Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

blog.ecosia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 227 posts

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#161

Post by hatthew »

roughly wrote: post #116

There’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…

It's not that we think we're the only one who thought about some implication, it's that that implication seems important and nobody has explicitly mentioned it yet, and maybe other people who have also though about this implication are trying to hide it because it's inconvenient.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#162

Post by bmicraft »

charlie0 wrote: post #158
dwedge wrote: post #8

I'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…

So your argument is that people who do good things must be poor or else they actually aren't good people?

I'd say they mustn't be filthy rich. Otherwise "doing good" clearly isn't the main priority.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#163

Post by fweimer »

rendx wrote: post #159
fweimer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can view many of them for free at unternehmensregister.de.

You can read ALL of them for free at the source, handelsregister.de - they stopped charging for access in 2022.

Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).

As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#164

Post by LiquidSky »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #139
Blackthorn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

law and medicine communities definitely have similar qualities in this way imo

In a different way. There's the old joke and doctors and God, and you will certainly find attorneys who are full of themselves. But while I've never met an attorney who thought they were an engineer simply because they were excellent lawyer, I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law (including here on Hacker News), having logically deduced it from first principles with their superior intellect.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#165

Post by tasuki »

lxgr wrote: post #112
moooo99 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it

Who doesn't? Why else would one make money other than to do something with it?

If they didn't make money, how would they support the tree-planting?

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#166

Post by nbadg »

stakhanov wrote: post #138
nbadg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I 100% agree with you that a Stiftung like that (possibly with a for-profit company as a subsidiary) would be the right structure if you wanted to maximize credibility around your community-interest status. This stuff actually gets a lot of attention from lawmakers: For example, in the U.K. you have the “CIC” (community interest company). Some 13 years ago, David Cameron tried pretty hard to motivate enthusiasm for t…

Very much agree in terms of the best strategy being simply to start a plain-jane Kapitalgesellschaft, probably either UG or GmbH, and go from there.

It is indeed possible to have a so-called "kein-Mann GmbH" where the company has bought back all of its shares, though my understanding is that it's a bit of a legal grey area, and certainly not settled law.

I agree that the legal infrastructure is almost certainly there, at least in the sense that there are absolutely plenty of lawyers and lawmakers that specialize in this area. My point is simply that, because it's so much less common, basically every situation ends up being unique, which means that the work that the lawyers are doing is almost always a one-off, which makes it really expensive. And so it's just not worth the effort.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#168

Post by lxgr »

tasuki wrote: post #165
lxgr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it Who doesn't? Why else would one make money other than to do something with it? If they didn't make money, how would they support the tree-planting?

Via direct, tax-deductible monetary donations.

This just seems like a donation with complicated extra steps, in the same way that e.g. "rounding up to charity" or even "round up savings" do not appeal to me at all.

That might well be an idiosyncratic preference, and to some the idea of "planting trees via running web searches" might appeal much more than a nonprofit search engine that donates to a basket of charities, or one that directly pays the user for showing them ads and lets them decide what to do with the money and then the user donating the proceeds themselves.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#169

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

nobodywasishere wrote: post #167
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #128

Rather than make promises of dubious enforceability, why not just share the index as a public resource.

What index? Their results are sourced from Google and Bing

https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#170

Post by jtcltk »

roughly wrote: post #116

There’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…

E.g., the majority of the posts on https://jefftk.com
Post reply on HN