Comment by firstOrder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by firstOrder | Hacker News Reader

> If you're itching to start something new, why chase the nth iteration of a company already serving the young, privileged, liberal jetsetter?

Because those are the projects which angels and VCs bankroll. Because those are the people who have disposable cash.

I was just reading an article on a conservative web site, actually one run by Ben Horowitz's father ( http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/cbs-colbert-and... ). It talks about how TV doesn't care about older viewers, rural viewers, and increasingly only cares about young professionals on both coasts, and how television programming is being focused on such people. Not sure how true it is but it makes sense.

Audre Lorde once said that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and capitalism is not going to solve the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, other than by imploding, as so many economic systems before have done (feudalism, slavery, primitive communism).

Also, anyone who has done work organizing working class people knows the solution is not for a genius from MIT to swoop in with some corporation to try to fix problems wrought by corporations. You see what is possible and organize around that. The American white working class once had power, and it chose to send bombers north of the Yalu river, support a war in Vietnam, on and on up to modern day with Obama's support of the Honduran's military overthrow of Honduras's democracy etc. The AFL-CIO saw it's steepest decline under someone who never worked or ran a union, but was involved undermining foreign unions in cahoots with the CIA and American big business. And on and on. Now they go down to fundamentalist churches and watch Fox News as they age, and slowly become a minority in their own country. Empowering white, blue collar Americans gave us No Gun Ri and My Lai. Thanks, I'll pass. I'm glad to see the sun setting on the white American working class.

Yeah, as someone who qualifies as privileged having grown up firmly middle-class and blessed with computers and the interest to learn them since the 80s, I am not incredibly inclined to channel my entrepreneurial spirit into something unfundable to satisfy the moral call of an ex-Goldman MIT graduate on a guilt trip. Put simply, I can not move the needle through self-sacrifice. That doesn't mean I don't have ethics and integrity about what I choose to do, but just that I'm not fool enough to believe I can solve (eg) poor single mothers' problems in this country with an app.

The problems are not going to be solved until culturally we come to a common understanding about what the concentration of wealth is actually doing to the country, so the zeitgeist can move past this sort of ra-ra Fox News pro-corporate anti-socialist propaganda that millions of people believe on principle because it appeals emotionally to their rugged individualist values, but actually only serves as an idealogical wedge to distract the proletariat while the oligarchs continue with business as usual lining their pockets behind the scenes.

>>"I'm not fool enough to believe I can solve (eg) poor single mothers' problems in this country with an app."

I've recently done research specifically on this topic, and here are three of single moms' many problems that probably could be solved with an app:

- Training for a job

- Reliable (as in timely and as in not about to fall apart) transportation to a job

- Childcare so that she can attend a job

Lets be fair, none of these things are solved with an app. An app, however, could facilitate better solutions.

I have personal experience with this from working with multiple single mothers while working retail as a starving student and the most effective way to get single mothers out of poverty is to get rid of the single part of their description. Patching the symptoms temporarily didn't seem to help much.

I'm not talking about some retroactive guilt shaming idiocy or a very niche dating website (although I've seen that work...) just from personal observation one chick and one kid in one apartment is just doomed, absolutely doomed, but you get three of them in a house having each others back and watching each others kids when they have to, and they get somewhere, at least better than the one trying to go it alone. And from direct personal observation, usually way the heck too much interpersonal "reality TV show" class of drama. Maybe the key is fixing the drama, somehow.

I know this sounds hideously 2009-ish but a social network for single moms is probably not the worst idea ever. Once you organize them, your list of three problems kind of takes care of itself.

Precisely that: a way to pool resources plus a bridge loan to cover a year of mortgage payments that are now her sole responsibility following a divorce.

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