8 ms·
The Unexotic Underclass (2013)
- clarkmoody 11y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261098 [496 days ago] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782704 [958 days ago]
- xiaoma 11y agoIf you click on "past" under the article title at the top of the page, it will show you several previous discussions.
- kbenson 11y agoOh, is that new? I don't recall seeing it before, but I like it.
- armenarmen 11y agofirst time I noticed it too
- doktrin 11y agoDescribing veterans as an unexotic underclass feels incorrect to me. Maybe it's just perception bias, but for instance my FB feed contains an order of magnitude more appeals for veterans causes than literally any other endeavor. GoFundMe's, petitions, charities, races, events - you name it. 4 out of 5 of my last donations concerned veterans (as a group) or individual vets, as were 5 out of 5 of my last signed petitions (whose value, I will grant, is probably a bit tenuous) Maybe there is some other social circle out there that exclusively cares about black and latino inner city youth, or Kenya, or Bangladesh - but if they really are as over-represented and over-valued as the author seems to derisively imply, then I'd like to see some data to support that. edit : the instant downvotes interest me. Can you qualify your disagreement? edit : to clear up some confusion, I mentioned anecdotal experience with veteran charities and fundraising efforts in order to illustrate their relative popularity - not their success. In my opinion, a popular cause is by definition not un-exotic (i.e. marginalized), which is the notion that I am responding to.
- JabavuAdams 11y agoThe veteran thing is strange. To a non-American the veneration of military personnel and veterans seems over-the-top to the point of self-parody. Watching the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, I wasn't sure whether I was watching a sporting match, or Starship Troopers. That said, for all the splashy thank-you-for-your-service it's a shame but no real surprise that veterans are getting shafted, behind the scenes, by one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
- peteretep 11y agoThere are plenty of classes of non-American, and most Anglo-Saxon countries also venerate their troops. It's also a reflex to what happened after Vietnam, where the veterans got an almost criminal level of under-appreciation, despite many being draftees.
- JabavuAdams 11y agoYeah, I understand why. It's still shocking to see / hear. I say this as an arm-chair war nerd. Nothing good can come from this level of military fetishism.
- peteretep 11y agoPerhaps. I'd argue it's not military fetishism though - there are no goose-stepping soldiers, missiles being wheeled through the streets, and so on. Closest they get in the UK is the Trooping of The Colour, which is a few centuries old, and hasn't caused a problem so far [citation needed — cf "Buzzfeed: The Three Countries the UK Didn't Invade?!"]. The focus appears to be on sacrifice and dulce et decorum est rather than on militeria.
- pjc50 11y agoI don't think troops are really venerated in the UK. This, after all, is what Kipling's "Tommy" was all about. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_tommy.htm http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_tommy.htm There's some veneration in a distant way for the RAF following the war, and the Sun newspaper runs its own pro-military campaign, but it's not something that comes up too often in political language. "Poppy day" is becoming more politicised in worrying ways, though.
- CookieMon 11y agoI wonder about this with open-source as well, since it's often about scratching the itches of the demographic that participates in it. But I don't know the unexotic underclass well enough to know if there's anything helpful software could do.
- username223 11y ago> I wonder about this with open-source as well, since it's often about scratching the itches of the demographic that participates in it. This is why I believe open source will always be much better at creating compilers and programming editors than desktop environments and word processors. There's nothing wrong with this, but it kind of explains why the Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive. It's a lot harder to solve other people's problems than your own.
- thedudemabry 11y agoI would posit as a counterpoint that improving compilers, programming languages, and programming editors feeds back into improving the open-source tools available to tackle the problems of others. Hopefully, we eventually arrive at a series of summits where creating a useful solution for a non-technical problem using an open-source tools requires less and less obtuse, finicky, technical knowledge gained through trial-and-error. That being said, I agree with you. Anecdotally, I haven't contributed anything to non-technical open-source projects outside of the odd bug report. That may be a good belated New Year's resolution. I'm also hoping that interesting experiments in lowering the unnecessary barriers to doing powerful things in programming will inspire folks like me to find a useful way to contribute to one of those summits. We need infinite Alan Kays and Bret Victors.
- andy_ppp 11y agoUnless we can find a way to give everyone a basic level of subsistence without any bureaucracy (read a basic living income) then nothing startups can do will help, apart from driving your business into the ground as there is no one to pay for it! Charities will not even touch the scale of the problem going forward.
- hguant 11y agoI think the existence of the Gates Foudation and the success it has had is sufficient rubutal of your argument.
- MBlume 11y agoOk, then the plan is start a world-beating company which monopolizes its (rapidly growing) market, then retire and start a non-profit.
