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 the thread for you.
I really wish you would say outright what you're referring to, because to me right now your comment comes off as a bit of cryptic snark. Perhaps there were some comments along the lines you mean earlier, but scanning through the top 6 or 7 comments now, none of them appear to display the kind of arrogance you are implying.
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.
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 alternative leads to terrible software, team dynamics, work-life balance, etc.
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!
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 superior intellect.
> 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.
One of the most important skills a lawyer can have is being able to comprehend highly complex topics in a very short time with minimal information to a reasonable level of confidence that they can advise genuine subject matter experts (experts the lawyer counts on knowing more about a topic than the lawyer does) about risk issues.
This is, of course, one of the most important skills anybody can have, but most people are terrible at it (whether by lack of talent or lack of practice) so our society pays lawyers to do it for them.
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.)
It's because most of the time people see mostly powerless people trying to do their jobs and messing up. They don't have as much of a frame of reference for how powerful people act, especially because there is so much mystification in the media (literally owned by the said powerful people). The rule you apply to your friends and co-workers isn't suitable for the maniacal supervillians running society. Of course, those guys also fuck up in bizzare and stupid ways too, so people will point that out and be like look, they're just bad at their evil jobs!
Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe my concerns from statements (e.g. "the wording here doesn't exclude XYZ scenario...") into questions (e.g. "does anybody know if XYZ is possible with this wording?").
Then what happens is I realize I can go answer that question myself by doing some research, and either I discover my original concern is unwarranted OR I can now state "well they said this but if you look here it's actually XYZ in fact!", which is much more interesting.
It’s an online board. You share your thoughts and challenge them against others responses, and learn more as a result. Is there a minimum requirement of corporate structure expertise required to comment?
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.
Yeah, there is just too much here - i started down the path of trying to explain some of the legal issues and problems, and how people often think and deal with them (with pointers to some of the more interesting attempts, etc), since as you say, this is a thing that's been thought about, by many people, many times, but i feel like i'd end up writing 50 comments and so gave up.
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.
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 taken away from you.
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?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
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.
Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).
As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
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.
No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.
Yes, but opposite of "maximizing profits" does not automatically imply targeting consumer or better product. In this example they state that they interested in maximizing amount of tree they plant. Cool, good for them, but it's not something I'm interested in when using a search engine. After one of Vivaldi's recent updates, I was asked to try Ecosia as my default engine, and I did, but after a few days I went back to Google.
If they are planting a million trees a month why "worry" that they might be getting paid, sorry "milking", to do their jobs?
The company is doing the work to earn that money.
Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.
Hm, I've seen this line of argumentation a lot, and I'd like to name it as a fallacy. It's basically "perfect is the enemy of the good", where one good action is dismissed because it's still not perfect.
The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
I see it a lot too, and it's called the Nirvana fallacy [1]. We shouldn't do anything about tax evasion because people will evade taxes anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total amount of tax evasion). We shouldn't ban drunk driving because people will drive drunk anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total number of drunk drivers). We shouldn't trust non-profits, because they seek revenue anyway (ignoring that it's much less severe for any non-profit in comparison to a for-profit company).
> The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
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.
Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.
They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.
> 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 user) that's when it gets worse.
In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.
The problem with social networks is that they decide to earn more money from advertisers by selling the users. I don't know how a company can say "I'll only ever want a specific kind of customer", but at least saying "I'll never want to sell" is a step in that direction.
FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.
I don't see a problem with a non-profit CEO (or any employee) taking a large salary. Even if they do, the non-profit structure still removes large shareholders, who are not employees and can have an outsized influence without a commitment to the project or an understanding of its workings.
A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.
Depending on where in the world you are, paying yourself a high wage results in much higher taxes than paying profits in the form of dividends. These taxes may benefit society at large, which may well be in line with their goals.
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.
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.
>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.
there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.
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 because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.
You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.
Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.
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. This is why anticompetitive business practices are so successful at generating profits, and at the same time are so horribly bad for the free market. In an efficient market, profits converge towards zero.
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.
In the narrow sense it’s good. It’s an optimization function, yes. With a wider lens it leads to problems that are just lumped into the big pile of things called Externalities. One of which is ecological collapse. Or just climate change if that sounds too drastic.
Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.
So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).
That's certainly a fair point, but currently even the (non-)possibility of shareholder ownership and for-profit takeovers seems to be on shaky ground with what OpenAI is trying.
I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.
I don't have any special information here, but I wanted to mention that's it's just as exhausting when people approach every single interaction assuming the worst possible intentions as the reverse. It's OK to not be cynical once in a while.
You're right. I don't necessarily assume the worst from them and I don't assume the worst in general, but it's difficult to switch off from the fact that this article is marketing, and it's marketing for a company that the author makes money from.
Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.
“They’re trying to do better, which means they’re claiming to be perfect, but I am wise enough to know nobody’s perfect, so they’re a bunch of liars who are no better than all those other liars”
I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well.
But how much a CEO of a company like this should make?
It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?
In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.
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.
> [...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us:
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.
(That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any potential future stewards of Ecosia, but I'll prefer a hard legal guarantee over a promise any time, especially when charitable donations are involved.)
"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, but if they did choose to restructure, i'm not aware of a country where the restrictions here would be enforced on the successor.
On top of this, in most (all?) countries, agreements not to file for bankruptcy are not enforceable ;)
So that's one mechanism.
In most countries, however, these provisions would be "easily" removable through shareholder + officer vote.
Some companies go pretty far down the path of trying to use trusts as shareholders and requirements on trustees and such to try to ensure such a thing never occurs.
You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.
I also had a friend who explored whether you could legally require the place of voting to be like "the surface of the sun" or something that ensures voting can't occur, but unfortunately, you usually can't.
Companies really aren't meant for this kind of thing - not that there is something better, but what tehy are trying to do is pretty fundamentally opposed to how countries want companies to operate.
If it's really a big enough deal, the "correct" answer is to create a new corporate form, much like we created LLC's, etc (LLC's are less than 100 years old, so it's not impossible)
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 always choose a restructuring rather than a windup if possible. You'd probably put that trust somewhere with UK Trust law.
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
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.
> You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.
Doesn't this mean it's quite possible to achieve what they want? Is there a limit on how absurd the statutes can get (at least in your jurisdiction)? Votes have to be held at 3:00AM on Mondays, in person, at the company voting office, which happens to be on top of Mt. Everest?
As I understand it registering as a Public Benefit Corporation assists with this and creates an explicit obligation for the directors to stick with the stated purpose in the constitution.
According to Wikipedia:
"The benefit corporation legislation ensures that a director is required to consider other public benefits in addition to profit, preventing shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation." ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Anyone have experience with Benefit corporations and more specifically what legal remedies are available if a corporation once setup as a benefit corporation fails to adhere to it's enhanced responsibilities. Or its directors for that matter.
OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case?
I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.
