Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#141

Post by gress » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 4:53 AM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #81

gress wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet has already redistributed earth shattering quantities of wealth in record time. Given that inequality has been steeply rising, you must mean that it has redistributed wealth further from the poor to the rich.

Global inequality has been sharply dropping over the past few decades as hundreds of millions of people in India and China have been lifted out of poverty. Amusing that you think inequality has been rising.

It has been rising in the U.S. and Europe. I imagine you're pretending you didn't know that, but it's not clear why.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#142

Post by gress » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 4:55 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #71

gress wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet has already redistributed earth shattering quantities of wealth in record time. Given that inequality has been steeply rising, you must mean that it has redistributed wealth further from the poor to the rich.

Or one might mean that it has redistributed the other way, while other factors in society were redistributing from the poor to the rich, and that the net imbalance would be far worse without the mitigating effect of the internet. Your presentation presumes that the internet is the only redistributive factor that existed in the time under consideration.

True, but pointing out multiple interpretations adds nothing unless you can tell us about the other factors. What are they?

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#143

Post by tomjen3 » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 4:58 AM UTC

jchrisa wrote: post #96

omouse wrote: post #32

> Most social impact projects and organizations are in the east coast, and, at least as far as I could tell (but in all likelihood, it’s probably because I suck at finding them), most of them don’t seem to have significant / meaningful software projects That's because they're stuck in the stone-ages and don't have the imagination to use and create software (aka they're run by marketers, managers and people who want t…

The flip side of "you can't expect much" is that a little help from tech folks would go a long way. Organize a hack event where non-tech people describe the stuff they need help with and tech people try to form solutions. The important thing is the relationships, not the solutions.

That is probably the only insightful comment on this article, which is sad for hn, however relationships are based on trust and respect and based on the other comments here programmers can't even respect themselves.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#144

Post by wpietri » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 4:59 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #123

wpietri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty far from true. Using rich people to pay for product development is a well-developed modern technique, and it can definitely work well. But we didn't get, say, the smallpox vaccine because Jenner said, "I wonder what I could do for very rich people?" Most early Internet work was done for the sake of public benefit; the rich-person version was Compuserve, which was basically an evolutionary dead end. More…

Hi William! I'm wondering how it would work otherwise. Should someone buying a new car who is thinking about its entire lifecycle optimize for fuel efficiency? Resale value? Ease of maintenance? Something else? I suppose a house should be designed so that it could easily be split into apartment units? It doesn't seem impossible to get wealthy people to consider these things, similar to how they consider the effect of…

Good question. I think a lot of rich-person spending is essentially buying status. So I think trying to get them to consider the ways their new dream home could be later retrofitted to suit the poor is working in contradiction to the motives. It is exciting to me when goods with some public benefit also become status goods, though; the Prius and the Tesla are examples of that.

I agree that do-goodery is hard. Of course, so is producing value in a for-profit context; I'm not sure which is relatively harder.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#145

Post by wpietri » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 5:06 AM UTC

carlosdp wrote: post #51

wpietri wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I think you're arguing against something that is not actually in the article. I read him as pointing at ends of a continuum, and I think you're falsely constructing a dichotomy out of that. He says quite clearly: "I’m still a believer in technology, particularly in the web platform, as a force for good." He also is explicit that for himself he wants something farther toward the clear-impact end of the spectrum…

Forgive me, but you're kind of reframing his remarks a bit. For example, you cut off the second part of this sentence: "Even though I’m still a believer in technology, particularly in the web platform, as a force for good, society needs more people working directly on problems that matter. " While the author acknowledges in the abstract that the internet has improved people's lives, I still see the tone implying we s…

You inferring something does not mean the writer implied it. This is all you, pal.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#146

Post by wpietri » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #135

rifung wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Bill Gates really an example of what the person described? Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think his motivation for working or making money was to donate it. It seems like he decided after accumulating his wealth that he should use it for good. It seems important to note the difference because I don't find it hard to imagine how a person whose motivation is to help the public good might not be passionate about…

It's hard to speak of motivation unless you're the person in question. Most people do things for a number of different motivations. Hence the adage "We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior." I suspect that as far as Bill Gates is concerned, he considers it all a game and just wants to win. For the first half of his life, the game was maximizing the money he makes. For the second half of his…

Did Gates ever speak of this? If not, it's a terrible example.

