posting a reply to? The point is that Zuck's a dipshit, and his Patrick Starr "problem solving"("Take all the miners, and teach them to code") is imbecilic.
You just need to give the teacher a $100 gift card for each coal miner they "re-train".
It seems like some of the less deep thinkers these days get confused by our societal value of equality.
When the founding fathers said said "all men are created equal", they meant that the government should treat everybody the same out of general fairness.
They didn't mean that Dr J and Albert Einstein have the same attributes.
Anyhow, you most likely won't be successful retraining most coal miners to write code.
But it's not much of a stretch for most coders, particularly brogrammers like Marky Z, to learn to shovel shit.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.
the problem with Zuck's thinking is that the logic goes like this:
1) say "omg coal miners could learn to code!"
2) expect coal miners to learn to code
3) blame coal miners when they are out of work but did not become coders
4) people on the government dole are lazy and shiftless! handouts! obama! socialism!
It's a very convenient slippery slope for those looking for a way to back into #4.
I wish people would stop talking about job training as the elixir for displaced workers. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of supply and demand should understand that if you train a million displaced coal workers to do something else, the value of that skill is going to be decreased significantly by the newfound supply. Of course, Silicon Valley understands which is why they're such vociferous advocates.
Being a good programmer isn't just about learning the semantics of a language. It's a problem solving job. As much as I hate IQ it's the best measure we have of intelligence and there's a very strong correlation between high IQ and success at programming. 100% of everything in programming is abstract. It's one of the hardest things human beings do in scale.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
It's clear that not every job lost can be replaced with a programming job. To imagine a single rather small profession as the profession into which coal miners, plant engineers that become redundant due to equipment that breaks less often and so on isn't sensible.
I don't feel that the matter is that coal miners aren't intellectual enough, but that the need for software isn't infinite. Finding productive work for people is going to require finding completely new ways for humans to contribute and to do so is going to be very difficult. Trying to let people who have been laid off study and learn something new is a good path for a society, but I don't believe that there is enough programming to be done for programming to be sufficient.
During the so called New Economy bubble I worked at an ISP and development shop. We tried to get more developers, but this was harder than expected. While the average CS student was more or less able to code, retrained ex-lorry drivers and bricklayers sent to us by the employment center where all unable to conceptualize problems maybe they would have been able to type in things we specified, but creative thinking was not their string side. Like, not everyone can run like Usian Bolt. Therefore, we need jobs for everyone suitable for their abilities.
You also can't teach some Kewl White Boys how to code, either - over the decades, I've had to deal with utter *crap*, with inconsistancies, lack or piss-poor error handling, and on and on.
Current pet peeve: a few months ago, I had to build BioPerl as an rpm at work. It took, on and off, about a month - some modules had hard-coded /usr/perl, /usr/bin/perl/ /usr/local/bin/perl into them; then there were the documented circular dependencies....
Oh, and if you want to teach everyone to code, and give them a job (yours?), then who are you going to get to fix your car, or your plumbing?
mark
It's the TOTAL number of high-paying jobs that's important, and people tend to gravitate to what they like.
You seem to overlook the fact that if there are high paying jobs there must, by definition, be low paying jobs as well. Not everyone can have high paying jobs simultaneously anymore than everyone can have an above average IQ. In the long run economic growth can benefit everyone, rich and poor alike. In the short run however it is something close to a zero sum game. If you make one person wealthier you are making another poorer at least temporarily. If you have a larger pool of high paying jobs, in the short run you necessary are making the pot of money available to lower wages workers smaller.
You might be able to implement policies that benefit most/all people in the long run but there will be some short term pain in the process.
I could never imagine working nine to five on an auto assembly line, but that's what people did 50 years ago at GM, for $20 an hour before the cheap labor conservatives came along and crapped in the punch bowl.
People get paid that much TODAY to work on some lines at GM. $20/hour is roughly $40K/year. Not exactly a huge salary in the US these days. There are plenty of assembly workers that get paid well in excess of $20/hour.
Furthermore it isn't "cheap labor conservatives" that limit pay at the automakers. You could have had to most generous liberal management you could envision in charge of GM and Chrysler and they still would have gone bankrupt. What primarily limits direct labor pay is competition. Labor is a huge percentage of the cost of building vehicles. That means that production will gravitate towards locations with cheaper labor costs. Ford, GM and Chrysler in years past agreed to labor contracts that were simply not economically sustainable in the long run. When new competitors with lower labor costs entered the market, the Big Three were unable to adjust their cost structure to match. (Note, this isn't an anti-labor screed. Management shoulders a huge portion of the blame here) Labor costs had to come down and that ultimately meant some combination of lost jobs and lower pay rates. It was simply economic "physics" at work - a reversion to the mean.
Hate to break it to you - most politicians are *very* smart. Arguably as much so if not more than most techies.
The difference is in how they apply their intelligence. Politicians specialize in motivating people to follow a course of action of the politician's choosing. That is no mean feat and requires a great deal of intelligence and insight. It is a different discipline than say writing code, but it does require a high degree of intelligence to figure out how to manipulate other people.
