Only a special group of conservatives largely in Utah have the ambition and brains to do much tech work. The rest aren’t very promising, and with the current birth rate, future tech jobs will mostly not get done and the work will move abroad.

Indians and even Chinese, not to mention most of the non-European immigrants, are relatively conservative (socially reserved, self reliant, lots of self responsibility) and are only seen as left leaning in the toxic form of nationalistic conservatism that dominates the USA.

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ben_w 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree, but none of this is incompatible with what you replied to.

I have no idea if their claim that the "birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0" is correct, but a demographic power struggle totally fits the rhetoric I observe from abroad.

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themaninthedark 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought that the rural conservatives just needed to learn new skills in order to transition into a new job market.

At least, that was the messaging around 2019 when we were telling coal miners to 'learn to code.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/changing-america/en...

Now we are saying it takes a specific mindset...

It's also looking like those coal miners who pushed back had more foresight as the market is saturated and with the AI sea change.

https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployme...

I do agree with you in part however, it takes ambition to succeed. This is true no matter if you are an immigrant or native born.

Maybe the real question should be, why is our population losing their ambition?

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seanmcdirmid 2 days ago | parent [-]

They should learn to code, but as long as they believe math is some sort of conspiracy, they can’t. And it’s worse as they push their kids into the trades and into mining jobs that should go away, there simply won’t be an improvement quality if life.

Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.

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qcnguy 2 days ago | parent [-]

Nobody says math is a conspiracy, except maybe the far left educators who think math is some kind of racist white supremacy. That's a ridiculous straw man.

https://www.hoover.org/research/seattle-schools-propose-teac...

> China is a conservative country but they believe in education

China is a communist country that banned private tutoring because some children were getting ahead, creating inequality (the "double reduction" policy).

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seanmcdirmid 2 days ago | parent [-]

China is less communist than America these days. And even if they were bonafide communists, that has no real relation to conservative values.

When you give American conservatives actual numbers on the economy, weather, healthcare, they assert that they would much rather go with what they think is true vs what actually is true. They simply don’t believe in data and math, you aren’t going to advance much in tech that way.

	▲	qcnguy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The Chinese economy is far more heavily planned than America's is, and they are far more totalitarian. There is no meaningful way you can claim America is more communist than China. China is less communist than under Mao, for sure, but it must still be kept in perspective. You are conflating "government data" with "math" as if they're the same thing. That's a massive error and suggests you should fix your own understandings before attacking other people's. Someone saying they don't trust the government to report honest/accurate numbers doesn't mean they think math is a conspiracy, and it's a ridiculous distortion to present it like that. In fact, it's exactly that kind of behavior that causes conservatives to not trust leftists (and by extension the government departments most full of them).