Agreed that it will be a cultural shift: there is a divide between meaning and economics.

People need meaning in life, but meaningful work and economic value aren't always the same.

Raising children or providing caregiving to the elderly can be very meaningful and happens to pay poorly. Building community is incredibly meaningful, and is usually volunteer work right now.

> People go all in on retraining (even though it obviously can't work for everyone)

I've heard that federal retraining programs have a success rate (defined as difference between placebo of nothing) of 0-15%. The current government solution to displaced workers is in practice is getting on disability.

Why is everyone so convinced people need to be told what to do to stay busy and engaged in the world?

And even in a post-scarcity society, some things (like attention and social status) will always be valuable.

In our current scenario "work" is generate economic value, and "outcome" is dollars.

In another scenario "work" could be stories / media, and "outcomes" could be attention.

In another, "work" is playing video games, "outcome" is level.

In all these scenarios you have people feeling the dopamine and at some level deriving satisfaction. It seems a bit dystopian (and anti-social) even to me, but if we're just talking about "human limitations on society" then I don't see why it couldn't be the case.

If we really lived in a post-scarcity world like The Culture, I'd imagine we'd have to evolve how we think about "work" and "outcome" in the same way that most of us no longer "work" for the glory of god for an "outcome" in the afterlife.

Well, we don't live in a fictional world. We live in a real world.

We just need to realise that life happyness and meaningful work doesn't mean generating profits for some ceo.

> We just need to realise that life happyness and meaningful work doesn't mean generating profits for some ceo.

I believe that's GP's point in a nutshell. The thing is for the USA "just need to realize" is a major cultural shift. Not to say it's insurmountable by any means, but making people just realize something is very tricky IMO.

Totally agree. I think the combination of emphasizing on STEM for all, along with smaller colleges facing shrinking enrollments, will result in losses to society that won't be obvious/measurable.

Look at the list of notable Hampshire College alumni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College

They range from Ken Burns, to one of the founders of Stonyfield Yogurt, to a Debian contributor, along with many other musicians and other creators.

We need to keep this kind of educational freedom alive.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Most Americans don't continue to work for status—they continue to work to eat.

I was speaking with regards to American society under UBI, not the current day.

The thing that prevents people from having jobs isn't a lack of demand for labor- it's the unwillingness of companies to pay for a worker's full cost of living. A UBI could correct for that.

The society that benefited from having these workers should give them time, money and resources to retrain. Some of these people have their identity wrapped up in their job (as you allude to), so the psychological jump may be the most difficult of all.

Maybe we should have insurance for large industries that are essential to society (I can't see how that could go wrong!) ;)

You grossly underestimate how many people would be content watching cheap entertainment, copulating without concern for consequences, and otherwise enjoying a life of mundane leisure.

The US poverty line is 80th percentile of world income. That’s pretty comfortable for most.

"Generating value" is such a capitalist fake idea though.

With UBI, people could potentially pursue whatever fulfills their soul, whether or not it creates economic value for others.

But the capitalist notion of "handouts" being personal failure and "generating value" as the meaning of life is so ingrained in American culture that I don't know how we'll ever move beyond it.

That's the government providing baseline competition (and non broken-window public works) to serve as something for private entities to beat.

Pragmatic considerations may override your personal beliefs in this matter. American culture strongly ties self-worth to productivity. Take away folks' ability to meaningfully contribute to society, and they will cease to see themselves as a part of that society. On the other hand, we have a strong cultural identity surrounding gun ownership, and we're seeing rapid polarization in politics. So what's the natural consequence when your populace is bored, disenfranchised and heavily armed? Sounds like a powderkeg to me

If you give people a floor like that, you have to keep them doped up enough to be content with it. Or engineer a more complacent human.

I enjoy the constant learning curve, but not everybody does. Professions that used to last a lifetime, don't any more, but we aren't given those expectations at the beginning of our journeys. Additionally, even though I enjoy the act of learning I'm starting to notice that it takes a little bit more effort year by year to learn the new tricks. And yet our earning potential (which directly drives a wide range of personal and family decisions) is dependent on staying on the treadmill.

I can see the day, eventually, where I'm not as fast a learner as the latest round of college graduates and where whatever wisdom I may have gained isn't of any value or relevance. I hope I am wrong about that.

