Biden announces, “Anyone that can throw coal in a furnace can program ”

The relevant question for a politician shouldn&#x27;t be &quot;Can they program?&quot; but rather &quot;Can they program in a way that produces enough value to a company per day to justify a wage that the person can live off?&quot;.<p>One limiting factor in that calculation might be not just the speed&#x2F;skill of the programmer, but the number of companies with such positions available.

Not sure what throwing coal in a furnace has to do with the mental exertion required to be a programmer, but maybe the point of being persistent makes sense.

He assumes &quot;Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well&quot; couldn&#x27;t just do the opposite and go up 3&#x27;-30&#x27; for the massive amounts of residential solar roof mounting jobs required to quickly ween Residential Zoned surface area off of being fueled from things &quot;thrown&quot; in a furnace.<p>Class C truck pallet delivery, crane, climb, connect, organize individual or aggregated items weighing 5-30lbs. None of these is sit, type, wait, compile, ponder and I know many of them would not want that life.<p>However, without violating NDA I can tell you there are furnaces and &quot;throwing&quot; involved in making components for the Tesla Model 3.

Sure they can, but why bother? Perfecting snark take a lot of work...<p>The real question is can they learn to be a politician, or say a Burisma board member?

It&#x27;s not surprising that a career politician doesn&#x27;t know anything about programming or coal mining.

You can find similarly silly statements about other skilled work. The bottom line is that humans can learn something; valuable experts are the priduct of an extensive training process.<p>I would argue for the benefits of retraining people of dying industries for work in growing industries.

There’s more to a healthy economy than everyone being a programmer.

This seems like the Dunning-Kruger Effect or maybe Pointy-Haired Boss Syndrome. Having never coded Biden miscalibrates the skill and effort required for competence. His words would have more weight if he took the time to learn to write FizzBuzz. After that he might want to qualify &quot;Anyone&quot;.

&quot;Throwing coal into a furnace&quot; hasn&#x27;t been a job for about a hundred years now. On other than the smallest scale (say, a home coal furnace) that&#x27;s been done with machinery for longer than Biden has been alive.<p>Does he really not know the difference between being a coal miner (which is a skilled trade, if dirty, strenuous, and dangerous) and being a furnace stoker (which historically required nothing but a strong back)?

The very fact he used a bogus comparison should be self-disqualifying, like, what?!

It&#x27;s election time and things are getting crazier every day. The whole thing is a shit show and I am trying to ignore it.

I rather agree. Call them a front-end engineer and let&#x27;s get back to simplifying what is supposed to be an indexed document delivery platform.<p>The dewey decimal system is more complicated that the request&#x2F;response cycle should be.<p>We invent busywork and it will take coal miners to break this farce, so bring on the coal miners!<p>Hindsight 2020<p>(just kidding, Sanders 2020)