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So why can't we invest enough time and money in these people to make them engineers and technicians? Then they might be able to start shops that make and distr

So why can't we invest enough time and money in these people to make them engineers and technicians? Then they might be able to start shops that make and distribute the tourist trinkets mentioned by another poster. Why is the only solution that a large company that someone else creates moves in and provides low skill jobs?

gph 9y ago
What makes you think these people wouldn't already have jobs as engineers and technicians if they were capable of that? It even mentions in the article that the one lady lives down the road from her nephew who has a nice house with trucks and a boat. He was pulling down 100k at a coal related job, that might mean in a labor role but there's a good chance he's the type of person you're talking about; someone capable of filling a sort of lower-level engineer/technician role. Edit: That's not to say there aren't a few capable folks that fell on rough times or came from a rough background and never quite got a good enough opportunity to make something of themselves. Certainly it would be nice to have programs to help those folks reach the full extent of their capabilities. But that's definitely not a solution for the broad majority of people in this situation.
- forkandwait 9y ago
  I am amazed by the pervasiveness of the assumption that most of the human race is inherently just too stupid to become upper middle like us.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Yeah, especially if you're rural or inner-city.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Well, half of the population has an IQ of less than 100. Also, if everyone tries to achieve greater education, then what's considered "upper middle" will shift. Just look at the devaluation of associates and bachelors degrees today. The sad truth is that there will always be lower and lower-middle class jobs, because not everyone is capable of joining the upper-middle class. Should those people continue to experience a declining quality of life just because they haven't been genetically or socioeconomically blessed?
  - megaman22 9y ago
    It's tough not to have that feeling, if you exist outside of bubbles of well-educated, high-IQ people. Shit, half the kids I grew up with were so LD they struggled mightily to learn how to read and do basic arithmetic, and another quarter were so low that they were labeled as MR. They don't have the capacity, no matter how much training and money and lamentations you spend on them. It's sad that people like that can't have a little dignity and make a living doing what they're capable of, but that's where we're headed.
  - wan23 9y ago
    It's not stupidity, it's a combination of factors. 1) Lack of knowledge of options. Let's say you wanted to get into the oil business. Without Googling anything, what job would you want? What skills and credentials would you need to acquire to get that job? How would you go about getting those? 2) Lack of education - Imagine trying to learn how to program without knowing what variables are. And then let's say you struggle and become capable of doing junior web dev work. What happens when you encounter even an easy interview question like "Write a program to find the first n prime numbers" 3) Lack of time - Most adults don't have time to focus full time on training, even if they aren't working. Children and elderly family members can suck up a lot of time.
    - noworld 9y ago
      1) Without googling anything, I'd need... presentable clothes, good hygiene, and to be able to make sense when I talk and respond sensibly to questions. Get into the oil business? Everyone's got a mail room, janitorial staff, etc. Get a job doing that and show them that you can show up for work on time and do a good job at the mundane stuff with a friendly attitude, no complaining, and not causing drama. That goes a LONG way. The other items follow this one.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    If every low-wage worker could start writing software, then writing software for an employer would also become a low-wage job. We're not paid well just because we have useful skills. We're paid well because the demand for our kind of skills hasn't been swamped by supply.
- weberc2 9y ago
  One obvious answer to your question is that they lack affordable access to training, which is what the OP purposes to address. Of course it's entirely possible that providing said training is economically infeasible or that most of these folks (as you seem to presume) aren't a good fit for this type of work.
smt88 9y ago
You should look into our extensive federal retraining programs, which have this goal. Oftentimes, the problem is age. Older people just finishing training still won't get a job. Other times, the problem is that they refuse to relocate to another part of the country to get the job they trained for. It sounds great in theory, but it requires a lot of flexibility that not everyone can have.
- forkandwait 9y ago
  If you are getting TANF, they generally kick you off after a year of training, and disallow getting an AA much less going to college. It takes a lot more than that to make up for a semi literate, etc., growing up.
convolvatron 9y ago
the trinket economy is a race the bottom. if you get a high enough profile or successful design suddenly shipping containers start arriving filled with nearly exact copies for 1/50th of what you were charging. and what you were charging was almost $5/hr for your labor. maybe more if you can invest in capitol equipment like a water jet. skilled technical labor (machinist, welder, cabinetry, jewelry, etc) isn't much of a growth industry either. but people are still hiring if you already have experience smt rework is a thing, but that seems like its inherently limited in volume. i think its pretty tough for someone in a garage to make it work..if anyone has any ideas though..
throwaway98vs 9y ago
Not. Everyone. Needs. To. Be. An. Engineer. Jesus. Christ.
mbesto 9y ago
Have you personally ever tried to train a low skilled laborer into something they have little to no experience in or desire to do? This is the same argument that I've heard from people (mainly young tech workers) that losing 1.5M truck drivers will just require "re-training". The reality that we can simple "turn a knob" and re-train people is extremely myopic.
- forkandwait 9y ago
  I said "invest time and money", nowhere did I say it would be easy or cheap or fast. The only reason I am upper middle class is because I got an enormous amount of investment growing up, from books to nutrition to upper middle family friends/role models to just plain good adv8ce. If you took my talents and plopped them in a working class family in rural wherever, I would be driving truck and getting high until it all apart, just like the people in the article.
  - mbesto 9y ago
    Well, I think you've just answered your own question then. The reason no one has invested time and money is because it isn't cheap/fast and there is no economic motivation (by anyone, government or otherwise) to do so.
vkou 9y ago
Re-skilling is a great solution for any one person when their coal job went away. You don't see pictures of those people in articles about American poverty. Re-skilling the entire mid-west is impossible. Jobs are currently a game of musical chairs. There isn't room in our economy for 15 million engineers, technicians, and shopowners.
blunte 9y ago
The article indicates that at least some of the people doing this are well below any normal education level; and in fact, some are below functional mental health levels. This would need to be an education process beginning with encouraging birth control + providing quality education for the children who are born in these regions... and providing enough family financial support so the children didn't have to quit school early just to help their parents survive.
- selimthegrim 9y ago
  Even if my cousin/sibling was retarded/whatever the word du jour is today I think I'd give them a glass of water from inside rather then generously limit them to the garden hose.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I don't understand your metaphor.
    - selimthegrim 9y ago
      It isn't a metaphor, read the article again.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Damn.
hestipod 9y ago
I have been trying to find a way to earn and live remotely for a long time amidst constant instability, more medical issues, more costs, and people in general making it worse. Vocational rehab programs are a joke. Despite common belief "everyone" isn't on disability in America and many like myself are in fact rejected. I have no health coverage. No safety. I am expected to do things I cannot do just to live or create some business or job from the ether but nobody can say how except flighty nonsense like "so and so's son makes Android apps and is successful" as if that means its as simple as "learning and doing that" while totally ignoring survivorship bias, my age, my lack of resources or all of the other relevant and real issues.. I am close to giving up on life entirely as I am so far down and have no feasible plan.
seabird 9y ago
It takes years and a huge amount of money to train a skilled worker, all of that on top of the drive needed from the worker in question. Once you're north of 30-40 with no real skills, you're up shit creek.
Noos 9y ago
Imagine if you as a programmer suddenly woke up at age 30 to find programming as a career was dead due to AI. The government is willing to invest time and money...into you retraining as a professional juggler, in the hope you would start your own street performing job, because the wave of the future is tourist performances. Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws. This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. No, that's not true of STEM in general, and actually AFAICT not particularly true of programming outside of the startup scene and top tech firms; the spare-time programmer is much less common, AFAICT, in the legions of programmer outside of those places, and the parallel phenomenon is no more common in non-programming STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.