I think over time those things are not as significant as the changes in disciplines (titles?) or verticals. E.g. Changing from an embedded SE to front end UX is more difficult than the languages or tools involved.

Edit: is it harder to retrain from front end to embedded? I've traveled the ≈embedded to ≈ux road (via ≈applications). From ≈employee land to ≈owner land.

The language or framework you use really shouldn’t matter all that much. That’s just a matter of taking some time to acquaint yourself with the vernacular. But fundamentally, the maths stays the same.

I think this is very different from the high cost 4-year undergrad or masters programs that are expensive and take a lot of time. A UAW worker will have a hard time, I think, getting a degree but should have an easy time taking a few 1-4 week programs at night or from home to pick up useful skills.

I’m not sure what other program will really work unless UBI gets here real soon (I don’t think it will). Programs where GM has to pay workers who don’t work will just kill GM. I suppose it will be ok for a few years, but once GM dies then no one will be able to pay.

But in all the cases I’ve seen so far, most of these people built their whole identities around being a coal miner or an automobile assembly line person. That’s the only thing they know how to do, and the only thing they are willing to do. Nothing less than the exact same thing will suffice.

In the case of widespread intransigence, I don’t see how you can solve this problem. Those people are going to be out of a job, in a career that doesn’t exist any more, having wrapped their entire concept of existence around something that simply no longer exists.

Yes, I agree that we as a society need to take care of them, otherwise we as a society will be paying a much higher price due to the problems they will cause.

We recognize part of this issue when it comes to soldiers who have come back home from war and are now trying to live during peacetime.

We need to come up with better solutions for people who have been obsoleted by the March of technology.

This might also be an example where we have to teach and support and encourage resiliency early in life. I’m sure there are some people who lock their life around their job, but that’s not healthy. Especially if it’s literally a shitty and unhealthy job like coal mining.

Are things so broken on the employer side that they won't take a 1 week risk on a new hire?

This is for software engineering which is a in demand field, I can't imagine how bad it would be for a field where there was a glut of people trying to apply

I saw a kid not get a job because she hadnt ever used a fax machine.

That being said it’s weird how many companies don’t pay for training, even simple stuff like LinkedIn Education and Coursera. So it would be nice to have more of these, especially curated, by a more independent source like a library or community college so it wasn’t tied to jobs.

There are also some great week or less trainings that can help improve performance. It’s surprising how many people can’t use Microsoft Office. I recently got to help people use Word and OneDrive and it was neat seeing how much work sucked before they figured out how to save files and edit files. This is someone that is simple to digital natives but a little bit of training can help extend careers.

The plasticity of humans in the face of adversity and changing times is a fundamental part of humanity.

From entire Nations migrating across the world in search of a new Homeland in ancient times (e.g. Helvetii) to the mass migration of people in modern times (Irish potato famine and mass emigration), to entire industries being automated many many times. e.g. the etymological origin of sabotage is from labor disputes over automation. Similarly luddites engaged in sabotage in the 1800s. And many industries have either been virtually automated (farming) or made obsolete (blacksmiths), resulting in dramatic reductions in labor demand in those areas.

In any of these cases, humans persevered and ultimately found new purposes.

And while automation is only going to increase at an exponential rate and displacement similarly so, given that there is still so much productive potential left in humans, it would be a folly to simply give up on a group of people and just give them UBI.

I'm not saying UBI isn't part of the solution, but the solution also has to involve utilizing the productive capacity of humanity. Bc we have too many big problems to solve to switch an ever growing percentage of our population over to only be consumers (and not producers). They will be an ever growing tax on the rest of the population the will prevent us from putting as much investment into R&D and problem solving.

I read this as "buggy device drivers union" and had a sudden moment of clarity.

That would have replaced blue collar jobs with blue collar jobs.

We need a carbon tax and federal funding to build these facilities.

Carbon extraction paired with more nuclear is what we need to invest in.

It leads to judges corrupting their own judgement to allow workers who probably aren't disabled to get onto the disability roles, it's a ratchet where once on permanent disability, an employee can no longer legally get a job again, it's almost certainly a downsizing in wages and quality of life expectations, and it leads to depression, higher suicide rates, and high rates of opioid abuse.

"Learn 2 code" was attempted because offering food stamps and Section 8 housing in coal country gets you immediately shut down. Those people, generally, don't want to perceive themselves as a burden on society.

