Posted on 07/03/2005 2:29:58 PM PDT by Our_Man_In_Gough_Island
Cañon City's streets are empty and homes are silhouetted against the gray sky when Zeke Porter sets off for work.
To save on gas, the 24-year-old car-pools with a fellow miner as they drive 60 miles on a one-lane, bumpy trail partly carved out of a sheer canyon wall to reach the Cripple Creek & Victor gold mine. Porter punches in at 6 a.m.
After a 10-hour shift in the millwright shop where equipment is repaired, he punches out and heads back down the mountain to his wife and 1-year-old son. On a good day, he walks through the door by about 6:30 p.m.
This is Porter's routine, Monday through Thursday for the past five years. He is a rare breed: a new generation of experienced, loyal miners whom robust Colorado mining companies are scrambling to recruit and retain.
The state's mining and natural resource sector employed 15,900 at the end of May, the highest in a decade and a 12 percent jump from a year ago. More jobs are on the anvil as new mines are explored and dormant ones are resurrected.
The boom highlights a long-overlooked dilemma: There aren't enough skilled miners in this generation to fill the growing number of jobs.
For one, the handful of trade schools in the state that train electricians, diesel mechanics, heavy equipment drivers and underground maintenance workers can't keep pace with demand.
Mining schools and state universities that pour out hundreds of engineers and geologists each year typically don't offer training in those blue-collar trades.
Also, mining is a lackluster profession. Average salaries of from $68,000 to $87,000 (for coal miners), health benefits, life insurance and vacations are not enough to lure people to this grime-and-dirt work. Never mind that most mines don't even require a high school diploma.
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
What are you talking about? You're confusing me with someone else.
My great-grandfather was recruited from Galicia (southern Poland, then part of Austria-Hungary) to work in the mines of Dickson City, PA at the turn of the last century.
There's so much land we could quadruple the population and not even notice it. Have you not ever looked out the window of an airplane. Most of this country is unused forest.
Thats debatable.
I'll concede, I am biased, I work in real estate (In NYC no less).
As has been pointed out, and numerious times (beyond repetition and almost annoyingly so) you could fit the entire population of the earth (over six billion no less) into an area around the size of texas (if you gave each individual person, man, woman and child indiviudally, around 1,1500 feet to live on or as we call it in NYC, a single bedroom apt, bare in mind, the "texas model" assumes no 2nd floor)
In other words, RE wise, over population is a myth, the entire population of the planet, if it so chose, could live in housing in a area the size of a large US state, without going overboard (over that states lines) sinlge story wise and be just as good to go as now (or better).
Housing is scarce but nobody wants to live there. A conundrum.
A double whammy!
Sing Sing and Alcatraz bested you: they wasted only 70 square feet per person.
Of course, some silly people think concentrating people is how you make a concentration camp.
I've seen the population double in my lifetime, and I noticed it plenty.
I'm talking prime real estate, pal.
You can live in some flat, boring, landlocked desert or flatland hell with the rest of your zillion immigrants if you like, just make sure your pollution doesn't drift over my property.
Seventy square miles of salt-water ocean front property for each person in a climate not too hot and not too cold is my ideal.
When you've run out of land for that, you're overpopulated.
And we've long since run out.
Even before Europeans arrived (driven out of Europe by overpopulation there), the Indians were overpopulated.
And it keeps getting worse.
Have you not ever looked out the window of an airplane.
Funny you should mention that.
Looking out the window during my first plane trip, down the East Coast, was a horrific lesson in how fast seemingly vast natural wilderness can be paved over and built upon.
It was houses all the way down, and it hasn't gotten any less crowded in the decades since.
Most of this country is unused forest.
May what's left of our unused forests ever remain so.
Please see post #29
Yep.
It sounds good.
One thing I am wondering...there are plenty of unemployed coal miners in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. I wonder why no company has thought to recruit from those folks, who could be probably be retrained to hard rock mining pretty easily.
Well, they are pretty silly people for thinking so stupidly, but their naive should not stop us from facing facts. Silly people who are ignorant can either learn or be ignored.
Note, sing sing and Alcatraz were multistory units, I'm using a single story example.
Its a simple mistake.
That said, people prefer living in cities, which is why they have the most populations, if people choose that style, then complain about over population is akin to claiming there isn't enough food to eat, while fasting intentionally.
That said, there is a huge surplus of prime real estate and land, if people choose to use it, this foolhardy notion of a "land shortage" can finally cease being taken seriously.
Its annoying that people really think there is not enought land or to many people, where does such nonsense come from?
Many hard rock miners come from there already. Most miners are family men and their wives just don't want to live in the isolated areas where the western mines are.
...
I am sorry to hear that.
Just remember the rule of thirds.
A third of folks won't do nuthin.
A third of folks don't do nuthin right.
The rest of us make the world work.
Lol...True!
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