Older workers facing reduction and layoffs have little opportunity - even if they are retrained. I am a tradesman with over 15 years accumulated trade experience in heavy industry and 30 years total technological experience. I have gone through a ton of retraining, including achieving a technology diploma in electronics and a bachelor degree in Computer Science. I have always had high marks and I excelled reasonably well at most jobs. Now I am trying to switch gears into pure software development, C++, Java, Javascript, Front-end, Back-end, Full-stack. Whatever opportunity I can sink my teeth into would be great. I have put over 60 resumes out there in the Vancouver, Canada area - very few callbacks. One online interview. Very sparse. I believe the problem is that I am 50 years old and my resume reflects that. Too much previous work experience and higher expectation of pay. I have been on the hiring side of management and I recall I tended to favour the younger hire myself. My reasoning was at the time was that I could train the younger hire vs. dealing with older trainees. I have not had good luck with established employee training in the past. Now that I reflect on it, it seems that I had a misperception. Younger hires were as difficult as the older hires with learning and adaptation. The secret may be the ability for self-learning. Interest and passion usually are the indicators of successful hires. And I recall only a small proportion (5%?) of potential candidates that met that criteria. So, for technical positions, it is not the courses you have taken, but the passion you bring to the job. Unfortunately, it appears that society views older people as lacking passion towards technology. The politicians need to address this aspect of society. Retraining will not help if the worker is not interested in the subject material. In my previous experience, industrial workers are passionate about their work because it is well within their skill set. We must realize how limiting and niche new technology skills are and the different levels of merit required to achieve success. A programmer may not be able to yield a 22 oz hammer for 1000 blows a day and a tradesmen may never be able to develop a simple heuristic for an NP-hard problem. That does not mean that either individual is not passionate about their trade. There is more to life (and hopefully the economy) that coding.

Employees at Google need to calm down and think about this ... they are usually good at that type of thing. And carbon swaps will not save the day either. There is a point where the cost of oil production from extraction, through transport, then refinement, becomes cost-prohibitive and the carbon sequestered in the ground will stay there. We just have to be imaginative enough to find that point ...

We are not there yet, but we do need innovation to get there and it must be on a global scale. How do we do that? By using the resources we consume currently to transform our society and our viewpoints. We build what we can only imagine and we profit from it if it produces what we expect (economists have probably blinked out thinking this is too philosophical).

A simple solution is to supplant oil production with green technology -- in a definite and decisive economic manner. We need to put the economic reins of control back into the innovators and wrest them from opportunists who can easily grab power from oil. And it requires employees at Google to understand this long-term requirement.

The Google employees are probably young and idealistic and they have to realize that change needs to slow, purposeful and strategic. Not, quick, unguided and without any long-term result. Running away from profitable business that can be supplanted and transformed is the death knell of a corporation. You can transform within an industry, but to run from it takes you out of the game.