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

171–180 of 227 posts

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

#171

Post by miki123211 »

LiquidSky wrote: post #164
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've never met an attorney who thought they were an engineer simply because they were excellent lawyer

Not sure about attorneys, but there are certainly legislators / regulators who think that, or who at least think that every problem they throw at engineers, like implementing end-to-end encryption that their government can backdoor but foreign governments can't, is instantly and easily solvable.

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

#172

Post by ahartmetz »

Galanwe wrote: post #81
antonkochubey wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but you can pay expenses to a "consulting company" that your wife/brother/daughter/... owns which will keep their profits and pay off dividents

Yes, you can, but that's not legal. If you want to compare the merits of two systems, you have to do it on legal grounds. If you allow cheating, then nothing is comparable, everything is possible, no system is better.

There is also legal cheating that only works if there is enough money involved. For example, for German companies, a holding company in Malta with low corporate taxes - but it happens not to make sense for typical freelancers.

Or the Irish shenanigans of US tech companies.

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

#173

Post by justusw »

odiroot wrote: post #160
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…

I'm proud to say that I have worked for Ecosia, though ages ago. Christian, the CEO, is really one of the kindest and most honest people I have worked with. Also 100% committed to the cause, he walks the walk. Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.

Chiming in to say the same.

I was there in their earlier years. Ecosia set the standard for me what an ethical company should be like.

And hey odiroot ;)

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

#174

Post by flkiwi »

LiquidSky wrote: post #164
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the most important skills a lawyer can have is being able to comprehend highly complex topics in a very short time with minimal information to a reasonable level of confidence that they can advise genuine subject matter experts (experts the lawyer counts on knowing more about a topic than the lawyer does) about risk issues.

This is, of course, one of the most important skills anybody can have, but most people are terrible at it (whether by lack of talent or lack of practice) so our society pays lawyers to do it for them.

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

#175

Post by Fomite »

LiquidSky wrote: post #164
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law"

So much so that this is a running joke among nearly every lawyer I know in private practice.

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

#177

Post by grandempire »

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 an online board. You share your thoughts and challenge them against others responses, and learn more as a result. Is there a minimum requirement of corporate structure expertise required to comment?

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

#179

Post by culi »

jksflkjl3jk3 wrote: post #48

Their website is confusing. So it's a non-profit for planting trees.. that's also a search engine? How are those two things at all related or have any benefit to being combined into one company?

ad revenue goes to planting trees. What's confusing?

They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!

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

#180

Post by culi »

moooo99 wrote: post #104
lxgr wrote: post #94

Earlier 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.

Their youtube channel covers what their partner orgs do in depth. It's a pretty cool channel if you ever wanna watch local organizations around the world trying to safeguard their natural communities
Post reply on HN