By way of contrast, most techies, while very good at figuring out technical problems, are often woefully inadequate when it comes to people/social issues. This is kind of the point of this article - that this naive belief on the part of techies that people can just arbitrarily change jobs, be "retrained" to do anything else - is completely unrealistic and doesn't actually work in reality. Techies often try to view the world in their terms and fail to understand that "their terms" are often a poor way of understanding the rest of the world. They then thumb their chests about how "stupid" everyone else is, how if only everyone could be "as smart" as they are everything would be so much better. What they fail to understand is that the world is as it is for very good reasons - that the world has been that way for millennia and will continue to be the same way - all for the very same, good reasons that shaped things that way to begin with.
Maybe, but it would only be a stopgap solution even if it worked. In the end there are REAL resource (ie, not money, not even gold) limits to consumption, there are no limits to labor productivity.
I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence. Politicians tend to be very wise when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and how to get people to like them enough to vote for them.
Then they get on Senate committees and blabber on about topics they have absolutely no business talking about because they are ignorant on the subject.
The intelligent person knows when it's raining. The wise person knows to get in out of the rain.
I am so sorry I maligned you and villified you for taking a third term when we had term limits. I'll even burn my Big Gulp jug. I see the error of my ways and that error has a name; Bill de Blasio. I know you left us, just to remind us how truly awful government can be. Now that we've learned our lesson, please come back!
I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.
;)
The bigger problem I see with teaching politicians to code comes from their comprehension of boolean logic. In computer science, we constantly evaluate the truth of various simple expressions. In politics, their entire career depends on their ability to obfuscate the truth of insanely complex issues in such a way as to make them look true (or false) based on the interest of their highest bidder.
More seriously, though, I have to agree with Bloomberg. Not everyone can code, and of those who have the raw capacity to learn it, many of them would hate actually doing it. Coding requires going into an almost trancelike state for hours at a time, sitting motionless while visualizing the flow of data through complex control structures and eventually interacting with some form of I/O. You try to stick a traditional manual laborer (I mean that in the good way - The kind of guy who enjoys nothing more than an honest day's hard work) into that seat for ten hours, and watch him slowly go crazy.
I don't care for Bloomberg but he is correct, I asked a question here a while back and no one answered, most likely because it sounded absurd.
"Have you ever seen anyone start coding successfully at 40 or at 50?"
No one answered that question, which is an answer in its self.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Okay. So, honestly, look at the people who work the mines. Not the engineers or supervisors, but the bulk of the 9-5 guys. What percentage of them, in less than a year's worth of school/retraining, would be really good coders - the kind you could put on a project in an office in SF and expect to get a similar result to someone who's first chosen profession from their teens was coding and spent 4-6 years in post-secondary school learning the art, science, and math of coding?
I say this because Bloomberg is probably right. I'll bet at least 80% of them can't make up for lost time in a year or less (which, if you want to completely fund their retraining, including costs and living expenses is going to run towards $100k each). I'd bet more than 50% couldn't do it in 4 years. I say that because more than 50% of the general population wouldn't make it, and coal miners are no different.
As you said, coal miners are the product of their families, and often families where higher education is neither valued nor rewarded. It's not about better or worse, smart or stupid, it's about expectations and preparation. Take a 35 year old who hasn't done more than 3rd grade math in the last 20 years and put them into a math-intensive program. Most will fail miserably. Doesn't matter if they're a farmer, a coal miner, an automotive assembler, a construction worker, a retail cashier, or a salesman.
Bloomberg's words may feel like a put-down, but they're about as straight forward realistic as it gets. It's hard for "smart" people to understand that mere's applying yourself to a higher field of study often isn't enough to master it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I bet it would smooth a lot the learning curve if we started them first coding in GoldMine.
Most people employed as coders are provably untrainable as coders.
You kinda tanked your credibility by starting a sentence that way....
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Everyone knows the best coders are waitresses.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They may not learn how to code, but there are lots of other jobs they can take. Even someone who is only good with manual labor can do carpentry, landscaping, construction, plumbing, agriculture, welding, and tons of other jobs; and there are plenty of job openings in those areas.
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills
I think it's a little more accurate to say that we have millions of people with skills that were marketable when they started working but over their career lifetime those skills no longer became useful. I really do feel bad for these people because they didn't do anything "wrong" - the economy shifted under their feet and the profession that they expected to spend their lives in just happened to disappear. Imagine if tomorrow programming or IT became obsoleted - would you really want to start over from scratch in some other industry that you don't understand (or even like), especially if you're an old fogey like me? That's the harsh reality of what people have to do, but it doesn't make it any less painful.
It's also not quite fair to say they are "mostly untrainable" but there is definitely a limited subset of things that you can be retrained for with a high school education and a professional lifetime spent in blue collar jobs. The US economy - like that of most advanced industrial nations - has shifted over the last several decades to outsourcing blue collar jobs and increasingly retaining onshore only "knowledge worker" and white collar roles. And many of these people are not educationally (or potentially mentally) suited to the jobs that are still here, which puts a premium on figuring out "what are the still extant jobs that they can be retrained for?" To Bloomberg's point, that is a hard question and the technology industry is not a panacea.
"95% of all Slashdot
I think you're assuming that there is only one type of intelligence. some people may have problem-solving skills but no emotional intelligence for how to work with and lead groups. If you have just one type of intelligence you shoudl consider yorself lucky for that and not make fun of those who are also intelligent but different.
I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence. Politicians tend to be very wise when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and how to get people to like them enough to vote for them.
Then they get on Senate committees and blabber on about topics they have absolutely no business talking about because they are ignorant on the subject.
The intelligent person knows when it's raining. The wise person knows to get in out of the rain.
