Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Future of Coal Country

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#51

Post by [deleted] »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #44
philipkglass wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that people should remain compassionate. I understand why some people experience schadenfreude when it's rural Republican voters failing to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" after hearing that advice given to urban Democratic voters, but tit-for-tat shaming is not humane. These people largely don't vote how I vote but they are still my fellow citizens. They have dependent children and elders. Some degr…

I have no sympathy for people that vote against their own interests. If you're living off of government assistance and vote Republican while Republicans are constantly talking about stripping away said assistance programs, you absolutely deserve whatever happens to you. I have zero sympathy for you. You made your bed, now you get to sleep in it. The only people I will have sympathy for are the children who have paren…

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#52

Post by cmurf »

philipkglass wrote: post #2

Shutting the mine could eliminate more than seven thousand jobs, in a county of thirty-seven thousand people. “Greene County will become a ghost town,” the neighbor wrote. Isn't that the normal fate of towns built around resource extraction after the resource is economically exhausted? The American West is littered with ghost town remnants around depleted mines. It doesn't make much more sense to stay in a coal minin…

I think it comes down to how we're educated in a very monolithic way still, with the idea of "a job" and "a career" and "a path". It's very much like all eggs in one basket, no diversification investing to me.

Students need to learn basic things, but that includes what is diversification, adaptation, how to learn, how to self-learn, and continuously integrate.

Because they don't learn this, there's a coal worker that only understands that task, and thinks it's tragic and someone's fault when it goes away. "I can't do anything else. Coal is all I know." And then they lobby and vote to protect specific job tasks, rather than some sense of a right to earn a living by contributing to society. Nope - it's all about 'the job'.

Imagine if more specialized jobs were suddenly easily automated, like say accounting. Uh ok that's a lot of people displaced from a job, 1.3 million in accounting an auditing. If even 25% were obsolete that's more than all of coal.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#53

Post by rfrank »

thwarted wrote: post #47
rfrank wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities. There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco. 1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio... 2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u... 3. http…

While true, this is largely beside the point, and is addressable because it's mostly caused by politics. We don't need to have yet another discussion about Bay Area building constraints. Additionally, there are other cities that have more opportunity than closed mining towns do. At the bare minimum the people need to relocate to someplace marginally better with ANY economic opportunity, because where they're at now h…

No, it's not beside the point, and it's actually a huge portion of the point. Those same constraints exist in the majority of major cities in America.

For people on the low end of the earning spectrum, the lack of tangible benefits for moving outside of a vague promise of better job prospects makes staying put a viable option. If you worked at McDonalds, would you move across the country and away from your entire social support system for a chance to commute two hours on public transit to work at Arbys? I wouldn't.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#54

Post by Spooky23 »

ticviking wrote: post #10
opportune wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm originally from an area not in coal country, but right by it and heavily influenced by it. I couldn't agree with you more. Both my home state and the federal government are already essentially subsidizing these people to live in these communities simply because it's where they were born. There is no infrastructure for jobs because there are no industries other than coal and growing marijuana / making moonshine (a…

How is this different from the narratives of "welfare dependence" and "inter-generational poverty" advanced by republicans to advocate for deep cuts to urban welfare? If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.

Disability is more insidious than welfare.

States like disability because it is 100% federally funded and determinations are made by administrative law judges based on local standards. Temporary assistance (aka welfare), Medicaid, and other programs have a administrative and program cost sharing with the state and/or county.

Urban poverty has a lot of disability cases too. Welfare phases out in a few years and chronically poor folks end up labeled disabled.

I call it insidious because once you're on disability, there is an incentive to not try to re-enter the workforce. Most welfare recipients are off the rolls pretty quickly.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#55

Post by cmurf »

rayiner wrote: post #37
philipkglass wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that people should remain compassionate. I understand why some people experience schadenfreude when it's rural Republican voters failing to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" after hearing that advice given to urban Democratic voters, but tit-for-tat shaming is not humane. These people largely don't vote how I vote but they are still my fellow citizens. They have dependent children and elders. Some degr…

Shaming is an important part of society. It's how we incentivize positive behaviors and discourage negative ones.

Like slut shaming, gay bashing, nerd bullying? Or maybe you'd like to better qualify or narrow your assertion? Because multiple generations did this, for exactly the reasons you state: it was good for society.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#56

Post by briantakita »

woodandsteel wrote: post #45

Trump says he is going to bring back coal as a part of his program to make America great again. But the reason America was so great is that it was at the leading edge of technological change. That is relevant because in the 19th century, coal was the hot new technology. It was used for powering factory machines, electric generators, railroads and steam boats, heating, and producing steel. But technology continued to…

I wouldn't say we are going technologically backwards if you take a systemic look at energy, manufacturing, & infrastructure.

