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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Exactly. There was no way she could have shared her medical condition without criticism. As the saying goes, damned if you do, damned if you don't .
edited 14th Sep '16 10:42:07 AM by Nightlikeday
I know the truth—darkness beats light. Visit my DA: I'll share my secrets stories with you.Bill Galston via Equiblog: Hard Truths for Appalachian Coal Country
Takeaways:
- Coal was on its way out long before environmental regulation was a big deal.
- Even at its peak, coal accounted for a miniscule fraction of the economies of West Virginia and Kentucky. It's symbolic, with no real economic meaning.
- Those two states have the lowest labor force participation rates, the worst education, the worst health, and the highest ratio of people on disability in the nation. (Not stated, but I'm going to propose adding drug abuse to the list.)
If there is anywhere that harbors a culture of dependency on welfare and a disdain for honest work, it's among those poor white folks who vote Republican because they've been taught that government is the cause of their problems, whist sucking eagerly at the teat of entitlements and complaining about the jobs they have.
Let's say, as a thought experiment, that we abolished all environmental regulation, expelled all illegal immigrants, and stopped all imports from China and other cheap-labor countries. These people would still not have good-paying jobs, because (a) nobody would want to hire them; (b) they wouldn't want to work even if they were hired.
edited 14th Sep '16 11:18:05 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Strange. It's on my Equiblog feed. Must have been taken down.
Original post
is at the WSJ: Equiblog's excerpt:
It is irresponsible for politicians to suggest that these mining jobs will return; they can’t and won’t. And even if mining recovered modestly, it would make at best a small contribution to coal states’ economies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mining and logging now account for only 3% of West Virginia’s total employment and less than 1% of Kentucky’s. Coal is less an economic development issue than a potent symbol in the partisan culture war. The future lies elsewhere.
Real economic recovery in Appalachia—the heart of Red America—requires facing some hard truths…. West Virginia has the lowest labor-force participation rate of any state in the country, 53%, and Kentucky the seventh-lowest, 58.5%…. Among prime working-age adults, age 25 to 54, West Virginia ranks dead last, Kentucky next to last…. Low levels of educational attainment help explain this gap, as does poor health. West Virginians are twice as likely as the average American to receive federal disability payments. Indeed, the share of the state’s adult population dependent on Social Security Disability Insurance is the highest in the country. (Kentucky ranks fourth.)
J.D. Vance… writes about running into a hometown acquaintance who said he had quit his job because he was “sick of waking up early.” Mr. Vance subsequently saw him complaining on Facebook about the “ Obama economy.” This man, he comments, is not a victim: His situation is “directly attributable to the choices he’s made.” But nothing in his environment forces him to look in the mirror and ask tough questions about himself. On the contrary, Mr. Vance insists: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.” The author of “Hillbilly Elegy”… a self-described conservative… criticizes his fellow conservatives for failing to tell their constituents the truth. Instead, the message of the right, Mr. Vance says, is: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault”…
The right tells poor, uneducated whites that it's the government's fault that they are economically disenfranchised, whilst at the same time telling minorities that it's their fault: they need to buck up and stop being takers. The hypocrisy is extraordinary.
edited 14th Sep '16 11:42:26 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Fighteer, you're sounding like a Fox News pundit. What's with the poor-hate rhetoric?
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Oh, give me a break. Have you lost all ability to understand context?
If one examines the work ethic among poor people as a measure of their moral worth, as the right is wont to do, these coal country whites compare quite unfavorably to, say, urban blacks. Yet the overwhelming narrative on the right is that the Appalachian folks would prosper if only the government would stop taking rich people's money and giving it to minorities; stop making coal feel bad about polluting the environment so there would be some kind of renaissance in mining; get the immigrants out so that Americans can have their jobs back.
These are blatant lies, and the voter base buys them completely.
Now, I reject the narrative of blaming the poor for their economic circumstances as a general evasion against helping them. However, it is certainly the case that individuals may make poor choices, and that those choices cause them to lose access to opportunity. The proper course is to work to lift everyone up — if you can't work, if you won't work, fine, but you should at least have enough to feed and house yourself and the freedom to strive for education and social participation if you wish. You should have the information available to you that allows you to make informed choices, and an environment in which making those choices does not carry the risk of falling through the cracks.
The right does not wish to give people these things.
edited 14th Sep '16 11:59:15 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"West Virginia and Kentucky have been stuck in the last century since the last century.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?![]()
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On that note, it's so uncanny how heated members of both sides have two common consensuses about those on the other:
1. They're being oppressed by the other side
2. The other side is made up of entitled assholes who want to coast by on privilege/political correctness.
It's like an eternal loop of resentment.
edited 14th Sep '16 11:51:04 AM by nervmeister
Well, in a certain sense, both are right: they are being oppressed. However, in both cases, the oppressors are mainly on the right side of the political spectrum. The main difference between left and right in this case is that the right-wing poor are conditioned to blame liberals and minorities, which is a false narrative.
edited 14th Sep '16 11:54:29 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"And, of course, when you look at what coal is actually used for...it's not that much. Almost no one heats their houses with coal, no one cooks with it with the exception of a very few "historical restaurants", steam trains aren't really a thing any more and so on. Most of the coal produced in Canada and the US is sent on to China. Cutting off trade with others would outright kill the coal industry.
