&quot;who don&#x27;t have the time to retrain&quot;<p>The reason why we hear and repeat that old people need to retrain, is because employers don&#x27;t want to hire older people and knowing that very few can afford the time and money to retrain, and that it&#x27;s politically permissible to discriminate based on &quot;retraining&quot; then you&#x27;re going to hear a lot about how its really important to retrain and old people need to work harder and its all the victims fault if they won&#x27;t retrain and much hand wringing about those darn victims bringing it on themselves.  If we had a magical (online?) way to retrain old people, the mantra would insta-shift to some other made up reason why old people can&#x27;t be hired and no one would talk about training anymore.<p>It the same thing with women or minorities who aren&#x27;t cultural fits.  Its not that there are no star wars fans in those demographics or that it truly matters, its just a way to say in polite company that blacks need not apply because of racism.  Just go ahead, &quot;change your culture&quot; and we&#x27;ll hire you.  Oh you say that&#x27;s impossible, oh so sad I guess we&#x27;ll hire the white boy instead.  What a shame we really wanted to hit our diversity quota, but, (shrugs shoulders) well you know how important culture is.  I mean look at how important culture is at every other employer who coincidentally also doesn&#x27;t hire black people.  Oh it doesn&#x27;t matter in the greater economy?  We&#x27;ll we&#x27;re special snowflakes in this industry, you see, and you outsiders just don&#x27;t understand, we really, really don&#x27;t like women programmers or black programmers.