Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

I find this kind of "in depth" news series frustrating. The problem here is not lack of coal business; it's lack of ability or motivation for these people to pull up stakes and move to a better area.

I would suggest North Dakota, or would have up until a year or two ago when the price of oil dropped drastically. The jobs up there were paying crazy wages, truck drivers pulling six figures, restaurant dish washers making $15-20/hour etc. It's a temporary boom but the fact is, that's where the jobs are, or were. Still better economy up there than in Kentucky, even now.

Thus, what's really missing from these backward areas is education. With good education, even just K-8, people will have the ability and resources to understand that they can vote with their feet and move to where the economic opportunities are. Someone with mining experience might do OK as a roughneck in west Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota. If you're a hard worker and have been in the mines, or driven trucks, or done back breaking work outdoors, you're going to be able to find something.

But as for people who just sit around their cabins, the classic backwoods hillbilly stereotype, addicted to opioids or other chemicals and unable to or unwilling to do something about their situation -- sorry if this sounds hard hearted but it's hard for me to dredge up a lot of sympathy. Someone who's not sitting around feeling sorry for himself and abusing drugs -- that's the one I have sympathy and respect for.

The thing is, people do. That's part of the problem. Who leaves? The most able, the most motivated. Those left behind? Less able, less motivated. Which makes it worse.

This was my own father. He came from a little west of that belt, the tobacco farms of south central Kentucky. He got up and left as soon as he could. He never even graduated high school. When I was a kid, we'd visit my grandfather's farm. I thought it was heaven - Kentucky is extraordinarily beautiful. But they didn't have electricity or running water. Not really something a five year old notices, but an adult remembers.

Incidentally, the exact same problem has happened to inner city black neighborhoods. In the pre-civil rights era, blacks simply weren't allowed to live in white neighborhoods, so the doctors, lawyers, business owners, and other talented and determined black leaders lived in the same neighborhood as the poor. Once they got the ability to live somewhere nicer, they left, leaving ghettos full of addicts, gangs, the uneducated, the disabled, basically people unable to leave.

It's really difficult for people who have grown up with the privileges of middle/upper class to comprehend what it's like to live in poverty. It's not just that you're poor. It's that you're surrounded by losers, because all the people with talent have already left. When I was a kid, I didn't know anyone wealthy, except those men my father worked for, whom he hated. I didn't know anyone well-educated, except teachers. The most successful adult I knew owned a motorcycle dealership, and not a very big one.

And as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, I left. I went to a great college and met a whole new class of people. But mostly, I was running. I got up and ran, and kept running until the stupid racist redneck bikers were long behind me. Because when you have talent and you live in crap, that's what you do.

I don't come quite from your background, but my social circle growing up overlapped with that world a bit. There's a huge gap between the bone-in poverty world and the "rest" of the US; ambition, expectations, mobility, money, interactions with authority, etc.

It's the case that able and motivated people leave, and they better themselves, and the people left behind are, sadly, less able, less motivated, less something. This accelerates the cycle. It's not just city/country (although that seems to be a big part of it): out West there is still a lot of money in industrial farming of wheat, potatoes, etc. Those communities are chugging along. It's the communities which have no industry that fail.

So I'm from the area and taught a remote CS class though teals. It isn't that easy. Most of these people don't have enough money for day to day and your idea of moving to another region requires capital. People that have never in there life had enough money to go to the dentist may find it challenging to move there entire family halfway across the country and support themselves while they get setup. Almost all the people with the means do leave what you have left are those that are already support family members or are tied to the land in some way.

So they have money for drugs but not moving?

Some people feel that they not only have the right to never move, but others should come in and help them, through aid or whatnot, for their bad decision.

you want to live in a barren waste land, that's your problem; Don't complain about it.

> So they have money for drugs but not moving?

$40 for some weed is different than the cost of gas, deposit to rent a new place, days or weeks of food while you find a new job, and stress of leaving your friends and family.

Yes, they have money for drugs but not moving.

$40 + $40 + $40 = enough.

Probably too stoned out of their minds to think that far ahead. They should move ahead with having their next 3 children instead.

>With good education, even just K-8, people will have the ability and resources to understand that they can vote with their feet and move to where the economic opportunities are.

With good education you might understand that there is a non-insignificant relocation cost that not everyone can afford.

Well, no one's saying it's easy to pick up and move. But sometimes it's just necessary.

Even if it's necessary, how do you manage to move if you have zero dollars, empty tank (or no car), constant calls from collectors (if your phone is hooked up)...

Sometimes it's not hard, but impossible.

I think the point is that whatever aid is provided should help people leave, not help them stay.

The point is, if you aren't going to do BIG, at least revive the 'new deal'. Unemployment shouldn't mean you don't have a job, it should mean you have the default job; sure that job might be underemployment and you might be underpaid relative to your skills, but you still have a job, a way of actually making the ends meet. Let's also finish the job of providing the other basic rights that a society expecting people to live in a city instead of carving their own village out of the wilderness should. Basic food, shelter, security, and health/death care.

You have to wonder then how is it that Mexico's poorer rural farmers are able to migrate over to the USA and start from scratch in a new country?

Deep family and community support system.

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