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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> We view it as the next economic revolution for coal towns," said Harry Collins, the chairman of the Letcher County Broadband Board, which formed late last year. "The majority of our railroad tracks are ripped up now—that revolution has played out. We feel that this [digital] revolution is just as game changing and life changing as those railroad tracks were in the 20s and 30s."

It's sad, but this is wishful thinking. If anything, tech-related jobs are more concentrated in urban areas than other service industries. These places have no economic viability outside the specific circumstances (coal mining, farming) that caused people to move there in the first place.

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The internet and tech related jobs are the best opportunity to work remotely that anyone living in a dying coal town will have.

An online freelancer with a low cost of living can live decently.

> An online freelancer with a low cost of living can live decently.

Eastern European and freelancer here. I can do all that freelance work for much cheaper than any American from a dying coal town. Furthermore, we Eastern European freelancers generally tend to be university educated, are used to working in a global cross-cultural marketplace, and we have a large pool of local talent we can subcontract work out to and thus grow our business. Anyone in rural America who now starts trying to make it in freelancing is likely to lose out to us.

On the other hand, one thing we cannot do – due to our foreign passports – is easily move to a large American city. So, I think moving to the cities is a better option for someone in a dying coal town than staying there and hoping for success in the digital economy.

Are you sure your cost of living is much less than a small town in an economically depressed rural area in the US?

An average middle class salary in my country would be around 1000€/month. That provides for a pretty good life in my country. In the USA, on the other hand, that annual income would be below the poverty level. The cost of fiber internet, electricity and gas is much cheaper in Eastern Europe than the horrible prices I have seen quoted for North America.

For what it’s worth, I am now a digital nomad. I don’t stay in my country on that salary, I travel among countries that are even cheaper. Someone who intends on staying in their dying coal town in Appalachia does not have that option.

If it costs $5,000 - 10,000 more to hire an American, so be it. The company gets an individual of native culture, native English speaker and a fellow countryman. Plus they are at least within 3 hours based on time-zone - minus Alaska and Hawaii.

So be it to who? The simple phenomenon of outsourcing shows that getting a "fellow countryman" isn't worth such a drastically higher cost to many clients. Yes, hiring people from the Indian subcontinent has burned many clients, but after getting burned they are often more likely to look towards Eastern Europe, where we are "close enough", than to hire North Americans at that much higher cost.

Time zone isn't so important, inasmuch as many freelancers in Europe are happy to adapt to North American hours.

In almost all of eg Appalachia, a 35-40 hour per week, $15 per hour online job (doing anything), is a good job for the majority of people versus the alternatives available.

There's no question it can make a meaningful difference near-term. The obvious long-term solution is further urbanization or near-urbanization, convincing people to leave those dying regions for greater opportunity.

What are these $15/hour 40 hour a week remote jobs? How many of them are there?

Call centres? They have an advantage over foreign call centres operators (more fluent in the language), some companies might pay for it.

Also, this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091

There are now just too many other countries with young people speaking excellent, near-native English thanks to an entire childhood spent with American movies and television. Eastern Europeans or Filipinos can do call center work cheaper than American rural areas.

Cheaper per hour is easy to measure but its hard to measure customer satisfaction.

When I call a support line and get "Walter" who is going to help me, I know they are in a different hemisphere and am mostly unsatisfied with talking to them because they are trained with scripts and they talk like robots.

If I called and recognized a Kentucky accent, chances are that person is going to be more relatable and personable than "Walter" from 8 timezones away.

Mr./Mrs. Kentucky might crack a joke and get me to lighten up a little about why XYZ isn't working. If both calls have the same result, I walk away from talking to Mr./Mrs. a little more satisfied than with "Walter".

The same could be said if it was reversed, if someone was calling from the far east and ended up talking with Mr./Mrs. Kentucky it is going to be hard for them to be relatable and personable to someone from the far east.

> Mr./Mrs. Kentucky might crack a joke

Call centers insist so much on following scripts that I am not sure there would be opportunities to make jokes even if the person was in the same country as you.

Also, do you think that Americans want to hear a Kentucky accent? I would rather speak to a foreigner than hear someone with a village accent from my country. Those places have a reputation for low education and low culture, and so it is hard for customers to trust any employee with that accent who claims he can help you. I know that call centers have moved to my country and to the Philippines because English speakers in these countries have a more "neutral" accent.

Everything from support, to sales, to web development, admin, security, etc.

I'd list all the telecommuting job sites, but there seems to be a thousand of them now.

The US median income is about $37,000 per year ($17-$18 per hour). To get beyond ~$13 to ~$17 per hour doing lower skill telecommuting work, you have to have a resume with something meaningful on it.

If you're from Appalachia, it's not difficult to teach yourself any number of skills (from database admin to javascript), go to a local small college to pad your resume with that, get a certification or two if applicable, and then get a job working remote at an entry level tech job that pays considerably better than anything local (few of those jobs exist locally there). A person can go work at a local AT&T or similar store doing sales in an Appalachian town, get some sales experience, and then go apply for a remote sales job making more than they'll get locally. Particularly right now is an ideal time, the US labor market is getting very tight.

I grew up in Appalachia and entirely self-taught my way out of it in the mid 1990s. It was a helluva lot more difficult to do back then. And that process is trivial compared to working in a coal mine, and it's a lot less soul destroying than toiling away for a decade earning $10-$15 at a local Walmart.

No doubt some people can do that. But the original quote is comparing broadband to the railroads. The railroads (and mining) supported a broad economy with various roles for lots of different kinds of people. I have a hard time believing that broadband is going to have the same effect through remote sales and database admin jobs.

In addition to online freelance jobs, I wonder if another important benefit is access to online education.

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