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Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

> You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.

I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.

Where do you live?

> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.

As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.

> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.

Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.

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> While you're off on Java

I think OP referenced Java because it was the hot language of the 90s/early 2000s that people would harp on about studying.

Sort of like how people nowadays go to bootcamps to study JavaScript and Python

Frankly the fact that you expect everyone who lived around you to just up and reskill shows that even if you lived there, you did not understand the people you lived with. People are limited, flawed, and 50% of them are below average in most any stat you could come up with. Does that mean it's their fault when the legislators in Washington decide it's time for their industry to go bye-bye? To put it concretely, is the fair punishment for "being too slow to adapt to industry trends" the total destruction of their family and the communities which once supported it? You seem to think that if people just swallowed their fear and dove in head-first, things would be OK. But in reality, the people who can, generally -do-: it is the people who don't think they have a chance at reskilling who are the most afraid, and are the most likely to lash out against the possibility of it happening. Because if it does, what are they going to do? Not every press operator can turn into a CAM engineer, there just aren't enough roles. Destitution was prearranged for the large majority of them.

This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c

I live in the Midwest. I don’t know what all your other reply’s to other people say.

I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!

If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.

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