Just to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild!
I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.
Suraurwanda, meaning “visit Rwanda” in honor of the growing tourism sector in Rwanda, was born into Mafunzo’s group on Nov. 30, 2018. His mother is Taraja, and because Mafunzo is the only adult male of the group, we do not need genetic testing to prove he is the father.
Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.
The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")
Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.
Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.
That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.
Energy is extremely difficult and expensive to store, it's not fungible over a time period. This is why energy rates fluctuate during the day. It's also not fungible between consumers not connected to the same grid.
When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.
What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.
> It already does, if a particular regulated activity involves plugging devices into outlets.
Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..
What we? These are individuals, each with their own goals. Give them some other business opportunity and I'm sure they'll jump on it - it just needs to be as good as Bitcoin.
The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.
Not sure I understand your argument, because there are externalities the network is not secured? All consumption of power created by fossil fuels has negative externalities. Also, there's no requirement that miners are on the grid (lots of mining operations use off-grid excess power that cannot be stored).
> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.
What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to
Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?
It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.
It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.
Anyone can participate in consensus, but you do have to be trusted by someone else who already participates in the trusted consensus, so you're right that it's not completely decentralized (but is also not strictly centralized either).
Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt
That's like saying that if my lamp uses 3W when I'm at my desk, surely it'll use 6W when I call someone over.
Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)
Fwiw the PoS network is already running, with $6 billion staked and 100,000 validators. Migrating the rest of the network is relatively simple, they're just being really careful with it.
Yep it's another blockchain running in parallel, called the "beacon chain." Anyone can deposit ETH in a particular contract on the main chain, and the beacon chain will read that and credit them ETH on the beacon chain.
The quickest migration is basically to upgrade both clients to talk to each other, and for the old client, instead of choosing blocks with the highest hashpower, choose blocks whose hashes are chosen by the beacon chain. Details here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/B1mUf6DXO
Energy usage is a recognised issue and while it offers challenges they are understood and developers are keen to address this. If you want to start deconstruction of the industrial military complex that would be just fine and might really start to change things, until then I argue there are more worthy targets for your ire than the energy use of an emerging technology.
This is like saying that pollution is a recognized issue with fossil fuels and while it offers challenges they are understood and engineers are keen to address this.
There aren't always easy solutions and you can't hand wave aside a massive problem because 'our best people are on it'
If fossil fuels producers had had the same level of awareness of environmental issues when that industry began we might not have the issues we have now, I think it's a poor comparison, my comment was acknowledging the issue and positing that an iteration of the technology could mitigate the problem.
Costs (of EVs) are passed onto the consumer and thus self-regulate, whereas many of the costs of crypto's wasteful energy usage are distributed among society.
Humans - that is problem number one. Like agent smith said in the Matrix. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet.." - Advocating for this cure will solve all the problems..
The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?
Exactly that. We destroy our tourist destinations, beaches, food sources, areas where to live, landscapes for desktop backgrounds, the air and the water. Lost in useless economic abstractions.
Sorry, I kind of misread the second sentence of the post above. I thought the whole point is that: why would you destroy your own habitat? That's just so incredibly unreasonable.
I don't think that cryptocurrency energy consumption is as big a problem as it's been recently painted in the media. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.
Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison. Using VISA requires a working settlement layer (because VISA transactions are reversable), banks, bank employees, bank buildings, international transfer support, international settlement layer, people handling those settlements, regulation, regulation enforcement etc. If you include all that then the energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't look all that bad.
So is the global population of the banking industry comparable to 41 M ?
UK employees: 1.1M
US Employees: 8.3M
So I went round a few houses and there is a lack of solid stats. But I think I can go with a decent indicator.
The USA has about 7.5 % of GDP (1.5tn) in Finance Services, and 6.3M employees (2018). Now translate that up to the global GDP of 87TRN, and say the global finance sector is as large globally as in USA (generous assumption) and that give 7.5 % of 87TRN - 6.5TRN. At 4.2M employees per Trillion that gives us 27 M global employees.
Now there can be lots of hand waving, but if bitcoin uses same amount of electricity as Argentina, and Argentina has
around 1.5 many people as the global finance sector, then bitcoins electrical use does seem very excessive.
I think I am replying to the oft-heard crypto argument that because bitcoin is self contained we need to bring in the whole costs of the current financial system to compare it.
This was my first attempt at it - and it seems bitcoin loses badly - the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry.
And bitcoin still cannot buy me a latte at starbucks.
So it's a weird speculative / money controls avoidance thing that happens to subsidise dubious global activity to the tune of Argentina's electrical usage.
It has always seemed BS - it still seems BS. And speculators have grown rich not on a technology that will replace currency but on massive migration of dubious activity (Chinese currency outflows). That Tesla was paid for by Chinese billionaires securing their gains.
:-(
Edit: so dissing bitcoin and Tesla is probably a bad idea on HN.
But to be fair I am not dissing Tesla - it's a genuine company making genuine product. It just seems to be marketing towards a ... marketing archetype that got lucky with their Crypto.
You see, to make cash from Chinese money laundering, one would previously have had to be a lawyer in the City or a real estate agent selling central London flats. But we democratised access to this flood of grey market cash via Bitcoin.
Maybe I would feel differently with a couple of coins in a wallet somewhere. But from a regulatory point of view, it's still taking cash from the poorest globally.