He's not confusing them. He's saying there are different types of intelligence. He's also agreeing with the post he replied to, basically saying that retraining politicians to code wouldn't work, but not because they're dumb. Rather because that's not how their brains are wired.
If goal X can be achieved by action Y, the ability to recognize this and succesfully carry out action Y would be considered a form of intelligence.
If goal X is get funding for something, and action Y is blather on about crap they know nothing about.... then blathering is a smart move. The morality of such an action is certainly debatable, but that's indepedent of intelligence.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Displaced coal-miners because of "dirty coal" has nothing to do with robotics and such. This seems to be an argument between to leftists about how best to help the "little people" they just screwed over.
Yes dbIII, those guys are leftists not libertarians, I knnow the first letter being the same is confusing and all. Or maybe you can show me how they are really just the Koch brothers in disguise.
Our society's problems aren't going to be corrected by listening to disconnected billionaires.
I am sure if VB6 is still around instead of the VB.net. Most of the unemployed coal miners will be employ by companies that required quick and dirty solutions that just works. My company still have a VB6 program written by a guy with little education and very little programming experiences. He learnt VB6 in a week and create that simple program in 4 weeks. That simple program have been running for more than 10 years. The OOP have created unnecessary complexity and increase the learning curve. Many real world situation just need a simple approach to solve very simple problem.
Out of my mind. Back in 5 mins.
Mining has problems; no doubt better technology can lessen the impact of those problems. Surely there is a ton of opportunity there. We need the raw materials for energy and we need more efficient ways to get them out of the ground. There is plenty to do, people at all ends of the scale of intelligence, physical strength, emotional depth, personal charm etc. etc. etc. can be gainfully employed doing what needs to be done for their own region of the country.
There is absolutely no need for a one-sized fits all "just teach them to code" statement from anyone, ever.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Agreed. Jobs are driven by demand, not by desire. There is huge demand for coal mining in West Virginia. There are very few other jobs. So it is mine coal or starve. Or move to another state, which is easy for some and hard for others. Family bonds and a claim to one's "home" can be very strong for many people. Some parts of WV still don't have indoor plumbing; I imagine those same locales don't have high-speed broadband either. If they retrain to be programmers, are they going to find a work-from-home job without any prior experience and a whole lot of coal mining activity on their resume? A resume showing years in an unrelated field is already a road block for many career changers. Trying to do work where there is no demand for it doesn't seem possible without a "big government" jobs program. Maybe they can relocate the Obamacare IT offices to WV and see how that works out.
could move to Minecraft?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I'm pretty sure that your average coder would quickly meet their end if they were to find themselves in a working coal mine.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It doesn't just take aptitude to become a programmer. You must also have opportunity. I assure you that 100% of the people born in the 1500s who had the aptitude to become programmers did not do so. Likewise, due to the overall poor nature of the area and resulting limited exposure to technology and investment in customized per-student education opportunities, and yes due to lack of knowledge of parents (who are the best people to teach their children to be inquisitive), I fully expect some kids in West Virginia who had the aptitude to become programmers are instead shoveling coal.
But in no way does that imply that everyone currently shoveling coal has the aptitude to become a programmer.
But in no way does that imply that everyone currently shoveling coal is incapable of learning and doing some other rewarding job, if given the opportunity to learn one.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
IT needs trades schools like how it is for stuff like miners and others.
It's right there are people who do really good in tech / trade school setting but don't learn good in a old fashioned college system. Also they may need to put in a full 2-4 years just to get the degree out then say just take 0.5-2 years in class. Why make some with 20+ years working take 1-2 years of filler / fluff / general classes just to learn a new skill?
Well, robots have to run on something...
Meh. Having people-person skills doesn't necessarily mean that someone is smart, especially when it comes naturally to them. Someone without natural people skills and are able to apply their intellect to gain them are very intelligent, however. But a lot of people out there don't have to think about it much. Must be nice.
Happy people make bad consumers.
The energy industry is moving away from coal because it's a dirty source of power and for now natural gas is cheap and plentiful. Coal power plants are being converted to burn natural gas instead.
This isn't just an issue with coal. All kinds of well paying jobs for unskilled labor are disappearing. Technology is actually part of the problem.
"I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence." An artificial separation.
Programming is always becoming obsolete. Every time a new compiler, API comes out there's a boom time where programmers in a particular field are in demand, then once all that infra-structure has been built, applications have been ported, the industry moves onto the next level. In the early 1990's, you could get a job with knowledge of C, X-windows, X-toolkit and GLX, X.25 and ISDN were also in demand. By the late 1990's, you needed to know C++, Win32, MFC, Then web page design took off around 2000, so a new path opened up as web page designer. That needed knowledge of HTML, ActiveX. Now, big data is another path that has opened, and that requires knowledge of things like Reduction, Hadoop, So there is a constant need to retrain as you go along.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
While its socially correct and karma-boosting to take potshots at how dumb politicans are, my experience with politically successful people is that they tend to be pretty sharp in what youd call "managerial" skills: figuring out the tl;dr of a subject, figuring out who to pull in, figuring out how to pull together a unified response. That is, they tend to be organizaltionally skilled.
IT / Comp sci people (especially slashdotters) seem to love touting how brilliant they are, but my experience is that they tend to have glaring weaknesses with:
* Idealizing situations and ignoring practical / human problems
* Interacting with other people
* Missing the forest for the trees
* Admitting when they might not have the answer / the best answer / the necessary skills
I was going to remark on how, like just about every other tech-oriented CEO, Zuckerberg is probably pro-Obama... but it seems like he doesnt really care too much about politics either way.