Definitely; by "hard legal guarantee" I mean the entire thing, i.e. both a law and it being enforced/upheld. (Conversely, it doesn't even need to necessarily be a law, but I'm afraid a strong social norm is even further out of reach at the moment.)
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?
Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".
But GP raises a good point: Are these two things that benefit from any kind of synergy in terms of skills required by the employees working there, target audience etc.?
If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated as its goal when it's incorporated.)
It seems they kind of do this already. [1] "We send out payments to different partners each month to plant and protect trees in biodiversity hotspots across the globe."
Their youtube channel covers what their partner orgs do in depth. It's a pretty cool channel if you ever wanna watch local organizations around the world trying to safeguard their natural communities
I didn't assume so, but they still do two things: Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it (in this case, planting trees).
As somewhat of a sympathizer of effective altruism (the idea of efficiency being an important factor in charities, not necessarily the implementation and even less the community), this isn't super appealing to me.
This just seems like a donation with complicated extra steps, in the same way that e.g. "rounding up to charity" or even "round up savings" do not appeal to me at all.
That might well be an idiosyncratic preference, and to some the idea of "planting trees via running web searches" might appeal much more than a nonprofit search engine that donates to a basket of charities, or one that directly pays the user for showing them ads and lets them decide what to do with the money and then the user donating the proceeds themselves.
Do they disclose what percentage of their revenue is donated?
If it's just a token amount, then I'd rather not support a marketing gimmick and would prefer to just donate directly to an organization focused on trees. If it's a significant amount, then it seems unlikely that they'll be able to compete with for-profit alternatives that can focus on developing the best product.
I really struggle to understand your confusion. How do you think normal companies work?
Ecosia is profitable, they take some percentage of that profit and use to plant trees. In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners. Profit is measured after investments into R&D, salary, marketing everything that come with running a business.
Sure they could "just" spend more on developing their product, but from what I can see they don't really need to, it's already a good product. So rather than stuffing the pockets of an owner or shareholders, they donate that profit, or parts of it, to organisations that plants trees. Most people wouldn't donate to a tree planting organisation, but they will switch their search engine, if it's good enough and even if that plant only 100 trees, that's better than no trees.
I worked for a company that spends it's profit on helping sick children. The owners make enough money. They donate over €1.000.000 per year to a foundation, rather than putting that money into the pocket of the owners. The customers might not even know that they support that foundation, but that also doesn't matter as long as they get the products they want and the price they want. Your suggestion is that the owners should pocket that cash, and I should go donate to that foundation directly?
> In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners.
Only if the company returns money to its shareholders (ex: pays a dividend or does a stock buyback). Many growth-focused companies don't do this -- Amazon didn't do it for its first 22y, Google for its first 17, Netflix for 24, etc.
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.
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.
In my case it's Kagi and Fastmail. Fastmail primarily because I don't want to support Google and Kagi because it's genuinely better than the alternatives.
Kagi and Soverin for me. I bailed from GMail after the AMP-in-mail proposal,[1] and EU hosting was a bonus; ended up blogging about my choice back in 2018.[2] If there was a good EU equivalent to Kagi I’d be definitely interested.
Not the GP, but I pay for Fastmail because it's just so much better than Gmail, and I pay for Kagi sometimes because it's generally better than Google.
I never found gmail particularly convenient. I still have a google account with an @gmail.com address, because Android basically doesn't work without that (you can make a personal @whatever else address, but that doesn't work with Android; you can also make a workspace @whatever else address, but that requires payment or time travel, and doesn't address the core issue).
The only inconvenient thing is people know how to spell gmail.com and have to be told how to spell my personal domain, but my preference is to use my personal domain anyway, I've been using my personal domain for email since before gmail launched; if I used gmail, I'd be forwarding my mail to it, rather than using my gmail address. Fastmail for mail just works, and I don't remember if I had to turn conversations off, but I only had to turn it off once (I detest the conversations feature, but if you like it, I can't tell you if Fastmail has a good one or not :P). Actually, the second inconvenient thing is the Android app doesn't really do offline content; I think gmail is better at that; I griped about this for a long time, but now I just accept it --- offline content is a good match for email, but it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it.
I do use my gmail address for something things where I feel it's a good thing to "present as a normal person", or where my email domain might be embarrassing (I have some other email domains, but one of them is a .is, which is even worse for getting people to spell). I used to use my yahoo address for that, but I got tired of logging into yahoo just for that, and google has successfully tied me into their account system.
I do not use the Fastmail calendar. Android calendar is convenient, and tied to google calendaring.
No, the only difference I noticed was that it was faster. I still use Maps and have my Google account, but I don't use Gmail (or Google calendar). I made the transition years ago and it was really painless for me.
Transitioning from Gmail was painless? What approach did you take? I think I would have hundreds, if not thousands of services I would need to change email on.
I did it little by little, no need to rush it. Just start changing some main ones and as you log in to the others take the min it takes to change it.
On top of that I moved services to their own custom email like <service-name>@<my-domain>.com. That way it's all neatly sorted inside Fastmail in different folders (and I know who is selling my data)
My approach has been simply signing up for new services on my non-Gmail addresses, and occasionally switching important ones over. Nobody's making you delete your Gmail account, so you can still keep it open for legacy stuff as long as you need to (especially since it's free).
Not parent, but: The primary inconvenience I see with de-googling is just the sheer number of things that become just slightly harder. For one, Login with Google. Now, I know people de-googling will probably want to have separate accounts rather than SSO anyways, but it is an important consideration. You also lose GDrive and the GSuite in general, which alternatives exist, yes, but IMO not as good. Also, most people who work online on GDocs will now find it inconvenient to collaborate with you.
All great points. I try to de-google mostly from a personal perspective (though still haven't gotten off Maps or Android). I use loads of Google products at work though because I'm not the decision maker there.
I do use personal Google Workspace now--in part, because I used to use it extensively at work. But even if I used something else, people casually share GDocs with me from time to time.
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.
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.
I stopped self hosting when my host got blacklisted and I lost about a year of emails with my grandmother… I just thought she was reading them but not having the energy to respond but when I visited at Christmas I saw that all my emails were in her spam box.
The unfortunate thing is that more than any other service, email feels like the one on which I cannot risk to compromise reliability. This sort of story (thank you for sharing) unfortunately fits with my own experience managing my University's undergraduate society's local email server. Non-stop headaches and complete indifference from every group which affects your setup.
I don't even routinely use my undergrad's email forwarding address. It's probably better than it used to be but, at one time, it definitely caused more stuff to drop in the bit bucket than emailing directly. And I assume, at this point, that my Gmail account isn't going to go away.
Fastmail and Kagi. The former is amazing – Gmail UX and speed is atrocious in comparison, and the latter is amazing to find reliable, to-the-point results.
Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
I looked up the bylaws just now (mostly because I'm procrastinating). It looks like they have a gGmbH that owns 99% of the shares (by number of shares), but founders retain 99% of the voting rights. Founders' shares are barred from receiving dividends, and the gGmbH has veto rights in relation to any certain changes that would fundmentally alter this ownership structure.