> the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry
But energy consumption behavior of all people who are deployed in the global finance industry ≠ energy consumption of the median of Argentinan/Ukrankian people. I think you can agree that most people who work in finance are generally in at least low middle-class to super wealthy. If you compare the mobility/consumption index of such a class to median income level of countries where wealth is generally much lower, the equation changes drastically in favor of computers doing the job without having the urge to fly to fiji over the WE, up to 4x between poor and lower middle-class already [1]
That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.
Sure, but rather than a vertical slice, do a horizontal slice. How much energy does every country in the world’s mints, bank vaults, etc. use up, including their whole logistical pipelines that wouldn’t be needed if countries didn’t mint+store physical currency?
my conclusion so far is that a lot of things use as much power as entire countries, but this unit of measure is a higher standard created specifically for bitcoin, and I'm waiting to see otherwise.
I don't mean to imply that switching to bitcoin will stop wars, but rather just remind that the true cost (and value) of USD isn't in it's infrastructure, but in the efforts taken to enforce it's dominance.
If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.
Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.
> If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between.
Sure, but I think for any effect a bitcoin-like system has any chance to have on the US's ability to wage war, it will have the same effect on the US government's ability to fund massive social programs. That is, bitcoin is going in the opposite direction from what is needed for achieving the world we hope for.
> My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.
While I agree with you that this is how things are looking, and it is also the most important long-term goal, I personally don't believe that we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate failure if we don't focus on drastically reducing consumption in the short term. To me bitcoin has proved exactly how chasing free economic growth will always drink up any electricity we can produce.
Basically they think that deflationary assets irreparably cripple the debt market, and therefore the government bonds market, and therefore wars will be harder to fund and less arbitrary.
There is some accuracy to that. Would raise the stakes and the resources involved in funding a war. The last 70-80 years of US hegemony have been based off of the market tolerance for US debt and slowly being paid their money back, in US dollartoken. And before then, US hegemony was not a thing.
So there is nothing to say that the market won't find a way to have fractional speculation on bitcoin/crypto asset backed securities, and there is nothing to say that a governing body won't find a way to sustain itself and gain compliance with its peers through it. But there is also not a history of US hegemony supporting it either. Not a panacea because the world was much more of a tinderbox before US debt based hegemony.
As long as the top reply to that comment explains that replacing dollar with a cryptocurrency would change absolutely nothing about the size and activities of the US military.
I'm not sure if I'm being down-voted for being pro-Bitcoin or anti-Bitcoin at the moment, but to clarify: My point is that the Bitcoin energy consumption problem has been and is getting worse over time.
I didn't do the math on this one, but it seems to me that the whole financial system (and all that's needed to ensure it's reliability and security) uses a bit more energy than Ukraine or Argentina.
The infrastructure supporting hundreds of national currencies, hundreds of stock exchanges, thousands of banks, hundreds of payment providers and cryptocurrency exchanges vs a single distributed ledger (basically a piece of paper). Bitcoin has 200 million users at most if you are really generous. It's really not a fair comparison. You would have to combine all cryptocurrencies and their energy consumption to even approach a fair comparison.
The energy usage is only used for mining, it's not even used to secure and ensure its reliability on exchanges whose energy consumption is actually counted against the mining energy. The energy consumption will grow simply because Bitcoin is going up, not because Bitcoin is processing more transactions or providing value in any form. Yes bigger banks need more energy but they can also provide more services thanks to their increased size.
Bitcoin doesn't even compete with Banks because Banks offer loans, consolidate small deposits into large capital reserves, etc. Bitcoin doesn't compete with stocks because Bitcoin ownership doesn't represent an ownership stake in the Bitcoin industry or any other industry. Bitcoin doesn't compete with payment providers because it is too slow and expensive. Bitcoin doesn't compete against cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum with its uniswap protocol may do so but that's not Bitcoin. Ethereum provides more value for less energy consumption than bitcoin. The only thing Bitcoin really competes against is gold because of the proof of ownership. You own your Bitcoin in your wallet the same way you own your car or house (after paying your mortgage or car loan off of course).
Bonus:
Why did I compare Bitcoin to a piece of paper? Because the people working in finance are part of the finance system. In Bitcoin only the miners are part of the system. So ultimately you just have a fancy piece of paper on which you cannot write lies on. With the finance system it is closer to bodyguards guarding the paper and making sure nobody can write on it. Again, people are part of the system. It's not just the paper that is important.
The whole financial system actually has some usefulness: you can pay for things with it. Anywhere in the world. Without paying $30 in fees, without waiting for 3 days to clear. It's also not likely to run on 60% coal.
Since bitcoin zealots have moved to pretending that it's a "store of value", you can compare Bitcoin to the energy used to secure the gold in the world. Hint: it's much more worse.
Not only that, but if you look at the energy usage per transaction, bitcoin is probably many orders of magnitude more expensive than the financial system
And mining Bitcoin requires chip makers (including rare earth materials), the tech industry and the whole internet. If you include side channels in visa, you'll need to do the same for Bitcoin.
Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.
What sort of calculation is that? Let's for a moment disregard the fact that banks do much more than just transactions, let's also ignore that there is more then the transaction energy in bitcoin (there are also people working for the miners, producing the hardware etc). Just the comparison between the number of transactions of the banking system (including credit cards) to the number of bitcoin transactions should tell you how different the scales are. There were around daily 400k bitcoin transactions. There were 100 Million credit card transactions per day in the US alone. That would mean if we were to transition to use crypto currencies as our main financial system we'd use more than all the energy we produce worldwide just for bitcoin. So bitcoin looks even worse after doing a bit more of a comparison.
> Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.
...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).
Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.
A token that needed a regular transfer of funds to retain ownership would be really quite neat.
A contract that showed I am the adoptee of Harry the gorilla, and provides a regular income for the charity. If I can’t keep up the payment I sell the token.
Fail to pay or sell the token and it reverts to the charity issuer.
Well you can put the tweet up for sale or auction on eBay. Just like with NFTs, you wouldn’t actually be transferring the underlying asset, nor would the tweet actually be hosted within eBay (or an NFT chain) for some kind of archival purpose, nothing stops you from selling it again on Amazon or Craigslist or any other marketplace (or another NFT). If Amazon, EBay, or the company behind the NFT decides to close up shop, that’s it for your listing. Heck, just as with NFTs, you could put tweets you don’t even own in your listings, since you’re really just selling the listing with some media linked in it rather than transferring the media or the rights to it.
The problem of course is the word crypto doesn’t appear in any of the traditional platforms, so no hype/demand exists for your tweets there. Those users have also over time not only been trained to recognize scams, but are provided with a little bit of buyer protection if they end up buying something you couldn’t really sell them in the first place.
Yep. Take a look at Jack Dorsey. He’s “selling” the first ever tweet as an NFT and it’s currently at 2.5 million dollars.[0][1] But what does that even mean to “sell” a tweet? It’s still visible to everyone at its permanent URL.[2] What’s stopping Jack from just auctioning it off again later?
If Jack Dorsey sold the "rights" to the first ever tweet, I'm confident someone would pay at least $1 million for it, even without an NFT involved.
The fact that there's an NFT involved makes it more valuable, because now the buyer can show off in more ways than one. But that's it.
There have always been, and always will be, rich people with more money than sense, who want to demonstrate their great wealth and worldliness by buying silly stuff to show off with.
You don't need email either, just write a letter or send a fax.
The point is that here is a piece of new technology that's part of a new vision for the future. Maybe you think it's an unrealistic vision, but that's no reason to sneer at people who disagree with you.
Email is easier and provides more features than a letter or fax in most cases. (With both still having some use in specific cases like personal messages or gov regulated messaging) NFT is harder and doesn't seem to provide any features over current donations. (It's actually worse due to unstable exchange rates and large fees)
Unless the vision provides benefits we did not have before I will continue to sneer at "the same thing but on blockchain" ideas.
Some people think it's a good idea to have a distributed, immutable ledger for stuff like this, with the ability to make payments without depending on a handful of individual corporations like Paypal and Visa. The fact that it's "blockchain" is immaterial except that blockchain happens to be the technology that makes it possible.
There's so much knee-jerk opposition to "blockchain" stuff just because some nerds get too excited about it (and some people are trying to get rich off it). It makes no sense to me.
> Some people think it's a good idea to have a distributed, immutable ledger for stuff like this
Ok, still - what's the benefit of that in the discussed context (donations to an organisation preserving wildlife) which they can't easily provide with existing programs?
(Accepting the payment is slightly unrelated - if they want donations via cryptocoins, there's a bunch of payment gateways they can enable today)
Exactly, but you have to go with the tech latest fad as many here seem stakeholders in it. Once you are invested, you can’t criticize in the same way. It’s castles in the sky to me. It has “bubble” written all over it. There is little in NFC or Bitcoin-like technologies that I see as a great benefit to the human species. Love to be proven wrong with good comments of what that specific tech can do for humanity.
There's streaming (https://sablier.finance/), I'm sure this could be used. Although I'm not sure how it would be used in the NFT aspect. Maybe they could be used for gaming mechanism. "Upgrade your gorilla to a larger environment!" "Unlock a new toy!"
You can just delegate Cardano's ada and give those as Charity. Or check Wozx which is trying to bring efficient energy to industries so while helping animals you help save climate as well.
You can create NFTs which programmatically collect royalties on each sale [0]. This royalty could be used for continued conservation efforts. I don't know much about programming smart contracts but I think one could be programmed such that if it isn't transferred within a certain period of time it could be burned the next time the user tries to transfer it.
You "just" need to tie each NFT to a specific gorilla and raise enough to find someone willing to sell an annuity tied to the expected lifespan of said gorilla.
Or just raise enough for the average investment returns from the one-off sales to fund the charity.
But the person who the money/etherium is sent to could be the charity, no? As in, people donate their digital art or whatever to a charity and the charity auctions off the NFTs to raise money.
That’s the way real life charity fundraisers sometimes work: you donate a physical object and they sell it to raise money. The benefit over you selling at and donating the money is that you don’t have to deal with selling it. The usage of NFTs here would be to take advantage of the mass hysteria(?) surrounding them to drum up the price.
An NFT could work like that, though. There's nothing stopping someone from writing an NFT smart contract that directs a percentage (of any size, including 100%) of future sales to the initial cause.
The NFT standard itself is quite basic, nearly every NFT people talk about are controlled by smart contracts that expand on the standard.
A bizarre scenario would be a digital photo (NFT of sort) of the rare animal becomes extremely high value, and end up causing the animal to be extinct.
To be macabre, genetic sequencing an animal and then eradicating the species would increase the data value. Thankfully, posting an open sequence on the net would remove the rationale for the horrible part of that sentence.
'Virtual Trophy Hunt', the Big 5, surely owning a Lion gives you serious flex these days? Not much more genuinely limited edition than an Iberian Lynx.
That's along the lines I was thinking, then they could be freely traded by collectors with some kind of profit share going back to those in a position to help.