But its probably still a fool's errand to paint Zuckerberg as being anti-Obama or anti-dem.
That's what nanny-state pricks like Bloomberg have for the public, and why they believe they're entitled to tell us all what to do. I'd like to see Bloomberg try to operate a continuous mining machine without dropping a thousand tons of rock on his conceited head.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Allow me to substitute some words. Having technical skills doesn't necessarily mean that someone is smart, especially when it comes naturally to them. Someone without natural technical skills and are able to apply their intellect to gain them are very intelligent, however. But a lot of technicians out there don't have to think about it much. - And yes, it's nice. In both venues.
we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
Fact: There are more unskilled humans employed today than at any other time in history.
Why? Because, as you pointed out, everyone has benefited from productivity improvements; those improvements increase the demand for all types of labor, even unskilled labor.
Fortunately, the vast majority of jobs do not require coding ability. So, while it may be true that you can't teach 'X' to code, there's really no need to teach 'X' to code.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Roddenberry-esque future with time freed up by automation to pursue creativity
Star Trek is not a very useful model for reality, especially when it comes to basic human nature. How many unskilled people are going to engage in "creativity" while unemployed? Creative people tend to be in high demand, and well compensated.
the politics of the evergreen American Puritans will ensure those without a job will still be perceived and treated like sub-human trash
I don't see that happening at all. The Democrats want to help the coal miners, because it helps get rid of coal, and they instinctively like big government programs. The Republicans want to help the coal miners, because the coal miners are Republicans. The big coal mining states (Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky) all vote Republican. The problem is that it is a difficult problem, and there are no easy answers.
You kinda tanked your credibility by not being able to read a complete sentence.
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
And this is exactly the reason people are pissed off about him saying that. The idea that because someone has a manual labor job must because they are stupid and useless is terrible assumption to make. Most people become coal miners because they grew up in a small town with little opportunity. That in no way implies that they can't learn useful skills and become something like a programmer, it says that because of where and how they grew up they never really had the chance. Lack of opportunity does not equal lack of intelligence or lack of passion.
To be clear, I am not saying that every coal miner could be a great coder, but I am saying that there certainly are some that could be. To simply dismiss them entirely out of hand smacks of classism. "They are poor and do manual labor so there is just no way they could ever be smart enough to be a coder."
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
The problem is, in this economy, everyone DOES need to do something to make a living, or else they'll be either living under a bridge and starving, or maybe on the dole and living in a rat-infested apartment and sleeping in their bathtub to protect from stray bullets.
Building a house, piloting a plane, etc. are nice skills, but in the near future we won't need many people to do those things, thanks to increased automation. So what are all these people going to do for a living?
There are two answers obvious to me: 1) we need to eliminate a large portion of the population. Obviously this smacks of genocide and isn't going to go over well. 2) we need to move quickly to a Star Trek-like post-scarcity society where everyone has a basic income (largely funded by aggressively taxing people like Michael Bloomberg) that's enough to live decently (not in a ghetto) without having to work, but which allows people to pick up extra work if they choose to increase their income.
We'll, maybe they can't all be coders.... But I'm sure there are plenty of openings for liberal arts professors.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Then there's those of us who can code in an almost-trancelike state, but rarely get the opportunity because companies these days have all embraced the "open plan work environment" that the ADHD Under-30 crowd loves so much, and which makes it completely impossible to get into a proper mental state to do any serious coding because every time some person walks by our desk or has a loud conversation directly behind us we lose our concentration.
I would rather teach a coal minor to code than try to educate one of today's self entitled kids. He (and occasionally she) will have discipline, hard work culture and some guts. Bloomberg is continuing elitism of his soft drink ban episode.
But in general we should move to guaranteed wage model to avoid a good thing (getting off dirty coal) being also a bad thing for thousands of workers. People who are up for retraining will want to make more money, while others can at least tide to retirement after being in one occupation for 30 years.
First, an IT administrator is not a programmer. Second, one truck driver who become a successful programmer does not prove that all or at least a majority can be trained accordingly.
But could we teach them to Bitcoin mine?
The really sad part is all the economists and politicians who can't seem to understand that a 50 year old coal miner probably can't afford to be out of work AND paying for school for 4 years and probably doesn't have enough working years left to pay off a student loan. They act as if re-training means swallowing a free magic pill and POOF!
New York mayors say: "Code? Yes we can!"
While some people may think that any monkey can code, most such simian code is fraught with rotting banana peels. And most great apes who make such statements often have long since left their brown, oozing mass to some underling who had to rewrite it to make it work right.
Grumbling about the 1% aside, the real issues of drastic career (or life) changes in middle age are:
By middle age, you have a family to support - and your parents probably can't put you up anymore. (Mine were deceased.) There might be other prospects where more of your skills transition than going from a labor intensive, physically focused occupations to intellectual, mind-games focused careers.
And I just don't see a coal-miner going to work riding a skate-board and wearing a backwards turned baseball cap.
There are plenty of dumb millionaires. Please name one dumb self-made billionaire.
i code, i network, i admin, i do graphics, i am a ham "general" tech, a former Crypto Tech for the U.S. Navy, an electronics tech, an electrician.... Bloomberg is the moron, not a coal miner.