Coal is used for electricity generation, mainly. It's also possible to build coal plants that recapture most of the emissions, making them competitively clean with other fossil fuels, but the necessary technology obviously increases the cost.
The coal fetishists insist that all we need to do to fix the economies of the Appalachian states is get rid of all this foofy solar and wind crap and build a bunch of unregulated coal plants that belch plumes of toxic smoke all over the North American continent.
I suppose they also think we should do away with automation and safety regulations in coal mining, and just send in tens of thousands of hard-hatted workers who will die in ten years from black lung. Because that was the golden age, yo. Sadly, it is all that generations of families knew, which is why it's taken on such a romantic tone even though it was one of the most hellish occupations imaginable.
edited 14th Sep '16 1:06:42 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"edited 14th Sep '16 1:51:28 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.![]()
It sounds like a chapter from a biography I read. The author was from "Pennsyl-Tuckey," as we term anything that isn't Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. In the southern part of the state, you have farmlands. In the mountainous north, you have coal mines.
In the author's own words: "You were born, you worked in the mines, you died. Next generation, lather, rinse, repeat. People couldn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, because most were too poor to own boots."
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.The picture was then credited, then taken down after said artist shamed Johnson over Facebook and Twitter.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."Sorry, to double post, but I want to ask about the newest Wikileaks leak. Specifically, what are the bullet points for it. I really want to know what actually is in them, but I can't find anything without a heavy bent towards one side or the other.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."My great-grandfather was a coal miner. He died at the age of 50 from black lung. Frankly I think shutting down the mines was one of the best things we could have done. Obviously there should be some kind of other industry but going back to coal is idiotic. It's like bitching about how automobiles destroyed the carriage industry. We're better off without it.
edited 14th Sep '16 2:13:58 PM by Kostya
Join the club. That goes for almost any controversial topic.
I know the truth—darkness beats light. Visit my DA: I'll share my secrets stories with you.Clean coal is a lie. It has always been a lie. This is obvious if you take a second and look at what it would involve. It involves pumping the CO 2 back underground into geological formations which would retain it. Well, okay, air-tight geology is a thing. If it was not, there would be no such thing as natural gas. But separating out and then pumping this amount of gas is very energetically expensive.
Estimates are that it would consume at least one third of the entire output of the power plant it's pumping gas from.
That right there is a big markup on the price of the electricity from such a plant. Further, the physical plant enabling it would be very expensive. In fact, it would make coal plants cost more to build than nuclear reactors. People are willing to pay for the very high cost of nuclear reactors because they have very low fuel costs. This idea has higher fuel costs than conventional coal, and costs more to build than a reactor.
Finally, just as a cherry on top, it could potentially also cause a bigger, even *less* pr friendly disaster than a nuclear reactor. All coal plants kill more people than nuclear reactors do, but this white elephant can do it dramatically, all at once, in a way far harder to ignore than miners dying and slow poisoning of the world.
Remember that air-tight geology? The places that retain natural gas occurred over geological time - we don't expect them to just breech and vent in any given year because they're all very old, and if that was something likely to happen, it probably already would have. But if we're making new air-retaining geologies, they do not come with that warranty. So they can potentially vent. You know what that would cause? A large area where all animal life, including humans, promptly choke to death until the CO 2 disperses back to a non-lethal concentration.
All of this. The costs, the risk, are obvious to anyone who takes two seconds to think about it. Especially anyone in the power industry. Noone has any intention of ever building these, except possibly as a one-off public relations exercise. The entire concept is simply designed to enable these companies to pretend that coal has a long term future. It does not. They know that, and are straight up lying to the public and to their investors to keep them from heading out the door right this instant.
edited 14th Sep '16 3:34:23 PM by Izeinsummer
Please- They're resources. It's entirely possible to own fifty square kilometers of the Sahara and the installation on top of it, or all the best wind energy sites in Chile. That's not the problem, the problem is that a corporation is a system for doing a particular thing. Dirty-Coal-Inc has geologists, blasting experts, and huge fuck-off machinery for digging huge holes in the ground. In order to do renewables, they need material scientists, and entirely different machinery. Pivoting a large corporation is just really difficult. Usually what happens instead is that the large corporation dies, and a small corporation in the new field that displaced it grows really big.

As far as I recall from what I've heard about William Henry Harrison, he gave a really long inaugural speech in a cold/damp environment. Think he was older than Clinton too.