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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

There’s a reason why industry likes to pursue business in places like Alabama with awful infrastructure and education.

Expenses for things like conversion of documentation to pictures instead of text (the workers are functionally illiterate) are one time, but you can pay someone $13/hr instead of $25/hr in a less regressive place.

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When I worked with some NASA engineers from Alabama, I had trouble taking them seriously due to their accent! They were the ones getting stuff done, though. Statistically, Alabama ranks significantly better than California for both child and adult literacy. Are you perhaps a bit biased in your opinion of people from the south?

This is a great example of Simpson's Paradox

Split across racial lines, AL has lower literacy than CA among each of Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks.

But because the literacy rate among whites is higher than Hispanics and Blacks, and Alabama is much more White than CA, AL's overall literacy rate is higher.

Alabama is over 25% black, which doesn't do them any favors from a simpson's paradox perspective. CA is 40% hispanic, and hispanics fall in between whites and blacks on literacy, so I'd expect this to more or less come out in the wash.

oof. Own goal.

Huntsville had the highest per capita Ph.D for a while due to operation paperclip.

The state is like 47th or 48th in education consistently. People are poorer, they live shorter lives, and lack access to basic services like hospitals.

It’s a sad state of affairs.

Most of Alabama is unlike Huntsville.

Lot of southern areas have massive differences depending on location. I life in an area that any hipster would love. Much of the rest of the state is hillbilly as can be.

Not if you include literacy in any language e.g. Spanish or English.

You are shadowbanned.

They're not shadow banned: they were explicitly banned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31520597

OFF: But octonion just made a post, that I (and other people?) can see? I don't understand.

OFF2: I wish for a functionality that could make my own post gray/collapsed, if it is offtopic. I must risk points, and being actually banned (or just don't be offtopic) this way.

edit: I am just asking for some explanation about how things work, e.g. why GP said "you are shadowbanned", and what's happening, really.

Someone must have vouched for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33302111. I assume it was [dead] before.

>the workers are functionally illiterate

This is a really bigoted comment that generalizes a whole state. If it would be racist for any random country, eg. 'Mexico' or 'Nigeria', why is it ok for an American state?

(no, I'm not from Alabama).

Sort of like Amazon's offensive stereotypical framing of Appalachia in Prehiprial?

Clearly, no one would ever want to live there. Right, muffy?

Amazon’s framing? I haven’t yet seen the Amazon adaptation, but when I read Peripheral, I thought it was clear the region Gibson was describing.

Precisely. I've found that people from Alabama are actually more literate and intelligent than your most common worker from a blue state, it just depends on which aspects of life you find more important.

This isn’t a red v blue issue, and we don’t need to reply with tit for tat shaming of the “other side”, it’s a shame that any state has child labor or illiteracy. I have known a lot of smart people from all over, no state or country is better than another. The differences we have are cultural, not ability.

(This comment is in response to this whole train wreck of a thread.)

> no state or country is better than another

Even though I agree with the thrust of your argument, I'd just like to point out that this is provably inaccurate, depending on which quantifiable axis you're referring to as "better" (i.e., test scores, IQ, lead in the water, whatever.) But, if you're just saying "better" == "humanity", then, sure, I agree with that too.

Alabama isn't bad because of its infrastructure or education. Here's a hint: if you condition on demographic characteristics (i.e. split state populations into obvious demographic categorizations), educational disparity across states is almost eliminated.

Isn’t that a pretty good reason why it’s bad? Alabama is massively failing an entire demographic segment of their society, not even a small segment but something like 40% of it. That does seem like a massive infrastructure and education failure. Unless there is a deeper implication here that I’m missing.

> Alabama is massively failing an entire demographic segment of their society

No, you misunderstand. That demographic segment has bad outcomes everywhere. Nothing about Alabama is worse once you condition on demographics. The state just looks bad because of demos.

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