Sunday, July 10, 2016

Ten (More) Reasons to Leave NEPA

Eight months ago we published an article called Ten Reasons to Leave NEPA. It was comprehensive, but this list will give the reader a more intimate understanding of the dark social underworld that is Northeast Pennsylvania (NEPA).

10. Demographic Asymmetries
NEPA is place where people go to die -- not live. In other words, if you're young and want to experience life, then go to an area with good-paying jobs and other energetic young people like yourself. But if you're old, have made your money, and want to live in a place with a cheap cost of living where your retirement dollars won't be sapped away to rapidly, then NEPA is ideal.

If you're young but incapable of earning much money because you have low intelligence or a disagreeable personality, then NEPA has plenty of low-paying jobs for you. It also has drug users in need of drugs in case you want to sell drugs to them.

The scarcity of good jobs in NEPA has resulted in several demographic trends. For one, there are very few Asians in NEPA because Asians tend to gravitate to high-paying areas like Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. In NEPA, a few people from India live in Mountain Top but that's about it.

Secondly, blacks and Hispanics have been flocking to NEPA since the late nineties. Many blacks go on welfare and many Hispanics do the cheap warehousing jobs which "Americans won't do" (well, at lease not for NEPA wages of $9-$10/hr).

The typical black or Hispanic family which moves to NEPA for the cheap cost of living doesn't produce quality white collar employees, so employers often recruit high IQ blacks and Hispanics from outside the area to comply with racial quotas. The majority of these talented minority recruits eventually leave the area for the same reasons most of NEPA's whites do: there is more opportunity elsewhere. NEPA is sort of a proving ground for them until they can get to greener pastures, so they are transient figures for the most part. Most of the minorities who come to stay, however, are usually of a low socioeconomic status and are either here for cheap labor or welfare.

Also, a few white trash also move to NEPA. They serve as clients for the black and Hispanic drug dealers of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton. However, there are very few of them compared with the masses of blacks and Hispanics.

The end result of these migrations is that there are four times more white baby boomers in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/ Hazleton (W-B/S) metro area than white millennials as compared to the national average and five times more white baby boomers than white children under ten years of age. In short, the data suggest that NEPA is a terrible place for a white millennial to look for a future spouse and an even worse place to start a family. W-B/S is ranked 374 out of 381 Metro areas with respect to the percentage of white children under the age of five versus the overall population. Only places in Hawaii or southern Texas that are essentially populated by Polynesians and mestizos, respectively, exhibit lower proportions of white kids. 1

Below some graphs illustrate aforesaid data.

In figure 1 we see that in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/Hazleton (W-B/S) metro area nonwhite males and females far outnumber whites in the 20-29 age bracket aka millennials. In figure 2 we see the reverse: white males and females far outnumber nonwhites in the 65-74 age bracket, aka baby boomers. Figure 3 shows the raw data used in the pie charts and uses a color scale of red being low, yellow being average and green high.. Figure 4 shows the age breakdown of white females in the W-B/S metro area versus the national average using the same color scheme. About 43% of females are white in W-B/S and 70% versus 43% for the rest of the nation. The bottom row shows how W-B/S has only about a third of the number of white females as compared with national average in the millennial age bracket (age 20-29 or the 7th and 8th columns above) but how they are actually over-represented in the baby boomer bracket (age 65-74) to the tune of 118% or 18% higher than the national average. The bottom row is also color coordinated with yellow being at the national average, red below it, and green above it.

A valid critique of looking at only at the Wilkes-Barre / Scranton / Hazleton metro area is that outlying heavily wooded suburbs such as Dallas, Clark's Summit, Mountain Top, etc, are a high percentage white. However, in these places live the sort of snobby, detached elites who own the slave-driving warehouses and dysfunctional family-run businesses that torment the NEPA masses. You're probably not in their clique.

