And from what I can tell, that demand has something to do with their belief that they will never be able to get similarly high-paying jobs without retraining. Which may or may not be true - but I’m not sure why it means the industry should be propped up. People have had to retrain before.
And, probably, relocating as well, unless wind turbine manufacturers (for example) start building manufacturing facilities in the mountains of West Virginia.
This is one of the things all the more rural rust belt cities need to get: Modern manufacturing is just different. Nobody’s building a chip fab in rural WV. They’re building it near Columbus or Phoenix.
Some time back I was part of a project to build out a small pharmaceutical production facility. Because something halfway there was available in Idaho, the powers that be wanted to go there. Not only less capex, but lower labor. I begged them not to. Hiring was a perpetual problem and it never really worked out.
I bet you Boston area universities graduate more chemists a year than there are chemists living in Idaho.
I’m sorry time has left these places behind, but denial is not a solution.
ETA:
I didn’t expect to find it, but in 2018 there were fewer than 300 people employed as chemists in Idaho
And I’m one of them.
Really? I’m surprised we have a coal employee here.
What do you do?
I’m seriously asking: What do you think should be the future of coal?
Can I take it that running a meth lab does not count as ‘chemist’?
Not an assumption I would make considering it is Idaho.
…and some of us displaced by changing industries who weren’t able to get retraining nonetheless have been able to earn a living anyhow. Cry me a river, boo-fucking-hoo, ya’ll can pull yourself up by your bootstraps as I was forced to do.
I get it - it’s disruptive and can really throw a wrench into plans and wreck havoc on your life. It sucks. But it’s not the end of the world, either. I didn’t wind up in the same place but where I landed isn’t bad. Just as there are some downsides in other aspects it’s better.
Mr Wizard worked with Tooter Turtle.
Mr Peabody was a Lab. Actually, he was a beagle, who had a lab.
Sparrows, curtain rods, and all that.
I work mainly on the reclamation side of things.
It’s a dying industry, and in the long run, that’s a good thing. I personally think these huge open mines in Wyoming should be used for something greener (though I don’t know what); we have all of this massive earth-moving equipment and a vast swath of ground that needs to be reclaimed, after all … But, instead, it’ll be put back into a reflection of its premining state, thousands of people will be out of work, and one or two cattle ranchers will have some extra land for their cows to graze on, and anybody that suggests trying to attract green energy in lieu of coal will be shouted down.
Has anyone ever suggested where all this fraud is in Social Security? Especially WRT retirement benefits. How many folk are misrepresenting their age? So we have to make it harder for old and poor folk to get their benefits started?
Just so silly, that you have an organization that pays some 75 million people monthly, has administrative costs of <1% of benefits paid, with its lowest staffing in years. If there is massive fraud, it really ought not be too hard to at least paint broad strokes as to where it is occurring.
Yeah, I know. It has nothing to do with fraud, real or imagined. Just happens to be one especially outrageous claim that I know a little bit about.
The suggested fraud (and no, it makes no damned sense) is some combination of “dead people are collecting” and “illegal immigrants are collecting”.
At least at the moment, this is where it stands. I’m sure they’ll come up with some other new group to blame next week. And, unsurprisingly, the MAGA crowd buys into the excuse du jour every time.
You don’t need evidence when you know it’s happening.
Which is another thing they are in denial about; sooner or later they’d have to either relocate or get a different job, even if the coal industry was booming. That’s just the nature of jobs involving the extraction of non-renewable resources; the world is full of abandoned former mines that were tapped out.
Their whole idea that they could have generation after generation of coal miners living there indefinitely was never anything but an impossible fantasy.
When you guys buy new pens, is it because the old pens ran out of ink or because they ran out of the building?
You don’t need to answer that. Musk knows all.
When you cut through all the bullshit reasons they’ve come up with?
Social Security’s existence is the fraud.
[Moderating]
Editing posts in the quote box to completely change their meaning is against the rules. Do not do this again.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
Man - it is funny you mention pens, because we used to have the CRAPPIEST pens! I remember laughing one time I saw Ronnie Raygun brandishing one of those pieces of shit during a national address! :D. Now, we have REALLY nice pens. Getting fat off the public teat!
Yeah - pretty sure that is it. It is funny, because internally the Agency has always talked a lot about fighting fraud. But there just has never been much of it! Pretty much some isolated cases and a vague concept of undeserving “welfare queens”…
In post-truth America the facts don’t matter, but you’re feelings do. Every time I hear something like election fraud or “illegal” Haitians eating dogs and asked for evidence all they come up with is, “Well I feel it’s true,” I want to say, “Well, I feel you’re a reptilian alien parading around in a human-skin suit. Let’s cut you open and find out!”
So if they stop that 'fraud" and save all that money, that should mean more for everyone else, right? But somehow it will mean less benefits for the deserving. Very odd that.