This is the same argument that I've heard from people (mainly young tech workers) that losing 1.5M truck drivers will just require "re-training". The reality that we can simple "turn a knob" and re-train people is extremely myopic.
Edit: That's not to say there aren't a few capable folks that fell on rough times or came from a rough background and never quite got a good enough opportunity to make something of themselves. Certainly it would be nice to have programs to help those folks reach the full extent of their capabilities. But that's definitely not a solution for the broad majority of people in this situation.
The sad truth is that there will always be lower and lower-middle class jobs, because not everyone is capable of joining the upper-middle class. Should those people continue to experience a declining quality of life just because they haven't been genetically or socioeconomically blessed?
It's sad that people like that can't have a little dignity and make a living doing what they're capable of, but that's where we're headed.
1) Lack of knowledge of options. Let's say you wanted to get into the oil business. Without Googling anything, what job would you want? What skills and credentials would you need to acquire to get that job? How would you go about getting those?
2) Lack of education - Imagine trying to learn how to program without knowing what variables are. And then let's say you struggle and become capable of doing junior web dev work. What happens when you encounter even an easy interview question like "Write a program to find the first n prime numbers"
3) Lack of time - Most adults don't have time to focus full time on training, even if they aren't working. Children and elderly family members can suck up a lot of time.
and what you were charging was almost $5/hr for your labor. maybe more if you can invest in capitol equipment like a water jet.
skilled technical labor (machinist, welder, cabinetry, jewelry, etc) isn't much of a growth industry either. but people are still hiring if you already have experience
smt rework is a thing, but that seems like its inherently limited in volume.
i think its pretty tough for someone in a garage to make it work..if anyone has any ideas though..
Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws.
This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.
No, that's not true of STEM in general, and actually AFAICT not particularly true of programming outside of the startup scene and top tech firms; the spare-time programmer is much less common, AFAICT, in the legions of programmer outside of those places, and the parallel phenomenon is no more common in non-programming STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.
This would need to be an education process beginning with encouraging birth control + providing quality education for the children who are born in these regions... and providing enough family financial support so the children didn't have to quit school early just to help their parents survive.
Oftentimes, the problem is age. Older people just finishing training still won't get a job.
Other times, the problem is that they refuse to relocate to another part of the country to get the job they trained for.
It sounds great in theory, but it requires a lot of flexibility that not everyone can have.
Re-skilling the entire mid-west is impossible. Jobs are currently a game of musical chairs. There isn't room in our economy for 15 million engineers, technicians, and shopowners.