For business partners Rusty Justice and M. Lynn Parrish, it’s at least one solution. This is not some grand conspiracy. It was cool, and funny to say that to those people, on Twitter in 2012. It's no different than being a sail-maker when the world was switching from sail to steam, or a buggy whip maker, etc. Who, through no fault of their own, ended up losing their jobs due to a certain administration. The “learn to code” meme is simply based on a lie. Anyone can learn to code, and I’m glad to see recognition that you don’t need to be in your 20s to do this as a profession. Story at a glance. Proposals to retrain coal miners … The idea that simply writing about programs designed to teach miners to code is an endorsement of those programs is just a bad faith argument. I think "learn how to Code" is itself code, it just means find another career path because what you're doing now is going away. The website Know Your Meme searched for the phrase “learn to code” and found the term began to spark interest in 2011. Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested Monday that displaced coal miners should learn to code. Email This BlogThis! “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well,” Biden said at a New Hampshire event Monday. Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest. Unfortunately there's a lot more to that. At a rally yesterday, Joe Biden advised a crowd in a coal mining town to learn computer programming. You're not just changing one job for another. #learningtocode. "Learn to code" is something that snarky journalists used to tell to actual skilled, blue collar laborers like coal miners. He added later: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”. It relies on people not reading past the headlines and has no basis in fact. The phrase is not something new, and Google trends bears this out. The closest thing to a smug “learn to code” response to miners losing jobs came from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who actually dismissed out-of-work miners … After that, "Learn to code" was used 1) as a meme phrase attempting to parody the narrative and 2) in continuation of the "everyone should learn to code" movement. Jim Ratliff worked for 14 years in the mines of Eastern Kentucky, drilling holes and blasting dynamite to expose the coal that has powered Appalachian life for more than a century. Interest has remained high since 2015, when the news articles about coal miners began to crop up. Is learning to code the answer to the plight of struggling coal miners? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction - Isaac Newton at 11:51 AM. 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