I’m not downvoting you - on HN you can’t downvote someone you are replying to. It’s the rest of HN that is downvoting your arguments.
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.
I think the sentiment you are responding to is the erosion of good jobs. There are tons of new jobs, but for those impacted by this stuff very few of them are good jobs that pay a middle-class income (I know, I don't have a cite, but I'm explaining a sentiment, not a fact - so iono I don't got it).
A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.
Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.
Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.
The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.
So what replaced the jobs in Detroit? You keep saying this but the numbers don't reflect what you're claiming. The middle class in the US is SHRINKING, their wealth is decreasing, and it has been since the 70s. All those jobs are going to other countries or disappearing entirely. You and everyone else on HN can keep parroting the same "it's different jobs" until you're blue in the face, but until you can show me some actual DATA to backup the claim, you're literally just making up a reality that doesn't exist. You're 4 responses in yet without a single citation to back up your claim that there are new jobs to replace the old, and I'm willing to bet if you replied 20 more times you STILL wouldn't have any facts to back anything up you've said. Going from a manufacturing job making $60-80k+/year to driving Uber making minimum wage isn't a "replacement".
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.