Rural areas around NEPA, which lay farther still outside the suburbs, contain some friendly, albeit simple-minded folks. Lehman and Sweet Valley are most representative of such areas. If you don't mind country living, that is, mounting a quad for a woodland romp on occasion or cutting enormous amounts of grass on your giant lawn or comparing the rack of this year's slaughtered deer to your buddy's, then it's not a bad life. However, if such activities offer you no pleasure then you'll find yourself in bad company.

9. Apathetic and/or Needy Friends
If you're lucky enough to find friends in NEPA, they usually come in two varieties.

"I know that feel bro"
1. The first is the kid you grew up with who's smart but too lazy to embark on a career. He settles for demeaning job in a call center or a retail outlet where he is ruled over by hostile emotional women having IQs one to two standard deviations below his. He lives with his parents and still hangs out with his old high school buddies, playing magic cards and video games while staying in a constant state of failure to launch.
2. The other type of friend is one who tries at life but fails. He's smart -- but not smart enough. He can't keep a job for more than a year. He complains endlessly about his situation but seldom endeavors to improve his employability by acquiring marketable skills. He holds out for the one good job he'll never get. His life is a viscous cycle of disappointments, and he broadcasts his repeat loop of burdens to you endlessly. He uses your shoulder to cry on so often that sooner or later you have to cut ties with him, lest you drown in his tears.

8. Social Anxiety as the Social Norm
Go to any normal location in the United States, and you'll find that many strangers are polite and friendly.

This is not the case in NEPA, where store clerks gruffly scan your items without acknowledging your presence. If you try to introduce yourself to a stranger at a bar, coffee shop, or anywhere else, the person usually will not look you in the eyes or even in the direction of your face and will mumble one-syllable replies. One has to devise a strategy for breaking down this proverbial wall. Thus, even brief social interaction is a chess game to get the other person to start conversing.

In other areas of the US, however, you can simply say hello and the person will respond with like enthusiasm. Social dysfunction is the exception in most places but in NEPA it is the norm.

7. Fear of Social Interaction While Sober
If a friend invites you to his house and you try to strike up a conversation, he'll shove a beer in your hand. If you keep trying to talk, he will keep handing you beers until you're drunk and quiet. Indeed, the inhabitants of NEPA are most gracious with giving out beers. But they will not, and perhaps cannot, give you a moment of sober conversation, which perhaps costs them more on a psychological level.

6. Scarcity of Jobs
One reason why nepotism is so rampant in NEPA is that people's family members often have immediate income needs, so many businesses become family affairs. Perhaps this is a self-reinforcing spiral, with fewer jobs provoking more nepotism resulting in more workplace inefficiency, lower profits, and eventually, even fewer jobs, more nepotism, etc.

As evidence of the scarcity of jobs, if one goes to Indeed.com and searches for jobs within a 25 mile radius of Allentown (which isn't in NEPA but the Lehigh Valley) over twice the number of jobs appear in the search results. One might attempt to chalk this up to differences in population density. However, this is not entirely the cause. There are 608,763 estimated people within a 25 mile radius of Allentown and 320,557 of Wilkes-Barre. As of writing this there are 10,111 jobs on Indeed within a 25 mile radius of Allentown and 5,078 within 25 miles of Wilkes Barre.

For 25 mi of Allentown: 608,763/10,111= 1.66% of the population needed for work.
For 25 mi of Wilkes-Barre 320,557/5,078=1.58% of the population needed for work.
1.66% / 1.58% = 5.1% more jobs for hire in Allentown than NEPA per capita. This is above the 5% margin of error typically used is statistical surveys. Measuring the overall population rather than the working population may seem misleading, since before we stated that NEPA has a high per capita of baby boomers, many of whom are retired. But consider the distribution of these jobs from the following graph:

There are more jobs within the $20k-35k in Allentown but more in the $35-45k in Wilkes-Barre. This probably reflects truck driving jobs so common in NEPA, which pay around 37k per year. Notice also that jobs paying above $45k are more common in Allentown. In sum, the Lehigh Valley overall has more jobs per capita available on Indeed.com and more that pay high wages (above $45k/year).

