When one or two get together to co-op, and leave competition at the door, abundance tends to prevail...
Cerate our world ;) On Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 08:29:23PM -0500, grarpamp wrote: > https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us > > Not an example of distributed DIY co-op, but a story anyway... > > McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the > Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the > poorest counties in the country. There’s a sit-down restaurant, > Opal’s, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic > light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen, > a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the > United States. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative > (P.R.T.C.), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley > County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the > coöperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. (By > contrast, where I live, in the mountains above Lake Champlain, we are > lucky to get three megabytes.) For nearly fifteen million Americans > living in sparsely populated communities, there is no broadband > Internet service at all. > > Fibre-optic cables strung above a home in Jackson County, Kentucky, > one of the poorest counties in the country. High-speed broadband has > been used to bring Internet-based jobs to the region. > Before Shani Hays began providing tech support for Apple from her > home, in McKee, Kentucky, she worked at a prison as a corrections > officer assigned to male sex offenders, making nine dollars an hour. > After less than a year, she switched to working nights on an assembly > line at a car-parts factory, where she felt safer. More recently, > Hays, who is fifty-four, was an aide at a nursing home, putting in a > full workweek in a single weekend and driving eighty-five miles to get > there. Then her son-in-law, who was married to Hays’s oldest daughter, > got addicted to crystal meth and became physically abusive. Hays’s > daughter started using, too. The son-in-law went to jail. Their kids > were placed in foster care. Then Hays’s stepmother got cancer. “There > was a lot going on,” Hays told me. “I was just trying to keep it all > together.” She began working from home last summer, which has allowed > her to gain custody of her three grandchildren. (Her daughter has > since completed treatment for her addiction.) During Hays’s half-hour > lunch break, she makes supper. “I wouldn’t be able to do this without > the Internet we have here,” she said.