Something I don't really understand, maybe you have thoughts: is there a benefit to gGmbH over the company being a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Stiftung?
They have a brief paragraph here [1] that indicates they considered these and decided against it: "The team considered several alternative ownership solutions to address these questions, including converting the business to a German non-profit and establishing a foundation. Both of these solutions had constraints, though, and neither offered the mixture of entrepreneurial flexibility and structure security they sought."
Stiftung (Foundation) generally work well if you have a bunch of money and you basically have a fixed "algorithm" that you want to execute around the money like: "Invest it all into an index fund, and in any year in which the fund returns a profit, pay out the profits to the family members of person X in the same ratios that would apply if those people came into X's inheritance". You then appoint a bunch of lawyers to serve as the board of the foundation. Because the "algorithm" is so precisely defined, the set of circumstances where the lawyers do their job wrong will be well-defined, and will constitute a breach in their fiduciary duty. There's basically no room for making entrepreneurial decisions along the way. It's a bit like taking a pile of money, putting it on a ship, putting the ship on autopilot, and giving up any and all direct control of the ship. Depending on what precisely that "algorithm" actually is, this might get you tax advantages. Or it might create non-financial positive outcomes you might be trying to achieve like making sure that your progeny will continue to enjoy the wealth you created for many generations to come while limiting the probability that any one generation can screw it all up for the later generations.
Social entrepreneurship is different from that: A social entrepreneur wants the goodwill and favourable tax treatment that comes from giving up their claim to ownership of the money generated by the business (this is what the gGmbH status does; it's a bit like 501(c)3 in the U.S.) -- But they want to retain control over the business. They want to make entrepreneurial decisions as they go, changing strategies along the way in whatever way they please, without restricting themselves too much to the execution of any predefined programme.
For context, I live in Germany and am familiar with the landscape here. Also, I would not equate a 501(c)3 to a gGmbH; gGmbH is more like a B Corp (at least in some of the states that allow it; corporate law differs from state to state in the US). A gemeinnützige Stiftung (Foundation for public purpose) is much closer to a 501c3 than a gGmbH, and a Familienstiftung (Family foundation) is closer to a family trust. (At least for tax purposes, which is the territory I'm most familiar with in this comparison).
But that's not what I'm asking about. Unlike in the US, Stiftungs in Germany (both family and public-purpose) can own an unrestricted percentage of shares -- including all of them -- in normal companies (Kapitalgesellschaften). And I'm specifically interested *not* in restructuring a GmbH as a Stiftung, which is what Ecosia decided against, but rather, I'm wondering if there are any resources available discussing pros and cons of forming a Stiftung as a holding entity, fully owning a GmbH subsidiary (such a construct is not legally possible in the US).
From my perspective, this holding structure would provide much better legal insulation (in both directions) from the founders, preserve the operational flexibility of the (operational) GmbH, while allowing distributions from the GmbH (which would, by definition of being a 100% stakeholder, flow exclusively into the Stiftung) to be distributed by the (purely administrative) Stiftung, according to the founding documents. But I've never seen such an arrangement discussed in depth, which is why I'm asking about it.
Okay, well it sounds like you're deeper in the rabbit hole than I am, then. (I also live in Germany and have a passing interest for the law, though I'm no lawyer).
Regarding your last paragraph, where you say that a foundation provides better insulation from founder control, it sounds to me like you answered your own question: Retention of control vs. insulation from control is precisely the distinction here.
Foundations are typically for people who don't have the option of retaining control, even if they wanted to, because they are typically close to death and in the process of structuring an inheritance. Handing over control to person X is something they see as a threat, because they assume that X will screw it up, so they'd rather make it so that no one can have control.
With social entrepreneurship like Ecosia, founders are typically still young and somewhat idealistic. They want to retain the control, because them being in control is not something they see as a threat. Rather that's what they see as the best possible mechanism for their company/cause retaining its idealistic values. (Also, they are looking for something meaningful to do with their lives).
A cynic might notice that you're kind of looking at regular narcissism vs. communal narcissism here.
If you wanted to structure your social entrepreneurship type business as a foundation which owns 100% of the shares in "your" for-profit corporation, that doesn't work as a "have your cake and eat it too" solution, because either that means that the trustees of the foundation are actually your boss and you're just a replaceable employee with replaceable employee wages or, if you try to pull any shenanigans to make it so that this is not the case, the trust loses its tax-free / "community interest" status. Trying to game this system is something that rich people are routinely trying to do. I'm not saying that some don't get away with it, but the authorities generally have a lot of tools at their disposal to fight this sort of thing.
Control is maybe the wrong word here. GmbHs are required to have one or more natural persons as a Geschäftsführer, which would presumably just stay the founders, so they would retain control of the GmbH. The holding Stiftung would then impose the rules under which the GmbH would issue dividends, and (presumably) also retain the ability to fire the Geschäftsführer:innen, if the Satzung der Stiftung decided to. And of course the founders could also put themselves on the board of the Stiftung for added control. Interesting side note, this would probably result in the founders being Sozialversicherungspflichtig, but that's a whole different can of worms. But the founding documents of the Stiftung could perfectly well spell out exactly the situations under which the founders could be removed as Geschäftsführer der GmbH.
What I mean by legal insulation is more that, in this holding construct, the GmbH ceases to have any financial relationship to the founders. Stiftungs are sort of... headless financial pools governed strictly by their founding documents, completely divorced from the people that created them, and the GmbH would simply be an asset in that financial pool. That means that, for example, were someone to sue the founders, even for something completely unrelated, there is no possible way that shares in the GmbH could possibly end up someone else's hands. Typically when we talk about the liability limitations in corporations, we're talking about them in terms of shielding the founders from the actions of the company, but the inverse is in my opinion just as important (if you're truly interested in forming a self-governing social organization pursuing a social good). I'm not sure if there's any examples of shares in a gGmbH being assessed as assets in a civil case; that would be another interesting question to inform the decision.
That being said, one of the reasons that I'm so interested in the idea of a Stiftung holding, is that I think it also opens up options for actual democracy within the leadership of a company, which is a fascinating idea. That isn't a requirement in a Stiftung holding relationship, but I do think it's an interesting possibility.
At any rate, I think probably the primary downside of this idea is that, like I said, I've not seen any examples of it discussed publicly. Which means you'd need to be doing a lot of the legal legwork on your own -- which means lots of time spent talking to lawyers, which would be really expensive. But I think there's some really interesting possibility for innovation in terms of corporate governance here, in a way that, like I said, wouldn't be legally possible in the US, and it definitely seems like the structure that gives the social purpose the maximum possible protection.
I 100% agree with you that a Stiftung like that (possibly with a for-profit company as a subsidiary) would be the right structure if you wanted to maximize credibility around your community-interest status.
