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Friday, January 3, 2020

Code Hearted

stilton’s place, stilton, political, humor, conservative, cartoons, jokes, hope n’ change, biden, campaign, malarkey, miners, code

Joe Biden brought little joy to the nation's coal miners when, in a recent "No Malarkey and Damn Little Poppycock" campaign speech, he acknowledged the job insecurity they face owing to the Democrats' quixotic war on fossil fuels.

Fortunately, Gropin' Joe was ready to present himself as the dim light at the end of the tunnel and told the miners that getting new employment under the Biden administration would be easy-peasy if they just learn to write computer code.

"Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well," Biden enthused. "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God's sake!"

Yeah! And if you can chop down a giant tree, you can sure as Shinola become a brain surgeon! And if you can bench press 300 pounds in the gym, you can damn well learn to be a quantum physicist! God love ya, get off your ass!

Putting Joe's somewhat questionable logic aside, he's telling fairly well-paid miners to learn a new, difficult, and constantly changing skill in which they'll be competing with roughly half a billion people, largely from Asian nations, who will happily write first rate computer code for $3 a day, a bowl of rice, and a few fish heads.

Moreover, Joe seems to be forgetting that computers need more than code to run on. They need electricity...and if the Dems succeed in closing the mines and coal-fired power plants, computers will go just as dark as every home and business in America.

Which, granted, will finally be a chance for the miners to make some money by selling the rest of us helmets with little lights on them.

31 comments:

igor said...

What amazes me is that Quid-Pro-Joe is still the frontrunner...

At least, according to the Mainslime Media.

Drypowda said...

One of the puppets of the last "half-black" presidents hopefully we'll never see again. Forget about coal, jojo, start makin' friends with Bubba and his new brolove, Hunter !!

The Pontificator said...

...and then Biden challenged the coal industry to a push-up contest.

M. Mitchell Marmel said...

I can see why Unca Joe is hanging out with miners. You need to go a mile or so down in the Earth's crust to find his IQ...

Geoff King said...

Anyone who can be an overpaid, lying, corrupt, perverted, senile, career politician can learn to flip burgers too.

Regnad Kcin said...

Need to check the carbon content between Smokin" Joe's ears. Maybe he can get a job after 11/2020 as a chimney flue.......

Fish Out of Water said...

The deplorable gene runs deep in this one too.

Fish Out of Water said...

To break from the thread, all most likely know this morning a leading islamo-facist is now somewhere with his promised bevy virgins -what sort of virgins they are is another matter.

Facepalm worthingly from leading democrats, there's hand-wringing and 'how dare he do this with out asking us first!' criticism.

One would think there'd be some common ground between the President and these consistent nay-sayers, but.....

Can only shudder at what the response might have been had the most unfit, unqualified and unworthy POTUS candidate since Henry Wallace was President.

Bobo the Hobo said...

@M Mitchell Marmel ... Bravo!

REM1875 said...

Pictures of white privilege there ..... I can see why they want them out in the code, homeless and flat on their asses ......oopps my mistake ... out in the cold ....

Fred Ciampi said...

Someone asked Joe just how stupid he really was and he took it as a challenge. I remember a few years back Joe said that if you think whoever is knocking at your door might be a bad guy just fire your shotgun through the door.

Rastapopoulos said...


Go Joe, go!

Now you need to follow me on this - I truly hope that Joe remains the resounding front runner as the Dems pick the least awful from their pack.

Remember there is no reason to encourage the Dems to front a candidate that is effective, or a person that any reasoning person might consider voting for.

Too bad they didn't push hard on one of their even more marginal candidates.

As for pulling the carpet out from under Joe, hold your horses. Wait until he is the candidate then let the festivities begin.

Studebaker Hauk said...

Ah Joseph, you incoherent boob. I just retired from a long career of "coding", as you call it. I started in the days of punch cards and in all my time at the keyboard I never once ran into a coal miner, a steel worker or an auto mechanic that could out-code a 9 year old kid from India. By the way, we also don't need any electricians, plumbers, carpenters, or anybody else who works with their hands. Just hairdressers. That's all we need.


BTW - this morning's NYT headline: "US STRIKE ORDERED BY TRUMP KILLS TOP IRANIAN COMMANDER" is just too precious not to comment on. After kicking in our embassy door the message is clear to anyone paying the slightest attention: we know who you are, we know where you are, we're not Obama.

Murphy(AZ) said...