When a momma gorilla and a papa gorilla love each other very much... (and significant resources are dedicated to keeping them safe, content and ready to procreate, which is what I'm assuming Reddit has achieved.)
Okay, I laughed at this, but unfortunately gorilla mating is quite a bit more brutal than this, more like an aspiring young alpha discovers the last alpha has grown old and weak, murders him, then murders all of the children as well, enslaves the gorilla women, and periodically rapes them. All he really offers in return is he'll keep other up and comers from murdering their new babies until he also grows too old and weak.
Eh, female/male sexual relations amongst gorillas aren't as fantastically patriarchal as this, female Gorillas solicit males for sexual coitus themselves, including males other than the silverback, even after conception, and have even displayed homosexual tendencies[0][1][2][3], and they have preferences that have been genetically impressed on Gorilla males, which is why Gorilla males, unlike Chimp males, are not only amenable to interacting and playing with their own offspring but also those of others[4]. Their sexual lives aren't solely at the privy of the dominant male, waiting around for his urges passively, that's something of a fantasy. The dominant male is rarely the sire of all offspring in a troop, the has proven genetically.
Officially this is an estimate, but having been where these animals live, I believe we can have an exact count. Keep in mind that when we say “globally” this means a tiny region straddling the border between Rwanda, Uganda and Congo.
We are talking about a few families of gorillas, some of which are tracked daily. There is a massive conservation effort on these animals, at least in Rwanda and Uganda, they all have names and I don’t think a gorilla is born without someone knowing about it
If there are really 1063 I would think conservationists could know about almost every one individually. That's smaller than the high school I went to. I know they are spread out over a wide area in a dense jungle but I think it would be possible.
The title is confusing, perhaps worth changing "Reddit investors" to "Wall Street Bets users" or something similar. I genuinely thought the article would talk about owners of Reddit, not it's users.
"adoption" is the terminology used by the foundation, and symbolic adoption is a known quantity in this type of operation so I don't have a problem with it.
However referring to wallstreet bets users as "investors" does seem like a bit of a misnomer...
And more seriously, people actually do adopt animals and bring them home or to some enclosure. There are supposedly more tigers in captivity in Texas than in the wild.
So my guess was not that crazy. Especially considering that it would be a much more captivating if less noble story than "redditors raised money for gorillas."
I kind of agree with parent. While I don’t have a problem with symbolic use of adoption, I do have a problem with “multiple adoption”.
When I think of a donor “adopting” a case, I have a model of “this donation sufficed for lifetime care of that case”. If one donation isn’t sufficient, then maybe a group of donations would collectively be the adoption.
You shouldn’t have a scenario where there are more adoptions than cases (gorillas in this one). I mean imagine if a foster agency said they processed five adoptions but had only two children.
I guess in my mind, the point of the adoption is that the "adopter" has a point of personal connection with the funding they are providing, and they can hang a picture on the wall to remind themselves why they are supporting this cause.
Given that almost none of these "adopters" will ever see the gorilla in question in real life, it seems unreasonably jealous to insist that this organization should forgo funding so that they and they alone can have a financial relationship with this particular gorilla.
>Given that almost none of these "adopters" will ever see the gorilla in question in real life, it seems unreasonably jealous to insist that this organization should forgo funding so that they and they alone can have a financial relationship with this particular gorilla.
I never suggested or hinted at that, just that it was misleading to call it adoption, if they're not granted a kind of "owning" of that relationship, in the sense of that donor is "the" supporter of that gorilla [pair]. If they want to call it "supporting", I wouldn't consider that misleading.
My only issue is that "Reddit investors" means people that invest on Reddit, while the article is about people that speculate with stocks (kinda ok to call them investors) and use Reddit.
>also they don't adopt them, they fund their caretaking. this title is pretty poor.
We don't have to be mega pedantic about words not being used for its literal meaning. The Dian Fossey Fund uses the word "adopt" in a symbolic way like many other charities do:
It's not being pedantic, but accurate. It took me a confusing 30 seconds to understand that the gorrilas won't be coming home with the owners of Reddit.
Ok, if we're getting pedantic about it, adopting as a synonym for supporting is a misnomer or more specifically an attempt to conceal the conflict of wanting to support something, but being unwilling to become intimately involved with it. It takes away from the genuine act of adoption. So I'll stand behind not using the term.
That just feels pedantic and gatekeeping. Adoption in this context has been used this way for as long as I can remember (20+ years) with every animal charity in the UK at least.
That's a fair point, as regards animal support. I was a bit hot under the collar when I wrote that. The scenario I was thinking of was adopting vs supporting people, and the regretable reluctance to adopt children in general.
using the phrase "adopt" to mean "funding the ongoing care of" is pretty common parlance, at least in US-based charities. You can, for example, adopt a highway:
Generic question: I see a lot of news articles stating that WSB has "10 million members". Does being a 'member' go beyond clicking the 'join' button on that subreddit? If so it's more like a 'follow this channel', isn't it?
It is striking how just about any subreddit is several orders of magnitude larger than their average engagement. It's seemingly no matter the size and affects huge and tiny subeditors. I guess there really are that many bot accounts on reddit.
Many people (including myself) will just not post. If you want to see what’s going on with a subreddit in your feed, you have to subscribe/join it. You can manually visit all your favorite subreddits but that can be very tedious and doesn’t fit the “news feed” type of behavior that people want to use.
No, it's indeed the number of users in that subreddit alone. The daily threads there regularly amass 100k comments. Reddit has grown really quite large.