Oh for some mod points. +1 to that. In a previous job I had my own office and could really get into things but now in a open plan the interruptions are endless.
Coding is outsourced to India these days. Would be better to say "you can't teach a coal miner to say 'would you like fries with that'". Except... you can.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I moved to a 3rd world country a year ago to look for ways to motivate people to learn to code. I thought it would be easier in a place where the benefits and needs are the greatest. It is much harder than I thought... I used to think the people just needed the funds to go to school, a patient personal tutor and/or extremely simple lessons (think computer game).
One person (~12 years old, on school vacation) simply would not learn code. I mean, the person would not consider it for any reason. I noticed that the person can play flappy bird with a high score of 71. I justed wanted to see if a very well done game environment might motivate them. Out of curious, I asked the person to play the Ouya game, Clark, that involves solving puzzles. The person gave up after hitting a puzzle in which you have to position two blocks to prevent the robot from being killed by 2 lasers.
In another case, I was able to convince the person (~27 year-old, college graduate) to take the javascript class at code academy but it didn't sink in. This person works at a restaurant where they make $10/day working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. I've explained to them that as software developer they can make in a year roughly what they would currently make in 30 years. I agreed to pay them to take a leave from work to learn javascript. After getting about a third of the way through the course, they still made mistakes that they should have learned in the first 5 lessons. (They couldn't remember where to put {}, (), commas, semicolons, function arguments, variable names, etc.) After 3 weeks, I decide to try a different approach. I showed them simple functions like max(number1,number2) or indexOf(array, value), etc. They could look at the solution as long as they liked. I explained it to them. The functions were only a few lines long. Then I hid the function and asked them to write it from scratch using a syntax aware IDE. If they got stuck they could look at the answer and I would explain where they were going wrong. It still took several attempts for them to write the function even when shown the answer. After that first day of the new approach, I thought I found a way get them to remember the syntax but the next day the person quit and returned to work at the restaurant.
I worked with several other people and the results are consistent. Coding is a kind of puzzle solving problem that people dislike intensely.
Out the 10 or so people, I tried to help only one has gotten very far. She is 51 year-old mother of 3, and I was surprised by that. I was actually trying to convince her kids (27, 18 and 14) to learn.
It is an interesting problem. I think there is a path to get people over their resistance but it is not obvious to me so far.
The really sad part is all the economists and politicians who can't seem to understand that a 50 year old coal miner probably can't afford to be out of work AND paying for school for 4 years and probably doesn't have enough working years left to pay off a student loan. They act as if re-training means swallowing a free magic pill and POOF!
This is why we really, really need to work hard to break the masses of their habit of voting for rich elitists who have absolutely zero clue how the average person lives.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO marketable skills.
FTFY. Skills can be useful but not marketable - the ability to create fire with nothing more than a couple sticks and some tinder, for example, is an incredibly useful skill, but you'd be hard pressed to do it for a living.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm the same way - give me a task and leave me to it, it'll be done quickly, efficiently, and on occasion, brilliantly.
My current job does not allow such focus on a single task, as I'm constantly being bounced from doing one thing to another... probably explains why I spend so much time on Slashdot...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Since we already do, in India by the zillion.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
...
It is essential that we keep the timelines straight on how jobs are lost, and then eventually regained in a true Industrial Revolution. We are currently in what should be called the Cybernetic Revolution, the only true successor to the original IR in terms of its effects on employment.
In the original IR there were rapid losses of employment (starting in textiles) as factories went up starting around 1780. Optimists, who prate about how 'the IR really wasn't so bad' argue that by 1840 the average wage had risen to finally exceed pre-levels. As with today, talking about average wages hides the extent of poverty with a society, but more importantly it ignores the fact that the gap between 1780 and 1840 is sixty years, and other more systematic analyses pretty much keep this same gap for the employment picture turn-around, though shifting the dates of both start and end forward slightly. This means the typical worker rendered a pauper in mid-life by the start of the IR never benefited, their children never benefited, their grand-children rarely benefited, it was only their great-grand-children that found ready work at good wages!
The promise that eventually the economy will adapt and replace the lost jobs is one that won't be seen for a few generations. We need to have policies in place now, as the jobs vanish, to keep the workers and their families from ending up in poverty, and these policies will need to be maintained and updated for several decades to come.
It is notable that a quick perusal of conservative policy sites (National Review, etc.) for suggestions on how to deal with this problem of inevitable long-term unemployment find by far the most common is to suggest that job salaries be subsidized by the government to create employment. The really aren't any other alternatives that might conceivably work - only government spending to stimulate the economy can step in. (But how taxes should be raised to finance this is never discussed.).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
If you pay politicians mediocre salaries (which we do) don't act all surprised when we end up with a bunch of incompetents. Any truly good manager/politician would make 10-100x more in the private sector than as a politician.
Well, taking herbal remedies to cure a fairly treatable cancer and then dying from it is fairly dumb...
Some people can be very smart in some ways and dumb - even gullible - in others.
"Well, the world needs ditch diggers too!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I've written down the date. Michel Bloomberg said something that made sense today!
It makes me feel a little better that I'm not the only one.
I was not a fan of Steve Jobs at all.
How many people do you think had a conversation with Jobs and left thinking "Man, that guy is stupid"?
