Spot on.

Years ago, I maintained a couple of desktops in a sort of 'job center' where people could submit electronic applications for various low-end, entry-level positions.

The most common issue - no email address. Second most common - has email, but has to take the bus to the library to check it.

Cheap smartphones have been a boon at that level. There's a whole segment of the population that was missing out on all the benefits of being connected until very recently.

Absolutely. We have come to know a couple of guys, one ex-homeless, who have real troubles here. We lent one an old iPad and that, together will free wifi in coffee shops and malls, has enabled him to talk to government agencies and job centers.

http://dclibrary.org/services/computer

Things like this will make a big difference. The email thing, as an IT guy full-time, blew my mimd. Many of my students were not stereotyped homeless people, but frustrated people with low incomes and dead end jobs. Some of them really lit up as you showed them how to spend all free time that could be invested in free education and researching better job opportunties. I only wish I had stayed longer volunteering there to make a real difference.

I hope other places start digital literacy courses.

That's cheap enough that there's no reason for a poor person NOT to have one.

Jack Monroe was poor and a blogger. She wrote a powerful piece about it once: ( http://agirlcalledjack.com/2012/07/30/hunger-hurts/ ):

> This morning, small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. ‘Where’s Mummys breakfast?’ he asks, big blue eyes and two year old concern. I tell him I’m not hungry, but the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar. But these are the things that we do.

> ...

> Then you start to take lightbulbs out. If they aren’t there, you can’t turn them on.

> ...

> Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one weetabix and says ‘more mummy, bread and jam please mummy’ as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam.

These are the people who can't afford $44.

Details are slightly unclear because not everyone's employment and sexual history is on the internet for the benefit of their book reviewers, but it appears that the shiftwork required of the job made it extremely hard to find childcare, and the cost of childcare+commuting to work made working non-viable.

I've no idea where the father is, you could ask about for him? As for the "shouldn't have child" argument, you can't return children for a refund when you become unemployed nor can you ebay them to recoup your costs.

She addresses this in a Guardian article:

> When I returned to work after maternity leave, my relationship broke down, and I found it impossible to cover the irregular night shifts 30 miles from home with any form of childcare. Childminders just don't work all night. Her son's father did and does look after him, but at the time it was impossible to match our work shifts up with friends, family and childcare to cover my working hours. Because he works too.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/richard...

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.

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. (It's a political thing where, let's be honest, there's a lot of incentives to keep promising more. I started listing them all out and the list of people interested in increasing poverty payouts got too long for a parenthetical. Again, not necessarily a complaint, but let's not pretend here that these interests don't exist. If you'd like, celebrate that often comes from something so crass as base political pandering ends up benefiting so many people, instead of a narrow interest group.)

I live in the Midwest and I don't know anyone living in abject poverty, but I know a lot of struggling families (as in, friends of the family that we socialize with frequently, not just "people I've heard of"). There's plenty of them that could afford $44, if you were somehow bringing something to them that was worth it. Which is, after all, the entire point here, to bring them something that will somehow improve their lives more than the cost of buying it, not to just pointlessly drain their wallets. This may very well only work right now in the US, where, yes, even the poor and struggling can afford $44, if it's worth it somehow. And on the flip side, while it's perhaps harder than you might initially think to bring $44 of value to somebody, it is also a very feasible goal. You don't have to work out how to bring them $5000 of value. (Although if you can somehow, awesome. That said the only thing that leaps to mind where you can pay back thousands for a small investment is budgeting apps, and that space is covered. The problem there wouldn't so much be writing the app as getting people to use it.)

While in high school, my mother finally left my father, taking my sister and me with her. Shortly afterward, she was incapacitated by cancer. My father would not have me back.

I continued to attend high school in spite of my homelessness. I was able to get a job at a restaurant that was a little lax on following labor law, and, initially, what I ate on the job was most of my meals (it was not allowed). I closed, so had keys to the building, and would come extra early and bathe in the dish washing sinks before the prep cooks arrived, then off to school.

I could never have afforded an electronic toy, and especially not the service plan that would come with it. And, no, minors do not get public assistance, if silly enough to try they will end up in foster care which more often than not means someone who wants the child simply to receive the monthly allowance for his "care". Even homeless shelters must turn away unaccompanied minors who come to their doors.

Eventually, I attended a good public university, but it was a long road. I do not want any longer, but I went hungry plenty-- I was 6 foot tall and 130lbs with as broad a build as you are likely to find, yet a rail.

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.

Note the difference between "overstated" and "false", and I'll even more explicitly say that that isn't proof that everything's hunky dory and nothing needs to be changed. But it's hardly like it's paradise for the poor in Europe and in the US you're just left out on your own... it's way more nuanced than that. (Everybody's books have to balance.)

