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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

"Helping rich people get taxis easier". As a Lyft and Uber driver, I count among my rides: getting a rough looking fellow (who has spent years in prison after accidentally killing someone in a bar fight) get to the only job that would take him - affordably and on-time (he would have been fired otherwise). I've given an enlisted navy family from Oklahoma (husband was deployed) get home from a late night run to a distant Walmart - the military pay for an e-3 is low and I imagine tough to support a family of three and there are few other options without a college degree.

It's crazy to read about this guy who wonders if this all matters... The amount of money that the government spends to get a marginal improvement on society beyond basic functions of the government should be even more dismaying.

And it's incredibly patronizing to despair from on high that tech doesn't do any good for society.

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The explicit inspiration for Uber's founding was as a "limo timeshare service": http://newsroom.uber.com/2010/12/ubers-founding/

I"m glad that some people are also getting easier taxi service. But having worked in in SF since the last bubble, there is definitely an intense focus here on solving rich-people problems; when they serve others (e.g., struggling felons and young military personnel) it is often, at best, a side effect.

Every solution starts out as a solution for rich people, that's what brings the price down for everyone else

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.

Moreover, plenty of things made for rich people stay as solutions for rich people. And some are only valuable because they are priced so only rich people can have them. Note the entire luxury goods market, for example. You could look at houses and cars as well: because those markets focus a lot of their product development on rich people, the non-rich end up with hand-me-downs that don't suit them very well.

They wouldn't have developed a smallpox vaccine if it didn't affect rich people.

That's just not true.. There are numerous diseases which only affect the most poor and downtrodden citizens that are being worked on by thousands of 'first world' scientists.

With the obvious axioms that anyone with 1st world single-payer insurance behind them, or, say, the Gates foundation, isn't poor, could you give some examples?

The Perlstein Lab is a Public Benefit Corporation in the Bay Area looking for lysosomal deficiency drug candidates. A ton of research scientists are working on obscure diseases at university.

Basically the whole Orphan Drug market; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug

From the article you linked:

    > Moreover, we suggest that orphan drugs have greater
    > profitability when considered in the full context of
    > developmental drivers including government financial
    > incentives, smaller clinical trial sizes, shorter
    > clinical trial times and higher rates of regulatory
    > success

The original statement was that we don't develop treatments for diseases unless they affect rich people, the existence of orphan drug markets and regulations is evidence that we do develop these treatments.

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 the products they buy on the people in the supply chain and on the environment, but it would require a lot of research and marketing.

On the other hand, long-term planning like this is hard to do effectively. It seems like a lot of charity efforts specifically targeting the poor turn out not to be very cost effective, compared to the best approaches highlighted in GiveWell. It's hard to be confident that your average startup would achieve anything more than just showing good intentions.

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.

That's often how technological progress works: it's developed to solve either a pressing-but-not-so-noble problem and then someone adapts it so the average person can benefit, or it's developed to solve a trivial and useless problem and someone improves it so it's useful to the average person.

We built radar so we could detect German bombers; we got microwave ovens from it. We built GPS so we could guide missiles and spy satellites; we got turn-by-turn navigation and Uber out of it. We built Twitter so we could send 140-character text messages; we got the Arab Spring out of it. We built the ARPANet to coordinate top-secret military projects; we got the Internet out of it. We built PCs to play games; we got Visicalc, Word, and all sorts of productivity boosts from it. We built computers to break German codes and guide artillery shells; you know where that went.

I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things accidentally.

Maybe those technologies were expensive at first and came down in price with adoption, but that's different than making the claim that if we just work on whatever rich people want today, we'll automatically get to places that are beneficial for society. Want to help the third-world feed itself? Perhaps you should invest your resources in that, not in a silicon valley nutri-shake startup.

Hell, most of your examples are cases where the military did something to solve a known problem that was too expensive (or too speculative) to be left to private industry. How you turn that into an argument that our best-and-brightest should be working on ad-optimization eludes me.

This industry, I swear: we whine about the loss of space exploration, and wonder what happened to our flying cars, but we brush off criticisms when someone invests millions of dollars in the sixty-seventh niche food-delivery service for the SF bay area. Perhaps the two things are related?

An example of a startup doing work for the developing world is Wave, focusing on helping people send remittances to family in west Africa.

http://www.sendwave.com/

That's great! And it's not even an exceptional case. There are lots of tech-related companies with an explicit social and developing-world focus, including many in SF---such as our company, Angaza, which makes it possible for emerging-market consumers to get much more energy for much less money through decentralized solar

http://www.angazadesign.com/watch-video/ (obligatory: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/angaza/)

and many, many others, e.g.

https://welldone.org/ http://saner.gy/ http://wecyclers.com/ http://www.allpowerlabs.com/ ...

not to mention areas of "SF tech proper" with a direct positive impact, such as medtech or cleantech.