This stuff actually gets a lot of attention from lawmakers: For example, in the U.K. you have the “CIC” (community interest company). Some 13 years ago, David Cameron tried pretty hard to motivate enthusiasm for the idea of a “third sector”, something that's not government and not for-profit. In the U.S. you also have the “L3C” (low-profit limited liability company). In Germany, you have the idea of “Verantwortungseigentum” which was on the agenda for the previous government, though they then didn't get around to it, and you had Sahra Wagenknecht making it into a big talking point for her campaign.
But I don't think a lack of legal infrastructure is really the limiting factor here: As you noticed, we do have foundations (Stiftung) of various types, as well as coops (Genossenschaft). In addition, regular partnerships (like KG, OG) have recently been opened up so that their bylaws can now prescribe a purpose that isn't for-profit. A club (Verein) which in and of itself isn't for-profit, can have a sort of dual identity because it can become the proprietor of a sole proprietorship with a for-profit purpose (at least I seem to recall reading that such a thing is possible). Oh, and, of course, a corporation can, in theory, own 100% of its own shares. I recall reading about that, just please don't ask me where. You can basically wipe out ownership that way, without being subject to the stringent rules around foundations.
So, legal structures are as powerful and flexible as they are underutilised: I think it's the psychological side that explains why.
Usually, even if you have very good intentions, your best bet initially is to start your entity as a for-profit. Being able to operate cheaply and without cumbersome decision-making structures beats lofty aspirations for any business that just gets started. Not turning a profit in a given year (and not paying taxes because you don't turn a profit), is an option you always have. (There's no special paperwork needed for that). In fact: Not having any profit to worry about when it comes to your structure is the likely outcome. Having a profit and trying to decide how to make it so that your profits won't corrupt you in your idealism is a problem you would quite like to have! (Again: From the perspective of a founder who is just getting started).
Then, the day comes where you turn a profit quite regularly. And, at that point, once the flywheel has got going, truly giving up control will be psychologically difficult.
Very much agree in terms of the best strategy being simply to start a plain-jane Kapitalgesellschaft, probably either UG or GmbH, and go from there.
It is indeed possible to have a so-called "kein-Mann GmbH" where the company has bought back all of its shares, though my understanding is that it's a bit of a legal grey area, and certainly not settled law.
I agree that the legal infrastructure is almost certainly there, at least in the sense that there are absolutely plenty of lawyers and lawmakers that specialize in this area. My point is simply that, because it's so much less common, basically every situation ends up being unique, which means that the work that the lawyers are doing is almost always a one-off, which makes it really expensive. And so it's just not worth the effort.
https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?
Ecosia also recently announced a partnership with Qwant to build their own search engine index! This is great for the open web and I'm very excited to see where Ecosia goes next
I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).
Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.
It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.
Yes, I haven't used Qwant though. I'd say it's pretty equal to DuckDuckGo, maybe a little better after they started mixing in Google results. Generally speaking I do think that the Bing powered search engines does much better than Google, but Ecosia had a few specific searches where it's would fail me, that's gone now.
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.
Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but...
Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
Yeah, I've got similar worries since there has been plenty of greenwashing that has happened with planting trees. I'd be sad but also not surprised if some of those trees being planted are sitka spruce wood plantations or so.
This is my main problem with Ecosia as well.
I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.
It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).
Given how bad Google search has gotten recently, I'd give this a try even without the trees. If they can provide a decent search experience _and_ reduce CO2, even better.
We have legal structures with which to make statements like this about nonprofit status, structures which bind the promise so that we don't have to take your word on it.
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.
I think there is a lot of truth in this, but presented in a way that misses some nuance.
It's true that if your goal is to regenerate native forest, which it generally[+] should be where that's an option, then it's indeed true that you want to allow existing forest to regenerate as naturally as possible. The problem in these cases is either land use (land is used for forestry / agriculture / etc. so there's nowhere for new trees to grow) or over-grazing (either by livestock such as sheep or by high populations of wild herbivores such as deer). In those cases you need to solve the underlying problems rather than just counting the number of saplings in the ground (in a heavily browsed area planting may have the advantage that you tend to put in tree guards. Ideally one could instead install appropriate fencing around the entire area to reduce herbivore numbers below the problematic levels).
However you aren't always in that scenario. For example if you're in a landscape with few seed sources then natural regeneration might take an implausibly long time. An extreme example of that would be "regreen the desert" type projects where you need to bootstrap the conditions for tree growth by putting in a lot of trees in a short space of time, although those have a high failure rate. You might also be worried that natural regeneration is too slow in the face of changing climatic conditions, and want to plant trees right for the anticipated climate 100 years hence (although that itself is likely to be controversial).
And of course frequently in the real world tree-planting projects have goals totally unrelated to climate change e.g. just forestry, and as such one shouldn't expect those things to be especially good for the climate, or at all good for biodiversity.
Anyway, I like the idea of companies dedicating part of their revenue to tackling severe global problems like climate change. But I tend to agree that Ecosia's continued focus on tree planting as their headline activity makes them look a bit naive to the audience that is likely to be most receptive to changing products specifically for environmental reasons. Hopefully some of the other project types they're moving into look better in the details than just tree planting.
[+] But not always of course. Converting peat bog to woodland, for example, is going to reduce its effectiveness as a carbon store, and likely reduce biodiversity as well.
My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.
You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.
Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.
AI has gotten cheaper and it will be even more in the future. This will eventually break even, comparing the cost of conventional web search vs AI on some cases. It is not the same as bitcoin where it requires more energy to get less value
... because AI Chats are consuming more energy than search? This is a flawed argument. Internet search also started out using more energy than looking up things in your local library, so maybe we should go back to that?
There is no way around increased AI usage. Would be great if Ecosia plays a key part in its adaption to balance it with environmental goals.
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 the thread for you.
I really wish you would say outright what you're referring to, because to me right now your comment comes off as a bit of cryptic snark. Perhaps there were some comments along the lines you mean earlier, but scanning through the top 6 or 7 comments now, none of them appear to display the kind of arrogance you are implying.
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.
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 alternative leads to terrible software, team dynamics, work-life balance, etc.
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?
I only feel like a genius after I solved a hard problem[1].
https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/the-two-stages-...
[1] Otherwise I have a serious impostor syndrome.
> I’ve never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.
To be fair to the other ones trying, we’ve set a fairly high bar recently, with "Let me show you how to run the world’s first superpower".
It’s also why our cars keep running people over and our websites keep overturning democracies
Maybe because others aren’t “disrupting” everyone else
law and medicine communities definitely have similar qualities in this way imo
In a different way. There's the old joke and doctors and God, and you will certainly find attorneys who are full of themselves. But while I've never met an attorney who thought they were an engineer simply because they were excellent lawyer, I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law (including here on Hacker News), having logically deduced it from first principles with their superior intellect.
> 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.
Completely agree w this clarification
One of the most important skills a lawyer can have is being able to comprehend highly complex topics in a very short time with minimal information to a reasonable level of confidence that they can advise genuine subject matter experts (experts the lawyer counts on knowing more about a topic than the lawyer does) about risk issues.
