Joe Biden tells coal miners they should 'learn to program'
Joe Biden may have just fallen for a fatal argument from Hillary Clinton's 2016 run.
The former vice president held a rally in New Hampshire on Monday, where he pushed the idea of retraining coal miners as programmers by saying "Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well." And as The Washington Post's Dave Weigel noted in a tweet, "This sort of 'just transition' stuff was murder on Clinton in 2016."
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"What, exactly, these blue collar workers in the mining and coal-shoveling sectors should learn to code is unclear," Alec McGinnis writes for Gizmodo. Coal jobs may be shrinking, but the tech sector isn't seeing the unlimited growth it once was. While "anyone can learn to code" even if you're "not in your 20s," Massachusetts congressional candidate Brianna Wu says Biden's job advice is just "tone-deaf and unhelpful." And as Weigel continues to point out — and compare to a similarly "elitist" notion from Clinton's campaign — this is all "the sort of thing you hear from well-meaning rich people who don't live in Appalachia."
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