They *could* be trained to program. If they wanted to. Shit, I started coding C in fourth grade, and I mean I'm smart, but I ain't THAT smart. What, is Bloomberg saying these guys are dumber than a fourth grader? I feel like coal miners should be pretty offended by the implication here...
Sure, they won't be GREAT programmers, but they could certainly be web developers or something... ;)
What are the moral implications of standing near by as someone declares their major to be Law/Poly Sci and not taking action to kill them immediately?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If we have absolutely no ability to foresee the future then why are we retraining these cold miners at all? It's just as likely that coal will come back in a big way in a few years and we'll regret that all the coal miners are sitting behind desks writing apps.
Those white collar, knowledge worker jobs are being outsourced too. You think it's any easier retraining these educated people?
LMOL - yeah coal miners have never been screwed over by the companies they worked for....pin head.
Ask the author of this article, who says, "The switch to such floor plans in offices is partly a generational thing. Younger workers, especially in their 20s and 30s, like being social and working in groups, and companies are doing what they can to attract them. That includes revamping office layouts to be more flexible and let in more natural light -- a perk for sustainable-minded Millennials, says Chris Corrado, president of Environments, a 30-year-old office furnishings supplier in Portland, Ore."
... the coal miner's daughter?
I would call it more of a slight against coal miners...
I don't like working in groups. I don't mind occasionally being social. But when I have a deadline, get the fuck away from me, and let me work in peace. I have ADHD and I'm under 30. I don't like distractions. I hate being in open plan. It's the dumbest layout ever.
Sure it does. If someone's a natural mathematician (like Euler or Ramanujan for instance) or physicist or (to a lesser extent) programmer then they are naturally smart. These topics engage the intellect. Being a natural people-person is an innate skill that does not require any proper definition of intelligence, and they don't need to appeal to the intellect much at all to be successful at it.
That isn't to say that being good with people isn't an important skill; it is vitally important. But being good at it does not always require or engage smarts.
Happy people make bad consumers.
I learned to code while I was working as a car detailer.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You never log in
So that's hardly fair
Perhaps you should think
Of growing a pair
BURMA SHAVE
cat
to be human. Fuck him.
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills.
Having vision and hand-eye co-ordination is a skill. People have it in varying levels (sportstars are You can take a below-average-intelligence person and have him pick cotton or harvest grains. When wheat are rice used to be harvested by hand, these people were very useful. Now that those jobs have gone to harvesters, these people are cannot be employed to run these machines. It is also far cheaper to use the machines rather than use the skills they have . They worked for some time in factories making stuff and exporting them to rest of the world. Now that has gone out too. US mostly exports software,tech and services now.
So the problem is not that they have no useful skills, but that they have no skills that are valuable. Alternately, their skills have been priced out of the market by machines.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Is there at least one Coal miner coder out there that would negate his supposition. What is the cross section of non-professional people who contribute to Open Source. What's their day job?
Never before have I found a more appropriate use for this:
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A code monkey's got Mountain Dew for his blood
Dew in the blood and Cheeto bones
One bad back n' carpal tunnel syndrome
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my laptop and I coded a line
I coded PHP and some Javascript
And off to Menlo Park then I was shipped
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
If you see me comin', better step aside
The Dew and Cheetos made-me a little too wide
A little too wide and a little too old
But for Facebook's perks my soul I've sold
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
Tweaks by by cold fjord (826450) (yeah, something useful came outta the NSA sock puppet, go figure)
Original parody by cervesaebraciator (2352888)
Original lyrics by Merle Travis, maybe.
I couldn't even teach science postdocs to code.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
NHS England had a program (I believe it still has a green light) to train around 50000 healthcare workers to code their own solutions, not to send them on a new career path, but so they can set them developing software at the same time that they are performing their healthcare duties for the population - Code4Health
So how hard could it possibly be?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Just because you don't understand the difference doesn't mean there isn't one.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'd like to see somebody teach Bloomberg to mine coal. My guess is that he couldn't learn it if his life depended on it. He hasn't learned yet that if he closes every coal mine, he's going to be living in a cold, dark house.
Um, hate to tell you this buddy, but the post you're replying to wasn't posted AC.
So how's the weather in Syracuse?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
OTOH, people who studied programming/CS are likely have intelligence in the top few percent. That makes it easier for them to pick up any new, similarly technical subject, even after they are outside the high brain plasticity age bracket. Which makes them a poor model for the general population.
"Coal miners", or equivalent, generally aren't in the top few percent, or even top ten percent. So once they are outside the age of rapid learning, retraining is going to be extremely difficult.
I put "coal miners" in quotes, because today mining is a high pay, high skill job. [At least it is in this country.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
they full well understand. They're counterbalancing the well being of that 50 year old coal miner against the enormous wealth they consider their birthright. For the nicer ones if they can keep the enormous wealth and let the coal miner do ok so much the better, and for a few of the nasty ones they're looking forward to the cheaper labor that coal miner and his peers entering the workforce will create...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
(Thus "the beatings will continue" until you leave... I've done it before).
Yes, this. This is what you do. You attack people for no good reason and try to drive them away. Me, Barb, Tom, and now geminidomino.
You *choose* to try to inflict harm on others for no other reason than your own gratification. Most people would consider this evil.
I'm with most people on this one.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Hmm, maybe what laws need is included comments...
Laws have comments. Things like introductions, framing statements, etc. In fact there's an art to reading laws in order to separate the "code" from the "comments", in order to get to the stuff you need to know. And then the specific laws have whole libraries of case-law, regulations, and other dependencies which you need to know in order to apply the "code" to a specific situation.