Worth noting they've also adopted whales, belugas, sloths, falcons, and probably a lot of other animals I didn't notice when scrolling the past few days.
Well, if the evil side can exploit this phenomenon to great success (e.g. drone strikes allowing to kill people halfway across the world, and making it feel like playing a video game from 1990s), why can't the good side? We can despair about the nature of man all we want, but if in the meantime, we can get rich people here to spend a lot of money on helping people far away, that's still a huge net benefit for the world.
There may be a tradeoff between the distance of someone you want to help and effectiveness - how much do you really know about their problems or the solutions you are funding? Have you ever tried to figure out requirements for a project at work that depend on a group of co-workers on another continent in a different culture?
There's also so many faraway causes, how do you prioritize?
The people I know, and the problems that I or they have, are not necessarily the most important in the world. But I have a better chance of doing something appropriate about them, because I'm not limited to vague stereotypes.
Trying to help with something that you know about firsthand also increases the odds that you will be addressing a problem which is common but overlooked by society because there isn't enough money, glamour, or self-actualization involved.
I strongly believe that a personal connection is not just a gimmick for these reasons.
The exact opposite argument can also be made here: they weren't remotely funding some specific measure that they think could solve the problem, which admittedly could be distorted by distance. They are funding an organization whose goal is solving that problem and has experts who are close to the issue. It's basically outsourcing.
Interesting read, and I definitely wasn't trying to say that outsourcing was great. But if you do your due diligence, your chances of actually fixing the issue you care about are much higher if you pick a reputable organisation to donate to, rather than funding actions directly.
Since philanthropy is usually fueled by emotions, you might be tempted to fuel actions to stop trophy hunting of endangered species, but according to many sources (see the wikipedia page and its references), that might actually be detrimental to the conservation efforts. Similarly, you might fund the planting of trees to restore forests, while those cutting existing forests down with no regard for the environment face no opposition (sound familiar?).
There's a lot of harm possible if you outsource to the wrong people, but if you do your due dilligence, a dedicated group of experts will be able to use your money far more effectively than you could.
As for "fixing the issues close to you" - you need to realise, that people who have money to throw around are rarely close to, let alone experts in, any such issues. They might want to help the homeless, for example, but if they just buy up a bunch of apartments and let them live there, they might not be solving much. Someone working with the homeless on a daily basis would know to put money towards rehabilitation, education and finding them employment first (from what I've heard - I, too, am not an expert).
>your chances of actually fixing the issue you care about are much higher if you pick a reputable organisation to donate to, rather than funding actions directly
I wasn't questioning the merits of working in groups.
However, the only way to have done "due diligence" practically speaking is to engage with an organization that operates near you and deals with something that you have experienced or known someone who's experienced.
Meeting the people who work for an organization, volunteering your time to work with them, observing what they do in your community, is how you do due diligence.
That's a specialized version of the question, is it really evil to kill evil people? But it's also a bit off-topic; the more important one is, are only evil people getting killed by drone strikes executed by people who (claim to) try to kill only evil people? The answer to that is a resounding no. We can debate the specifics of this, but it wasn't my point.
My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one[0], and drone strikes are the usual example - the killer has no personal risk, and the act itself involves operating video game controllers while watching a low-resolution image of distant events. And, for many practical reasons, this has been embraced by the military. Cheaper, less trauma for soldiers, less bad press, less likely the soldier will hesitate or spare the lives of their targets.
And thus I'm asking: if that works so well for killing, and there isn't a big pushback against this[1], then why criticize the case where the similar levels of detachment are making people more likely to do good deeds? If people are more likely to donate to good causes further away than they are to those close to them, then why not be just happy that more people are donating to good causes?
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[0] - It most likely has a formal name in psychology, but I'm not aware of it.
[1] - There is some pushback, but I don't see it rising to the level actually influencing any decision-making in the US.
Am I missing some context here? This keyphrase gives me some articles about how UNICEF is helping mitigate the problem of arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh. This is good, right? Or are they, or other charitable initiatives, somehow responsible for causing it in the first place?
>are they, or other charitable initiatives, somehow responsible for causing it in the first place
That is how the story goes. Millions of wells were dug via aid that turned out to be contaminated with arsenic then ingested by tens of millions of people. Many of whom suffered over the years thinking they were "cursed".
I don't know how culpable the aid organizations really were, but even if it's just one of those "truthy" things that isn't quite true, it represents what can happen when people are detached from consequences of trying to do good very vividly.
>My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one
It seems that you are again assuming that drone strikes are evil immoral acts.
Most people view civilian casualties in war as a trolley car problem, (e.g. a necessary evil in an overall moral action)
I don't really care what most people think. If I chose my beliefs based solely on what most people thought, I would be guilty of committing the bandwagon fallacy. So don't hide behind "most people". What do you think about this issue?
My own personal view is this: The Geneva convention forbids the killing and torture of non-combatants. The Geneva convention exists for a reason: without it, war would be more brutal and kill many more innocent people. Sure, it's easier to destroy the enemy if you don't worry too much about civilian casualties. But if both sides reason that way, the advantage to each cancels out, and the net outcome is just more civilian deaths.
It's cheap to say "oh it's a trolley problem" when we're talking about killing some innocent people thousands of miles away in order to take out an enemy general. Imagine if the civilians killed by each drone strike were all Americans. Want to kill that enemy commander? It'll cost you 5 American lives. Same logic from a trolley problem standpoint, but I expect you'd get some very different results on your poll.