^Fish Out of Water:

Just to wander down your path for a moment; the Dems are wildly upset because President Trump didn't ask "Mother, may I?" before taking out a high-ranking threat to the U.S. of A.

Do you suppose he might just as easily target certain un-named local politicians? A phone call, an airstrike, and it's a whole new ballgame.

TrickyRicky said...

"Moreover, Joe seems to be forgetting that computers need more than code to run on. They need electricity...and if the Dems succeed in closing the mines and coal-fired power plants, computers will go just as dark as every home and business in America."

THIS^^^^

There will be no need whatsoever for computers in the prole-burbs when cheap, reliable energy is outlawed. Imagine Venezuela on steroids. I suppose there is more than one way to skin the family cat. Cooking it may be more of a challenge.

Fish Out of Water said...

@ Tricky. Progs will tell you we will get our electricity from solar, wind and fairy dust.

John the Econ said...

I'll agree with Biden only up to the point that there is little future in coal mining. But that has to do with fracking and the rise of cheap natural gas more than anything else.

But what this really is is another example of how out-of-touch Biden is with the current Progressive zeitgeist. The "Learn to Code" meme was popular with the left during the waning days of the Obama era as the general answer to anyone who found themselves unemployed as the result of the left's war on the economy. If only those ignorant yokels up the hollers of West Virginia would learn to code, then they'd be living it up like they do in San Francisco or Seattle.

The left's enthusiasm for deploying these meme immediately fell out of favor the moment when layoffs started hitting Progressive journalists who had previously been joyfully deploying the meme at people they considered politically, economically, socially, and intellectually inferior. Karma is a bitch!

As for "learning to code", a little biography: I learned to code in the late '70s and early '80s with the advent of practical and affordable personal computers. In high school, I quickly learned that I could make money doing so, and did so. But just knowing how to code was not enough. I quickly learned that in order to tackle the more challenging problems people were offering me, one had to know how to apply other people's problems to code, and that required an education in things other than coding. That's how I ended up as an economics major; I was very interested in economics, but had no intention of becoming one. What I was interested in understanding economics, efficiency, process engineering, and the big one, accounting. (In the '80s, getting into the business program at my university was very difficult, but an economics path gave me access to the same courses I needed in accounting, which is what I was really after)

Over the years I've given this advice to aspiring coders: Know something else. The world is already chock-full of people who can code, but don't know anything else. Many think they can bypass formal education because they already know how to code. This is why the majority of young coders I've known over the decades started out believing that they'd be the next big video game designer because video games were all they knew outside of coding. Unfortunately, the world only needs so many of those. The world does need people who know countless other disciplines that can apply that knowledge to code.

So jobs for people who only know how to code will be rather limiting. And to make matters worse, if large employers need coding done by someone who only knows how to code, they can easily outsource that overseas where there are now millions of other people who know how to code, and are willing to do it for less than $5 and hour.

The problems with these small towns in NH, WV and elsewhere is more cultural than the lack of coal jobs. And just admonishing people living there to "learn to code" isn't going to fix anything.

Better advice from Biden might be "Come to Washington and become an insider and you and your family will make millions of dollars with no transparent qualifications whatsoever." That's a skill Biden has mastered that could be applied to code.

Bruce Bleu said...

Didn't hear you clear enough, I've got a code in my ears.

John the Econ said...

@igor said "What amazes me is that Quid-Pro-Joe is still the frontrunner..."

It shouldn't. For the last decade and change, Joe has been the supposed-sane "adult supervision" of the Democratic Party.

Let that sink in.

Speaking of Joe and fossils, I mean, "fossil fuels":

Joe Biden: ‘We’re All Dead’ if We Don’t Stop Using Fossil Fuels

Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed during a Sunday campaign event that “we’re all dead” if fossil fuels continue to be used as one of the world’s primary energy sources. Earlier in the event, Biden vowed as president to hold energy giants liable for global warming and made a pledge to even jail executives.

Would that include his son, Hunter?

Iran: Yes, it is amusing to watch Progressive outrage regarding Trump's positive reinforcement. A much different response than drawing lines in the sand that everyone knows are meaningless or shipping off pallets of cash in the dark of the night.

One has to wonder what the world would be like today if Jimmy Carter had acted in a similar manner 40 years ago.

Fish Out of Water said...

The political, chattering head class no aghast over Trump taking out another terrorist, are cut from the same cloth as the political class in Britain, who were willing to cut a deal with hitler after the fall of France.

