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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

Probably depends on where you go to school. My high school was in the middle of a pre-trump era industrial region of WI. High school was teaching us the basics to go work in a factory.

However I did learn to read, and a book on the bare basics of accounting is like 200 pages.

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Accounting is just arithmetic, some jargon, and some rules. There's nothing hard about it. There's no reason high school can't teach it to ordinary students.

When you say "pre-Trump-era industrial region", do you mean that there is now more industry there, or less?

There were many small manufacturers, and I think 2 very large ones near me. When I was around 13 I think, one of the big ones closed down, and many of the small ones followed soon after. It went to Democrats every year (but the margin was dwindling over time). 2016 it finally flipped completely. I think there is a trickle of new things coming back, but I don't think it is correlated with Trump in any way. I describe it as pre-trump because, at least to me, I get a very vivid picture of a region with a long history of successful industry that's dried up, and the only thing people have left in the area is retail and healthcare.

To be fair, the sort of people who used to live there then are not of a kind with the variety that live there now. Most of those who could leave — undoubtedly like yourself — did.

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