I think that the killing of civilians is undesirable, but clearly moral under the right conditions. The proposition is not weather one should "worry too much about civilian casualties" but if they are morally justifiable at all.
Do you really hold that that it isn't acceptable to kill 1 non-combatant to save a greater number of non-combatants at a future date?
You can change the conditions or description, but it is still a trolly problem.
Imagine the "default" track splitting into a hundred million tracks, which all cross and merge into and separate from each other. It's such a maze that nobody can really tell what path the trolley will take once it enters a particular track. There's a couple thousand people in blue shirts tied down to a single-digit number of those tracks. A hundred-million-way split is essentially a bump in the main track, which means the trolley will randomly pick one of the hundred million of directions.
The service track (which splits off the main track before the hundred-million split) has a couple redshirts tied to it, plus 50 yellow-shirts per each redshirt. If you flip the switch, the trolley is sure to travel down the service track.
Additionally, the rules of iterating the problem are: if you don't flip a switch, there's a small chance the game ends. If you do flip a switch, the game will always continue, and there's a small chance that next round, more blueshirts will be tied to some of the hundred million tracks, and a small chance that the trolley will go down the main track regardless of your choice.
What do you choose? The US government answer is essentially to jam the switch in the "to service track position", because "fuck it, we don't care about non-blue shirts, and besides, the trolley company pays us to make sure the trolleys keep going".
Overall, I think I agree with your analogy, which illustrates the complexity of the problem.
If I follow, you are claiming that:
1. Lives saved by military intervention are unpredictable
2. The people killed by military intervention are categorically different than those saved
3. The number of lives saved changes over time.
4. Military intervention on average kills more than it saves (Today)
5. There are ulterior motives at play
OF these, I think 1-3 are pretty agreeable, 4 is unknown, and 5 is true, but generally overstated.
>What do you choose?
Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.
I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.
The real challenges are twofold:
First is the asymmetrical information between the professional lever pullers and the 3rd party critics. 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.
Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.
My claims are similar to which you identified, but stronger in some points, so let me put them explicitly.
1. Drone strikes aren't saving lives in an immediately obvious fashion ("these targets were about to launch an attack on us"), but only indirectly, if at all ("these targets may or may not have been planning some sort of attack in the future, which they may or may not have been able to execute; but we're sure they won't be planning or executing anything when they're dead"). The hundred million tracks are meant to show the degree of uncertainty about possible future attack and its casualties. Any given drone strike is unlikely to have saved anyone at all.
2. The people killed by drone strikes are of different nation than the one that does the killing. This is illustrated by the blue/other color split, and red/yellow illustrates enemy combatant/enemy civilian split. That they latter are tied together describes collateral damage.
3. The risk grows over time if the drone strikes continue. This is illustrated by the iteration rules. In the example, as long as the trolley keeps killing redshirts and yellowshirts, the number of blueshirts on the tracks tends to grow over time - and if it goes on long enough, the trolley will eventually follow the main track despite the switch being flipped, and will run over some blueshirts. This illustrates how each drone strike generates more hatred on the other side, creating more potential attackers and increasing motivation for performing an attack. Done long enough, an attack is guaranteed to happen. Conversely, stopping the strikes deescalates the issue, reduces the hatred - as illustrated by the game having a chance to end early if you don't flip the switch.
3a. The exact point I'm trying to make here: US drone strikes are creating and perpetuating the problem they are claimed to mitigate. Stopping them is the actual way to mitigate the problem.
4. As per point 1, the amount of lives saved by these attacks in the long run is unknown, but unless military intelligence is not an oxymoron it's claimed to be, it's most likely negative.
4a. From this follows my belief, reflected by using 1e8 tracks in the example, that the chance of actual attack happening and killing people is much smaller than the chance the enemy will lose their interest in the fight if they're no longer being terrorized. Not pulling the lever and waiting for the game to finish is a loss-of-life-minimizing strategy in my example.
5. There are ulterior motives, and there are many of them. That's somewhat of a side topic, though. But I do claim that these motives are enough to blind the decision-making apparatus to the point 3a - drone strikes are causing the risk, not reducing it.
> Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.
That's the right view in the abstract, but in reality, the professionals running the show are professional PR people ordering professional lever pullers to pull the lever. That's not to say the politicians and the military are bad at their jobs - they're OK, but they're also not focusing on minimizing loss of life long-term.
> I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.
It isn't always evil to pull the lever here - it just almost always is. Exceptions are few and far between.
> 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.
This is a line of reasoning that's commonly used to defend intelligence agencies - "they won't announce out loud when they save everyone from doom, because that would be defeating their ability to stave off another disaster". However, as far as I know/read, to the degree various journalists and investigators were able to dig out information, there aren't any secret success stories they're hiding. So I'm biased strongly against trusting this line of reasoning alone.
> Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.
That's true, but the lever pullers are also good at playing up the need for pulling the level, and then there's also the trolley company - which is meant to depict, in a generalized way, how the military–industrial complex makes money on perpetuating the killing.
Thanks for engaging. You raise a number of interesting points worth exploring, but the end of of the day, I think it all boils down to two of them.
3a. Do drone strikes exacerbate or mitigate the problem violent actors and actions in the long run.
5. if decision makers are capable of assessing 3a and acting in accordance with public interest.
Regarding 3a, I can see the obvious logic of how drone strikes(or any bombing/killing) could militarize more people and think it is plausible. It is worth considering that there are other factors which can militarize people as well, such systemic injustice, domestic violence, poverty, and cults of personality. These can continue independent of strikes and still increase the number of militarized people in it's absence. It is also worth noting that the capacity for harm for those already militarized increases with organization, which strikes purportedly disrupt.
