The Unexotic Underclass

Plus if you are living a chaotic life, keeping hold of something like this, keeping it secure, dry and charged can be a mission in itself. And when times are hard what is going to be the easiest way to get some money (for bus fare to that job)...

So yes, if you are in the right location, with the time and means to get to an open wifi connection, and have the spare money to buy a tool like this, then awesome. But a lot of people aren't.

There is more than a hint of the populist a. randist philosophy throughout this article. Maybe this is a cult, and it goes without saying.

The privileged group (such as the author's) consider themselves hero's and the saints of today's countries, the ultimate problem solvers that defeat the overbearing complications of governments and regulation. The expectation of privilege versus the torrent of their own baser instincts that pervades their own reflection, is one even a clever author can not mask with the vanity of the wealthy with the needs of the exploited and poor.

Lets get straight to the point. The 'exotic' underclass are in resource rich regions. Investments into these 'entrepeneurs' is miniscule to the massive profits from the resources from the "emerging third-world countries".

The article is a complaint, that the unexotic underclass is unexploitable. Nothing much else is expected from the a group of sycophants whose main desire was to wheel and deal financial sludge on wall street.

So there ARE two sides here.

Side 1 is the "I want to have a startup so that I can do something important to me.

Side 2 is the "I want to have a startup so that I can do something important to others. I will find some way to make this important to me as I go along.

Side 1 folks are tweaking on a moral crusade. Let's change the freaking world, folks!

Side 2 folks are deeply ignorant. I do not know what people want that I can make. Maybe they want better restaurant recommendations based on blood type. Maybe they want job recommendations. Maybe somebody would want jobs for cats. Has anybody done that? Beats me.

If this were a war to improve the future of humanity, Side 1 folks are always the ones charging up the beach on D-Day. Rally after me, men! The cause is just and victory awaits!

Side 2 folks are always trying to find a better way to make the machine gun fit to the machine gun mount. You know, if the bearing fit this other way, machine gunners would have a bigger field of fire....

Side 1 guys are the evangelists. Side 2 guys are the plodders, plodding along. Tinkering.

There is no right or wrong answer here. One out of every 10K or so of the change-the-world guys actually change the world. Very cool! One out of 100 or so of the better machine gun mount guys actually do something that somebody, somewhere finds useful. Very cool!

My problem is when the Side 1 guys go on these long tears about what the rest of us "should" be doing. Dude. I've been working and living in the startup scene for a long time. Am I supposed to get all emotionally fired up because of social injustice? Or perhaps just go do something other folks might find useful? Because that thing where you run on passion for a year and burn out? That's not so much fun.

I love charities. I love hobbies. I think it's fine to have something that's a cross between a hobby and a charity. Perhaps this is what the side 1 guys really want for the rest of us and they are just doing a bad job of explaining it. Or perhaps they should just leave the rest of us alone while we go try to make something useful to somebody, anybody.

The sharing economy, at heart, is about the monetization of spare capacity. So far it's mostly been physical assets, but spare time is next. Anywhere you find a poor person watching TV (or, god forbid, reading a book) there's spare capacity ready to be monetized. And, why are they sleeping so much? They could be working.

The sharing economy is also about getting around transaction costs. Ideas like "minimum wage" and "minimum shift length" can be viewed as transaction costs that services can route around.

A marginal hour's unskilled labour isn't worth very much. There's always been exploitation of this fact, but web services have the potential to scale it up.

The basic problem is that economics rewards smart choices for the earlier items on the list and punishes smart choices for the later ones.

So it's 'not efficient' to think about them.

One hypothetical solution is to make distant pain points personal. If you're directly, immediately impacted by someone else's misfortunes you're going to want to do something about them.

It's possible technology could help with this. But it may have to do it in some unexpected and new ways.