Brit here. Enlighten me as to how not being able to afford to visit a GP is 'overstated'.

As I understand it, if you are poor in the USA, there's a real chance you won't be able to pay for the pills you need, or for mental health treatment, etc. That simply doesn't happen here in the UK.

> Everybody's books have to balance.

But that doesn't mean anything. Different countries invest different amounts in welfare.

The U.S. government does provide health care programs for people below a certain income threshold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

The trouble comes when you are just over the threshold, but still can't afford health insurance, or just didn't bother to sign up. Or have insurance, but the part it didn't cover bankrupts you anyway.

So if we exclude those people from the "poor" category, perhaps "the poor's lack of access to health care is also overstated" makes a little more sense.

SNAP policies (supplemental nutrition assistance ie. food stamps) can vary greatly from state to state too. I've lived in states that provide unconditional benefits to anyone below a certain income level, but my current state (Florida), only provides a few months of benefits at a time, and then after that you have to continually re-qualify, providing proof that you're still looking for work if you're unemployed, things like that. It's incredibly easy to fall through the cracks with these proof requirements though.

Being poor certain places in the US is misery. People do go hungry plenty, and adults and especially children often suffer severe lasting health problems from malnutrition here.

I know this stuff from personal experience.

Go to a city. Any notable city. Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus. You'll see plenty of poverty, if you spend just five minutes to look for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/ click "Number Living in Poverty" and then look at the midwest. It's everywhere. Every major city, and a number of rural areas (Tippecanoe County, Isabella County, Allen County, etc)

There's poverty all over the Midwest. If you don't see it, you aren't looking very closely.

This is not a political thing.

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.

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.

1) Equip them with internet-enabled smartphones 2) Give them software to get things done more efficiently

I just wish there was one more thing:

3) Decentralize the networks so there's no need to pay for an expensive mobile internet plan in order to communicate in your own neighborhood.

But those aren't the only kinds of companies worth building, and "young entrepreneurs from top schools" aren't the only people who can build good companies. We shouldn't look to them (err, ourselves) as "humanity's only saviors". Which I think this article makes the mistake of doing.

A similar problem that I have with this piece is an over-reliance on entrepreneurs - that is, the free market - to solve the problems of "the unexotic underclass". The free market will solve the problems of people (and businesses) who have discretionary income. That's how capitalism works. Capitalism also has a lot of inequality baked-in. He shouldn't be surprised that difficult-to-serve, low-income individuals are failed in America.

Keep in mind, too, that the other part of "discretionary income" is "discretionary". Schools, Hospitals, Government Agencies like the VA? They typically have terrible purchase processes (and generally poor management) that make it almost impossible for entrepreneurs to sell to them. I recently folded an Education Technology company because schools are so difficult to sell to and have so little money. Don't blame the entrepreneurs here; blame a government which over-regulates and under-funds schools, the VA, and other services. (And then vote to make a better one!!)

All that being said, I do agree that there are opportunities for entrepreneurs in these markets. They may be hard to find, but we're not going to do it by holing up in Tech/Wealth bubbles like SF and NYC. Spending some time in the heartland may be a great way to find those rare business models that could profitably serve the underserved.

There's an interesting correlation between immigrants and entrepreneurship (old-school building a profitable business entrepreneurship, not SV-type scaling an unprofitable business entrepreneurship). My take on this (utterly my own opinion) is that immigrants are less likely to get jobs, so more likely to start their own businesses.

So the people who are going to solve these problems are probably not going to be VC's, Ivy leaguers, incubators, or in Silicon Valley. They're probably going to be bootstrapping (nice bonus: if you're used to living on a very low income then bootstrapping is a lot easier). Maybe the problem here then is not the entrepreneurs, but the media and reporting. We only hear about young entrepreneurs building something awesome with technology. Maybe there's an interesting story about poor, underprivileged people dragging themselves out of poverty with technology?

As an immigrant, I think it's more that we're more comfortable with taking risks (leaving one's home country and emigrating anywhere is a huge risk, after all), so we don't have a big problem with abandoning steady paychecks and diving (back) into a sea of uncertainty.

Eh, most of your "funded" cash is spent on labor. What does someone working for a funded startup cost? $200K/yr if you skimp on office space?

Figure that as a bootstrapped company, you spend 1/3rd of your time earning money to feed yourself (Without dependents, you can live pretty okay off of 1/3rd of a competent coder's salary, even in SV.) Note, it may be easier, say, if there are three of you to rent out one of you as a contractor full-time and use that money to pay everyone else, rather than all of you working for other people 1/3rd of the time. Getting part-time work that pays good is a significant marketing effort, while $90/hr corp to corp full-time work is easily obtainable through the body shops.