gph 9y ago

What makes you think these people wouldn't already have jobs as engineers and technicians if they were capable of that? It even mentions in the article that the one lady lives down the road from her nephew who has a nice house with trucks and a boat. He was pulling down 100k at a coal related job, that might mean in a labor role but there's a good chance he's the type of person you're talking about; someone capable of filling a sort of lower-level engineer/technician role. Edit: That's not to say there aren't a few capable folks that fell on rough times or came from a rough background and never quite got a good enough opportunity to make something of themselves. Certainly it would be nice to have programs to help those folks reach the full extent of their capabilities. But that's definitely not a solution for the broad majority of people in this situation.

forkandwait 9y ago
I am amazed by the pervasiveness of the assumption that most of the human race is inherently just too stupid to become upper middle like us.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Yeah, especially if you're rural or inner-city.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Well, half of the population has an IQ of less than 100. Also, if everyone tries to achieve greater education, then what's considered "upper middle" will shift. Just look at the devaluation of associates and bachelors degrees today. The sad truth is that there will always be lower and lower-middle class jobs, because not everyone is capable of joining the upper-middle class. Should those people continue to experience a declining quality of life just because they haven't been genetically or socioeconomically blessed?
- megaman22 9y ago
  It's tough not to have that feeling, if you exist outside of bubbles of well-educated, high-IQ people. Shit, half the kids I grew up with were so LD they struggled mightily to learn how to read and do basic arithmetic, and another quarter were so low that they were labeled as MR. They don't have the capacity, no matter how much training and money and lamentations you spend on them. It's sad that people like that can't have a little dignity and make a living doing what they're capable of, but that's where we're headed.
- wan23 9y ago
  It's not stupidity, it's a combination of factors. 1) Lack of knowledge of options. Let's say you wanted to get into the oil business. Without Googling anything, what job would you want? What skills and credentials would you need to acquire to get that job? How would you go about getting those? 2) Lack of education - Imagine trying to learn how to program without knowing what variables are. And then let's say you struggle and become capable of doing junior web dev work. What happens when you encounter even an easy interview question like "Write a program to find the first n prime numbers" 3) Lack of time - Most adults don't have time to focus full time on training, even if they aren't working. Children and elderly family members can suck up a lot of time.
  - noworld 9y ago
    1) Without googling anything, I'd need... presentable clothes, good hygiene, and to be able to make sense when I talk and respond sensibly to questions. Get into the oil business? Everyone's got a mail room, janitorial staff, etc. Get a job doing that and show them that you can show up for work on time and do a good job at the mundane stuff with a friendly attitude, no complaining, and not causing drama. That goes a LONG way. The other items follow this one.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  If every low-wage worker could start writing software, then writing software for an employer would also become a low-wage job. We're not paid well just because we have useful skills. We're paid well because the demand for our kind of skills hasn't been swamped by supply.
weberc2 9y ago
One obvious answer to your question is that they lack affordable access to training, which is what the OP purposes to address. Of course it's entirely possible that providing said training is economically infeasible or that most of these folks (as you seem to presume) aren't a good fit for this type of work.