In any case, NEPA employers often complain that they cannot fill blue collar positions with people who will show up to work, yet they reject most applications of college graduates since most jobs are blue collar. These days it is not uncommon for a college graduate to need any job, including blue collar work, and since backward NEPA employers still think college degrees as rare as they were in the 70s and as such refuse to hire college grads, they will continue to suffer poor workplace performance.

5. Disappointing Dating Scene
In number five of our previous top ten reasons we documented how there is a high ratio of males to females in Luzerne County among millennials, being as high as it is in China, where there is a national crisis of men not being able to find wives. We also alluded to the physical detriments of NEPA women overall, such as a tendency toward poorly developed secondary sexual characteristics. In ten of this list, we proved that the number of millennial white females is very low on a per capita basis in W-B/Scran/Haz, being at only about a third as high as the national average. For every one white female milennial in NEPA there are three in a typical place in the US.

In spite of women being picked over, few and far between, and less attractive on average there are still some eye catching young ladies in NEPA. However, if you're able to get one, they will usually fall into either of the two following categories:

1. Semi-retarded Disney Cartoon-Watching Girlfriend - This girl is by no means literally retarded. She performs her job at at call center or retail outlet with the utmost robotic efficiency. The problem is that arrested development has manifested itself in her leisure activities, which include watching Disney cartoons that she saw as a little girl. She often has pets, which, together with movie trivia, occupy the farthest reaches of her consciousness. She is always a white girl and usually is light-complected. She has a beautiful face and usually has large breasts and narrow hips but some have wide hips and small breasts instead. Communicating with her is a test of self-control as one must avoid using long sentences or referring to abstract concepts which might cause her eyes to glaze over. She typically shows interest in you at first but quickly becomes bored with you unless you can put on an act of being a normie chad.

2. Hypergamizing Latina Girlfriend - Hypergamy refers to mating up, or choosing a mate who is better looking, wealthier, or more popular than yourself. It is the subject fairy tales about a lowly peasant girl marrying a prince charming. Whereas men tend to be more sensitive to the physical aspects of hypergamy, ie, they want someone who's better looking than they are, women are more sensitive to the social manifestation of hypergamy, ie, they want a man with higher social standing than they have. Social status isn't just related to wealth however. It also manifests itself along racial lines. In countries whence Hispanic girls come, lighter skinned elites rule over dark-skinned mestizos and/or mulattoes. After many centuries of native Amerindian and black women gaining status by marrying white Spaniard men, an attraction to white skin is practically embedded in the DNA of Hispanic women. Thus, they will settle for white men who are less attractive relative to the white race than they are to their mestizo or mulatto racial cohort. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see an ordinary-looking white guy in NEPA with a knockout beauty of a Latina. The white guy gets morphical hypergamy by getting a thin curvy woman with a pretty face and the Latina gets the white skin status she craves out of her mate. If you're a white guy who wants a woman who's the same race as you but not significantly less attractive, the deck is stacked against you in NEPA. However, you can get a beautiful Latina girlfriend quite easily because of hypergamy.

In short, we can expect that the few pretty white girls available in NEPA have arrested development due to having lower intelligence since NEPA, as expressed in the last list, is in the bottom quintile in educational attainment and education levels are correlated with intelligence. Moreover, we can expect an abundance of young Latina women to be available because many millennial women are Hispanic, so the fact that these are the only two (defacto) options is not surprising.

4. Behind the Times
Northeast PA is said to be between twenty to forty years behind the rest of the country. Casual observations verify this. It is not uncommon to see women in small credit unions using carbon paper and fax machines rather than modern printers or the Internet. They would never hire a young person who would pester them to stop living in a 70s movie set.

Coelacanth Fish: Fossil (Above) Living (Below)

Also, much as the coelacanth fish was thought to be extinct but later found as a living specimen, old cars you'd never think are still driven are common in NEPA. They're not classic cars either, just old, beat up, living fossils that have stood the test of time.