I'm glad to hear about these sorts of things. The world seems like a slightly less shallow place!

I've been working on p2p sync since 2008 or so. Now we have a real deployed base. I feel lucky because I chose the tech for it's political possibilities. This keeps me on track on the days when it'd be hard to focus otherwise.

What's the p2p sync software that you've been working on for the past seven years? (This is a part/spare-time project, yes?)

Sorry I didn't want to be too spammy, link from my profile: http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/

No worries. I deeply appreciate people who don't spam their projects in every single comment they write. :)

Penicillin was discovered by complete accident, actually.

Also, the jury is still rather out on the long-term impact of medications...it sure made a bunch of rich folks richer, though!

EDIT:

Also, most of those solutions came through private industry working on .gov contracts. A better example you might want to use is the innovations out of Bell Labs, all done basically to further solidify the telephone monopoly. That in turn could be argued to be a monopoly granted by a state to solve the communications problem, but still.

> Also, the jury is still rather out on the long-term impact of medications.

I can't speak to your experience, but I would have died as an infant without modern medications and modern medical procedures. I speak to you today as a healthy, relatively happy, productive member of society.

Moreover, I think we can point to the innumerable treated cases of snakebite, lockjaw, rabies, polio, cancer, syphilis, etc. as strong evidence for the positive long-term impact of medication and medical care.

Fleming discovered Penicillin accidentally, but he was a bacteriologist, and he was doing research into antiseptics. It was a discovery that was entirely related to his work.

And he was researching antiseptics because he had served in the Royal Army and had watched numerous colleagues die from infections following their wounds.

Since we're complaining - I'm so tired of the (hopefully) thoughtless use of "we". It is incredibly presumptuous. Every time I hear it I'm reminded of the artificially simplified narrative portrayed by WWII propaganda posters - where if you do your part, Rosie the riveter, then we'll save the world†!

†Saving the world means unwittingly working to further the military industrial complex, undermining your long term interests, terms and conditions may apply, see reverse side of poster for eligibility and placement in the new power superstructure.

yeah, fighting that nazi's was all about furthering the military industrial complex.

That whole pearl harbor thing wasn't really the japanese attacking, it was obviously lockheed.

yeah, taking advantage of a crisis is impossible and never happens.

http://www.herecomestheairplane.co

On a more serious note, you have services which will e.g. Wheel in your bins for you, or manage your grocery delivery and housekeeping services so you never have to see the people doing the work.

A lot of problems look this way. If you want to really start thinking about this: ask yourself whether we should be focusing on obesity and heart disease at all. What greater rich person problem than too much food. You could argue that we should be focusing entirely on "real" problems like malaria first, then deal with the side effect of first world culture. We choose to focus the lens in our own frame of reference, so "taxis" seem like rich people problems, as opposed to having the frame of reference be something more objective like the state of the world, when all of a sudden many more issues reveal themselves to be "rich people problems".

Of course, funny enough, many of the same people that complain about this will simultaneously tell you how many unexpected discoveries came from seemingly abstract government funded projects (from pure research that has no clear immediate benefit to huge projects like landing on the moon). Such side effects are not exclusive to government projects however. So too the problems we choose to work on voluntarily. I think its not necessary to get into the great many benefits studying the heart for the sake of heart disease have given the medical community in general. Another example I like to use is how the gaming industry has led to the development of super powerful graphics cards that now have enormous medical uses. Personal computers themselves have enabled so much for our society. But before there could be a 200 notebook there had to be a 10,000$ rich person computer.

In my experience, it is a trap to worry about what is "impactful". You will make a much greater impact on the world working on what you're good at and what you enjoy, because you have more control on making that GOOD than making the alternative impactful. If you look at the history of truly amazing discoveries, they are rarely straight forward, so its a better bet to invest in what you like than what you think is important.

Ride sharing is helping lots of not-rich people in small and medium sized towns who can't find jobs but have a car. I can go to my hometown and probably would request an Uber or Lyft. I never once took a taxi living in the same area for 20 years.

I for one think technology should help the living. The goal should not be to maximize human population on Earth. If we could reduce the birthrate, fewer children would die from disease. Overpopulation is sometimes the cause of widespread disease.

Ride sharing also helps the middle class by providing available, affordable transportation and reducing the need for (multiple) vehicle ownership. It certainly has the potential to reduce emissions and other waste.

