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Dear Conservative Life Coach…
1983
Dear Conservative Life Coach,
I’m 23 and just graduated from college and I’ve met the most wonderful girl. Neither one of us believes in sex before marriage so ‘shacking up’ is out of the question. Should I ask her to marry me even though my career is still in its infancy?
Bob in Ohio
Dear Bob,
Absolutely! We know that the way to prosperity is to get married and have children.
CLC
1993
Dear Conservative Life Coach,
I’m 33 and just got a nice promotion at work. My wife and I have been renting but the kids are growing and we’re thinking about buying a home. Should we make the leap?
Bob in Ohio
Dear Bob,
Absolutely! Home ownership is a surefire way to prosperity! Plus home ownership makes for stronger neighborhoods and stronger communities in general. And with all the tax breaks and programs designed for first time buyers there’s never been a better time!
CLC
2005
Dear Conservative Life Coach,
My wife’s father has Alzheimers. We’ve been looking at extended care facilities but neither of us liked what we saw. Should we add a room on to the house or petition the government to expand care to the elderly?
Bob in Ohio
Dear Bob,
First of all, we conservatives know that government is never the solution to any problem. If I were you I’d take out a small loan, build your father-in-law a room and take care of him! Nobody is going to do that better than family. And to encourage and reward good people like you we’re working on providing tax breaks for caregivers.
CLC
2013
Dear Conservative Life Coach,
My oldest just graduated from high school and we’re looking at colleges. Are Federal Student Loans really the way to go?
Bob in Ohio
Dear Bob,
Absolutely! With the changing economy you know your child is going to to have to have at least a Bachelor’s degree to compete in the job market. Besides, we’re working to pass new changes to the Dependent Child Tax Credit that will reward good people like you!
CLC
2017
Dear Conservative Life Coach,
I’ve done everything you told me to do in the past. I’m 57 and farther and farther away from retirement with all the changes in Social Security. Now it seems my company is moving production overseas. All of the tech jobs here in the home office are being filled by H1B visa workers from India. I’m losing my job and my health insurance. I had to refinance the house after the ’08 crash plus I have those additional loans that I took out for the addition for my elderly father-in-law and college loans for both kids. And the real estate market here is pretty depressed. What do I do now?
Trump Voter in Ohio
Dear Ohio,
Why are you asking me? If you voted for Trump you’re obviously not a true conservative. Stop whining and looking to others to solve your problems! You should have thought about this a long time ago.
CLC
2019
Published in GeneralDear Conservative Life Coach,
Screw you.
Angry in Ohio
I would add ..bought a home to live in that they could afford…
There are coding bootcamps that last about 12 weeks. They could also be sent to a technical school to learn a trade. They can learn a new skill late in life without going to college.
I doubt they would be able to learn advanced mathematics or engineering at that point in their lives.
Of course it has worth, and of course it can be sold. Just not at the price you might want. So you don’t sell it. Or you do, if it makes sense to do so.
See how easy that was?
That’s another thing we do bass-akwards in this country. We have private/public funded training programs and THEN we try to find people jobs. If an industry needs trained workers give the training funds to the companies. They can hire the people that pick up the skills quickly and identify the ones who can’t and move them on to acquire another skill.
Everything is easy when it’s not you.
I guess whatever Albert Brooks tells us to do?
That sounds awful. If you let the companies decide what should be taught, then they will make classes as narrow as possible so that students only know how to fulfill whatever jobs they need filled. These companies can’t be trusted to design classes in advanced mathematics or statistics, primarily because they don’t see an immediate need for them and I doubt people whose task it would be to design such courses would understand advanced math or stats.
Contrary to what conservatives believe, the best and the brightest in quantitative fields tend to not work in industry. They become professors.
Stay with the group? Don’t go off on your own?
I’m not sure what your problem is. You already said these sorts of things can’t be taught in 12 weeks.
I interpreted the comment to refer to all training at the university level.
Oh. I thought it was about the boot camps.
After 40+ years of experience, I would say it’s the same with coding. It’s been my experience that most people can never be good at coding, period, even if they start trying when young. The older they get, the more unlikely they are to “get” it to any significant – i.e., employable – degree.
Plus which, coding has to be one of the most easily-outsourced jobs to ever arise. To put it simply, however little pay you might be willing to accept to do coding in the US, someone in some other part of the world is willing to do it for less.
You could be right. Re-reading the comment, I’m not sure what he is referring to.
I thought the whole point of the coding bootcamps was that anyone can learn it well enough to get a decent job.
The alternative is to have government programs that train people for non-existent jobs, or for jobs for which they’d never qualify. When it’s a government “program” it doesn’t work out well either way.
