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US Does Surprisingly Well in Internet Survey
Herman's hermit writes "A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the US number four when it comes to 'network readiness,' despite the fact that the same report has the US 17th broadband subscribers and 19th in bandwidth. 'While good news overall for the US, which is poised to take full advantage of information technology gains, the report probably won't change many minds when it comes to talking specifically about US broadband deployment.'"
Well, I do live in Appalachia, and I am so poor I have to put 87 in my Porsche sometimes.
Maybe you should be a lot more specific about where in Appalachia, I live several hours outside one of those major metropolitan areas in Appalachia and personally know more than a few "independently wealthy" people. I know I can hop in my (very fast, very expensive to maintain) car and drive about an hour east to find people living in quaint little ghost towns, but if I keep on driving another 30 minutes, I am back in another well off city.
You are painting fine details with a very broad brush there, and even those details are wrong. Unlike much of the rest of the world, the poor and destitute in this area are mostly just the inept and lazy. They believe the same bullshit story about being poor by their geographic location and have too much "home town pride" to commute to the next town over or just moving away to where they could obtain a paying job. This isn't the 1930s, and the old excuses no longer apply. This area is developed significantly thanks to things like ARC and TVA and companies like Eastman who invested heavily here during the last century. But as much as you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink. And though a few people here refuse to take advantage of the opportunities around them, to portray an entire region as such based on those backwoods jackasses is a grave injustice to the majority of us living a comfortable modern lifestyle.
The last time I met anyone so poor that they could not afford to feed themselves was about 15 years ago. The woman's husband had abandoned her. She refused to work because it was not a "woman's place" and claimed that if God wanted to her to have something, he would give it to her. I could insert a rant about religion here, but would rather point out how this woman found a way to martyr herself and paired in a comfortable excuse for stupid and lazy, then ran with it by her own volition. This mentality, this excuse, is rather rampant here but few take it to that extreme. Seems most people like modern conveniences, but the media is way more interested in the backwoods bumpkins.
Most people in America who are poor, are poor by choice. Working is hard, handouts are easy.
For more information about how poor everyone in America is, check out the website for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It will paint the most accurate picture off these regions are.
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