It would absolutely be worth the cost to collect solid data on the drivers of militarization. I would love to see it and admit that I have not looked deeply into the subject. Most discussions on the subject I have seen take 3a or its opposite as a foundational assumption.
Regarding 5, I wholeheartedly agree that in reality there are additional motivations at play. However, I am generally skeptical of traditional military-industrial complex profiteering motive and think it is over complex. I do not think that defense companies lobbying for war and has a significant impact on it, although companies provide the means and certainly profit off of it. Similarly, I dont think military decision makers seek war for personal gain. There are a sufficient number of other motivations political decision makers to engage in warfare without such elaborate and clandestine explanations. I suspect personal political benefit, national economic benefit, and propagating social ideals at the global level are at the top of this list. You are right in that minimizing the long term loss at the global scale is not the main objective.
Also, it is a created trolley car problem not the trolley car problem. And creating such a situation instead of coming across it is definitely morally evil.
How is it a new trolly problem?
Technology may have changed, but I don't see how that changes the morality.
If it is moral to minimize the deaths by pulling a lever, shouldn't it also be moral to invent the lever?
Someone can certainly argue that drone strikes are not always an effective way to save lives, but if they are, I don't see an argument that makes them evil.
Yes, because these are extrajudicial killings with high death tolls and serious injuries for bystanders.
Suppose China, Russia, or the EU would conduct drone strikes on US soil but only target evil people such as Donald Rumsfeld, who is known to have ordered torture and initiated a war under false pretense. However, many bystanders including women and children would be killed as well. Would you be against it?
For every person that is labelled "evil" by the US, I'm sure there are thousands who would consider them "good". I would hazard to guess that there are more people who considered Osa Bin Laden "good" than consider you "good" and could make a case that you are "evil". Does that means that they have a right to kill you? Or does the US government only get the right to designate people Good or Evil?
I'm not personally against usage of drones in some totally general way, but we should keep in mind why the Bush to Obama shift was made. Aside from the technology simply maturing and growing more viable, we went away from having teams of special operators apprehend terrorism suspects in surgical snatch and grab operations and toward just murdering them with drones for two basic reasons.
One, surgical snatch and grab operations sometimes result in high profile failures where US operators are themselves captured or die in the process, which becomes a huge local media sensation. Two, when you arrest people, you run into the issue of what to do with them. Hence, all of the continuing problems with Guantanamo. Do you give them rights? Transfer them to regular prisons? Release them? Hold an actual trial at some point? We still haven't figured it out, and the easiest answer is just stop arresting people and kill them instead.
I leave it to you to decide which of the two options is more ethical, but the reasons we did it have nothing to do with ethics. And drones are inherently less precise and also kill whoever happens to be nearby a lot more often than Seal Team Six.
When another country or organization turns their drones on us because of our antiquated human rights ideas, inability to form consensus, and extreme ideologies - from their perspective - opinions will get much clearer.
Best way to stop the drone wars at this point are for us to stop now.
I hadn't seen it before, but I suspect it's a prod at wealthy Western philanthropists who spend a lot of money on children in Africa or Asia- meanwhile ignoring the homeless & starving in their own town.
Ugh, those prods reek of Western superiority. If a dollar goes further in an impoverished place I don't see what's wrong with directing it accordingly. Moreover, taxes (in theory) should already be directed to help those locally.
I haven't done too much research and I direct my donations both domestically and abroad.
Reddit has always been a place where you can find spontaneous generosity with a fun twist. Just one example: there was a popular sub many years ago called "randomactsofpizza" where Redditors would send pizza to other Redditors who were hungry or down on their luck.
I don't know why we should assume Redditors are less charitable than people at large when if anything they've demonstrated otherwise.
The subreddit is /r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza and still in operation. /r/RandomActsOfPizza was a copycat started with the explicit purpose of bartering nudes for pizza (forbidden in the original). It was later shut down when it turned out it was run by a scammer.
On the gorilla front, the AR15 subreddit helped the anti-poaching squads with technical advice and parts to help protect gorillas.
It's a good venue for charity and people helping others.
No one who has spent much time with humans should be shocked that the same people are also sardonic assholes at times.
There is still an imgur user doing this regularly.
I think username is pizzaguy
They used to do it on their own, and now they organise pizza nights, where a bunch of users sign up to donate, and those who need pizza sign up to receive.
For people who call themselves "retards" and "apes" with the perchant for doing reckless if not outlandish sh#t - I think it's very much in character and quite apt.
What you are missing is that this allows people who are otherwise unable to help to do so.
Helping animals has always been somewhat more popular than helping people because people have more agency and also tend to suck.
What do you suggest we do for the people struggling in front of us? Also that is a broad brush you are painting a lot of people with. It's likely that many /r/wallstreetbets users donate to other charities. Americans tend to be quite generous.
I don’t have hard facts, but I believe I’ve read that basically the generosity of the American people is largely the same amount as the surplus taxes of Europeans. And in better functioning European countries that money will benefit people much more than animals — so in a way it helps explain the difference in the quality of social nets.
In charity or volunteering, it's similar to the template of "adopt-a-<noun>". Examples such as "Adopt-a-Highway" or "Adopt-a-Child" to sponsor a hungry child in Africa.
You send some money to an org and they look after a gorilla for you. Usually not so directly tho. They just calculate how much their operation costs per gorilla and send you a bill for it.