There are certainly some trivial things out there, but I wouldn't include ride sharing in that population.

I agree with the "help the living" objective. Helping poor, sick, foreign children is a fine cause. So is helping Joe Public.

If you make video games, and those games offer a few people a little entertainment and enjoyment, I think you've done some good.

Overpop is sometimes the cause of disease. Compared to the effects of ignorance, poor education, or systemic corruption, overpop is never the cause of widespread disease in contemporary human society.

If one is actually concerned about population control, sterilization is an easy, simple, relatively safe, and well understood solution.

A good part of the reason that they spend that money is because they've been discouraged and hamstrung from developing those expertise in-house.

Don't forget the mechanism by which government spends money - it issues a bond, which gets converted to dollars. The bond comes with interest, and the interest payments go to rich people (banks).

That's the mechanism by which government borrows money; the mechanism by which government spends money is that it takes money out of the pile which it has either borrowed or received in revenue (taxes, user fees, proceeds of government-run enterprises) and spends it. (This ignores the possibility of government receiving grants directly for the particular spending, which also happens, more for some governments than others...)

Marginal increases in spending once revenues are completely used may be, in effect, equivalent to increases in borrowing, but spending in general is not equivalent to borrowing, so the mechanism for government borrowing money should not be presented as the mechanism for government spending money.

This poorly represents where the US national debt goes.

About 30% of the debt is owned by federal agencies ... that is the government owes itself that money. Social Security is the easiest (and largest) example. It owns about $3 trillion of the federal debt which it is saving (for now income>expenses for SS) for when it is needed as the population ages.

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.

The federal reserve owns about $3 trillion. This is the institution that creates dollars out of thin air. The interest paid to the fed goes right back into the treasury – the fed uses this as a control mechanism to keep the currency stable growing and shrinking the money supply. Lots of mildly ignorant people really hate the idea of the fed, but few of them have even the slightest understanding of how it works.

State and Local governments own another trillion – interest paid here is just like a different route to funding state and local governments, not something you can complain about all that much.

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.

There are a few other owners of us debt... Saving Bonds and insurance companies account for another few hundred billion together. The rest are odds and ends significantly smaller than anything mentioned above.

To summarize, the majority of the US debt is owned domestically, much of it by domestic government. Only a small minority of the interest goes to "rich people".

"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 who get to collect money from the U.S taxpayer. A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money! The annual payment of interest on the debt is 430 billion dollars[1]. So rich people get roughly 43 billion a year totally risk free for doing absolutely nothing courtesy of the tax payer. Meanwhile, in China, whenever the government needs some money they just print it up at the PBOC and hand it out, usually to bail out bad debts to state owned enterprises, but at least they aren't sticking it to the taxpayer like we are.

1.https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.ht...

Well, ok, so some of that debt does go to things like retirement funds and mutual funds, which help individuals that are not the mega-rich (like middle-income folks) but still the very poor in this country are not being helped by this.

Just printing money is not a good solution. Inflation (despite what Paul Krugman says) is very bad for the poor. One: If it weren't bad for the poor, why is there a need to periodically raise the minimum wage? Two: The common refrain is that the poor are indebted and benefit from nominal devaluation while the rich will stuff their matresses full of bills if we had deflation, but the rich do benefit from quasi-loans, like leveraged investments. Leveraged investments get very favorable interest rates, and the poor, typically are not offered low interest rates. I will be impressed if you can find an urban money lender that offers an interest rate below inflation, but if you have access to IMF funds (which sometimes are below inflation!), you're probably not in the 99%.

The amount owed to SS is really just an accounting artifact.

SS works by promising future taxpayers will fund today's taxpayers' retirement benefits. The fact that all of the "saved" money was actually "loaned" back out to the taxpayer (while current taxes fund current beneficiaries) is a perfect demonstration of this facet of SS's internal workings.

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)

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).

Definitely no disagreements there.

>Meanwhile, in China, whenever the government needs some money they just print it up at the PBOC and hand it out, usually to bail out bad debts to state owned enterprises, but at least they aren't sticking it to the taxpayer like we are.

And when PBOC prints up that money to bail out state owned enterprises it devalues existing currency by the same amount. Inflation by this manner is functionally indistinguishable to a tax.

AFAIK, concerning the interest payments sent to the Federal Reserve, if any profits are made they are given to the US Treasury, after operating expenses. And all the staff at the federal reserve make ~$250k/year or less.

Last time I was on AC transit, I was next to two men in their fifties in white tees, one of whom was trying to convince the other to get his groceries with Uber- "only 7 bucks".

People are too convinced Uber is too expensive, I suspect[1].

[1]: I've never actually used Uber

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