Plenty of rich people, after spending their lives in business, eventually switch to philanthropy. Presumably because they discover, like the OP, that they value doing something more meaningful than stacking up money. But that's entirely different than somebody who has that realization young and does corporate stuff as a way of extracting cash, which is what alwaysdoit was suggesting.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#147

Post by dang » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 5:56 AM UTC

Sophistifunk wrote: post #55

Standard liberal guilt. If you're a programmer and you feel like curing malaria is more important than Uber, you should make a shit-ton of money and give it to Bill Gates. Without the teen angst.

It's not ok to hijack the thread by posting a trollish, unrelated reply to the top comment. I'm going to detach this subthread and mark it off topic now.

In the future, if you want to make this kind of point on HN, please do so more thoughtfully. Slinging insults provokes flamewars and makes the site worse.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#148

Post by colechristensen » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 6:03 AM UTC

saryant wrote: post #30

narrator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"40% is owned by foreign governments. Being indebted to foreign countries isn't so bad. It means they have faith in you and are rooting for your success. It supports peace and cooperation." "As for "rich people" mutual funds and banks own together about $1.5 trillion. A lot of those are pretty average folks. Even then this is only ~%10 of the $18 trillion debt." Ok so still that's 9 trillion in debt owed to people wh…

The "rich people" you're talking about includes pretty much every Average Joe with a 401k or IRA. For instance, of that $1.5 trillion, $50-$100 billion is held in Vanguard's investor shares (by definition, retail investors with less than $10k in the fund). These people (mostly regular people saving for retirement) aren't "doing absolutely nothing"—they're helping fund the US government!

People are also missing the basic fact: with inflation and interest rates on par and both so low ... government bonds aren't profit centers. They store value and gain just enough interest to beat inflation. It's about your savings not evaporating over the years more than big greedy profits.

If you look at the interest payments for the US debt over the last 25 years ... despite the recent debt bubble... the actual interest paid when accounting for inflation is flat.

Adjusting for inflation we paid less interest in 2014 than we did in 1988 or 2000 (these are two random years I checked). America does not have a debt problem. The people who obsess over it or yell about the gold standard almost exclusively have absolutely no idea what's been happening or how it works. That's not to say that we should _aspire_ to borrow endlessly, but when times are down and people have faith in you, there's nothing better than borrowing. With the fed pushing the interest rates so low, (and buyers elsewhere running to the Dollar for security in uncertain times) there's just no reason to be afraid of a little more debt. We're far _far_ away from the territory when it starts being a problem. (and the same people who complain about the debt now want tax cuts instead of paying off debts when times are good – fools)

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#149

Post by beatpanda » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 6:22 AM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #139

beatpanda wrote: post #126

I would love it if anyone repeating the tired talking point, that solutions for rich people's problems will magically transmogrify into solutions for real problems with actual impact on human potential and quality of life, could name even one example of this that's come out of U.S. technology startups in the last ten years. I would also love it if anyone could explain why so many people don't feel compelled to do any…

So getting laid isn't a problem with real human impact? I guess I'm not a real human being then. Maybe I should just go slit my wrist and stop taking up space that could be used by people who haven't committed the crime of doing something with their lives.

Believe it or not, people get laid every day without having to use the Internet. One thing that really helps that out is living in a city where lots of different kinds of people are able to live.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#150

Post by saryant » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 6:26 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #148

saryant wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "rich people" you're talking about includes pretty much every Average Joe with a 401k or IRA. For instance, of that $1.5 trillion, $50-$100 billion is held in Vanguard's investor shares (by definition, retail investors with less than $10k in the fund). These people (mostly regular people saving for retirement) aren't "doing absolutely nothing"—they're helping fund the US government!

People are also missing the basic fact: with inflation and interest rates on par and both so low ... government bonds aren't profit centers. They store value and gain just enough interest to beat inflation. It's about your savings not evaporating over the years more than big greedy profits. If you look at the interest payments for the US debt over the last 25 years ... despite the recent debt bubble... the actual int…

I absolutely agree. I was mostly replying to the uninformed belief that the benefits of investment accrue only to the "rich" (a loaded term I'm loathe to use).