smt88 9y ago

You should look into our extensive federal retraining programs, which have this goal. Oftentimes, the problem is age. Older people just finishing training still won't get a job. Other times, the problem is that they refuse to relocate to another part of the country to get the job they trained for. It sounds great in theory, but it requires a lot of flexibility that not everyone can have.

forkandwait 9y ago
If you are getting TANF, they generally kick you off after a year of training, and disallow getting an AA much less going to college. It takes a lot more than that to make up for a semi literate, etc., growing up.

convolvatron 9y ago

the trinket economy is a race the bottom. if you get a high enough profile or successful design suddenly shipping containers start arriving filled with nearly exact copies for 1/50th of what you were charging. and what you were charging was almost $5/hr for your labor. maybe more if you can invest in capitol equipment like a water jet. skilled technical labor (machinist, welder, cabinetry, jewelry, etc) isn't much of a growth industry either. but people are still hiring if you already have experience smt rework is a thing, but that seems like its inherently limited in volume. i think its pretty tough for someone in a garage to make it work..if anyone has any ideas though..

throwaway98vs 9y ago

Not. Everyone. Needs. To. Be. An. Engineer. Jesus. Christ.

mbesto 9y ago

Have you personally ever tried to train a low skilled laborer into something they have little to no experience in or desire to do? This is the same argument that I've heard from people (mainly young tech workers) that losing 1.5M truck drivers will just require "re-training". The reality that we can simple "turn a knob" and re-train people is extremely myopic.

forkandwait 9y ago
I said "invest time and money", nowhere did I say it would be easy or cheap or fast. The only reason I am upper middle class is because I got an enormous amount of investment growing up, from books to nutrition to upper middle family friends/role models to just plain good adv8ce. If you took my talents and plopped them in a working class family in rural wherever, I would be driving truck and getting high until it all apart, just like the people in the article.
- mbesto 9y ago
  Well, I think you've just answered your own question then. The reason no one has invested time and money is because it isn't cheap/fast and there is no economic motivation (by anyone, government or otherwise) to do so.

vkou 9y ago

Re-skilling is a great solution for any one person when their coal job went away. You don't see pictures of those people in articles about American poverty. Re-skilling the entire mid-west is impossible. Jobs are currently a game of musical chairs. There isn't room in our economy for 15 million engineers, technicians, and shopowners.

blunte 9y ago

The article indicates that at least some of the people doing this are well below any normal education level; and in fact, some are below functional mental health levels. This would need to be an education process beginning with encouraging birth control + providing quality education for the children who are born in these regions... and providing enough family financial support so the children didn't have to quit school early just to help their parents survive.

selimthegrim 9y ago
Even if my cousin/sibling was retarded/whatever the word du jour is today I think I'd give them a glass of water from inside rather then generously limit them to the garden hose.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I don't understand your metaphor.
  - selimthegrim 9y ago
    It isn't a metaphor, read the article again.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Damn.

hestipod 9y ago

I have been trying to find a way to earn and live remotely for a long time amidst constant instability, more medical issues, more costs, and people in general making it worse. Vocational rehab programs are a joke. Despite common belief "everyone" isn't on disability in America and many like myself are in fact rejected. I have no health coverage. No safety. I am expected to do things I cannot do just to live or create some business or job from the ether but nobody can say how except flighty nonsense like "so and so's son makes Android apps and is successful" as if that means its as simple as "learning and doing that" while totally ignoring survivorship bias, my age, my lack of resources or all of the other relevant and real issues.. I am close to giving up on life entirely as I am so far down and have no feasible plan.

seabird 9y ago

It takes years and a huge amount of money to train a skilled worker, all of that on top of the drive needed from the worker in question. Once you're north of 30-40 with no real skills, you're up shit creek.

Noos 9y ago

Imagine if you as a programmer suddenly woke up at age 30 to find programming as a career was dead due to AI. The government is willing to invest time and money...into you retraining as a professional juggler, in the hope you would start your own street performing job, because the wave of the future is tourist performances. Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws. This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. No, that's not true of STEM in general, and actually AFAICT not particularly true of programming outside of the startup scene and top tech firms; the spare-time programmer is much less common, AFAICT, in the legions of programmer outside of those places, and the parallel phenomenon is no more common in non-programming STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.