This is, of course, one of the most important skills anybody can have, but most people are terrible at it (whether by lack of talent or lack of practice) so our society pays lawyers to do it for them.
"I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law"
So much so that this is a running joke among nearly every lawyer I know in private practice.
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
It's because most of the time people see mostly powerless people trying to do their jobs and messing up. They don't have as much of a frame of reference for how powerful people act, especially because there is so much mystification in the media (literally owned by the said powerful people). The rule you apply to your friends and co-workers isn't suitable for the maniacal supervillians running society. Of course, those guys also fuck up in bizzare and stupid ways too, so people will point that out and be like look, they're just bad at their evil jobs!
econ on hackernews be like
Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe my concerns from statements (e.g. "the wording here doesn't exclude XYZ scenario...") into questions (e.g. "does anybody know if XYZ is possible with this wording?").
Then what happens is I realize I can go answer that question myself by doing some research, and either I discover my original concern is unwarranted OR I can now state "well they said this but if you look here it's actually XYZ in fact!", which is much more interesting.
It’s an online board. You share your thoughts and challenge them against others responses, and learn more as a result. Is there a minimum requirement of corporate structure expertise required to comment?
As someone who works at Ecosia, thank you for this. I’m used to people being skeptical about Ecosia’s business model. But this is something else.
Epistemic statuses are a great aid in sharing ideas without sounding overly confident.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bbtvDJtb6YwwWtJm7/...
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...
Yeah, there is just too much here - i started down the path of trying to explain some of the legal issues and problems, and how people often think and deal with them (with pointers to some of the more interesting attempts, etc), since as you say, this is a thing that's been thought about, by many people, many times, but i feel like i'd end up writing 50 comments and so gave up.
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
Skepticism should be the default stance when consuming press releases.
In fact it’s better to be arrogant than to be “neutral” (agnostic) towards a press release.
E.g., the majority of the posts on https://jefftk.com
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 taken away from you.
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?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)
Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
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.
> German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.
German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.
And you can view many of them for free at unternehmensregister.de.
You can read ALL of them for free at the source, handelsregister.de - they stopped charging for access in 2022.
Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).
As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.
> the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows
Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.
> That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
In the US salaries for the top dogs at nonprofits is reported.
Some trick this with “consulting fees” to companies controlled by the top dogs, but it sat least something.
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 :)
No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.
Yes, but opposite of "maximizing profits" does not automatically imply targeting consumer or better product. In this example they state that they interested in maximizing amount of tree they plant. Cool, good for them, but it's not something I'm interested in when using a search engine. After one of Vivaldi's recent updates, I was asked to try Ecosia as my default engine, and I did, but after a few days I went back to Google.
They can do the milking without selling - don’t they?
If they are planting a million trees a month why "worry" that they might be getting paid, sorry "milking", to do their jobs?
The company is doing the work to earn that money.
Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.
That's true, but the product can still get worse chasing revenue from those consumers.
Hm, I've seen this line of argumentation a lot, and I'd like to name it as a fallacy. It's basically "perfect is the enemy of the good", where one good action is dismissed because it's still not perfect.
The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
I see it a lot too, and it's called the Nirvana fallacy [1]. We shouldn't do anything about tax evasion because people will evade taxes anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total amount of tax evasion). We shouldn't ban drunk driving because people will drive drunk anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total number of drunk drivers). We shouldn't trust non-profits, because they seek revenue anyway (ignoring that it's much less severe for any non-profit in comparison to a for-profit company).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Nice, thanks for the name! Your examples are also spot on.
> The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
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.
Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.
They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.
> 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 user) that's when it gets worse.
In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.
The problem with social networks is that they decide to earn more money from advertisers by selling the users. I don't know how a company can say "I'll only ever want a specific kind of customer", but at least saying "I'll never want to sell" is a step in that direction.
> 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...
FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.
The CEO of Ecosia makes less than EUR 100k per year.
At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.
I don't see a problem with a non-profit CEO (or any employee) taking a large salary. Even if they do, the non-profit structure still removes large shareholders, who are not employees and can have an outsized influence without a commitment to the project or an understanding of its workings.
A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.
Depending on where in the world you are, paying yourself a high wage results in much higher taxes than paying profits in the form of dividends. These taxes may benefit society at large, which may well be in line with their goals.
Oh but you can pay expenses to a "consulting company" that your wife/brother/daughter/... owns which will keep their profits and pay off dividents
Yes, you can, but that's not legal.
If you want to compare the merits of two systems, you have to do it on legal grounds. If you allow cheating, then nothing is comparable, everything is possible, no system is better.
There is also legal cheating that only works if there is enough money involved. For example, for German companies, a holding company in Malta with low corporate taxes - but it happens not to make sense for typical freelancers.
Or the Irish shenanigans of US tech companies.
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.
Yes avoiding another Mozilla situation should be a high priority for anyone interested in this area in future.
>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.
there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.
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 because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.
You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.
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.
This is a distinction unworthy of merit. The slave labor creates the profit. The only reason it exists is because of the profit.
On the contrary, it will be an incentive to stop.
In other words, profits are bad when they necessitate some threshold of negative externalities.
Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.
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. This is why anticompetitive business practices are so successful at generating profits, and at the same time are so horribly bad for the free market. In an efficient market, profits converge towards zero.
"economic profit" is a different concept. non-profits, the topic of this discussion, are defined as not allowed to make "accounting profit"
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.
In the narrow sense it’s good. It’s an optimization function, yes. With a wider lens it leads to problems that are just lumped into the big pile of things called Externalities. One of which is ecological collapse. Or just climate change if that sounds too drastic.
Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.
So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).
That's certainly a fair point, but currently even the (non-)possibility of shareholder ownership and for-profit takeovers seems to be on shaky ground with what OpenAI is trying.
I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.
Both of these conditions are true for Ecosia. They have bylaws that prevent excessive salaries.
In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.
Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.
I don't have any special information here, but I wanted to mention that's it's just as exhausting when people approach every single interaction assuming the worst possible intentions as the reverse. It's OK to not be cynical once in a while.
You're right. I don't necessarily assume the worst from them and I don't assume the worst in general, but it's difficult to switch off from the fact that this article is marketing, and it's marketing for a company that the author makes money from.
Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.
Yeah seriously.
"Oh no the entire company has wages - let's assume it's exploitation"
Is basic divisive language that just perpetuates the "world is bad and there is no lesser evil" bs that drives current news fatigue imo.
People are sure that 1 < 100000 but Google Vs ecosia is somehow more muddy.
“They’re trying to do better, which means they’re claiming to be perfect, but I am wise enough to know nobody’s perfect, so they’re a bunch of liars who are no better than all those other liars”
It does get fatiguing.
That's a lot of projection in a forum where you're supposed to assume the best of people you talk with. I never presented that false dichotomy.
Apologies if it seemed personal. I was observing a far too common pattern here, where, as you say, charitable interpretations are encouraged.
I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well.
But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?
I honestly have no idea
In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.
That is a good estimate.