But programmers CAN become politicians,
Technical people make terrible politicians. Some can become good technocrats, in a non-democracy, but generally not good politicians.
Software developers have experience at building systems that need to be useful, flexible, but difficult to exploit.
Oblig
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Natural resources provide squishy, easy to overcome limits. In reality, most of what limits our economy are flaws in how we implement capitalism.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
"I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence." An artificial separation.
Wisdom is what an intelligent person may eventually acquire if they live long enough, but they don't automatically start out with it just because of being intelligent.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Nice way to try to change the subject.
But--since you bring it up--globaljustin and I don't agree about a few things. Big fucking deal. He's entitled to his opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. He's going to go on with his life, and I'm going to go on with mine. I'm not following him around flinging shit in his face every time he posts, and he's not following me around flinging shit in my face every time I post. We don't constantly scan each other's posting history and troll every one of each other's posts. That's *your* trademark, not his or mine.
I just friended someone here today with whom I strongly disagree on most things. I still think he's wrong, but he also seems to have some character, and I respect that.
Whereas you are a stalker and a bully, you add nothing of any worth to any of the discussions you barge your way into, you're not even a very good troll, and therefore I have nothing but contempt for you. There is nothing at all admirable or useful about anything you've ever posted on this site, Ars, Wikipedia, or anywhere else that I've seen. You either have mental issues or are pretending to be someone who has them, but even if you do, I still have a very difficult time feeling sorry for you because you *choose* to inflict yourself on others rather than to admit that you need help and to get yourself some.
You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense, then you hound anyone who objects. Then you try to claim that they started it. In particular, you make a *point* of attacking anyone who says anything that might make them appear to be vulnerable. You did that to tomhudson/Barb over her sex change, you've done it to me because I mentioned that I've had issues with depression, and I've seen you do it many, many times to others, simply for admitting that they had experienced challenges or troubles in their lives.
That's just plain evil. If you want to pull that sort of shit, you should be on 4chan, not Slashdot. Why don't you go over there and see how long you last?
If you weren't such a fucking stupid, chicken-shit coward, you'd be a monster. For people who are easily intimated, maybe you do look like a monster.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...My friend's mother dropped out of accounting and picked up web application design in her late fifties, and developed a small but successful consultancy...
If she was that old when web application design first became "a thing", then in her previous life as an accountant she no doubt had 10 if not 20 years of experience with computers.
If she'd spent that time as a migrant worker picking lettuce and strawberries and such, or painting houses, or working as a short order cook, it might not have been as easy to make the transition.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A 50 year old coal miner should have been able to see at age 20 that the industry was fragile and in decline
I think there are degrees to this. If you wanted to get into typewriter repair in the 1980s, you were pretty clearly an idiot. But if you were getting into US auto manufacturing in 1965, with a sweet "for life" union job at high wages, at the time that seemed like a really safe bet - with no way to predict where that industry would be just 20 years later, let alone 40 at the end of your career.
If they were the kind of people who had the discipline and motivation to train for other jobs they wouldn't be stuck in the dead end job they have
I think that's a misperception common among white collar workers, that any blue collar job that was phased out was always a "dead end" job. For several decades in the US, there was a reasonable expectation that you could get a job in a steel mill, auto manufacturing plant, coal mine or whatever and you would be paid a living wage that increased ever so slightly each year with your seniority and you would eventually retire with a pension because you never contributed to an actual retirement savings plan. For my parents' generation - as amazing as it sounds to me - this was actually a workable plan for many people. In retrospect: mmanufacturing union wages have been WAY too high, economically speaking, for half a century; and defined benefit pensions have always been more or less a ponzu scheme. So, sadly, it was just a matter of time until those blue collar industries busted and shed their "living wage" blue collar jobs en masse. But, honestly, what high school graduate decades ago was supposed to figure that out when even leading economists hadn't?
It's easy to laugh at the dopes who were the last enrollees at buggy whip manufacturing school after the fact. It's not so easy to see it decades in advance when you were choosing your profession.
"95% of all Slashdot
I think there are degrees to this...
Certainly, but the case for coal declining 30 years ago was a little more clear than 1965 auto industry. You also have to admit that this isn't just a one time decision that a kid makes when he's 18. It could have been apparent for some that manufacturing jobs were going away in 1965, but by 1975 you had to really delude yourself if you thought there was endless potential. IMO, many gambled that unions and seniority would secure them, but that was bound to end up badly for many. This was perhaps the true Ponzi scheme.
I think that's a misperception common among white collar workers, that any blue collar job that was phased out was always a "dead end" job.
True, but it is not a misconception that I share. But in many ways it was an unsustainable model, certainly in a declining industry. Okay, I guess you noticed that too when I read further. But by dead end, I mean that your choices are limited, you don't grow, you don't have more choices, you don't learn new skills (other than a slightly different kind of drill or lathe), etc. Once you get stuck in that mindset and don't have to stretch to earn more you make it more difficult as time goes on.
Tech people are not immune to this. A small number can still find jobs with obsolescent technologies and as long as they make an economically sound decision I'm okay with it. But I'm not going to feel guilty about Fortran programmers who can't make a living in 2014 either and claim to be too old to retrain.
But, honestly, what high school graduate decades ago was supposed to figure that out when even leading economists hadn't?