As a final example, throughout America smoking was more common in decades past, but in NEPA it remains quite popular. Wilkes-Barre / Scranton exhibits the second highest cigarette consumption per capita in the nation. NEPA also has the highest number of chain smokers in the nation. The effect of this is that young women age faster and their voices become deep and raspy, as their grovelized vocal chords deliver a decidedly masculine tone.

Whether it be workplace procedures, transportation means, or lifestyle habits, NEPA is out of the loop.

3. No Entry Level Jobs
An old saying goes "if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere". This is not true with respect to NEPA. One fellow we knew who had a degree in English could not find a job in NEPA that paid more than $8/hr. He moved to NYC and now works as an editor and earns a decent salary. It's tough to make it in NEPA -- not because of competition as it would be in the Big Apple -- but because employers are lazy and only want people with tons of experience who require no training. Any job market is better than NEPA.

Staring into the NEPA Abyss
2. Jealousy
When crabs who are stuck in a bucket notice one of their fellow crabs succeeding at efforts to climb out, they often pull him back in. This analogy is applied to humans who hate to see others succeed and who similarly pull them down. Because all negative behaviors are more common in NEPA due to brain drain and sanity drain, we can expect jealously to be common, all things being equal. Add to this the fact that NEPA is a proverbial bucket in which most individuals are unwillingly stuck, and you have a recipe for especially high levels of jealousy.

1. Arrogant Normies
Some people deserve to be a little aloof. For example, Nikola Tesla spent most of his time alone, and justifiably so. If he were alive today, we would not expect him to put aside discovering the next scientific breakthrough to meet with normies and discuss TV sitcoms, the score of last night's game, the best place to get chicken wings or sub-1100 SAT Score music. Generally, he would not like to skip from subject to subject without ever getting into depth about anything like what happens in so many normie conversations. Since he was a kind man, he probably would have done so if he had had unlimited time, but he was mortal and condemned to live only so many days on this earth, so he limited himself to communicating with people through other ways, such as through lighting their homes with AC electricity, something no normie could ever hope to accomplish.

But imagine the pure evil of normies who shun others for not having adequate knowledge of movie trivia or the cheapest local discount stores or craft beer. Do said normies deserve to be aloof?

Because the zenith of shared knowledge does not surpass normie levels in NEPA, their attitudes are considered high brow and set the tone for the culture. Need we say more?

***

During the early part of the 20th century it was said that the coal miners of NEPA were birds of passage, ie guest workers who tentatively lived in northeast PA until they could find better work elsewhere. In other words they never had a sense of permanence. They were Europe's poorest who roamed the world in search of work that could physically sustain them. They had to buy their stuff at the company store, which did everything it could to tie them to area by getting them in debt and thus make them a captive population.

Being an early coal miner was horrible work. They died in their forties of black lung, ie their lungs becoming nonfunctional from the accumulation of coal dust. They lived shorter lives than wildmen hunter gatherers and the South's former black slaves. The backbreaking work left them eager for spirits which they drank to ease their aches and pains in corner bars. Despite their daily eclipse in the mines they played football and baseball on the weekends, exchanging coal dust for soil dust in raucous physical contests. Their spirits could not be trapped in the mines even if their livelihoods were.

Granted, NEPA still has beautiful green landscapes, charming reminders old ethnic traditions, and stylized architecture from bygone eras. Many people have fond memories of growing up in NEPA. But today the beauty of its land and former inhabitants serve as reminders of potentialities unlived, such as a kiss never made, a battle never fought, and a song never sung.

Today NEPA's inhabitants no longer physically go into the mines, but their world is a subterranean Hades of stupidity, insanity, spitefulness, and old age.

A phoenix cannot rise from its ashes if it remains in them. Nor can it appreciate its ashen struggle unless it is freed. It's time for the remnant of worthy souls in NEPA to be the last birds of passage to leave.

The way to fondly think of NEPA is through the lens of nostalgia. One should strive to be the beleaguered traveler who returns to NEPA to see the ghosts of his past and pay respects to a land and former inhabitants that time has forgotten and which posterity may fail to remember.

Notes
1. SEX BY AGE 2014 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates US Census Factfinder