You can see US non profit compensation online - https://datarepublican.com/nonprofit/assets/
Many of the presidents/vps make in that exact range (~$200 - $300k), although there are other like:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...
Feeding America, which pays their CEO a tad under $1m.
So your argument is that people who do good things must be poor or else they actually aren't good people?
I'd say they mustn't be filthy rich. Otherwise "doing good" clearly isn't the main priority.
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.
If only there was this much scepticism around the manifestos of Thiel, Andreesen, Yarvin and the like from within the tech community.
Nah, the guys working to give people options and save trees. THEY must be up to something
Nobody wants to see grift, but we should also normalize non-profit employees and CEOs making a good living.
Even if the CEO makes a million a year, it is a pittance compared to the potential equity value of a tech company.
> [...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us:
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.
(That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any potential future stewards of Ecosia, but I'll prefer a hard legal guarantee over a promise any time, especially when charitable donations are involved.)
"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, but if they did choose to restructure, i'm not aware of a country where the restrictions here would be enforced on the successor.
On top of this, in most (all?) countries, agreements not to file for bankruptcy are not enforceable ;)
So that's one mechanism.
In most countries, however, these provisions would be "easily" removable through shareholder + officer vote.
Some companies go pretty far down the path of trying to use trusts as shareholders and requirements on trustees and such to try to ensure such a thing never occurs.
You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.
I also had a friend who explored whether you could legally require the place of voting to be like "the surface of the sun" or something that ensures voting can't occur, but unfortunately, you usually can't.
Companies really aren't meant for this kind of thing - not that there is something better, but what tehy are trying to do is pretty fundamentally opposed to how countries want companies to operate.
If it's really a big enough deal, the "correct" answer is to create a new corporate form, much like we created LLC's, etc (LLC's are less than 100 years old, so it's not impossible)
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 always choose a restructuring rather than a windup if possible. You'd probably put that trust somewhere with UK Trust law.
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
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.
> You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.
Doesn't this mean it's quite possible to achieve what they want? Is there a limit on how absurd the statutes can get (at least in your jurisdiction)? Votes have to be held at 3:00AM on Mondays, in person, at the company voting office, which happens to be on top of Mt. Everest?
A corollary to the above is that it’s impossible for a company to gather personal information but not put it up for sale.
This is doubly true for public companies, as we saw with Twitter.
Didn’t Patagonia pretty much achieve this?
Kind of, sort of - they depend on the trustees not going rogue.
As I understand it registering as a Public Benefit Corporation assists with this and creates an explicit obligation for the directors to stick with the stated purpose in the constitution.
According to Wikipedia: "The benefit corporation legislation ensures that a director is required to consider other public benefits in addition to profit, preventing shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation." ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Anyone have experience with Benefit corporations and more specifically what legal remedies are available if a corporation once setup as a benefit corporation fails to adhere to it's enhanced responsibilities. Or its directors for that matter.
OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case?
I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.
Definitely; by "hard legal guarantee" I mean the entire thing, i.e. both a law and it being enforced/upheld. (Conversely, it doesn't even need to necessarily be a law, but I'm afraid a strong social norm is even further out of reach at the moment.)
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?
Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".
But GP raises a good point: Are these two things that benefit from any kind of synergy in terms of skills required by the employees working there, target audience etc.?
If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated as its goal when it's incorporated.)
It seems they kind of do this already. [1] "We send out payments to different partners each month to plant and protect trees in biodiversity hotspots across the globe."
[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
Ecosia themselves does not really plant trees. Instead they pay out money to different projects all around the world.
They are very transparent about it. They list the amounts paid, the partners, the tree species, etc.
They are also fairly efficient from what you can tell by their reports.
Their youtube channel covers what their partner orgs do in depth. It's a pretty cool channel if you ever wanna watch local organizations around the world trying to safeguard their natural communities
I didn't assume so, but they still do two things: Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it (in this case, planting trees).
As somewhat of a sympathizer of effective altruism (the idea of efficiency being an important factor in charities, not necessarily the implementation and even less the community), this isn't super appealing to me.
> Making money, and picking a purpose of what to do with it
Who doesn't? Why else would one make money other than to do something with it?
If they didn't make money, how would they support the tree-planting?
Via direct, tax-deductible monetary donations.
This just seems like a donation with complicated extra steps, in the same way that e.g. "rounding up to charity" or even "round up savings" do not appeal to me at all.
That might well be an idiosyncratic preference, and to some the idea of "planting trees via running web searches" might appeal much more than a nonprofit search engine that donates to a basket of charities, or one that directly pays the user for showing them ads and lets them decide what to do with the money and then the user donating the proceeds themselves.
Do they disclose what percentage of their revenue is donated?
If it's just a token amount, then I'd rather not support a marketing gimmick and would prefer to just donate directly to an organization focused on trees. If it's a significant amount, then it seems unlikely that they'll be able to compete with for-profit alternatives that can focus on developing the best product.
You can explore the amount paid out to projects by month, region and partner projects in those regions here: https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
I really struggle to understand your confusion. How do you think normal companies work?
Ecosia is profitable, they take some percentage of that profit and use to plant trees. In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners. Profit is measured after investments into R&D, salary, marketing everything that come with running a business.
Sure they could "just" spend more on developing their product, but from what I can see they don't really need to, it's already a good product. So rather than stuffing the pockets of an owner or shareholders, they donate that profit, or parts of it, to organisations that plants trees. Most people wouldn't donate to a tree planting organisation, but they will switch their search engine, if it's good enough and even if that plant only 100 trees, that's better than no trees.
I worked for a company that spends it's profit on helping sick children. The owners make enough money. They donate over €1.000.000 per year to a foundation, rather than putting that money into the pocket of the owners. The customers might not even know that they support that foundation, but that also doesn't matter as long as they get the products they want and the price they want. Your suggestion is that the owners should pocket that cash, and I should go donate to that foundation directly?
> In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners.
Only if the company returns money to its shareholders (ex: pays a dividend or does a stock buyback). Many growth-focused companies don't do this -- Amazon didn't do it for its first 22y, Google for its first 17, Netflix for 24, etc.
Ecosia isn't an stock based company (AG), it's a GmbH.
A gmbh is basically equivalent to a LLC (US) or a Ltd (UK) from my understanding. A gmbh can still be stock based.
But are you donating to an organization to plant trees?
What has the lower barrier of entry: making a point to donate your money, or switching your default search engine?
Definitely switching default search engines.
Yup, their financial reports are completely public and transparent. As a non-profit you could also access that data through other means
https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
So by your definition it should not exist, but it does and they donate non negligible amounts.
So where is your fault?
You can donate to an organisation and use their search engine.
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.
ad revenue goes to planting trees. What's confusing?
They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!
yea, I could't figure out what's the idea either.
Same, they really need a better landing page.
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?
In my case it's Kagi and Fastmail. Fastmail primarily because I don't want to support Google and Kagi because it's genuinely better than the alternatives.