Anonymous said...

In my limited but professional & real experience, getting across project objectives to "programmers or coders" was a pretty challenging job of communication, management and oversight. I'll not go on due to respect for what they can do (and I cannot)... but my goodness it was difficult to keep them on track. And we usually had pretty good but obsolete real-world examples examples of what we needed.

Pat Cummings said...

@SpectreRider: You're right, and well-spotted! In fact, there are no extant coal mines in the New England states, and NH mostly relies on nuclear power and natural gas for electricity generation... For anyone who wants to explore further: https://nma.org/category/statistics/

@Studebaker Hauk: Mark Steyn said it: We can go far by periodically making "a preemptive strike against a villian that only Hollywood actresses and Democratic presidential candidates would object to..." and that otherwise the real answer is to make Iran and its neighboring Islamic states "the same kind of irrelevant to world affairs that other miserable third-world dictatorships are." He pointed out that the best way to do this is to remove their world dominance in fossil fuels—by continuing to develop our own extensive reserves of coal, natural gas, and petroleum.

Yah! Two problems, same answer!

Colby Muenster said...

Joe Joe Joe… He is the gift that just keeps on giving! Or maybe more accurately, He’s like VD that no amount of penicillin will banish.

@igor,
What amazes me is that Quid-Pro-Joe is still the frontrunner... I just read that Bernie is creeping up on Joe. But, isn't that something that Joe usually does to other people?

@Geoff King,
Not sure about that; can a politician be trained to do something that serves a practical purpose? Even so, I'm not sure I would want a burger that Joe cooked. Lord only knows where those hands have been.

@Studebaker Hauk,
You win the internet! But I beg to differ one point. Obammy absolutely knew who they were and where they were. Hard not to know that when you're airlifting pallets of cash to them.

@TrickyRicky,
Geez. Everybody KNOWS electricity comes from that big wire hooked to your house, silly!

@SpectreRider,
Joe probably just forget where he was again. The NH miners can become doctors and engineers. The ignorant West VA hillbillies will have to settle for coding.

DJ Vietnam Vet said...

As far as Nasty Nancy is concerned Loose lips sink ships.

Anonymous said...

Be sure to read down to the U S.
-----------------------------------------
How many coal plants are there in the world today?

The EU has 468 - building 27 more... Total 495

Turkey has 56 - building 93 more... Total 149

South Africa has 79 - building 24 more... Total 103

India has 589 - building 446 more... Total 1036

Philippines has 19 - building 60 more... Total 79

South Korea has 58 - building 26 more... Total 84

Japan has 90 - building 45 more... Total 135

China has 2,363 - building 1,171 more... Total 3,534

That’s 5,615 projected coal powered plants in just
8 countries.

USA has 15 - building 0 more...Total 15

And politicians with their "green new deal”
want to shut down those 15 plants in order to "save”
the planet.

This is EXCELLENT!! I knew the rough idea about
the number of coal plants, but had not yet seen
actual numbers until now.

This makes the point. Whatever the USA does or
doesn’t do won’t make a Tinker’s Damn regarding CO2
unless the rest of the world – especially China and
India – does reduce coal-fired power plants, too.

Green New Deal???

“Oh, we will SAVE the planet!!” 100% Pure Bull@#$!
.
NSF

Edam Wensleydale said...

It's never been about saving the planet.

It's always been about the chronically insignificant trying to impose their views on others by force.

Anonymous said...

It amazes me that even 1 American would even consider voting for this dimwit.

TrickyRicky said...

@Anonymous- Yeah, I fell for that email a few months ago myself, and forwarded it to my conservative leaning email list. One of my correspondents corrected me, and being a geologist, I felt pretty silly for being taken in by confirmation bias.

Yes, the USA is about the only industrialized nation to have it's CO2 emissions drop (and who really cares about that) due to the bonanza of natural gas production. In reality the USA still had 359 coal fired units operating in 2017, down from 1024 units in the year 2000.

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

@Readers- Once again, I've showed up at the party late and can't address all the posts. But I read and enjoyed every one of them! Maybe Joe Biden can put me in touch with a coal miner who can write an autoresponder app for me...

Pat Cummings said...

@Stilton Jarlsberg: Creepy Uncle Joe is far more likely to "get in touch with" a prepubescent youth with those coding abilities...

Alej said...

Joe proved to be worthwhile for only one thing in his sinecure as a Washington politician.

Assassination insurance for O.