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The Unexotic Underclass

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Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#181

Post by aianus »

callmeed wrote: post #62

To those who commented on the financial or regulatory hurdles in serving these people: Maybe another way to look at this is: instead of creating a startup to serve veterans or single mothers–why not create a startup that can employ veterans AND single mothers ? One of the biggest problems facing single mothers is the high cost of childcare. In many instances, it makes going to work almost pointless because it eats 50…

A very obvious solution would be to have some proportion of single mothers watch the children of the other single mothers while they work outside the home.

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if there's a metric shit-ton of misguided regulation around running home daycares that makes this impractical.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#182

Post by PeterisP »

onion2k wrote: post #70
declan wrote: post #12

>what with government penniless and gridlocked Um, the U.S. federal government will be spending something like $3.4 trillion in the fiscal year beginning at the end of this month. That's pretty much the exact opposite of truly "penniless." As for gridlocked, sure, it's going to be difficult for the Dems to expand Obamacare, and it's going to be difficult for the GOP to repeal Obamacare, so by that crabbed version of…

Imagine I give you $20. Then I tell you that you have to spend all of that $20 on x, y, and z. Are you penniless? Yes. You have no money. All of the government's $3.4 trillion is budgeted for, allocated and spent. What makes the government penniless is the fact that they can't do anything else because they have no budget for it.

The whole point is to look at the budgeted allocations - if it has budgeted $100 million on foobar, then that's a $100 million marketplace for foobar-replacing products and services.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#183

Post by loumf »

facepalm wrote: post #74
burgers wrote: post #29

I can sum this up so very simply. The way to make the most money is to get as close to money as possible. Hence why finance is such a lucrative career. We are seeing the obvious flaws of capitalism now that capital is no longer tied to low skill labor for manufacturing. Want to make a ton of money 1 year from today and have good credit? Spend your days with an MLS subscription finding under-priced homes to flip in a…

Where I live, many landlords prefer tenants who are on welfare. The state pays their rent, so it's practically guaranteed. So I think single mothers might be a lucrative market. Especially if you can get the foot into the door for some government contract. Another data point: I think Warren Buffet got rich with Coca Cola and chocolate bars? That's basically selling crap to the poor.

I think Warren Buffet got rich with Coca Cola

Coca-cola is where he parks excess cash. He got the cash using insurance cash-flows (get cash now, pay out later) to fund utility building (needs cash up-front, pays out cash reliably for a long time)

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#184

Post by lmm »

jerf wrote: post #161
rmc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"agenda": The word you use when you want to dismiss someone's issues without actually addressing them. Most of your questions are answered here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/richard... "Why does she have a child?" News for you: Sometimes people's circumstances can change. It's impossible to be sure you're income will be stable for 20 years.

I was actually surprised when I read the summary, because that would be a surprising level of poverty in the US. If anything, we are unnecessarily generous with the food stamps here. (Which I am not necessarily complaining about, just observing that they are relatively easy to get.) And lo, it turns out this was in Britain, so saying they can't afford $44 is sort of deceptive. I well believe she couldn't afford £44.…

> There's a certain segment in American politics who really doesn't like to talk about this, but for all the drama, the poor in America are still better off than they are in almost any other country, which, yes, includes all (AFAIK) the European countries, and while that doesn't prove anything about what we do or do not need to do in that area, it does suggest that rhetoric about poverty in the US can occasionally get overblown.

Really? My understanding was that without state-subsidized healthcare, many don't have access to non-emergency healthcare, and so miss out on the kind of preventative measures that can do a lot for your general health. So while the American poor might be wealthier in some narrow sense than the European poor, their quality of life is worse than in nations with state healthcare.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#185

Post by hnal943 »

julian_t wrote: post #100
narrator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days you can buy no-name android tablets from Walmart for $44. For example: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Ematic-7-Tablet-with-4GB-Memory-an... That's cheap enough that there's no reason for a poor person NOT to have one.

Cheap is one reason, but also... When you're functionally illiterate and have spent a few years living on the streets, are not good with money, and have a generally chaotic lifestyle, then you may well not think about going to your local supermarket to buy a cheap tablet (even if you know what a tablet is ) For some folks, their lack of ability to cope with (and fit into) modern life is truly incapacitating.

