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The Unexotic Underclass

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Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#101

Post by cdoxsey »

michaelochurch wrote: post #86

We actually pay dearly for what's happening to the so-called Unexotic Underclass. 1. Many of us will join them. Most people who join VC-istan and Wall Street in 2013 aren't going to make any money. By the time they're eligible to sit at the table, the money will be elsewhere. The vicious culture of VC-istan (with extreme deadlines, fast firing, and little investment in doing things right; so you end up not learning n…

What about Texas (with lots of job growth) or North Dakota (with really low unemployment)? There's been mass migration back to the South too.

Maybe (NY, CA, DC, etc..) are dying, and maybe they'll bring the rest of the country with them, but there are other places in the US which seem to be OK.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#102

Post by ebiester »

jasey wrote: post #99
ebiester wrote: post #44

It's pretty simple. The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal... Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the…

100% this. As per the laws of free market capitalism if a niche in the market is underserved the market will step up and supply to the markets demand. On Wall st where the author has worked, any market inefficiency is arbitraged away. Where there is profits to be made the market will find them. I just don't think there's any big viable markets there, it would be nice if the author could identify at least 1 product id…

There are ways, of course. As one example, find more inexpensive ways to make goods already marketed to a higher segment. For example, 300 dollar laptops that look better, especially if you can get a few reality TV stars using them and bravo pimping it. Start a brand that is perceived as high end by the middle class, show it to them in conspicuous consumption avenues, and then tread downmarket. You can only do this so many times.

But if I'm looking at a startup, it sure wouldn't be my first market of choice.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#103

Post by netrixllc »

This article is completely false. There has been an exponential increase in the number of start-ups in America to specifically serve the underclass. What the poor want is money, and the market has responded with almost every conceivable solution. Some examples, Gold for cash stores, Payday Loan stores, Auto Title Loan stores, increasing number of pawn stores, new high risk credit cards offering 29.9% APR, rent-to-own furniture/appliance stores, the 'short term' elimination of any standards towards an approval for purchase of a home to allow predatory 'Borrowers' to buy homes they could not afford, etc...

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#104

Post by twrkit »

Spooky23 wrote: post #49
justzisguyuknow wrote: post #35

"Of the single mothers, the majority is White, 1 in 4 is Hispanic, and 1 in 3 is Black." This does not add up.

Statistics here are easily manipulated. Usually these stats are kid centric, because that's how he census bureau tabulates the data... Nearly 70% of black children are in a household with a single mother vs. 45% Latino, 25-30% white, 15% Asian. The numbers vary when you flip it to be parent-centric, and you can cherry-pick states to some extent to find the results that you want. If you want to decrease single motherh…

To back this concept up, check out this post[1] on Zerohedge which points out how it's becoming more lucrative to work a minimum wage job (or no job at all) and collect entitlements than it is to work a 'middle-class' job.

[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-...

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#105

Post by jlujan »

vkou wrote: post #20
mikeash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out. It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell…

From what I understand of Veteran's Affairs, the technology has been built, and it does sell. The only problem is that the government's being fleeced for all its got by the vendors in question. VA's got no end of computer systems, where its staff hand-enter information in one system, print out its report, only to scan it, fax it across the country, where someone else will hand-enter it into... A different system. Eng…

"On February 5, 2013, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced that instead of building a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR), both DOD and VA will concentrate on integrating VA and DOD health data by focusing on interoperability and using existing technological solutions. This announcement was a departure from the previous commitments that both Departments had made to design and build a new single iEHR, rather than upgrading their current electronic health records and trying to develop interoperability solutions."

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#106

Post by jlujan »

arkades wrote: post #30
Cyranix wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you take this comment a step further and attempt an explanation for why a gargantuan pile of paperwork does exist despite such excellent software?

In part the problem arises from the interface between systems. If you walk into any normal hospital internal medicine floor you'll see about 5 different systems in use, with varying levels of interoperability: the VA, operating what is the largest network of healthcare centers in the country, takes that issue to the next order of magnitude. A lot of paper gets generated at these interfaces. Although the core VA EMR s…

See my comment above

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5786754

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#107

Post by cobrausn »

cdoxsey wrote: post #101
michaelochurch wrote: post #86

We actually pay dearly for what's happening to the so-called Unexotic Underclass. 1. Many of us will join them. Most people who join VC-istan and Wall Street in 2013 aren't going to make any money. By the time they're eligible to sit at the table, the money will be elsewhere. The vicious culture of VC-istan (with extreme deadlines, fast firing, and little investment in doing things right; so you end up not learning n…

What about Texas (with lots of job growth) or North Dakota (with really low unemployment)? There's been mass migration back to the South too. Maybe (NY, CA, DC, etc..) are dying, and maybe they'll bring the rest of the country with them, but there are other places in the US which seem to be OK.

Texas is having a somewhat similar problem, but the economic boom is masking it a bit - the suburbs are now the place where a lot of the poor live, and the cities are getting expensive.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#108

Post by ctdonath »

gadders wrote: post #77
ebiester wrote: post #44

It's pretty simple. The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal... Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the…

Yeah, but there are a LOT of poor people. For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_th...

Total USA household wealth is somewhere around $50T, GDP $15T. Per parent post, the bottom 60% has 4.2% of wealth: that's $2.1T, or average $11,150 per person - most of which is not "disposable" (tied up in home, car, and other nonliquid essentials). Assuming same distribution for income, that's averaging $3,343 - again, most of it not "disposable" (rent, gas, food).

Yes, there are a lot of them ("poor" still being a debatable moniker when you're making more than 15x income of half the people on the planet). A lot of money can be made there, and many manage to. To the point of the lead article, a little bit from a lot of people can add up nicely for a business. To your point, there are indeed a lot of people sitting on a cumulative lot of money. To the point of the post in between, eliciting a lot of tiny slices from a lot of small piles of money is a lot harder than eliciting the same sum from a few piles orders of magnitude bigger.

Just trying to get a sense of scale here.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#109

Post by vijayr »

This is a nice read. Is there any place where we can learn more about these problems? as in, a place (blog/site etc) that lists problems that are real world problems to solve, than twitter/facebook type?

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#110

Post by adamgravitis »

kyllo wrote: post #3

I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months , and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pa…

I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem.

When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess.

It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities.

Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb.

Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.

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