You don’t necessarily need to learn a new trade to advance. Take your mechanical skills- those can be applied anywhere, not just auto mechanics. See all those fancy robotics being developed? Guess what, the fundamental mechanical structures aren’t much different. You have gears, hydraulics, pneumatics etc just being used differently. Sure there are some fancy new technologies being integrated alongside (electro-optical/mechanical) but I suspect you could pick up that stuff as well if given the chance. Sometimes, that’s what it comes down to- being given a chance. And most everyone settles into their niche in the world where it’s comfortable and familiar. The old shoe. Half the battle is getting out of the comfort zone and seeking out opportunities. The other half might even be luck but it’s possible to make your own luck…BTW- I’ve known quite a few PhDs that couldn’t spell or compose a decent sentence and didn’t have any practical knowledge…don’t sell yourself short. You have skills not many people have…
@davesmopar self-description above could have been written by my brother. (Although I’d say dave was able to write it up better than he would have been able to).
After several failed attempts to get started at community colleges he finally gave up. (A lot of it had to do with writing issues. We went to Catholic schools, so it wasn’t for lack of instruction. We just all have our particular “knacks” or lack thereof).
He ended up an electrician - training begun by an uncle of ours who was a lifelong electrician (after his tour in 'Nam as a base mechanic).
He did the independent self-employment thing for a while and quite successfully. That all went to heck in a handbasket during the 2008 debacle. With mostly his wits and “I can figure it out” skills/mentality he’s now making very good money for a very large corporate entity doing facilities maintenance.
I’m a social sciences faculty member - and I constantly tell my student that if college is not their thing, whether by ability, desire, or finance to look into the trades. It will be very hard for tech to replace the hands on folks for lots of skilled trade work. Some of it perhaps. (E.g. maybe 3-D printing of buildings). But not all.
My point was not that Hilary Clinton was responsible for their job loss, she was just pandering to them to get votes, that is what politicians on both sides of the aisle do.
My point was that coal miners nearing retirement thought the idea of them retraining as computer programmers was as ridiculous as I did.
Well, what if you’re 45 years old and/or not nearing retirement?
I’m 53 years old and I’d consider retraining if for some reason I was no longer able to work in my field
No she didn’t. That’s absurd. The coal industry has been on the way out for DECADES (and rightly so). She was offering them a way out of a dying industry. This is EXACTLY what happened in the early 80’s in the auto industry under Reagan. So Reagan is to blame for the demise of the auto industry?
If you rear what you quoted, I did not say she was responsible for her job loss.
I frequently had up to 53 children and I had some runs where the last student off had been on the bus one and a half hours. You also do not have much attention to spare because YOU ARE DRIVING A BUS!
For safety’s sake your attention has to be outside the bus and you cannot leave your seat while driving and I almost never had an aide on the bus. If you have elementary kids on, you can see almost none of them because of the high backed seats on today’s buses.
I admire your motivation but think you’re the exception that proves the rule: After a certain age, say 55, not much chance learning something difficult.
No chaperones on the bus? Any school trip, other than the daily commute, requires chaperones around here.
Who requires the chaperones? The state. the school district, or someone else? I know NY State has no such requirement and the State of NY has made the bus driver responsible for the reasonable behavior of the students. Another driver had a field trip to a nearby State Park as a reward for a class of delinquents for not attempting to kill anyone for a whole week. They got to go fishing and get a steak dinner grilled for them. The teacher and two aides were on the bus. all males of 200 lb or more.
On the way back to the school. the students mugged one of their members who was wearing a brand new jeans jacket and were passing it around outside the window and lost it between windows.
It fell on the windshield of a car driven by a woman who went off the interstate and suffered some damage to her car.
The responding police gave the slightly built woman driving the bus for not controlling the students.
By the way, when I had students on the bus for an hour and a half, it was on a daily run, not a field trip and it was just me and the students.
On field trios I have driven with just students on the bus because sometimes the teachers want to take their own cars.
I suspect if anybody remembered the names of the delinquents and looked them up, they’d probably find that some . . . probably most of them . . . wound up in prison at some point
A few years ago, the online “inmate locator” told me where the former owner of my old Subaru dealership was imprisoned. I don’t know whether he developed a problem with the ponies, or wild women, or drugs, or… whatever… but w/in ~3 years of selling the dealership, he was convicted of burglarizing several homes. There was so much stolen jewelry in his home that he went to prison on several counts of Grand Larceny.
Not true. It really depends on the person. Someone who STOPPED learning or trying to learn anything since graduating high-school 40 years earlier will have a very hard time. But someone who reads a lot or is engaged in learning new things won’t have a problem learning new things. This has been proven over and over again.
I have to agree with @MikeInNH. I was 58.years old when, 3 weeks into a semester, the chairman of the computer science department where I held rank died. He taught a graduate course in computer simulation. He was the only professor in the department that had ever taught the course.I was asked to take over the class. I spent every spare minute over a two day period learning a computer language Visual SLAM to prepare for the next class meeting.
Over.my 44 years of teaching, I was always having to learn something new. When I began using a computer back in 1969, I had to use a key punch machine to punch the cards to be fed into the card reader on the mainframe computer. Today’s students have never seen an IBM punch card.
I am 83 years old. I have to work harder at learning new things, but I don’t want to turn back the clock to the old days. I write grants to support a chamber orchestra where I am a horn player. I used to have to make 20 copies of the proposal and deliver them to the funding agencies. There is now online software that I had to learn to prepare and submit a grant proposal. A little effort was needed to learn the software, but in the end it made preparing the grant application easier.
If I can learn new things at 83, a person 55 should have no problems.
As a kid we feared the black cat gang. Hank lived a block away and was a member. We avoided him. 50 years later Hank was retiring from his job at the school system and all the kids loved him. When he retired he started a business putting flowers on graves for a fee. Judge not lest ye be judged.
there are levels to this
there are punks who act tough and steal your lunch money
and there are hardened people who belong to established organizations that will demand protection money, beat up and murder people, deal in hard drugs, force people into prostitution and worse
Rail is still pretty miraculous but unfortunately not in the USA. I can walk from my hotel in London grab a 300 km/h Eurostar to Paris and walk to my hotel and check in about the same time as an airplane would be just landing on the ground or a car would be disembarking a ferry.
Transportation system# evolved over the past centuries differently in different continents. The conditions are different in the US than Europe as much as people would like to think not. When I had an engine put in 200 miles away in western Minnesota, spose I could find a train, bus, or anything heading out there? Just no market. Vast miles and few people. Trains haul grain, not people. Trucks bring the product to the elevators where trains might be available. 50 years ago we could take a train and a bus but just no demand anymore. I can’t imagine a farmer buying a driverless truck to haul their grain but there are some hubs where it might make sense. How’s. That rail system going in California? Thank heavens for uber now.
I agree that Europe has a much denser population than the US. Still, there are rural areas where trains aren’t appropriate. Rural Europeans don’t have nearly as far to travel to get to a train station. My father in law’s family live in a village in Northern Germany. The closest cities are Bremen and Hamburger, both about 45 minutes away. That’s about as far away as you can get from cities in Western Europe and still not.a bad drive to public transportation. Also, I doubt that there are many corporate farms that could fill a few rail cars with food stuffs. Trucks make more sense there.