Our government should help the unemployed, but paying them off "until they reached retirement age" means that the people who are still employed are paying for them to do nothing.

That's literally the point. The cost to society of having a large, disgruntled, restless, unemployed population is high. If this population decides to revolt, the cost could be catastrophically high.

The goal is to pay this population less than the total dollar value of the expected damage, but still enough to stave off the most expensive / disasterous outcomes.

If you prefer, employable people like living in a world where they're employable. If the unemployable decide to revolt, that world could be threatened. It may hurt your sensibilities, but paying them to do nothing could still be the least expensive option.

I would suggest helping those people move on to something else that enables them to care for their families. It’ll make change far more palatable and is better for people

In Spain several coal mines shut off. The initial idea was to just retire this people. In some cases they made them hop trough some recolocation programs.

IMO retiring people is just cheaper. The administrative overhead of managing this people is not worth the cost.

Can somebody go into depth on this? Everyday I interact with people who have jobs that suck way more than coding and pay way less.

Why wouldn't people want to work 40 hours remotely with full benefits making decent wages?

"Learn to code" is great advice in general and can change the lives of certain individuals but it's not a winning strategy for shifting a mid-career workforce from one career to another, at scale.

Unrealistic in what sense? That most people are unable to learn managing state and code flow?

I never hear anybody say "it is unrealistic for workers to learn Spanish/Russian/Mandarin/Japanese", yet I really feel basic programming is even easier to learn than a spoken language.

I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) is missing when you look at men who started working in the mines before they finish high school. Without the math foundation, it's not "hard work", but a weak foundation which just causes frustration.

That, and a 58 year old guy learning to code will soon have to compete against a 20-something with far more education + computer + social media experience, especially since coding can be done overseas.

Oh and age by itself has nothing to do with it. There are old people who could pick it up because they have the right fundamentals. Sure there are some challenges that come with age, but let’s not sweep all old people into the category of “cannot enter a programming career.”

I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. I think you were talking about age as a further factor compounding the difficulty on top of already lacking basic related skills.

I am a senior full stack developer and typically in the top 10% of the developers in my org wherever I've gone past 5 years.

I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state.

I really don't think it's "math"y at all. I transform data, I use libraries. I can't think of any algebraic examples of anything I've done in the past 5 years, let alone geometry.

That's not something to be happy about, that's something to be terrified of. If nothing the average coder does requires any particular specialized skills beyond gluing together libraries built by experts, what do you think will happen when, like the coal miners, some technological or societal change comes along that reduces the need for average coders?

Demand for coders isn't infinite.

I mainly taught a handful of college educated people who studied things like earth sciences, arts, and ocean science, but struggle to understand a for loop or a function call.

And now I understand how it can be un-fun to struggle, especially if you don't intrinsically enjoy writing scripts and mucking around the terminal.

middle age blue collar workers can't learn a natural language or a programming language

I really have to ask, what makes us "programmers" so elite? I find it hard to believe that if your average person spent 90 months learning programming that they couldn't scrape by as a mid-level web developers. I have developers in my org who go weeks without committing and management seems to have no problem with that. If that's the quality accepted, why can't that be taught in 90 days?

Telling blue-collar workers to learn to code is in their analogy like telling them to be rocket-scientists. If they could, they probably wouldn't be blue-collar in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037674

It's all about what you've been exposed to.

What are some basic white-collar jobs other than "go to meetings" and "Excel"?

I've been on both coasts. I've been in big cities. The prosperity is there. The hope is there. The schooling and resources are there.

My family came from the Appalachians. Hill country. they live off the land, cause the only money is from tourists. They used to work in the mines, but 'them environmentalists' ruined their livelihood and ended their bodily suffering so their kids could do better. But in doing so, the coastal elites destined those cities, those families to poverty.

But this poverty is working in restaurants, working menial service jobs that pay $8/hr, no benefits, and no vacation. And remember that in the USA, your property tax is linked to school funds. Sure the feds pitch in a bit, but not that much.

So you get: bad education, bad jobs, no upward mobility, low/no healthcare. You get poverty equal to what we'd call 'Third World'.

So when I see a bunch of coastal elites say blasely, "Why cant the blue collar workers just learn programming and be rich?" It's about as tone deaf as Marie Antionette saying 'Why can't they just eat cake?'