Steel is needed to rebuild existing infrastructure (roads, bridges, railroads) that have been falling apart over the years.

Steel is also needed to new infrastructure (buildings, electrical grid, solar panels (including those which will line the Mexican border wall), walls, housing, equipment, manufacturing).

Coal power is also inexpensive, transportable (power generation can be localized), & cleaner than ever. There's also a lot of coal left to be mined (> 260 bn short tons; 200 years).

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Energy.html

Coal can also be converted to diesel allowing states to create their own energy & reducing our need for foreign fuel sources. This will have geopolitical ramifications. Even if we decide to move toward renewable resources, having this coal stockpile in our back pocket will give leverage in acquiring the rare earth minerals needed for batteries & solar cells.

Also note that China & India burn a lot of coal, even though they could leap frog to a new energy infrastructure, giving more evidence that there must be compelling reasons to do so.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#57

Post by rayiner »

cmurf wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shaming is an important part of society. It's how we incentivize positive behaviors and discourage negative ones.

Like slut shaming, gay bashing, nerd bullying? Or maybe you'd like to better qualify or narrow your assertion? Because multiple generations did this, for exactly the reasons you state: it was good for society.

It's like saying "law is an important part of society." You don't need to qualify that statement by expressly disavowing laws that protected slavery, made homosexuality illegal, etc.

"Shame" is defined as "a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior." Teaching people to feel shame for conduct like lying, cheating, and stealing is an important tool societies use to enforce social norms in situations (such as with young people), where resort to legal action would be excessive and harmful.

It works at a macro level too. Consider this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25947984 ("Child Labor: India's Hidden Shame"). The word succinctly captures the international community's disapproval of certain practices that are common in certain places, with the implication that continuation of those practices will meet with continued disapproval from international peers. Again, that's an important social tool at the international level.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#58

Post by nandemo »

scottLobster wrote: post #5
phil248 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally in this country, people readily migrated for job opportunities. Maybe that's just a fairy tale, though it happened more than once in my family and with plenty of people I know. Perhaps people in resource extraction and one-factory towns no longer want to migrate for opportunity. Or maybe that's never been a majority inclination to begin with.

Not a fairy tale at all. In the 19th century De Tocqueville commented on how eager Americans were to sell land in pursuit of profit relative to Europeans at the time. It seems that in the post-war era we settled on this notion that families should largely remain rooted and stable, and that became part of the modern "American Dream". I wonder if all of that is just a long-term backlash against the forced migrations of…

There was a post on HN on US internal migration patterns a while ago. IIRC migration rates have decreased, but it's a fairly recent phenomenon (as in 1990s not 1950s).

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#59

Post by terravion »

Gargoyle wrote: post #28
opportune wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making a mean spirited attack. In fact, I think in the long run moving would even be beneficial for these people

I think in the long run it won't matter. For the most part, the jobs they could get in the cities are starting to vanish as well. In 10-20 years, the cities will have it even worse at the lower economic end. People might as well stay where they want to live. This economic transition will eventually effect everyone. Everyone. These people are just at the front end of it.

Why do you think this? Can you provide some evidence? There was a lot of hand wringing during the recession about the end of work--"we're all losing our jobs to the robots," etc.--but it seems like there are as many jobs as ever and more good jobs. This is especially true from a global perspective. While many blue collar workers in the US are suffering from competition from foreign substitution, there are literally billions more people joining the middle class globally. It doesn't sound like the end of human work when you zoom out.

Also, if you compare the rate of job displacement right now with technology compared to say the early 20th century where a majority of the jobs that existed 50 years prior were "destroyed", then it doesn't seem like we're at much of an inflection point.

More likely, because we have development policies that make it hard/expensive to move, we're not putting people in the new jobs like we used to--this has down the line effects of slowing growth because the workers who are also consumers aren't spending what they could have.

Re: The Future of Coal Country

#60

Post by akgerber »

rfrank wrote: post #14
opportune wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities. They may not all be >$50k solid middle class jobs, but they are there. There are actually almost no jobs in these areas. I would even agree with urban relocation if one city had a disproportionate number of people trapped in inter-generational poverty and another had extra jobs. I don't think "deep cuts" to urban welfare are ever the solution. I do think…

> The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities. There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco. 1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio... 2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u... 3. http…

This is often true on the coasts, but not particularly true in Appalachia or Appalachia-adjacent urban areas.

A basic house is $65k in Morgantown: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Morgantown-WV/22898744...

And a nice house with a 10 minute funicular commute to Downtown Pittsburgh (the Paris of Appalachia) isn't too much more: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/11363350_zpid/globalre...

And one can pay much less if one wishes: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2040-Lowrie-St-Pittsburgh...

Scarcity-driven housing costs are one of the biggest problems in a few coastal cities— but in much of the country, the problem is poverty.

Post reply on HN