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Comment by cardigan

I'm a software engineer at Scale and the author of this blog post.

Let's talk about Venezuela for a second. ~75% of the population lost >19lb in body weight in a year according to this survey: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/02/19/Venezuela... It's unbelievable that we haven't figured out how to prevent people from living like that in the 21st century. I think it's totally deplorable and honestly an affront to humanity.

You know what I think the most effective way to combat large scale poverty is? Not by working for an aid agency (we've all heard the horror stories) - instead, how about making those people economically valuable? The internet is an amazing way to reach those people - and guess what - Scale is actually doing that (evidence: these stories). If we continue to grow, we'll be doing that even more.

To be clear, this isn't the main mission of the company - but I don't see how anyone could think it isn't a great side effect. Hence the title of the blog post - positive externalities.

parent cardigan 7 years ago

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