[olcor]

This so much. It felt so weird that this person was talking about poverty and blogging/reading on the internet at the same time.

Few poor people in the third world would know what blogging even is, forget about even wasting precious resources like time, money for a smartphone and an internet connection just to read/write some ideas which few are ever going to read and you won’t be making anything out of.

This feels like being written by a person who knows that she’s writing for people who like to think about the idea of poverty living, but haven’t experienced it much first or even second-hand, only knowing about it from the news or glossy donation pamphlets.

[odshoifsdhfs]

While I don't disagree the 'real' poor can choose the alternative and agree with GP, I think you also have a very fatalistic view of 3rd world poor. I have family living in the '3rd world' and even there the poor have phones. Sure they are 20 dollars, 10 year old models running android 5.0 or something, but they still check facebook and whatever. They aren't probably blogging but they also read websites/blogs

[olcor]

I do agree with you on that aspect; in fact the proliferation of cheap smartphones and providers like Jio means that a lot of people are able to get their hands on actually decent hardware and a good internet connection if it is in their reach. Which is a great thing! In fact most of the tips mentioned is pretty much what a lot of people do in 3wc too, just replace Reddit with WhatsApp groups.

The issue here is that this is being given as advice, when a lot of this is standard operating procedure which comes semi-automatically for most people in this situation (this I do know, because you need hustle to even survive poverty in a third world country). Most people have multiple jobs by default; it’s not a discussion of if you can leave your day job here, it’s about how many jobs you can cram in a day, and that too without even the possibility of “maneuverability”. A mobile phone and an internet connection in such a situation is a rather significant investment even if it is widely available; it’s not something you can just get without thinking too much, which is what I feel the post reads like. While yes, the internet connections have become so good that you can watch YouTube videos for entertainment, few will be doing that without checking their daily limit caps first, and do it only when there’s nothing else to do. If you’re thinking of blogging/videos, you’re already thinking of it as an investment, if at all you reach that point. And this comes only when a person has escaped poverty, and has at least some sense of stability.

Add to it the plugs of Hacker News and Patreon at the bottom, and things start feeling very dissonant. Which is why I wrote about the potential target audience of the post.

[imheretolearn]

Have you been to Africa? Or even rural India? The fact that you have access to HN means that:

1. You are able to afford to connect to HN

2. Are privileged enough to be able to read it

3. Your family also has the ability to do 1 if not 2

And let's assume for a minute they do have phones and an internet connection, which in itself is an egregious assumption(the real poor are the ones who don't even have phones). What are they going to do with their phones if they are unable to read half if not most of the internet?

[odshoifsdhfs]

Not rural india but africa yes. Family there. Not all countries are bad, but I saw some that are quite horrible. Saw people 'bathing' in puddles in the street as to not pay for water. Saw slums where 6-7 live to a zero-bedroom 'house' (I wouldn't call that a house in most parts of the world). Family works with local schools and institutions to make sure kids have food.

But I can say, even in those situations, most has a cheap-ass phone with internet. Sure, not 5g to watch HD movies or whatnot, but they could talk with people and go to facebook

As for rural india, it seems they have more internet users than urban india: https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/internet-usage-in-r...

[frequentnapper]

I fail to see the point you're trying to make. This post was written by a homeless person in a "first world" country so the target audience is people in those countries. Nobody is obligating whomsoever you consider "third world" to read or follow her advice...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

This smacks of some kind of

No True Poor Scotsman.

If you expect one lone blogger to address the entire gamut of poor at every scale up to and including global poverty...

Your going to be disappointed.

You might want to give steelmanning a spin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning

Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says.

[Applejinx]

It doesn't feel that weird to me, but there's a reason her blog would resonate with me in particular.

I was homeless myself, briefly, half a lifetime ago. I ended up dedicating my life to coding free and open-source audio DSP software, which I do to this day under the name 'airwindows'.

Part of my motivation for this choice is a determination to give functional tools to a community that may have artistic ability and the ability to learn audio production skills, but can't come up with the money to do this using cutting-edge hardware. CPU cycles are impossibly cheap, ESPECIALLY if you are able to do functional work on 'last year's' computers, which is why I take pains to code stuff that doesn't require current computer systems (particularly significant on Mac OSX, which deprecates stuff like mad to render older systems nonfunctional).

In my opinion, you should be able to not only blog, but do a professional grade mix on a digital audio workstation using only a cast-off semi-working laptop from years ago that somebody no longer needed. Your bottleneck would be monitoring: professional quality speakers and amplification are harder to come by that way, but even then modern advances in class D amplification and a bit of ingenuity go a long way (I run a subwoofer where the speaker part was insanely cheap, because I used cardboard builders tubes for enclosures, capped on both ends by inexpensive woofers, and doubled for more cone area)

With intelligence and effort it is more than possible to break the link between access to capital, and potential performance. You can compete on the grounds of ability and quality and increasingly remove access to capital as a gatekeeping mechanism.

If you don't do that, one might conclude that poor people are lower quality and not capable of worthwhile things.

One resource that my work does NOT address is mental attitude: I can make a person think, 'I now have the tools to pursue audio production' by giving the tools, but I can't make a person think, 'I can step back and think about life and the world I'm in, outside the narrow lens of capitalist status seeking'. It's nice that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Google employees and trust fund kids can view life outside the immediate struggle to not die: I think that's very civilized and laudable, in a way it's the whole point of being human. This blog about 'FU, Money' is an alternate path to the same goal.