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Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#241

Post by charlesu »

daniel-s wrote: post #197
charlesu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a part-time trader, my social impact has no relationship whatsoever with my profits.

Not true. Your trading provides a secondary market for companies. It encourages people to create new companies to later sell to investors. Further, you get rewarded to the degree that you correctly speculate on the future prices of stocks (or whatever you trade) and penalised when you get it wrong. That tends to bring future prices back in time (that is, speculation causes the price of something to reflect today what…

Stock trading is at an all-time high. Do you think more companies are being created or fewer?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#242

Post by derrick_jensen »

songzme wrote: post #235
gibolt wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained. Financial transactions are not inherently bad. They are one half of value transfer. In your case, a win-win situation.

> Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained. If you believe that, then it will be true for you. Alot of things are free. If you plant a potato you can end up with a whole field of potatoes that you can eat forever, for free. And all the potatoes you don't eat decomposes back into the soil and makes th…

Time has value, and economies of scale make it more efficient. I worked at a CSA for a while and the amount of time it would take an individual to have the diversity of foods we provide would have taken them far longer. I have nothing against gardening on its own, but the marginal value add of doing something else yourself doesn’t always exceed the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

You could always live an AnPrim lifestyle and that’s fine (one of Kaczynski’s main points was that specialization in the abstract is incompatible with people), but there are more obvious reasons why more people don’t do that.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#243

Post by askafriend »

songzme wrote: post #193
jahewson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop throwing good money after bad. You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! Go find yourself a more business-minded partner in this undertaking so that it can be financially sustainable. Noble intentions are great but in the end you will be left with nothing and unable to help anybody.

> You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! I haven't proven anything yet and I have learned alot. You seem to have reached a conclusion though, care to share how?

You spent 4 years failing to find a sustainable, repeatable model with economics that work.

Right now it’s a matter of when you burn out, not if.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#244

Post by chispamed »

kisamoto wrote: post #64

I co-founded a company to make carbon removal accessible to everyone ( https://carbonremoved.com ) Idea is to avoid the dubious carbon credit system and instead actually remove your historical footprint. We've been iterating on different variations of the product for a year and registered a company (we're Swiss based) in April. So far we are responsible for the removal of 26tons of CO2 and with our customer base we'r…

First of all congrats on building a business that focuses on tackling climate change as its probably the most pressing global issue of all right now. However I’ve been struggling with the ethics of carbon removal and carbon offsets a bit myself and would be really interested in your perspective. If the ethical goal is to have the lowest atmospheric CO2 concentration in let’s say 2050, how do you justify funding carbon removal now at a time where the prevention of carbon creation is way cheaper per ton and thus allows people to have a higher impact regarding that goal for the same cost? Is it because you feel that with the right funding now carbon removal could eventually become much cheaper? I’m not trying to criticize you, I’m just really interested in the topic as something about carbon offsets always feels pretty sketchy and I’m always looking for ways to ethically invest or donate (I gave to an anti-deforestation initiative for some years and am financing crowdfunded loans for businesses to install solar panels in developing countries right now while also leading an ethically conscious lifestyle when it comes to travel, diet, activism and general consumption).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#245

Post by sizzle »

minerjoe wrote: post #190
sizzle wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply amazing, thank you for your impactful work. Any tutorials for grafting fruit trees you can recommend to a complete beginner?

I have an old mentor that tought me. I've been staying with him thought the years helping out on his orchard. I'm sorry but I haven't researched any online tutorials. It's not hard though. Really not hard. You can go into all the root-stocks and such, but if your in for old-school and easy and importantly, to me at least, free, get a small fenced garden plot to make your starting place, collect apple seeds, plant the…

Thank you kindly for sharing your knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#246

Post by jwally »

slickdork wrote: post #182
jwally wrote: post #124

I built a site (addictionlocker.com) which is a password manager that makes you donate to charity to get your passwords back. I built it because everytime I try to lock myself out of twitter, et al, I just unlock whatever I set up because I know the password. Originally, I was going to take a percentage of the profit; but now want to see all of it go to charity. What sucks is I think its a really solid idea; benefits…

This seems like a great idea for a niche group of people. My initial recommendation is making the time limited option free. Currently the end user has to donate 1 dollar no matter what, right? For every individual password?

Thanks for the feedback!

You're correct; the audience is niche. I felt like this would be perfect for the typical hacker-news reader.

- Its a password manager - Its anonymous (no account to create) - It has a negative outlook on social-media and political news - Its an efficiency "hack" (kills time wasters)

You're correct in that its $1 / password to sign up. The way I'm using it now is I set up time-limits on my iPhone through screen time, then locked myself out of screentime. I've given myself 20 minutes on my phone's browser / day, and can't install apps. This way, I don't have to save a password for twitter, instagram, etc. I can still use them; but after 20 minutes they're blocked.

This cut my usage in half the first week I used it.

If you don't mind, can you elaborate on what you said about "making the time limited option free"?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#247

Post by digitale »

A company called xocial would fit the bill. They're a registered B-Corporation. From their FAQ:

xocial is a team of do-gooders (okay, okay, developers, strategists and investors) who want to use technology to make us better parents, friends, coworkers, bosses, businesses and citizens. Instead of measuring our popularity, xocial measures our positive social impact. The fact that we’re measuring it means we can compete with each other to see who can do the most good—which is where our idea for competitive kindness came from.

https://www.xocial.com/faqs https://app.xocial.com/

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#248

Post by [deleted] »

songzme wrote: post #189
mkolodny wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. What do you think students shouldn't be paying for? Education? Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for learning materials and a certificate of completion. Up front. With no guarantee of future income. And no refund if you don't finish. Offering learning materials that only cost money if y…

I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn. It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#249

Post by Avtomatk »

songzme wrote: post #237
Fiahil wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way I plan to solve this (next year) could be very controversial, but I believe it based on my experiences so far: No internet until you finish the curriculum, no alcohol, no drugs. Maybe also no meat but that's still up in the air. Sounds like today’s version of a 17th century monastery. Maybe, you should push it further

that is the plan. No phones between 8am - 8pm, like a true bootcamp :)

If this can help you ... From my own experience, I advise you that you should also ban music, external noises and any other distractions ... Basically to make your students bored and that the only thing that "entertains" them is to code in the computer.

By the way, I would be interested to know more about your project and its progress, if you could give me some form of contact I would greatly appreciate it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#250

Post by cm2012 »

minerjoe wrote: post #150

I gave up using Federal Reserve Notes, on principal, and have dedicated my life to improving a small ranching community. By limiting my use of money to less than $100 a month (hopefully soon $0), I've had to build connections with human beings that would have not been possible otherwise. It was really eye opening to realize that the universe wants to play and it will help me in the strangest ways. I've set up a commu…

Real life Stardew Valley
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