Conservatives: “You’re a fool for trusting the government!”
Also Conservatives: “Trust this government retraining program.”
The alternative is to have universities continue to train students in quantitative fields as they do right now.
Or work at a hedge fund.
Theft and what is basically non-productivity has been reward like crazy in the last 20 years or so. People want Trump or Bernie to fix it, or get them in on the action. That is just the reality.
This discussion reminds me of the local public school district’s proposal in the 1990s to rework the high school curriculum and scheduling system. The proponents would explain how people can no longer expect to work in the same job their entire life. Their solution? Switch to providing courses in narrower skills and specialties.
You could try to explain the obvious disconnect to them, and they acted as though you were speaking in a foreign language. And at the next public meeting they’d go through the same routine.
Some people, including the trainers, are not trainable.
The only guy who I can think of that was probably amongst the best in his class and went on to work at a hedge fund is this guy.
I’m sure there are more, but he is the most famous.
So what happened?
Our youngest graduated in the early 2000s. I washed my hands of the whole business, and no longer kept up. They did get their block scheduling program adopted, in a modified form, but our son graduated by the time it was much implemented.
Somewhere in the proposal process, though, I had been in touch with a local newspaper reporter, so a member of our opposition group asked me to question her about something she had reported based on information from the Superintendent. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember her email reply (possibly in slightly paraphrased form): “I had no reason to question what he said.” That Superintendent didn’t last much longer, and the new guy seemed to be an improvement. At least he was more politic in dealing with the public. But by then I was paying less attention.
The block scheduling itself didn’t necessarily mean that they would teach narrower specialties, but the concept was presented as a package. All during the years during which I was involved with the local schools there was constant pressure from certain teachers and parents to offer narrower vocational or professional specialty training to students. I had been on a couple of curriculum committees so had gotten used to carrying on my end of the argument, but the proposals for training for soon-to-be-obsolete jobs or too-narrow specialties never let up. Training for narrower computer programming was always an item. The strongest proponents were people who knew the least about computers. My own experience in the field, as well as that of other computer professionals on our committee, was that people who were successful at it were driven to learn, and that while schools could be helpful and supportive, it was just not the sort of thing best taught as part of a school curriculum.
But there were also the parents who would say, “My daughter is going into psychology and why don’t we offer any courses in psychology? Or, My daughter is going into veterinary medicine, and why don’t we offer any courses in veterinary medicine?” The problem was not just the educational establishment, some members of which had more sense than some of the more highly educated parents. (There were a lot of well-off professionals in our school district, though that has changed somewhat now that the pharmaceutical industry, which was a big employer, has consolidated.)
I’m a big fan of providing a broad education in liberal arts and math & science for almost everyone, and letting the specialization, whether vocational or professional, come later than the high school years. But a lot of nuance is needed, with details to be worked out with give-and-take. It’s not an either/or sort of thing. But when new programs are being proposed, there is no more room for nuance. Proposing public programs is like going to war. Then it’s time for everyone to choose sides, and there is no room for neutrals and nuance.
I agree with all of this. If they privatized all of it except the funding, the aggregate value would go way up. Voucher-ize all of it.
Perhaps I missed it in the comments and explanations, but there’s coding, and there’s coding. One is computer code, which requires learning languages, and the other is data-entry for government / insurance billing. If you hav someone who sits at a computer all day assigning specific numbers to specific procedures to generate an invoice, that’s coding. It doesn’t require Fortran.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the 12-week “coding camps” are about. But the kind of coding you describe is also easily outsourced at much lower cost.
There was a guy I knew years ago, who worked in grocery stores, stocking shelves etc, and actually got a pretty decent income from it. He expressed an interest in learning programming (perhaps a better term to use than “coding”) and I suggested he “not give up his day job” because the kind of work he was doing – and raising his family on – was not likely to be outsourced to Bombay or Manila any time soon. Unlike programming, OR “coding.”
Okay, I’ve never understood the question of job retraining to refer to anything else than programming. At least when it uses the word ‘code’.
If they’re actually supposed to be teaching programming type “coding,” not the kind of medical-billing-etc “coding” that James describes, then frankly I’d have to think they’re lying. Or they just don’t understand enough about it themselves, to realize when they’ve failed.
Based on my experience, this article describes the problem very well, and many of the comments are also quite enlightening (as well as entertaining).
https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/
You can take courses in medical coding, of which there are two types, diagnostic coding and billing coding. And since computer billing has been enshrined in law, it won’t be going anywhere fast, though it can change year to year.
The link is broken.