But what if there was a way to make a profit planting trees? Wouldn’t this accelerate the rate of trees?
Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
111–120 of 227 posts
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
But GP raises a good point: Are these two things that benefit from any kind of synergy in terms of skills required by the employees working there, target audience etc.? If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated…
Ecosia themselves does not really plant trees. Instead they pay out money to different projects all around the world. They are very transparent about it. They list the amounts paid, the partners, the tree species, etc. They are also fairly efficient from what you can tell by their reports.
I didn't assume so, but they still do two things: Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it (in this case, planting trees).
As somewhat of a sympathizer of effective altruism (the idea of efficiency being an important factor in charities, not necessarily the implementation and even less the community), this isn't super appealing to me.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#113I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…
> headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit" or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers…
Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#114I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…
> headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit" or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers…
Profits are bad when they exist due to unethical cost cutting. Profits are bad when they artificially lower the cost of the good by exporting the costs to other people.
If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.
If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.
If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.
You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a brief paragraph here [1] that indicates they considered these and decided against it: "The team considered several alternative ownership solutions to address these questions, including converting the business to a German non-profit and establishing a foundation. Both of these solutions had constraints, though, and neither offered the mixture of entrepreneurial flexibility and structure security they sough…
For context, I live in Germany and am familiar with the landscape here. Also, I would not equate a 501(c)3 to a gGmbH; gGmbH is more like a B Corp (at least in some of the states that allow it; corporate law differs from state to state in the US). A gemeinnützige Stiftung (Foundation for public purpose) is much closer to a 501c3 than a gGmbH, and a Familienstiftung (Family foundation) is closer to a family trust. (At…
Okay, well it sounds like you're deeper in the rabbit hole than I am, then. (I also live in Germany and have a passing interest for the law, though I'm no lawyer).
Regarding your last paragraph, where you say that a foundation provides better insulation from founder control, it sounds to me like you answered your own question: Retention of control vs. insulation from control is precisely the distinction here.
Foundations are typically for people who don't have the option of retaining control, even if they wanted to, because they are typically close to death and in the process of structuring an inheritance. Handing over control to person X is something they see as a threat, because they assume that X will screw it up, so they'd rather make it so that no one can have control.
With social entrepreneurship like Ecosia, founders are typically still young and somewhat idealistic. They want to retain the control, because them being in control is not something they see as a threat. Rather that's what they see as the best possible mechanism for their company/cause retaining its idealistic values. (Also, they are looking for something meaningful to do with their lives).
A cynic might notice that you're kind of looking at regular narcissism vs. communal narcissism here.
If you wanted to structure your social entrepreneurship type business as a foundation which owns 100% of the shares in "your" for-profit corporation, that doesn't work as a "have your cake and eat it too" solution, because either that means that the trustees of the foundation are actually your boss and you're just a replaceable employee with replaceable employee wages or, if you try to pull any shenanigans to make it so that this is not the case, the trust loses its tax-free / "community interest" status. Trying to game this system is something that rich people are routinely trying to do. I'm not saying that some don't get away with it, but the authorities generally have a lot of tools at their disposal to fight this sort of thing.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#116There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is the thread for you.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#117There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is t…
That sort of arrogance is absolutely out of control in the tech industry and it's bizarre because I've never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
For context, I live in Germany and am familiar with the landscape here. Also, I would not equate a 501(c)3 to a gGmbH; gGmbH is more like a B Corp (at least in some of the states that allow it; corporate law differs from state to state in the US). A gemeinnützige Stiftung (Foundation for public purpose) is much closer to a 501c3 than a gGmbH, and a Familienstiftung (Family foundation) is closer to a family trust. (At…
Okay, well it sounds like you're deeper in the rabbit hole than I am, then. (I also live in Germany and have a passing interest for the law, though I'm no lawyer). Regarding your last paragraph, where you say that a foundation provides better insulation from founder control, it sounds to me like you answered your own question: Retention of control vs. insulation from control is precisely the distinction here. Foundat…
Control is maybe the wrong word here. GmbHs are required to have one or more natural persons as a Geschäftsführer, which would presumably just stay the founders, so they would retain control of the GmbH. The holding Stiftung would then impose the rules under which the GmbH would issue dividends, and (presumably) also retain the ability to fire the Geschäftsführer:innen, if the Satzung der Stiftung decided to. And of course the founders could also put themselves on the board of the Stiftung for added control. Interesting side note, this would probably result in the founders being Sozialversicherungspflichtig, but that's a whole different can of worms. But the founding documents of the Stiftung could perfectly well spell out exactly the situations under which the founders could be removed as Geschäftsführer der GmbH.
What I mean by legal insulation is more that, in this holding construct, the GmbH ceases to have any financial relationship to the founders. Stiftungs are sort of... headless financial pools governed strictly by their founding documents, completely divorced from the people that created them, and the GmbH would simply be an asset in that financial pool. That means that, for example, were someone to sue the founders, even for something completely unrelated, there is no possible way that shares in the GmbH could possibly end up someone else's hands. Typically when we talk about the liability limitations in corporations, we're talking about them in terms of shielding the founders from the actions of the company, but the inverse is in my opinion just as important (if you're truly interested in forming a self-governing social organization pursuing a social good). I'm not sure if there's any examples of shares in a gGmbH being assessed as assets in a civil case; that would be another interesting question to inform the decision.
That being said, one of the reasons that I'm so interested in the idea of a Stiftung holding, is that I think it also opens up options for actual democracy within the leadership of a company, which is a fascinating idea. That isn't a requirement in a Stiftung holding relationship, but I do think it's an interesting possibility.
At any rate, I think probably the primary downside of this idea is that, like I said, I've not seen any examples of it discussed publicly. Which means you'd need to be doing a lot of the legal legwork on your own -- which means lots of time spent talking to lawyers, which would be really expensive. But I think there's some really interesting possibility for innovation in terms of corporate governance here, in a way that, like I said, wouldn't be legally possible in the US, and it definitely seems like the structure that gives the social purpose the maximum possible protection.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#119There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is t…
That sort of arrogance is absolutely out of control in the tech industry and it's bizarre because I've never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.
It’s also why our cars keep running people over and our websites keep overturning democracies
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#120There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is t…
That sort of arrogance is absolutely out of control in the tech industry and it's bizarre because I've never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.
The proliferation of Hanlon's Razor has been one of the most damaging things to society.
People as a whole are not incompetent, every individual (and every grouping of individuals) have goals and will take appropriate actions to achieve them with intent, but somehow a neologism has tricked people into believing this is the exception and not the norm.