It's easy to laugh at the dopes who were the last enrollees at buggy whip manufacturing school after the fact. It's not so easy to see it decades in advance when you were choosing your profession.
What economists couldn't see the buggy whip becoming obsolete in 1900 or 1910? Again you don't decide to make buggy whips in 1890 and then obstinately stick with it as the market declines. If you do, you probably are a dope, IMO, even if you defy the odds and get lucky.
Were you that badly abused as a child, that you can't relate to anyone or anything except in terms of "beating"?
That's sad. It's not too late for you to get some help, though.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ashes to ashes
Station to station
Don't you get it? This account
Is basically your own creation.
Not a blessed thing hidden
Not otherwise pretended
You've simply taken the bait
Just as I had intended
BURMA SHAVE, motherfucker
cat
You're the one who chooses not to have an account.
We've already seen at least 2 vulnerabilities that arise from this:
1. You've no posting history; all you can do is follow those of your targets. Sure, you can link to your own posts but you cannot prove that you *didn't* say something that's been attributed to you.
2. You can be impersonated. And, again, you've no way to disprove it.
Looks to me like it sucks to be you.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So much of the discussion on this topic ignores that some people like working around plants in agriculture, or like building things with machine tools, or like working with heavy equipment, and so on. Granted, they may not like their boss, or may not like being overworked, or may not like low pay. To suggest such people become programmers (or nail salon workers or whatever) ignores that a lot of a person's life satisfaction may come from doing work they love. I love programming and think it is a useful thing for many people to know, but I accept most people may not like to do a lot of programming, say if they like working outdoors or like working with people or plants or visibly moving machines. It is a deep flaw in our current discussions to ignore the potential positive value of meaningful work in someone's life and just focus on getting people to do work they may not like 40 hours a week so they can get a paycheck to buy stuff, raise a family, and maybe have a hobby they enjoy in their remaining time. "Work" can be better than that.
Two essays on that, one by EF Schumacher:
http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And one by Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Still, with more and more AI and robotics, there will be less and less jobs where it makes sense to pay a human to do them. So, we need a mix of a "basic income" for the exchange economy, an expanded volunteer/gift economy, improved local subsistence via 3D printing, solar panels, cold fusion, and agricultural robotics, and improved democratic participatory planning at all levels of government. Then at least parents will be able to spend more time raising their kids well, a job that can take about as much time and energy as most people can put into it, especially if you forgo institutionalizing kids from an early age in prison-like compulsory schools. More ideas on this:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The world needs ditch diggers too!"
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Some miners can learn to code. But the ones who could learn to code AND who are willing to relocate out of mining country probably left a long time ago. There isn't a lot of call for coders in a typical mining town.
Do you seriously believe there is any reason for open floor plans other than that companies want to save money and don't see the connection between working conditions and the performance of their employees? No one wants to work in an open environment. Companies do it because they can put up four walls and a ceiling and call it done.
Please do tell the Australians how to easily desalinate their farmland, they're struggling with it a bit.
No one wants to work in an open environment.
That's not what I see. Go read the article, or other articles about them. There's tons of comments from people saying how much they love working in open environments, how they love the "camaraderie", being able to ask people questions quickly, being able to overhear conversations and know what's going on, etc. Yes, there's also lots of comments from people like you and me who hate these environments, but don't make the mistake of thinking everyone is like us; clearly there's lots of people who aren't, and apparently a lot of those people have infiltrated the programming profession.
Yes, cost savings is also a factor, but it's not the only factor. There really are a lot of people who like working that way.
I can provide all sorts of apps and programs which were apparently coded by coal miners. Although, I must admit, they do appear to have been coded by coal miners who could not be taught to code.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I was under the impression that they don't mine coal any more, just remove the top of the mountain and scoop it out? (serious question, not trolling)
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
- ANYONE CAN BE A JACKWAGON MEGALOMANIAC.......Ive heard horror stories about working for Doomberg. Btw - he can not code either.
Ok, maybe my comment about the ADHD was off-base, but it does seem there's a trend for extroverted talkers to get into coding these days, and they love the open-plan work environment. It's probably more of an introversion vs. extroversion thing.
Smart at business/marketing, stupid at surviving/living...
you do realize that lesson is ridiculous on a small community scale right? It's unlikely any of these coal mining towns put their eggs in the mining basket. Most of the time a mine or some other industrial complex opens up, and a large community is built around it.
I doubt these were thriving communities that then said "hey, let's stop doing all this other stuff and just mine". More likely, it was, "before the mine, this was nothing other than a collection of a few family farms."
Sure, you can argue about diversity, but decisions are made by individuals and if the mine is large and growing, it can usually soak up most youth that stay around (and the rest go into jobs which provide services and goods to support the miners).
Now a state will all its eggs in one basket is in for a world of pain. But I can't think of a state like that (except maybe Alaska, which nicely diversifies from oil with government military money)..
Never said that. Just pointing out that Bloomberg and other leftists are trying to destroy the coal industry and ShanghaiBill was off on a tangent about robotics. I'll admit that robotics does displace workers, but the article was talking about workers displaced because of leftists shutting down coal mining.
And this is exactly the reason people are pissed off about him saying that. The idea that because someone has a manual labor job must because they are stupid and useless is terrible assumption to make.
Here in the UK, there was a newspaper about some physicist complete with a PhD who decided that he wanted to make more money, and retrained as a plumber... Actually doubling his income in the process.