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Poverty-Fighting Startups

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Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#81

Post by praulv »

john_moscow wrote: post #13
aphextron wrote: post #9

Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT t…

>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. Because there is a huge and complex domain of human motivation, appreciation for hard-earned things vs. taking them for granted and so on. USSR tried doing exa…

And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#83

Post by loblollyboy »

masonic wrote: post #49
gumby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that t…

they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty Those who weren't outright killed during or in the wake of the revolution and pogroms, anyway. But many who DID survive did so only because of famine relief from the USA and Europe as farm collectivization went sideways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...

Pogroms were definitely not a Soviet phenomenon. Many of the party leaders were Jewish. In that article, it shows that since 1947 no famines. I think the original post is making the argument that they started making progress later. 1950-1970 they really did make progress in almost every concretely measurable thing. USSR went tits up in the way that maybe a chilled out company (albeit with a weird corporate culture) would not compete well against a sweatshop with a culture of work hard, make money. The latter would just have more output, innovate quicker and maybe make a better product. But maybe also be better at cutting corners, or marketing or growing for the sake of growth like a cancer. I’m all over the place bc it’s a huge topic, but there is a reason why a lot of people miss the Soviet Union - and it’s not only because it was their youth.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#84

Post by loblollyboy »

sologoub wrote: post #61
masonic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy crashed after the revolution The loss of the war with Japan didn't help, either.

Source? I can’t find any evidence that there was any economic significance to that war aside from loss of the fleet and human life. Bruised imperial egos for sure and likely contributing to an image of a week government, but I’m hard pressed to see how it could have had any impact on the industrial output of the country.

Sergei witte basically saved Russia’s ass in the peace negotiations. He was one of at least two very good ministers fired by the tsar in a time when Russia really needed one.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#85

Post by amelius »

john_moscow wrote: post #13
aphextron wrote: post #9

Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT t…

>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. Because there is a huge and complex domain of human motivation, appreciation for hard-earned things vs. taking them for granted and so on. USSR tried doing exa…

> people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost.

But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#86

Post by dudzik »

throwaway1202 wrote: post #53
BurningFrog wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty Depends on in what column you put the ~10% of the population they murdered. I would think of them as "not raised out of poverty".

I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.

I fail to see what the ugly part of the American past has to do with the current thread. Your comment feels a lot like Whataboutism[0] to me.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#88

Post by k__ »

If a poverty fighting startup would work it would be a huge plus for capitalism, I think.

How to get poor people at least to an average income while making some money yourself.

I'm from Germany and at least here I have the feeling that the issue is mostly missing education opportunities for older people.

Sure, the "really" poor without any job have more time on their hands, but there are probably a huge bunch of people who could work as taxi diver or waiter, who can make 1000€ a month without the need of too much education.

While you probably can mingle with the "Arbeitsagentur" (part of the public service for unemployed people) to get the people without income paid by them while you re-educate them, the much bigger part are the people who work but simply don't make enough money to have an okay life.

Also, while you have to get the second part of the people like 1000€ a month so they can do their re-education fulltime, you also have to make money yourself.

All I found today were some models, where the re-educated had to pay like 10-20% of their first income as payment later. This doesn't sound too bad, since it forces the education-company to get them ready for jobs, but on the other hand it maybe prevents people from getting good jobs? I don't really know.

The other model could be more like Mozilla does it, getting big sponsors, but then you are working for the sponsors and not for your customers anymore :/

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#89

Post by ForHackernews »

azernik wrote: post #54
noobermin wrote: post #10

I'm not from Silicon Valley, so the only sampling I have of SV culture comes from this site[0]. From what I see, the article has a refrain that being anti-libertarian goes against the SV gain, but I see political opinions from across the political spectrum here, and my leftist opinions are often upvoted. So, while I can see investors being skeptical, would the tech community as a whole be anti-welfare? I don't necess…

I think SV culture tends to be politically extremist, or to be more accurate fundamentalist, in whatever ideology it pursues. I see more hard-line libertarians, but also more hard-line socialists, than in other subcultures. There's a long tradition of political extremism among engineers in cultures around the world; something to do with seeing society as a system simple enough that a single human being can understand…

> or to be more accurate fundamentalist

It's also noted that engineers are overrepresented among terrorists. [0]

I think it's because engineers believe that there really is such a thing as a coherent, all-encompassing political philosophy that will yield strictly best outcomes for a given set of constraints.

They're basically porting their mindset from a technical endeavour to a sociopolitical one.

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/11/theres-a-good-reason-wh...

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#90

Post by tim333 »

aphextron wrote: post #9

Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT t…

Relative poverty is a social and political problem but reductions in absolute poverty such as having enough to eat have been to a large extent driven by science and technology.
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