- jholman 11y agoIt might not be the best plan, but it's not the worst plan. Step one: Do something mildly skeevy that skims from the public weal, e.g. by using monopoly power to suppress competition (hurting the ability of the invisible hand to give hand-jobs to the rich) and thereby profiting more than an "honest businessman" would. Step two: take actions that will actually benefit the least fortunate on a massive scale. More concisely, steal from the rich, give to the poor. Bill Gates is Robin Hood. We who read HN are the rich from whom he stole. I used to mildly resent it, but now I only resent that he couldn't figure out how to do it without side effects like giving a cut to Steve Ballmer and giving Paul Allen the capital he needed to start Intellectual Ventures. Until those guys start Robin Hooding too, at which point I abandon all comprehension of which white collar bastards are actually bastards.
- marcosdumay 11y agoSorry, but some of those "rich" is my country's government, that Microsoft was caught bribing a couple of times and, like every other government, gets its money basically from the poor.
- hguant 11y agoShe uses the VA as an example of an approachable "underclass" problem...but in order to work with the government, you have to be on their procurement cycle, which is (perhaps by design) anathema to all but the large contractors who have equal budgets for their legal and software development teams. Edit: he to she
- hardwaresofton 11y agoLost me early on at the assumption that entrepreneurs have always faced Big Problems... When was that assumed/implied? Entrepreneurs are just small business owners... literally
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- johnrob 11y agoIt's happening! Those companies that serve the cushy urbanites (Uber et al) are also providing above-minimum-wage jobs to the unexotic underclass.
- pmorici 11y agoIn general I wouldn't characterize the money Uber pays it's drivers as "above minimum wage".
- hackaflocka 11y agoThis video is a counter-argument to the idea that single moms are suffering and looking for flexible jobs, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhU85b7cidA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhU85b7cidA
- kazagistar 11y agoEntrepreneurship is a capitalist phenomena, and as such serves capital. People trying to solve real problems are going to fail more often, because there is just a lot less money in it. Helping rich people find a place to get their toenails done is a way safer idea then trying to help the homeless find a place to stay or whatever.
- tempodox 11y agoWow, I can't upvote this enough. > The dysfunction in D.C. is a big problem. Indeed, it's high time for a disruptive change.
- amelius 11y agoThis just shows how much capitalism is broken.
- facepalm 11y agoI can't even think of so many frivolous examples, off the top of my head. Most technology would also benefit the "underclass"? Maybe Tinder helps veterans and single moms to get together and have sex. Uber facilitates the date, and AirBnB organizes their honeymoon should they hit it off? Amazon saves time for everybody. What are the horrible startups - are they really dominating? What would be an idea that would benefit exclusively the underclass? (Political issues aside - or how could you launch a startup to fix the paperwork veterans have to do, wouldn't that have to come from politics?)
- VLM 11y agoThe frivolous examples all have something in common, spending money. One thing all underclasses have in common, is not having much money. As income and wealth concentrate into ever smaller groups of people, technologies that extract money are naturally going to focus on ever smaller demographics. The point of the article is possibly there is some social good in doing something other than finding new ways to extract money by entertaining the ever shrinking pool of ever richer people, and by doing that, possibly, we can avoid joining the underclass. Ironically that joining is inevitable, much as people can try to avoid death but can't really, "we" can't avoid demographic pressures and we will all be poor sooner or later. One aspect carefully tiptoed around in the article is if the number of rich people only decreases and the number of poor people only increases, there is some enlightened self interest involved. All of us are far more likely to become poor than to become rich. And that makes us and everyone around us extremely uncomfortable for obvious reasons, so its really cool to help exotic people on the other side of the planet, and really uncool to help our own people locally, beyond the minimal symbolic stuff like saying we support the troops and putting a ribbon on the car, for example. If you help a poor white male, that's going to make people extremely uncomfortable because its socially unacceptable to discuss that as our inevitable future, even if we all know it is our future and even worse we can't talk about it.
- facepalm 11y agoA couple of years ago I visited a castle in Slovakia. The boss of the castle had all sorts of amenities (the museum told), such as people who washed their clothes, food that would appear magically, heated rooms. That required a whole castle with lots of employees (slaves?) to sustain. These days "normal" people live better than the kings in former times, with zero employees, thanks to technology. So poor is not always the same as poor. Also, please provide an example of startups catering to rich people? Tesla comes to mind, but other than that? Netflix is pretty cheap, I think - certainly cheaper than the cable subscriptions of old times?
- FussyZeus 11y agoThis speaks to me on such an impressive level. Being one who lives in the midwest and not in a city, all the startups out there pouring just asinine amounts of money into solving complete non problems is just an endless source of amusement. Like that article I found way back here on HN about how you shouldn't send some rep from some shop-for-you company to CostCo, and I was literally laughing out loud saying "No shit, did this question really need an answer!?" So much of Silicon Valley now is peppered with insipid firms run by well educated and street dumb people spending atrocious amounts of money solving problems that exist to no one outside of an urban center. At the risk of sounding too rural: Ya'll look so silly.