Tech Founder: Middle America Is Too ‘Violent, Stupid And Racist’ For New Jobs

Daily Caller ^ | 01/08/2017 | Robert Donachie

[Trillian]

Haha, Violent, stupid and racist describes them. You always know what they’re up to.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Exactly. There is an article on FR that blames poverty for violent crime in Chicago, but you don’t hear about poor whites in WV shooting each other for little or no reason.

[BenLurkin]

They know to shut up and shovel

8-)

[Rebelbase]

” you don’t hear about poor whites in WV shooting each other for little or no reason.”

A lot of reason in WV and other depressed Appalachia would be Alcohol followed by meth.

[Eisenhower Republican]

"About the only thing I agree with this woman about is the quality of education in these areas."

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and postulate that you haven't actually been to all that many of "these areas". Not all small towns are Appalachia, and there are alot of places in Appalachia that have cleaned up their act significantly in the last 30 years or so.
I grew up in a town of 1,000 people in a very poor and rural county in Colorado. The graduates our HS turned out were some of the finest in the state at a time when Colorado was regularly ranked top-5 in the country for K-12 education.

Part of it was the way the district was set up. Rather than each town having its own little parochial high-school, the towns in about half the county decided to pool resources and send all the kids to one school. It was still a 'small' school by most standards, but that gave them the budget to do some things that normally can't be done in small town schools. We also had a very active and involved PTA basically calling the shots for the district rather than some disinterested bureaucrats and making sure the budget got spent in the classrooms where it belongs.

As a result, we had PhD's teaching our math and science courses, and one of the better HS computer labs in the state for the time. The subject material and expectations in our normal math/science courses were roughly the same level as AP courses in most Denver schools. Our knowledge bowl team made it to the state competition twice - a big accomplishment considering KB was not segregated by school size so we were competing against schools with 4-10 times as many enrolled students. My graduating class of 100 includes high-level execs at big name tech companies and defense contractors, as well as 2 service academy appointees.

We also had many like the people you described in some respects. I had 3-4 friends who had kids on the way when they graduated HS. They all stayed married to the same women at least until the kids graduated, and were/are generally stable, productive (and happy) tax-paying members of society - which is quite a bit more than I can say for most of the feral youth in the inner-cities.

The meth problem you speak of has indeed crept into my hometown as well as many other rural areas. The last 25 years have not been kind to small town America. Attitudes like that of the lezbot in the article and yours along with pretty much zero economic opportunity have led to widespread problems with self-esteem and hard drug use. Despite all that, there are still plenty of good talented hard-working kids graduating from the schools, but most of them have to leave their families, friends, and homes behind if they want even a small shot at ever putting their talents to use and making a decent living. There's no opportunity there for them - unless you want to count being a lower-cost alternative to already low-paid call center workers in the city. Corporate America doesn't think the math adds up to invest, and the gov't has laregely turned their back on rural USA for partisan political reasons.

Also - getting decent talent into call centers isn't strictly a rural problem. Call centers attract lowest-common-denominator employees because they're uniformly lousy places to work. I had the misfortune of working in several of them after I runn-oft to the city, and the average length of employment for people in them was under 6 mos. The pay and working conditions were atrocious in all of them, and they eventually run themselves through the people willing to actually work there no matter how large the city/town. So your opinion of the average rural worker is probably clouded by the fact that the ones with the traits you're looking for already either had stable jobs or left for the city, and weren't in the 'available' pool for call-center employement.

I ran a small call center myself for awhile. I had no illusions about the quality of people I was going to attract with what the company could afford to pay. I adjusted my management practices accordingly, and was able to get passable results out of them. A poor carpenter blames his tools for shoddy work - no different than results of poor/lazy management practices are often blamed on employees.

[SaraJohnson]

Who the heck would want that snot nosed bigoted pig as an employer?

[Mr. Douglas]

You are right about call centers and the kind of people they attract. However, when there are several million people in an area it takes longer to burn through the population. And by the time you do, a new batch is reaching the age to participate. :)

[suthener]

You don’t know when to quit digging. You sound just like Patty Murray:

Quoth Murray: “I have stood on the line in Everett, Wash., where we have thousands of workers who go to work every day to build these planes. I would challenge anybody to tell me that they’ve stood on a line in Alabama and seen anybody building anything.”

Must be in the water up there.
https://itsonlywords55.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/1539/

[Mr. Douglas]

You are forming an opinion based on a few posts. No, I don’t sound like Patty Murray. Problem is, there seems to be a failure to communicate here. You are making incorrect inferences.

My comments come from a position of knowledge. Not perfect knowledge, but knowledge, nonetheless.

Here is a bit of a hint: I’ve lived here for six years now. I live in a small town that has a university. I’m in a southern Gospel band that takes me all over this area. I’m also very gregarious. i.e. I talk to a LOT of people from a lot of small towns in this area. My comments are from conversations with actual people that live here and their actual problems they and their parents have faced for many decades.

And it is not all bad. Quite the contrary. But I stand by my comments. They come from knowledge.

Oh, and I have many other sources of information, but I’m not blogging here. I’m just posting...

[Mr. Douglas]

See my post 169.

[Laser_Ray]

I’ll give him ‘stupid’ at the least. The thought of ~80% of my generation being able to vote much less be voted into office scares me sick!