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After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

washingtonpost.com

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Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#101

Post by amigoingtodie »

javajosh wrote: post #19
24gttghh wrote: post #6

> She lit a home-rolled cigarette and, getting to work with a mattock, tried to ignore the weather. She had lately been telling herself that she had to stop taking these risks. They were more than an hour from the nearest hospital, and what if she had another heart attack? Yeah...she seems to be ignoring the heart-attack risk she is pumping into her lungs while she says that. I get that it's an addiction that is hard…

This article makes plain that she, and everyone she knows are, economically speaking, dead-men walking. And there is a certain dignity offering someone a smoke before they accept their doom. The question that plagues me is: can I give her a job? What could this woman do, online or off, that would be valuable to society? Is Mechanical Turk, marketed to the rural poor, a solution?

How would she connecto to the internet?

Super expensive LTE or satellite connection, or overpriced Shentel cablemodem, or DSL, where upload will be less than 1Mbps.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#102

Post by amigoingtodie »

reaperducer wrote: post #97
javajosh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article makes plain that she, and everyone she knows are, economically speaking, dead-men walking. And there is a certain dignity offering someone a smoke before they accept their doom. The question that plagues me is: can I give her a job? What could this woman do, online or off, that would be valuable to society? Is Mechanical Turk, marketed to the rural poor, a solution?

This is why West Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, and other low-education states are magnets for call centers coming back onshore. They may be dumb as a brick in American terms, but they're able to function at a higher level than the average Indian call center employee, at a comparable salary, and they have the right accents.

Need AFFORDABLE internet connections first.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#103

Post by thehardsphere »

reaperducer wrote: post #81
leggomylibro wrote: post #41

>because disability payments on average amount to less than minimum wage, sometimes much less, ... Why is this? How are these people expected to survive, if they are disabled to the point that they can't hold down a job, and aren't allowed to work without the risk of losing their disability payments? Busking? I know that's been one traditional job for disabled people over the centuries, but I feel like we should be a…

It's so the U.S. doesn't end up with an epidemic of people "on the dole" like they have in the U.K. PBS viewers may know it as Onslow Syndrome.

"Any more beer?"

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#104

Post by lazerpants »

jccalhoun wrote: post #92
reaperducer wrote: post #70

Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona. When I lived in West Virginia, I did note that the Washington Post had a weird fascination with the place. Whenever things got slow, you could expect some big exposé about what a bunch of uneducated, dirty bumpkins we were. WaPo even once held a contest to come up with a new slogan for…

I'm always kind of amazed that stories about how much it sucks to be poor are "news" and not common knowledge. I remember when Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed came out and it got all this press. I was dumbfounded. People needed a book to let them know that it is hard to survive on a minimum wage job?

Income mobility in the United States is not that high. Most people stay in the income class that they are born into, so most people who are not impoverished do not know what poverty is like.

Also, the level of poverty covered in the article is pretty extreme. I grew up in a low income area but it was not difficult to find some way to make 15-20k a year. My neighbors were no where near as poor as the woman highlighted in the article.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#105

Post by irrational »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #91
reaperducer wrote: post #70

Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona. When I lived in West Virginia, I did note that the Washington Post had a weird fascination with the place. Whenever things got slow, you could expect some big exposé about what a bunch of uneducated, dirty bumpkins we were. WaPo even once held a contest to come up with a new slogan for…

> Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona. Plenty of people have no idea that there are people living like this in America.

And plenty of people in these areas have not idea what life is like outside of their rural areas. My brother recently told me a story of talking to two 20 somethings in rural Pennsylvania (not Amish). They had never traveled anywhere outside of their town and had no concept of what it was like to live anywhere else.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#106

Post by thehardsphere »

amigoingtodie wrote: post #102
reaperducer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why West Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, and other low-education states are magnets for call centers coming back onshore. They may be dumb as a brick in American terms, but they're able to function at a higher level than the average Indian call center employee, at a comparable salary, and they have the right accents.

Need AFFORDABLE internet connections first.

The call center can afford an internet connection; it's cheaper than the people they'd be hiring.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#107

Post by jpindar »

javajosh wrote: post #19
24gttghh wrote: post #6

> She lit a home-rolled cigarette and, getting to work with a mattock, tried to ignore the weather. She had lately been telling herself that she had to stop taking these risks. They were more than an hour from the nearest hospital, and what if she had another heart attack? Yeah...she seems to be ignoring the heart-attack risk she is pumping into her lungs while she says that. I get that it's an addiction that is hard…

This article makes plain that she, and everyone she knows are, economically speaking, dead-men walking. And there is a certain dignity offering someone a smoke before they accept their doom. The question that plagues me is: can I give her a job? What could this woman do, online or off, that would be valuable to society? Is Mechanical Turk, marketed to the rural poor, a solution?

I bet a lot of them could make crafts that could be sold online, if there were someone there with a computer & internet to do the actual selling, and perhaps to purchase materials.

In some cases, they'd be preserving authentic folk art.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#108

Post by pavel_lishin »

selimthegrim wrote: post #73
blunte wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article indicates that at least some of the people doing this are well below any normal education level; and in fact, some are below functional mental health levels. This would need to be an education process beginning with encouraging birth control + providing quality education for the children who are born in these regions... and providing enough family financial support so the children didn't have to quit scho…

Even if my cousin/sibling was retarded/whatever the word du jour is today I think I'd give them a glass of water from inside rather then generously limit them to the garden hose.

I don't understand your metaphor.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#109

Post by amigoingtodie »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Logan County, West Virginia, where this article is set, voted 80% in favor of Trump, giving him 10,000 additional votes. [1] The entire state of West Virginia went to Trump. If Democrats want to change the current political landscape in this country, they might start by addressing some of these peoples' problems while they're campaigning on everyone else's problems too. Trump (and conservatives) aren't going to do a…

West Virginia only has 5 electoral college votes.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#110

Post by hestipod »

ggm wrote: post #80

I cannot find it in my heart to admire the people who comment here proscriptively, without any attempt to signal empathy. Its understood few of us (myself included) will be doing anything to ameliorate this situation, and that empathy signalling is at best chest beating, but I still find the lack of compassion in the responses chilling. Yes, not smoking would reduce health risks and spend. so what? If you haven't tri…

This is how 99% of people are. I wouldn't have believed it until I became a victim. Even people who claim to love you and you have known for life. In the end people care about themselves and if you challenge their just-world view by suffering in front of them, or make them feel bad or guilty, they attack. The sad part is for those people nothing will change it but being forced into despair themselves and then it's too late for both of us.

I made an account just to comment on this issue after lurking for a long time but it's surely just another pointless action because it's the same story over and over. Empathy is not common.

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