Right, but that brings us back to the main point: how is an app going to solve that? It's not.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#186

Post by aianus »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #159
rwallace wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich? I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to t…

Organ donation 2.0 and prostitution 2.0. But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.

Let me understand how I'm supposed to see this:

A-OK: Rich Americans die from kidney failure while poor Africans die from malnutrition/AIDS/TB/whatever.

Reprehensible exploitation: Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#187

Post by tomjen3 »

graeme wrote: post #108
rwallace wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich? I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to t…

Unfortunately, this is the future. I say unfortunately, because I think if we could see the final version, we'd recoil. 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?…

I ask this because I have never seen a decent answer to this question: how does that make the poor people worse of? I mean I can sorta see it with the spare room (rent goes up because your neighbor has a little extra cash, now you _have_ to rent your room out too) but your car? Swinging by with my groceries on your way home from work? Swing by with some ready-to-freeze homecooked dinner for me[1]?

[1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#188

Post by chillingeffect »

tinco wrote: post #76

I would really love to cater to the unexotic underclass, but how? I mean he goes on and on about how much opportunity there is, but I don't see it. I know how to get 500 white liberal suburbanite young males to pay me $10 per month. They have the money and they love to spend it on tech and gadgetry that makes their lives even more comfortable. But single house mothers? Poor Romanians? How would I even get them to pay…

> all these people really want and need is money,

In my opinion, all they really want and need is _land_.

The real people squeezing everyone else are the landowners, and the landlords. With enough land, anyone can support themselves: chickens, vegetables, hunting and fishing, etc.

Mortgages in exchange for housing ("death pledges") exploit the poor, indenturing them to overemployment at insufficient wages. The novelty and promise of technology are part of the system that works like a carrot on a string enticing us toward so-called "higher standards," which we only think we need. The rest of the system is security/fear. These are the forces governments and corporations use to keep themselves secure. Anything we're going to do to escape it will be much more like what Jesus of Nazareth, Gandhi, Martin Luther Kind or Malcolm X did than what Paul Graham or Scott Adams did.

Technology and SV makes an easy whipping boy because they're in the crosshairs of the media (all the "billion dollar" buyouts), but we're just another pawn in the game the powerful landowners, governments and corporations are playing. In fact, we're playing along to their rules.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#189

Post by JoeAltmaier »

chillingeffect wrote: post #188
tinco wrote: post #76

I would really love to cater to the unexotic underclass, but how? I mean he goes on and on about how much opportunity there is, but I don't see it. I know how to get 500 white liberal suburbanite young males to pay me $10 per month. They have the money and they love to spend it on tech and gadgetry that makes their lives even more comfortable. But single house mothers? Poor Romanians? How would I even get them to pay…

> all these people really want and need is money, In my opinion, all they really want and need is _land_. The real people squeezing everyone else are the landowners, and the landlords. With enough land, anyone can support themselves: chickens, vegetables, hunting and fishing, etc. Mortgages in exchange for housing ("death pledges") exploit the poor, indenturing them to overemployment at insufficient wages. The novelt…

Hey! I'm a landowner! I didn't know I was ruling by security/fear. Wow! I should make myself some jackboots or something.

No kidding aside, in the USA anybody can own land who wants to. That seems too convenient a variable to tag all the social ills on.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#190

Post by PeterisP »

jamesash wrote: post #133
x0x0 wrote: post #5

fta: But there’s only so much Washington can do to help out, what with government penniless and gridlocked, and its elected officials occupying a caste of selfishness, cowardice and spite, heretofore unseen in American politics. This is pure both-sides-do-it bullshit. In reality, one side recently passed an amazing transformation of health care to attempt to pull the united states -- still the world's richest large c…

>Somehow Europe, Canada, Japan, etc, all make health care work but we can't. The countries you mentioned largely have outsourced their national defence concerns to the United States, allowing them to have defence budgets of <10% of spending while the USA's defence spending stands at 17% of spending. That is not irrelevant to this discussion.

Amount of money going to healthcare is actually NOT relevant to this discussion - all the countries are spending less on healthcare than USA, none of those health advantages are caused by being able to afford healthcare because of some or other reason reason.

The call for health reforms isn't "give medicine more money", but "fix the system so that you stop getting shit priced as gold".

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