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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)

#201

Post by DannyBee »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #190
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…

Didn’t Patagonia pretty much achieve this?

Kind of, sort of - they depend on the trustees not going rogue.

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

#202

Post by svrtknst »

hatthew wrote: post #161
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.

a wonderful thing to do in that case is to either ask, or present your concern as a concern. An expression of uncertainty and fear. Not as a statement, or counterclaim, or by trying to propose a solution to the problem you've invented.

The figurative "you", in this case

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

#203

Post by gherkinnn »

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?

Kagi and Proton.

I pay for Kagi because it is a genuinely good search engine. I pay for both because I de-googled my life and I understand that one needs to pay for a service one way or another.

The price is negligible in the grand scheme of things. I've had nights out that cost more but gave me less.

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

#204

Post by d3athj3st3r »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #188
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can make it difficult to work in the industry because you find yourself surrounded with expert beginners who (generally privately) think they're geniuses. I love working with people who aren't afraid to solve problems, but are also firmly in the camp of recognizing how clueless we usually are. We shouldn't be terrified of failure, anxious about what we don't know, etc. But man, some humility goes a long way. The a…

Heard a guy about six months out of undergrad once declare (completely serious) that of course he knew how to run a school district, he attended public school! Wow did that make me distrust every suggestion he made.

Hahaha. As an undergrad in my University, I asked a guy just before an exam on electro magnetic waves if he had studied properly, and the guy told me dead serious, that he knows Ohm's law, and he can derive everything from it!

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

#205

Post by hoseja »

johnisgood wrote: post #153
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.

I am pretty sure "planting trees" is just an oversimplification and goes beyond just planting if they are actually "helping trees".

I wouldn't be so sure.

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

#206

Post by hbsbsbsndk »

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?

As someone who has attempted to escape from tech industry employment, the high status and salary are very alluring. If you leave your 6 figure tech job to live in a van by the river and plant trees you're a burnout loser with no money. If you start a search engine that gives money to people to plant trees you're a green entrepreneur with a health salary who can always pivot back to helping energy-guzzling Google AI identify targets for drones to bomb.

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

#207

Post by rachofsunshine »

yifanl wrote: post #120
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.

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.

There's two different questions here: one is "is the way things are currently done stupid" (to which the answer is often "yes"). The other is "can a random outsider do better just by thinking about it" (to which the answer is usually, though not always, "no").

It's the same principle as another comment I made a few days ago ([1]). It's not hard to identify problems that really are problems, but finding effective and feasible solutions to those problems is often far more difficult, especially if you're an outsider. The mistake isn't in identifying the problems, it's in thinking that you can come in totally blind and know how to solve them. (Or, put another way, in thinking that you as an outsider can tell the "dumb and easily fixed" problems from the "horrifying systemic nightmare" problems.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265532

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

#208

Post by elric »

ahartmetz wrote: post #172
Galanwe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those shenanigans really ought to be illegal. They probably are to some extent.

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

#209

Post by ahartmetz »

elric wrote: post #208
ahartmetz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those shenanigans really ought to be illegal. They probably are to some extent.

The majority state-owned (well̃, >30% federal state and >20% city) Frankfurt airport company has a holding... sorry, "management" company in Malta. Maybe they are doing just enough business in Malta to hold up to scrutiny. Most are based on no one looking too closely. But it's not a very meaningful difference. Heck, maybe I'd occasionally fly to Malta and work from there if that helped to "optimize" taxes like the big boys.

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

#210

Post by imgabe »

I mean, cool, and ok, but it is kind of ridiculous to consider taking profits from your company "unethical".

And you're taking them anyway in the form of planting trees. You could have just had a normal company and taken all the profit you wanted and used it to plant trees and done the same thing. I guess this is somehow more tax-efficient, but it’s not really any different in principle.

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