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

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

#191

Post by Nevermark »

dwedge wrote: post #26
stavros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else. I said the product will be better for me . I generally believe that things are better for me when they're trying to entice me versus when they're trying to entice someone who isn't me, but we can debate that, if you want.

I agree with you that it's usually true, I just don't agree that it has to be true. When a company is well funded and focusing on userbase, that's great. When they need more money, it might not be. I know they are totally different types of companies, but look at social networks - when they are expanding they are good for everyone, once they decide it's time to earn more money from their exist users (focusing on the…

> when they are expanding they are good for everyone

They were very aware they were herding people like cattle into digital conclaves where they could be milked.

Strangers with candy are great for everyone, until...

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

#192

Post by [deleted] »

BurningFrog wrote: post #148
jmcqk6 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, the use of slave labor is bad. The profit is not the problem. It wouldn't be any better if the company made no profit.

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by tdb7893 »

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…

Honestly even if they had super high executive pay like current tech companies do but then used the profits for good that's still like 100x better than tech companies now.

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

#194

Post by tsimionescu »

miki123211 wrote: post #171
LiquidSky wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's basically the opposite phenomenon: you know so little about how an industry operates that everything they do seems like magic to you, so you end up making absurd demands of them.

The phenomenon discussed here has engineers believe they can practice law and medicine themselves. So they're not asking lawyers to get them out of a murder caught on national television, or doctors to cure their cancer in three days. They think they can do these themselves.

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

#195

Post by tsimionescu »

fsckboy wrote: post #108
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…

> 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…

Profit has two commonly used meanings. One is basically revenues minus expenses, and is essentially a measure of how successfully the company is operating.

But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.

Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.

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

#196

Post by yungporko »

conaclos wrote: post #2

Does anyone use Ecosia every day? How does it compare with DuckDuckGo and Qwant?

i have ecosia set as my default and use google or something if i really need it, but that rarely ever happens. its not the best search engine in the world or anything but it does the job perfectly fine and does some good in the world, so i'm happy to use it.

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

#197

Post by globular-toast »

guhwhut wrote: post #66
hoseja wrote: post #59

Trees don't need planting. Trees need a safe place to grow without saplings getting destroyed. But trees absolutely don't need planting. Besides, a healthy forest has to go through pioneering stages first.

As a forest land owner, trees absolutely need planting. Then they need to be protected from humans and deer and invasive species and disease. Many trees fail to grow. Most people would be astounded at how many trees don't make it.

Not surprising really given how many seeds a single tree produces every year. Must be in the thousands.

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

#199

Post by internet_points »

dmbche wrote: post #4
aswerty wrote: post #3

I really like the idea of Ecosia and Steward Owned companies, but as somebody who wants out of the Ad game completely, uses uBlock Origin religiously and pays for services like email and search. I haven't actually used Ecosia, but am interested in others experiences with it. But I imagine in the HN crowd a lot of other people fit the same profile as myself.

You pay for search and email? What services do you use? May I ask you why, if you're wanting to go into it?

Fastmail for me. Switching was easy. For existing services/logins, I just added forwarding from gmail and didn't bother changing addresses except with the most important things. Most services from back then no longer exist anyway, or have turned into spam, so I eventually turned off the forwarding.

I don't yet pay for search (mostly using duckduckgo), though I am considering it.

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

#200

Post by DannyBee »

vessenes wrote: post #156
DannyBee wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well." Lawyer here - it is basically impossible to do what they (and others) want. There are few (if any?) countries, where either provision would survive bankruptcy, for example. They could always choose to dissolve rather than restructure, b…

It seems to me you could create non revocable trust that gets most of this done, with specific instructions to the trustees. That trust would own 100% of the company, and could issue voting and economic rights akin to shares, with the proviso that the trustee cannot implement a sale. That said, creditors could still force the sub into bankruptcy in most countries; even then I think the trustee could be instructed to…

Trusts get complicated quickly, and I'll admit i don't know enough about per-country/per-state (in the US) trust law to know if you could achieve this for real everywhere. I'm sure there are countries you can mostly achieve it, and places where it's really hard.

One major problem with trusts is in lots of places you usually can't undo the action of a rogue trustee, only seek damages/etc against them.

It gets complicated there too - whether you can order the return of property, etc, often depends on the status of who it was sold to and whether they knew or should have known, or ...

This usually means you have to enjoin them ahead of time if you can.

In the end, the law generally assumes money damages are a sufficient remedy. Not always true, but mostly true.

Again, even this varies by country/state.

Honestly, given some of these are talking about many billions of dollars in companies, i'm sort of surprised at the lack of legislative assistance. Creating a corporate form that supports this much more effectively is not hard (states/countries definitely have the power to do it), and despite the common view of legislators/etc, this sort of non-controversial thing is not that hard to get passed, though it takes time.

I suspect it's mostly related to "nobody starts trying to get this done 10 years before they want it done" :P

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