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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I lack vision - but I don't see how any of the problems of the white collar and working poor can be solved by Silicon Valley. It would be impossible for a startup to work with the government in processing Veterns claims, for example. The regulations barriers are immense and the security and compliance problems are legion.

Similarly, how are startups supposed to improve the earning potentials of the working poor? MOOCs? Don't make me laugh. Most of these people wouldn't want to take one, they are not interested in an Education. They can barely fit in their current paycheck to paycheck lifestyle into their current schedule. And even if we could retrain them - as what? Coders?! Most people do not have the aptitude or patience nessecary.

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Domain specific knowledge would help. Find a vet that landed on their feet and ask what worked. Talk to a few people inside the VA and figure out what makes claims go faster vs slower. There are businesses that exist today where their sole revenue stream is providing accurate and up to date court forms.

To think that technology can't help the poor or unskilled is ignorant of history. The assembly line was a means to use unskilled labor to produce a skilled piece of work. Same reason you can have bankers who can't calculate an amortization by hand.

Articles like this one paint the situation as a moral imperative, but its actually an opportunity. If you can design a tool to make people at the margins more valuable or competitive, you'll be able to capture some of that value as well.

I feel you're dead-on about domain-specific knowledge.

An effect of hyper-capital (not a problem with moderate capitalism) is that everyone gets hyper-specialized. No one experiences the Veteran's Administration until... they're in it with brain damage and can't write code for it.

But I would bet that any who regularly reads this website could hang out in the V.A. as an intern for 30 days and add at least $100,000 worth of annual value.

Even if it was just improving paperwork - machine learning for diagnoses - delivering education - encouraging exercise.

These problems are unexotic at first glance, b/c our society's values are so crazily skewed.

> Articles like this one paint the situation as a moral imperative, but its actually an opportunity.

I guess the author failed in this regard, b/c I read it as trying to show how it's an opportunity, although the article itself lacked your insight about domain-specific knowledge.

Not every solution takes the form of a startup. And there's always the lifehack of asking the working poor what they think, and listening to them. Maybe some of them have the vision we lack.

> It would be impossible for a startup to work with the government in processing Veterns claims, for example.

This is changing" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...

> MOOCs? Don't make me laugh. Most of these people wouldn't want to take one, they are not interested in an Education. They can barely fit in their current paycheck to paycheck lifestyle into their current schedule.

That's an obnoxious and senseless statement. A MOOC is (1) lower cost, and (b) more flexible than existing *very popular education programs (ITT, DeVry...), solving the two problems you called out.

Studying using MOOC requires level of self-motivation that most people - both poor and rich - simply lack. Realistically speaking most MOOC do not add much value on top of a book you can get for free from any public library or buy for $30 on Amazon. Every time new medium is created people think that it will revolutionize education but the last time it was true was when printing press was invented. Radio lectures, TV, CD lectures and now MOOCs are fads and nothing more at that.

I think they require time. I started a Coursera machine learning course, then had a busy couple of weeks, where I couldn't do it. Got another week on, then another busy week. Makes learning a lot more difficult;t if you only get small fragments of time to focus on it.

Agree, not reading HN can give some extra time.

Are the major MOOC providers doing gamified study on mobile phones? I think that could be effective for basic stuff if it's not already being tried.

A bit like Duolingo which is really well done.

> The regulations barriers are immense and the security and compliance problems are legion.

Paging Uber ... I am kidding, kind of. I do wonder what would happen if a well-capitalized startup did something in this space. Provide services directly based on the hope/promise/belief of future repayment?

> I do wonder what would happen if a well-capitalized startup did something in this space.

There's a problem with this line of thinking... A statup is a company that lacks capital, and compensates that by an improved supply of other kinds of resources[1]. Compared to a mid-sized company budget, VC rounds are change money.

Red tape and government bureocracy are common examples of problems that can be solved with money (== people's time, not competency), and nothing else. Startups in that enviroment either discover one of the few exceptions or die.

[1] Besides other constraints you may want to apply to that term, like high growth potential. The point is, that one constraint is there.

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