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

blog.ecosia.org

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

#211

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

Galanwe wrote: post #105
fadesibert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder... There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK. So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?). T…

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

When you say “employee gross”, is this analogous to what we Americans colloquially refer to as “take home pay” eg the final amount you get after all taxes and the like have been removed from your pay? I know it is common in Europe to refer to salary this way but in USA it is rare, salary is usually discussed with taxes still included in the States

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

#212

Post by odiroot »

justusw wrote: post #173
odiroot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Hi Justus. Long time no see :)

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

#213

Post by etothepii »

imgabe wrote: post #210

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.

The difference is that the users buying the product (eye balls on search) value it differently. This means you can get your first 1m users without needing to be as much better (maybe you can even be worse) than Google as you would otherwise need to be.

It's a very interesting problem. When starting a company the biggest problem is often getting the first few users. One option is to build something people want - another is to build something your friends want - but another option is to build something the media wants to talk about.

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

#214

Post by DiggyJohnson »

tsimionescu wrote: post #194
miki123211 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Completely agree w this clarification

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

#215

Post by imgabe »

etothepii wrote: post #213
imgabe wrote: post #210

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.

The difference is that the users buying the product (eye balls on search) value it differently. This means you can get your first 1m users without needing to be as much better (maybe you can even be worse) than Google as you would otherwise need to be. It's a very interesting problem. When starting a company the biggest problem is often getting the first few users. One option is to build something people want - anoth…

According to Wikipedia, ecosia launched in 2009 and this is from 2018, so they must have already had traction by then.

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

#216

Post by fsckboy »

mcmcmc wrote: post #133
fsckboy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Actually economic profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. Demand is what tells you that you’re selling something of value. Extended profits mean competition hasn’t caught up yet. It has nothing to do with good or bad. If there is profit to be made in a market, firms will enter until it reaches an equilibrium where profit is 0, then when it becomes overcrowded and firms are losing money, they leave the market.…

"economic profit" is a different concept. non-profits, the topic of this discussion, are defined as not allowed to make "accounting profit"

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

#217

Post by Galanwe »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #211
Galanwe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

When you say “employee gross”, is this analogous to what we Americans colloquially refer to as “take home pay” eg the final amount you get after all taxes and the like have been removed from your pay? I know it is common in Europe to refer to salary this way but in USA it is rare, salary is usually discussed with taxes still included in the States

Super gross = the total cost of the employee paid by the company

Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%

Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%

Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.

In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.

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

#218

Post by vessenes »

DannyBee wrote: post #200
vessenes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complica…

There were a series of performance art type challenges to citizens united in Washington state, including one guy who wanted to marry a company (application denied - company was under 18 years old. Really.) And given Seattle’s economic history and trajectory, “permanent” trusts that can revive your frozen head in a couple of hundred years are not uncommonly sought after but difficult to achieve in the US. As you say, trust law is complex, not least because there are basically three overlapping trust systems. I think UK law is likely the one you’d want for these. Scottish based trust law includes the concept of reverting a trust for the common good, (based on an amazing amazing sequence of events where the sole surviving relative of a rich Scottish dude challenged his trust formed for the purpose of putting statues of himself up everywhere in Scotland — she won, trust dissolved, then when she died with no heirs or relatives, she tried to make the same bequest — the state itself dissolved the trust and took the money.) And, my very basic understanding of Civil law trusts is that they are less interested in the beneficial owner part of the trust and more interested in following civic/statutory rules. Well, maybe a civil law country would be a good place to start here actually.

Obviously, IANAL.

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

#219

Post by ethan_smith »

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…

I don't completely agree with you, but reading the blog post gives off the same vibes as what I imagine Larry and Sergey must've been thinking when they came up with the "Don't Be Evil" slogan 26 years ago.

Everyone starts off with a great intention, but money corrupts and humans are generally highly unreliable long term.

https://steemit.com/history/@taznuranam/let-want-to-know-his...

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

#220

Post by nar001 »

d3athj3st3r wrote: post #204
lazyasciiart wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Did he pass the test?
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