Can Tech Save Small Town America?

theodp writes "Declaring that small town life no longer has to be separate from financial success thanks to technology, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told North Dakota state officials to take hope in people such as Napster's Shawn Fanning. Interesting remarks, considering that Fanning conceived Napster in small-town Boston and the jobs Amazon's brought to rural areas don't exactly scream financial success."

Comments

Huh?

[AaronStJ]

I don't quite understand the editorialization on the summary. Theodp tries to make it sound like Amazon.com's hiring practices are bad for rural America. But his links don't support that. They talk about having to bus workers in from out of town (as far away as the next state) to work seasonally in the warehouses.

But it's not like Amazon is turning down local workers in favor of out of town workers. According to one of the articles linked "more than 85 percent of the yearly labor needs are supplied by the local labor pool. Staff management works with local employment agencies, recruits at colleges and works with high schools to provide jobs for graduating seniors," and "we first start with the local labor pool, then broaden our search." Amazon is employing the locals and out of town people (which also help the locals by staying in hotels paid for by Amazon and patronizing locals businesses).

Amazon has also set up education programs to help potential-workers complete their GED, and supported other local programs. "Amazon.com has partnered with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Team Taylor County and Kentucky Adult Education to form the Go, Earn, Do program, which helps people earn their GED." According to an Amazon spokesman, "we've hired several graduates of the program so far and as the program grows we hope to hire even more."

So I really don't see Theodp's snarky objection to Amazon and Bezo's stand on how tech helps out rural areas. If anything, the articles he links actually support Bezos' claims.

Bezos' remarks on Shawn Fanning are on the mark, too. Sure, Fanning was in a Boston dorm room when he wrote Napster, but it's not like he needed the massive infrastructure of a huge city to do it, just an Internet connection. As Bezos points out, "that's the kind of thing people can do anywhere. They can do it in Seattle, they can do it in North Dakota."

So pretty much all of the editorializing in the summary is wrong, and doesn't seem to server any purpose other than to troll us. I guess I bit.

(An off topic ad hominem: theodp@ aol.com ? On Slashdot? Puh-leaze. I see September still hasn't ended.)