It's real life Mad Max. Scrapped dump trucks and semis litter the yards along the highway. There is even a smaller plant that was converted to natural gas nearby that fires it's exhaust to add a special sense of destruction when the cloud ceiling is low. Sometimes you'll see the barges cruising up the Big Sandy to the Ohio sending what little coal is still being mined to the newer plant in WV. Highway 23 is a sight to see. I'd imagine driving down that road would be the equivalent of Deliverance to most liberals, especially once you reach the Ashland oil refinery sitting at the I-64 intersection.
That's all aside the point however. The scene is familiar to me so I am done reflecting on the Armageddon like appearance of it all and ponder different questions. Like what a structure of that size which once carried such great import for our nation but now lies dormant means?
For the most part, it means we are all smarter. We have found new, less harmful ways to provide energy to our nation than these aged behemoths which dot the Appalachia countryside. I'd imagine not 50 years ago people in these parts in particular were very poorly educated. In the 1950's when scenes like the one below were common place in these parts the high school graduation rate for the state of KY was below 30% (note: in the Appalachian region it was considerably lower). https://www.census.gov/population/www/c ... cation.pdf
We are over double that now yet these very towns where once upon a time "Friday night traffic would be backed up two miles as coal miners and their families came to town for entertainment. In fact, traffic was so bad that Welch built the first municipal parking garage ever in the United States. A famous 1947 photo shows the main drag, McDowell Street, clotted with cars and crowds of stylishly dressed people eager to visit one of downtown's three famous movie palaces." http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/10/stuck are mostly deserted and impoverished.
Seems education hasn't done these folks much good.
This is a unique sample of America though. The Appalachians break all the SJW rules of poverty and its disparate affect on individuals by race showing that extreme poverty has little difference between whites and blacks except for violent crime rates. I imagine that's because in bigger cities violent crime probably pays better.
In all, America is the smartest its ever been. Over the past 100 years, Americans' mean IQ has been on a slow but steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it rose nearly 30 points, which means that the average person of 2012 had a higher IQ than 95 percent of the population had in 1900. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx yet narrative after narrative produced by "sources of record" state education has replaced the culture wars as the defining electoral divide http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/upsho ... .html?_r=0
Confusing ain't it? The average American has a higher IQ than ever before yet Trump supporters were considered wholly uneducated and backwards. The "White Working Class", no matter avg income of Trump supporters being significantly higher than Clinton backers.
The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the ... s-support/
The voters Clinton really lost—the ones she was targeting and relying on for victory—were college-educated whites. Most polling suggested she would win these voters, but she didn’t, according to exit polls: White men went 63 percent for Trump versus 31 percent for Clinton, and white women went 53-43 percent. Among college-educated whites, only 39 percent of men and 51 percent of women voted for Clinton.
https://newrepublic.com/article/138754/ ... king-class
What does this mean? Why did more productive members of society vote for Trump? (I measure production as GDP) Because they are stupid? Stupid compared to when? According to the "Flynn Effect" (IQ) Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. FE gains vary from country to country and over different time intervals, but the
gains are usually a fraction of a point per year http://www.triplenine.org/portals/0/Pub ... eprint.pdf
Should we eliminate the Electoral College so that the less educated and lower producing members of society have more influence in national politics?