> What if the real value was paying poachers to not poach?
You wouldn't believe how many animals I haven't poached today. Where's my cheque?
Ultimately, you're describing Coasean bargaining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem). However, in this case there's a real problem of demonstrating commitment (preventing a poacher from betraying the deal) and more critically in induced demand; if I pay you not to poach then your neighbour might decide to enter the now-vacant industry themselves.
For Coasean bargaining to work, you need a very well-defined and well-enforced set of property rights, such that if the "legitimate" poachers refrain then nobody else can take up the slack. Since poaching is illegal to start with, this set of rights does not really exist.
1) demand, mostly from Asia, for body parts of endangered animals. Unfortunately, the customers are willing to pay a lot of money (a single rhino horn for example can fetch 15.000 $!), and don't care if they actively contribute to the extinction of a species.
2) Enormous poverty in the regions where these endangered animals live. The median wage of South Africa is 17.000 $ - so it's no surprise that many turn to poaching.
Basically the West would need to impose drastic sanctions on China and other Asian countries that act as demand for rare animal parts (not made easier by the fact that the West has a shoddy history itself in that regard, e.g. ivory, and so such politics always has legitimacy/neo-colonialism issues), while at the same time directing massive amounts of money towards eliminating the poverty and establishing alternative, legit jobs for former poachers.
Pay to poach the poachers. Or large sums of money to rat out organizations so they need to deal with internal revolt of some poachers throwing everyone else under the bus for their payout.
To be honest, I don't. I was more interested in having intelligent conversation around it. I feel (generally) that when people don't have aligned incentives, there can't be aligned outcomes. To me, that means there's a conversation to be had around how do we get groups with differing priorities to have aligned incentives.
Harambe is definitely a factor. But it's probably primarily related to the somewhat recent, self-deprecating meme of calling themselves "monkes"/apes (implying some acknowledgement that they are less "sophisticated" investors than traditional retail or institutional). I'm kind of glad to see this new meme because the older self-deprecating memes were pretty insensitive and made it easier to paint the crowd as malicious.
You completely misunderstood what this is. Short explanation: GameStop holders on r/wallstreetbets refer to themselves as "apes" and decided to crowdfund actual gorillas.
He is saying that it may or may not be greenwashing if that's the take you want to have but either way it's not relevant to Hacker News. Not sure whether I agree or not, just trying to explain the parent comment.
Pretty sure parent thinks this is Reddit investors (as actual investors in the company, VCs etc) randomly funding a charity project, which I would agree could be a PR piece. What's actually happening cannot be greenwashing by the definition of the term.
One could interpret it as greenwashing for sure. Like who dares to act like a reddit community of people helping cute gorillas? IMO that's exactly the kind of tension that they want to create. Transforming it in a meme, would be the superhero sweating, having to decide between button A (Save Wallstreet) or button B (Save the cute Gorillas)
> that's exactly the kind of tension that they want to create
Who's the "they" referring to in this sentence? We're talking about an online forum where people don't know eachother's names for the most part. It's a community known for reckless spending in the pursuit of humor. I see no reason to believe this is anything other than an action that a particular user took in an effort to be funny catching on and becoming a meme. There's no PR firm planning their actions in a centralized way.
I'm sorry but this seems paranoid to me. Where exactly do you think is the smoke filled room where the "leadership" is planning a PR campaign against hedge funds?
That's been going on for a while now.
One of the firearm subreddits gave technical advice and donated parts to the anti-poaching squads that protect gorillas.
It's likely that the "mob" who did this considers such action as a joke, they are not really people with good intentions, more like trolling intentions.
Even-though the outcome here looks positive, I don't think it's any good. They could as well have bought gallons of oil and spilled it in the ocean if it had been a good joke for them.
But something that I noticed during the GME craze is how (some) people were making pledges to donate part of the profits to charities if things went well for them, and later showing proof of doing it.
IIRC someone pledged 20% of the profits thinking they'd donate a few 100s, and ended up donating several 10'000s, but staying true to the pledge.
If you dig the subreddit you'll see people donated to foundations for autism and homeless shelters, in addition to local food banks.
It might be another one of the usual internet "mobs", but it's the first one were I see unorganized individuals part of the community pushing others towards doing good, lead by example and show proof for it (although typically with some meme reference in it).
I don't agree with you at all. You can't blanket condemn a community of over 8 million people. Sure there are trolls, a lot of money is lost by naive people, but there are plenty of decent people there who just like participating in that culture for fun.
Why doesn't hackernews adopt something or do something like this? Software developers are rolling in money, and it's not that expensive. Guess we're too busy eating the world.
I think it’s just because HN isn’t really a community that has many consistent themes/cohesion. It’s very active but only on individual news items rather than across posts.
But I think if the mods could potentially put up a link for donating to something, it’d get decent traffic. I just wouldn’t expect that initiative to arise organically from the user base and get significant traction.
Philanthropy is one of the greatest evils of our time.
Philanthropists steal money from workers via monetary inflation and financial schemes.
Then they give away a tiny portion of it to the world's poorest. In the meantime their financial schemes squeeze everyone in the middle; those who actually produce all of the world's economic value.
In this case, they steal money from working humans and give it to a bunch of gorillas who should have been left alone in the jungle in the first place.
Not surprising that many of these displaced working humans turn to poaching and other illegal activities to make a living. Their salaries are constantly inflating away, they can't save anything on normal salaries. They can't start their own businesses, they can't compete against those who have access to the money printers.
I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.