teach coal miners to code

When you came here, you were IN something. His backup plan was to follow strip mining work to Wyoming, but the thought of missing his three teens’ last years at home killed him. The coders are getting it — they’re building websites, closing contracts. Well, a junior developer in Kentucky could make $60-$80,000 a year. Do the coal miners want to learn to code and are interested in computers? Were they technical thinkers? BitSource is bringing the computer coding revolution to Eastern Kentucky.”. “I think that job training keeps being promoted because it solves a political problem both for elected officials and for employers, but it doesn’t do anything for the economics,”. calls for a 'Task Force on Coal and Power Plant Communities' to reinvigorate communities that depend on mining and coal as their economic backbone. In Pike County, the only major non-coal factory churns out Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s. At first Ratliff struggled to keep up. Let’s consider that to learn how to code, all you need is the desire to do so, a computer, and an internet connection, and a typical American household, even a financially struggling one, has all three. Whatever happens, the same-old isn’t going to work. And others find it too daunting to learn a complicated new skill late in life. But until there’s some serious new high-paying option, most ex-mine workers are getting by on unemployment, taking lower paying jobs, moving away, or, as one put it to me, “going into panic mode.”. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once. Cause this was a hub of activity, it had an energy all of its own. Now that they graduated from training and had started building their first professional webpages, the $18-an-hour BitSource wage for junior coders still didn’t match mining. Proposals to retrain coal miners … Other than taking chewing tobacco breaks, it’s their one social activity (no happy hours when everyone commutes an hour each way to work, or has kids to get back to). Meanwhile, a third wave of the pandemic is surging. Ratliff was one of the lucky ones. His brown beard is edged with gray. Ad Choices. And it turns out the assessment was incredibly adept at finding the miners who could be part of the club. why suggest that coal miners learn to code? Ratliff brings up his son’s high school football victory the night before. Sep 06, 2016. Then, after those 22 weeks, Justice and Parrish would put up three dollars for every one from the government and build a coding team that could take on real, paying work. Some 8,000 miners have been laid off in the last four years — that’s more people than the entire population of Justice’s hometown, Pikeville. News Joe Biden Coding Coal 2020 Election During a campaign event on Monday, Joe Biden suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to "jobs of the future." “They’re going to have to close mines.”. “Have you been laid off from a job in the mining industry? The startup is called BitSource, and the surprising thing is it’s actually working. Let’s turn around and go back again. “I don’t know how to break it to you …. That’s the magic.”. In Kentucky, it’s coal mining, and in much of rural America, it’s agriculture. We got to fix the holes in our game, and get this baby in the air. He mentioned healthcare, construction, education, and tourism as promising fields. This was just patronizing. You go home and your head is tired. The bartenders. Getting down to this final group of candidates had been tough. “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well,” Biden said at a New Hampshire event Monday.. They began driving about 500 miles from Chicago every weekend to teach him and others in the community how to code. Much of the instruction came from videos at Lynda.com. The plan would invest in assets of mining communities, "like a rich culture, natural beauty, a proven workforce, and entrepreneurial spirit.". He’s the resident jokester, wearing blue Chuck Taylors and a fierce red mountain beard that hipsters can try to mimic, but would fail. “We need to do something.”, In the weeks that followed, they lined up the details. © 2020 Condé Nast. If so, then, yes absolutely they should learn to code. When they get back to the office, Rusty Justice blazes in. It was certainly a long shot. “I’m not going to lie,” Garland tells me about his first time pushing code live to a website the team was building, “I was sitting there for 15 minutes before I had the nerve to push the button.”. The real question isn't can you teach some specific coal miner to code. I flap it open. There's no doubt you're going to be able to find some former coal miners who would make good coders. He mentioned healthcare, construction, education, and tourism as promising fields. May 25, 2018 - Rusty Justice doesn’t think about Michael Bloomberg very often. One new venture in Kentucky offers a solution: teaching coal miners how to code. Rusty, you see, runs a land-moving company in Eastern Kentucky, and the anti-coal movement is playing a big role in systematically closing down the industry he’s worked around all his life. But when he does — even if it’s just for a moment — it’s like remembering the gloating rich kid who stole his lunch. Biden's campaign has proposed moving the U.S. away from fossil fuels to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. In the end, they got 900. “You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code.” So said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit, a … Dell monitors sat on a dozen desks, murals of Appalachians who’d made it big covered the walls. Parrish is worried even about the effect of U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez coming to shake the coders’ hands, or reporters like me coming to do stories. Where great games were played.”, What they’re building in its place is all so fragile and new. Ratliff stares straight ahead. Inside, Awesome had all the visual shorthand of Silicon Valley: ping pong table, programmer books, entrepreneurs typing at rented desks. They find the toothless guy, the trailers with shotguns racked up on the wall and the yard strewn with diapers and beer cans, and they film some dude saying weird shit in a backcountry accent that needs subtitles to comprehend, they give it an ominous title like “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” and they leave. It’s the subtler side of coder culture, the exuberant and unrepentant nerd-dom. Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”. Let’s not be like that old mule. professor and author of “The Job Training Charade” told Ohio Valley ReSource. The mine security guards. The miners would have to learn or they would be fired, and if too many of them failed, so would the business. You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. Instead, Lafer recommended training people and investing in industries that have to stay local. “People are going to have to get laid off,” Andrew Cosgrove, a mining analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence has said. This week it’s El Azul Grande, a sit-down Mexican restaurant named in honor of the University of Kentucky’s rabid sports fans. Several months later, in April 2014, in response to a comment by Mark Zuckerberg about shifts in energy use that has led to many coal mines being closed and coal miners behind laid off, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Future of Energy Summit said, "You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. After all, coal was the back-end code of 200 years of industrial progress — the fuel that bent the steel for Ford cars and train tracks and skyscrapers, and much of the electricity to light them. They filed into a glass-walled conference room along with a gang of other Kentucky entrepreneurs, to speak with the space’s 29-year-old co-founder Nick Such. Via New York Magazine, Please Stop Telling Miners To Learn To Code: God only knows where Biden got the idea that coal mining consists of throwing the stuff into a furnace. This fall, working at BitSource, he hasn’t missed a game. I wanted to be a part of it.”. According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience. An employment ad for BitSource . Vines cover a coal operation closed for two or three decades. “Once we got the idea of BitSource, it was like, ‘Look here, buddy, you’ll see what we’re going to be,’” Justice says. They move some of the earth back into place and grow grass to stabilize the fresh soil and make it look mountain-ish again. “I definitely did not create a cool little zombie scene with a first-person character in Unity while I was waiting.”, “Last 24, I fixed the header,” he says. has proposed moving the U.S. away from fossil fuels to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. Hall is a distant cousin of Rusty’s on one side. Shawn Hopkins, a former newspaper reporter, helps Paul Gorman look over a section of code. Now the challenge is one that’s very typical to startups: how to scale. 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