Same here. Both products are actually better than the ad-supported versions. Fastmail masked-addresses are great.
Kagi and Soverin for me. I bailed from GMail after the AMP-in-mail proposal,[1] and EU hosting was a bonus; ended up blogging about my choice back in 2018.[2] If there was a good EU equivalent to Kagi I’d be definitely interested.
[1] https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmai...
[2] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
Not the GP, but I pay for Fastmail because it's just so much better than Gmail, and I pay for Kagi sometimes because it's generally better than Google.
How is Fastmaol? Is it inconvenient to not use Gmail?
I never found gmail particularly convenient. I still have a google account with an @gmail.com address, because Android basically doesn't work without that (you can make a personal @whatever else address, but that doesn't work with Android; you can also make a workspace @whatever else address, but that requires payment or time travel, and doesn't address the core issue).
The only inconvenient thing is people know how to spell gmail.com and have to be told how to spell my personal domain, but my preference is to use my personal domain anyway, I've been using my personal domain for email since before gmail launched; if I used gmail, I'd be forwarding my mail to it, rather than using my gmail address. Fastmail for mail just works, and I don't remember if I had to turn conversations off, but I only had to turn it off once (I detest the conversations feature, but if you like it, I can't tell you if Fastmail has a good one or not :P). Actually, the second inconvenient thing is the Android app doesn't really do offline content; I think gmail is better at that; I griped about this for a long time, but now I just accept it --- offline content is a good match for email, but it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it.
I do use my gmail address for something things where I feel it's a good thing to "present as a normal person", or where my email domain might be embarrassing (I have some other email domains, but one of them is a .is, which is even worse for getting people to spell). I used to use my yahoo address for that, but I got tired of logging into yahoo just for that, and google has successfully tied me into their account system.
I do not use the Fastmail calendar. Android calendar is convenient, and tied to google calendaring.
No, the only difference I noticed was that it was faster. I still use Maps and have my Google account, but I don't use Gmail (or Google calendar). I made the transition years ago and it was really painless for me.
Transitioning from Gmail was painless? What approach did you take? I think I would have hundreds, if not thousands of services I would need to change email on.
Oh, sorry, I have my own domain so I just changed my DNS, imported my messages to Fastmail and that was it.
I did it little by little, no need to rush it. Just start changing some main ones and as you log in to the others take the min it takes to change it.
On top of that I moved services to their own custom email like <service-name>@<my-domain>.com. That way it's all neatly sorted inside Fastmail in different folders (and I know who is selling my data)
My approach has been simply signing up for new services on my non-Gmail addresses, and occasionally switching important ones over. Nobody's making you delete your Gmail account, so you can still keep it open for legacy stuff as long as you need to (especially since it's free).
Not parent, but: The primary inconvenience I see with de-googling is just the sheer number of things that become just slightly harder. For one, Login with Google. Now, I know people de-googling will probably want to have separate accounts rather than SSO anyways, but it is an important consideration. You also lose GDrive and the GSuite in general, which alternatives exist, yes, but IMO not as good. Also, most people who work online on GDocs will now find it inconvenient to collaborate with you.
All great points. I try to de-google mostly from a personal perspective (though still haven't gotten off Maps or Android). I use loads of Google products at work though because I'm not the decision maker there.
I do use personal Google Workspace now--in part, because I used to use it extensively at work. But even if I used something else, people casually share GDocs with me from time to time.
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.
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.
Fastmail and Kagi. And I'm very happy with both.
I pay for Tuta (tuta.com) for email.
The only paid search engine I know is Kagi (kagi.com)
I pay for purelymail after seeing others on HN say they like it. It costs something absurd,like $0.8 per month, and I've never had a problem with it.
I wish more people would self-host email. Email getting centralised to a handful of providers is no good for anyone.
I stopped self hosting when my host got blacklisted and I lost about a year of emails with my grandmother… I just thought she was reading them but not having the energy to respond but when I visited at Christmas I saw that all my emails were in her spam box.
The unfortunate thing is that more than any other service, email feels like the one on which I cannot risk to compromise reliability. This sort of story (thank you for sharing) unfortunately fits with my own experience managing my University's undergraduate society's local email server. Non-stop headaches and complete indifference from every group which affects your setup.
I don't even routinely use my undergrad's email forwarding address. It's probably better than it used to be but, at one time, it definitely caused more stuff to drop in the bit bucket than emailing directly. And I assume, at this point, that my Gmail account isn't going to go away.
Same here about not wanting to compromise on email reliability. I self host most things, run Linux, DDG, custom rom without Google Play, etc etc.
But I've still got my @outlook.com email address.
Fastmail and Kagi. The former is amazing – Gmail UX and speed is atrocious in comparison, and the latter is amazing to find reliable, to-the-point results.
Kagi and Proton here
Not OP, but just checking in as a another happy Kagi + Fastmail user here!
Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
It sounds like a gGmbH, but the Imprint (https://www.ecosia.org/imprint) still says Ecosia GmbH (-> For-Profit).
I looked up the bylaws just now (mostly because I'm procrastinating). It looks like they have a gGmbH that owns 99% of the shares (by number of shares), but founders retain 99% of the voting rights. Founders' shares are barred from receiving dividends, and the gGmbH has veto rights in relation to any certain changes that would fundmentally alter this ownership structure.
Something I don't really understand, maybe you have thoughts: is there a benefit to gGmbH over the company being a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Stiftung?
They have a brief paragraph here [1] that indicates they considered these and decided against it: "The team considered several alternative ownership solutions to address these questions, including converting the business to a German non-profit and establishing a foundation. Both of these solutions had constraints, though, and neither offered the mixture of entrepreneurial flexibility and structure security they sought."
Stiftung (Foundation) generally work well if you have a bunch of money and you basically have a fixed "algorithm" that you want to execute around the money like: "Invest it all into an index fund, and in any year in which the fund returns a profit, pay out the profits to the family members of person X in the same ratios that would apply if those people came into X's inheritance". You then appoint a bunch of lawyers to serve as the board of the foundation. Because the "algorithm" is so precisely defined, the set of circumstances where the lawyers do their job wrong will be well-defined, and will constitute a breach in their fiduciary duty. There's basically no room for making entrepreneurial decisions along the way. It's a bit like taking a pile of money, putting it on a ship, putting the ship on autopilot, and giving up any and all direct control of the ship. Depending on what precisely that "algorithm" actually is, this might get you tax advantages. Or it might create non-financial positive outcomes you might be trying to achieve like making sure that your progeny will continue to enjoy the wealth you created for many generations to come while limiting the probability that any one generation can screw it all up for the later generations.
Social entrepreneurship is different from that: A social entrepreneur wants the goodwill and favourable tax treatment that comes from giving up their claim to ownership of the money generated by the business (this is what the gGmbH status does; it's a bit like 501(c)3 in the U.S.) -- But they want to retain control over the business. They want to make entrepreneurial decisions as they go, changing strategies along the way in whatever way they please, without restricting themselves too much to the execution of any predefined programme.