They don't have the prior education to learn programming. They don't have the free time due to working 50-60 hour weeks. Or they don't have the ability to afford computers or the know-how to use free and open source software effectively to learn.

We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.

This is often the situation faced by the poor and working classes on the coasts, also. Even if they have different beliefs from you on, i.e. social issues, on economic fairness there is a lot of agreement.

> We need socialism, especially when policies end up destroying counties, towns, and cities founded in old paradigms we now kill for being bad. We can end dirty jobs - but we should never end the people. But that's what we're doing.

The fleeting, once in a generation chance to turn the country in the direction you propose (cleaner jobs, more support for people and communities) begins in the upcoming primary election. Arguably, how people vote in places like Appalachia and the Midwest will decide if we enter your hopeful future, or continue down the current path toward the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

He spends hours every year at tax time, carefully collating his paper records onto a paper ledger that he shares with his accountant. If he'd enter the data into even the most basic of bookkeeping systems or even an Excel spreadsheet, tax time would take him a few minutes (and he wouldn't be paying his accountant so much to handle the paper). And he'd have a better handle on monthly expenses, revenue, etc. his system works for him, it's just labor intensive.

But he still makes a good living at what he does, he just prefers to do it with a welder while climbing on a truck. Even if he were offered free coding classes, he wouldn't take it -- he can't understand how I can possibly sit in front of a computer all day long, stuck in an office.

I actually co-founded a non-profit to address this to the extent that I can with entreprenuership training in the Appalachian region. I think building up the area and creating successful businesses where people live is the way to go.

I hope that what I said here makes sense. It’s based on my own work and experience,

Thank you

> from their perspective it’s the government coming in and destroying their way of life and then not even bothering to help

It's not our jobs as taxpayers to maintain coal miners' "way of life". Coal mining was a massive improvement to the world in the mid 1800s between whale blubber and refined petroleum, but the world doesn't owe coal miners anything more than a paycheck on the open market, where coal is a commodity and has to compete against fracking (cheaper) and solar and wind (far cleaner and create more jobs). They have cashed 200 years of paychecks and chose to send their young boys into the same coal mines rather than invest in a better life for their kids.

But I also don't look at this in a vacuum. As far as I know, coal mining companies don't offer great pensions for their mine workers. No state in the US has a decent job/vocational retraining and placement system. The coal mining states don't vote politically for good welfare programs that would allow what you claim to want (retirement at their current standard of living). If coal miners wanted a retraining system, they have the ability to vote for political leaders who could do that -- but there is no political will. They could start their own companies or non-profits (like you), but I don't hear about them (doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist). The guys that made billions in coal aren't investing in the same regions that have historically been single-industry areas.

And when it comes to coal, I would argue that - (1) it was largely beat by innovation and fracking before the EPA / federal government / renewables started reducing coal jobs. The largest coal mine in the world is in Australia finished in ~2008 and idled because it was no longer cost effective to run the mine at those current coal prices. - (2) it has massive negative externalities to the entire air-breathing world just to keep a few thousand coal miner jobs[1]. Coal miners know this acutely, but they continue to work in the industry (to the extent that it's possible).

I think it's important to help others, but self-agency has to play a role. Your anecdote about the chat lady shows that she had enough agency to quit her job willfully (I've worked at jobs long past when I had decided that management) and that she didn't bother to go to read a book or internet article about how to move up in the workplace shows a great example of the possibility of agency, but the unwillingness to execute.

I think this kind of complacency is why we are losing jobs to other countries. The Netflix documentary "American Factory" perfectly describes the mismatched expectations of American union workers in 2020 thinking they have the same bargaining power as in 1960 and international companies who know they the Chinese workers doing the "996" work ethic is a far better value than the American who clocks out after a very safe 40 hours a week and demands much higher for producing the same exact product.

When it comes to the entire US, I think we should adopt a more comprehensive employment-and-reemployment program, more like Germany's. But we like to pride ourselves on "being free" and not accepting government handouts or entitlements, so we reap what we sow.

> Coal-mining employment increased rapidly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and peaked in 1923 at 798,000. Since then, the number of miners has fallen considerably since, due to mechanization. By 2015 it had fallen below 70,000.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining_in_the_...

When you legislate the job away for the benefit of society you have an obligation.