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You and your coal mining friends

By Paul Campos

On December 31, 2019

At 8:08 am

In General

3467 Views

Joe Biden putting in a full working day in New Hampshire:

Biden riffing on how Obama put him in charge of judging the "jobs of the future" suggests re-training miners as coders.

"Anybody who can go down 3000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well."

This sort of "just transition" stuff was murder on Clinton in 2016…— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 30, 2019

But Biden returns to the same point: "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God's sake!"— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 30, 2019

I’d say OK boomer but Biden’s pre-boomer.

I wish someone would ask Joe Biden "What should we learn to code?" so we could hear his response which would be something like "What should you learn to code? Computer. It's the future."— Cari (@eatinginmycar) December 30, 2019

There are a lot of things wrong with this but as someone who graduated into the recession with a bunch of other people with IT/CS degrees it really grinds my gears that there's always an implication that "coding" guarantees you a job, my ex husband was unemployed for TWO YEARS.— Cari (@eatinginmycar) December 30, 2019

Meanwhile, back in 1972, the idea of a bipartisan presidential ticket looks super attractive right now:

Joe Biden told voters in New Hampshire on Monday that he would consider choosing a Republican as a running mate, but added, “I can’t think of one right now.”
Biden discussed the possibility after a woman told the former vice president that if he is the nominee, he will “have to pull out all the stops.”
“Our 21-year-old son said the other night, ‘I wonder if Joe Biden would consider choosing a Republican as a running mate,” the woman added.
“The answer is I would, but I can’t think of one now,” Biden replied. “Let me explain that. You know there’s some really decent Republicans that are out there still, but here’s the problem right now … they’ve got to step up.”

Over the past few months, Biden has offered several clues about who he might consider as his vice presidential pick if he earns the Democratic nomination. He previously said he would prefer to pick someone “of color and/or a different gender” as his potential running mate. Biden has also acknowledged he’d think about adding Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to his possible ticket.

“Whoever I would pick for vice president, and there’s a lot of qualified women, there’s a lot of qualified African-Americans. There really truly are. There’s a plethora of really qualified people. Whomever I would pick were I fortunate enough to be your nominee, I’d pick somebody who was simpatico with me, who knew what I, what my priorities were and knew what I wanted to,” Biden said in Exeter on Monday. “We could disagree on tactic, but strategically we’d have to be in the exact same page.”

Old man, look at my life . . .

The belief that there’s a lot of structural unemployment in the American economy, so people can get good jobs if they retrain themselves to work in areas where there are lots of such jobs going unfilled because of a shortage of qualified workers is one of those zombie ideas that survives because it’s such a convenient belief for people who think the economic system is basically fine, and you just need to tweak it a little here and there.