So to compete with a company funded with a half-million bucks, you and your partners need to be willing to put in almost four years of your time.

this is not unreasonable. I've done rather more than that. and there are many advantages; getting contracting work, in my experience, requires a hell of a lot less marketing effort than getting VC money.

Of course, the difficulty increases as your funded competitor gets more funding; if, say, your competition has tens of millions in funding, say, rather than just half a million? yeah, that's going to be rather more difficult.

Funding makes it easier to pay your bills while you work on a problem, but can also remove a lot of the urgency about finding a solution that customers will love. If you depend on customers to pay your bills, however...

>Many problems have an 80% software solution attached to a 20% "interface with the real world" mandatory bit.

My "Big Problem" is Education. I'd almost flip those numbers -- 20% software, 80% "interface with the real world." Throw in non-trivial entrenched interests including existing teachers who think they know the best way to teach, and a significant fraction of people in this country who went through a public school education and who might be prone to object to teaching kids in a new and different way.

But I still want to try. I think that it's a problem that will actually address many of the "unexotic big problems" plaguing the world today.

The big fix is for the poor. Get education right and you can make strides against poverty from multiple directions. The educated adults you produce will be more able to be employed, or to create employment opportunities (depending on temperament and opportunity). That would help single mothers and the rest -- eventually.

The major problem is that people who need to learn something are by definition the least able to evaluate what they need. So the dominant incentive is for companies to produce crap and then market the hell out of it, or develop connections and feed off public credit ("you may qualify for state assistance!")... almost anything except for producing stuff people actually need and trying to sell it on its virtues. And then there is the lack of money, because student budgets are often directed elsewhere, such as to their expensive but ineffective accreditation programs and university classes.

This transforms meaningful work in the education space into an uphill struggle against funded businesses with predatory business practices, and while word-of-mouth can benefit you over them in the long-run, the viral loop goes slower in education than in other areas and it is very, very difficult to build effective placement in commercial sales channels like search engines.

More direct connections between education and employment would help, but the connection is often weaker than one would think from the political rhetoric thrown around, especially considering that education is often a proxy term for "credentials" or "signaling" in public rather than knowledge.

I have to respectfully but firmly disagree with this assertion.

Kids are born to learn. They seek out experiences that involve learning, and they lap it up voluntarily when given the chance.

School, as it's currently designed, does its best to remove all of the natural fun from learning.

Read about Sudbury Schools if you don't believe this can work. [1] They have no curriculum or standardized testing, and yet 85% of the kids who graduate go on to get higher degrees.

>More direct connections between education and employment would help, but the connection is often weaker than one would think from the political rhetoric thrown around, especially considering that education is often a proxy term for "credentials" or "signaling" in public rather than knowledge.

You're referring to the current (i.e., completely profoundly broken) educational system. The current system was designed for the industrial age to create interchangeable cogs in the manufacturing machine. It actively suppresses creativity and individuality. It requires all the various kids to learn in lock-step, which in reality they never do.

So of course what currently passes for "education" is poorly correlated with employment results. But what I want to do is fix education so that it does a good job, not optimize the current IMO broken system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

Just focusing on the adult education market, it is extremely clear that the most well-known educational products are those associated with non-educational marketing factors: institutional prestige (MOOCs), television advertising (Rosetta Stone), famous people (Bill Gates & Khan Academy).

You rarely, rarely, rarely hear about educational startups that are excellent, financially independent and successful. It CAN happen, but if you are planning to build a startup with that in mind, you will have a much harder time than if you raise cash and put education behind marketing, marketing, marketing....

Socrates also basically invented the strawman argument as an educational tool.

Read about Sudbury Schools. Not only do kids choose to really learn, they don't all pick the modern equivalent of pastry chef.

My Big Problem to solve is education as well, and currently, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to tackle the root cause. I feel we are all inclined to use technology as the path to success, but perhaps more fundamental issues need to be dealt with first. If this is the case, then which issue do we initially target -fighting predatory business practices, creating a culture that values education, establishing employment credibility for non-traditional education, something else?

The entire current educational system is based on creating interchangeable docile workers for manufacturing jobs.

What we need moving forward are creative, intelligent, and self-motivated individuals who will create value in a service/information economy.

I just listened to a story on public radio that talked about business-without-employees, and referred to the new "Participation Age" as the future. It's worth a listen. [2] He also brings up Sudbury Schools as an example of this philosophy as it applies to education.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

[2] http://www.cpr.org/news/story/why-employees-are-bad-idea