[1] https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ecosia/
For context, I live in Germany and am familiar with the landscape here. Also, I would not equate a 501(c)3 to a gGmbH; gGmbH is more like a B Corp (at least in some of the states that allow it; corporate law differs from state to state in the US). A gemeinnützige Stiftung (Foundation for public purpose) is much closer to a 501c3 than a gGmbH, and a Familienstiftung (Family foundation) is closer to a family trust. (At least for tax purposes, which is the territory I'm most familiar with in this comparison).
But that's not what I'm asking about. Unlike in the US, Stiftungs in Germany (both family and public-purpose) can own an unrestricted percentage of shares -- including all of them -- in normal companies (Kapitalgesellschaften). And I'm specifically interested *not* in restructuring a GmbH as a Stiftung, which is what Ecosia decided against, but rather, I'm wondering if there are any resources available discussing pros and cons of forming a Stiftung as a holding entity, fully owning a GmbH subsidiary (such a construct is not legally possible in the US).
From my perspective, this holding structure would provide much better legal insulation (in both directions) from the founders, preserve the operational flexibility of the (operational) GmbH, while allowing distributions from the GmbH (which would, by definition of being a 100% stakeholder, flow exclusively into the Stiftung) to be distributed by the (purely administrative) Stiftung, according to the founding documents. But I've never seen such an arrangement discussed in depth, which is why I'm asking about it.
Okay, well it sounds like you're deeper in the rabbit hole than I am, then. (I also live in Germany and have a passing interest for the law, though I'm no lawyer).
Regarding your last paragraph, where you say that a foundation provides better insulation from founder control, it sounds to me like you answered your own question: Retention of control vs. insulation from control is precisely the distinction here.
Foundations are typically for people who don't have the option of retaining control, even if they wanted to, because they are typically close to death and in the process of structuring an inheritance. Handing over control to person X is something they see as a threat, because they assume that X will screw it up, so they'd rather make it so that no one can have control.
With social entrepreneurship like Ecosia, founders are typically still young and somewhat idealistic. They want to retain the control, because them being in control is not something they see as a threat. Rather that's what they see as the best possible mechanism for their company/cause retaining its idealistic values. (Also, they are looking for something meaningful to do with their lives).
A cynic might notice that you're kind of looking at regular narcissism vs. communal narcissism here.
If you wanted to structure your social entrepreneurship type business as a foundation which owns 100% of the shares in "your" for-profit corporation, that doesn't work as a "have your cake and eat it too" solution, because either that means that the trustees of the foundation are actually your boss and you're just a replaceable employee with replaceable employee wages or, if you try to pull any shenanigans to make it so that this is not the case, the trust loses its tax-free / "community interest" status. Trying to game this system is something that rich people are routinely trying to do. I'm not saying that some don't get away with it, but the authorities generally have a lot of tools at their disposal to fight this sort of thing.
Control is maybe the wrong word here. GmbHs are required to have one or more natural persons as a Geschäftsführer, which would presumably just stay the founders, so they would retain control of the GmbH. The holding Stiftung would then impose the rules under which the GmbH would issue dividends, and (presumably) also retain the ability to fire the Geschäftsführer:innen, if the Satzung der Stiftung decided to. And of course the founders could also put themselves on the board of the Stiftung for added control. Interesting side note, this would probably result in the founders being Sozialversicherungspflichtig, but that's a whole different can of worms. But the founding documents of the Stiftung could perfectly well spell out exactly the situations under which the founders could be removed as Geschäftsführer der GmbH.
What I mean by legal insulation is more that, in this holding construct, the GmbH ceases to have any financial relationship to the founders. Stiftungs are sort of... headless financial pools governed strictly by their founding documents, completely divorced from the people that created them, and the GmbH would simply be an asset in that financial pool. That means that, for example, were someone to sue the founders, even for something completely unrelated, there is no possible way that shares in the GmbH could possibly end up someone else's hands. Typically when we talk about the liability limitations in corporations, we're talking about them in terms of shielding the founders from the actions of the company, but the inverse is in my opinion just as important (if you're truly interested in forming a self-governing social organization pursuing a social good). I'm not sure if there's any examples of shares in a gGmbH being assessed as assets in a civil case; that would be another interesting question to inform the decision.
That being said, one of the reasons that I'm so interested in the idea of a Stiftung holding, is that I think it also opens up options for actual democracy within the leadership of a company, which is a fascinating idea. That isn't a requirement in a Stiftung holding relationship, but I do think it's an interesting possibility.
At any rate, I think probably the primary downside of this idea is that, like I said, I've not seen any examples of it discussed publicly. Which means you'd need to be doing a lot of the legal legwork on your own -- which means lots of time spent talking to lawyers, which would be really expensive. But I think there's some really interesting possibility for innovation in terms of corporate governance here, in a way that, like I said, wouldn't be legally possible in the US, and it definitely seems like the structure that gives the social purpose the maximum possible protection.
I 100% agree with you that a Stiftung like that (possibly with a for-profit company as a subsidiary) would be the right structure if you wanted to maximize credibility around your community-interest status.
This stuff actually gets a lot of attention from lawmakers: For example, in the U.K. you have the “CIC” (community interest company). Some 13 years ago, David Cameron tried pretty hard to motivate enthusiasm for the idea of a “third sector”, something that's not government and not for-profit. In the U.S. you also have the “L3C” (low-profit limited liability company). In Germany, you have the idea of “Verantwortungseigentum” which was on the agenda for the previous government, though they then didn't get around to it, and you had Sahra Wagenknecht making it into a big talking point for her campaign.
But I don't think a lack of legal infrastructure is really the limiting factor here: As you noticed, we do have foundations (Stiftung) of various types, as well as coops (Genossenschaft). In addition, regular partnerships (like KG, OG) have recently been opened up so that their bylaws can now prescribe a purpose that isn't for-profit. A club (Verein) which in and of itself isn't for-profit, can have a sort of dual identity because it can become the proprietor of a sole proprietorship with a for-profit purpose (at least I seem to recall reading that such a thing is possible). Oh, and, of course, a corporation can, in theory, own 100% of its own shares. I recall reading about that, just please don't ask me where. You can basically wipe out ownership that way, without being subject to the stringent rules around foundations.
So, legal structures are as powerful and flexible as they are underutilised: I think it's the psychological side that explains why.
Usually, even if you have very good intentions, your best bet initially is to start your entity as a for-profit. Being able to operate cheaply and without cumbersome decision-making structures beats lofty aspirations for any business that just gets started. Not turning a profit in a given year (and not paying taxes because you don't turn a profit), is an option you always have. (There's no special paperwork needed for that). In fact: Not having any profit to worry about when it comes to your structure is the likely outcome. Having a profit and trying to decide how to make it so that your profits won't corrupt you in your idealism is a problem you would quite like to have! (Again: From the perspective of a founder who is just getting started).
Then, the day comes where you turn a profit quite regularly. And, at that point, once the flywheel has got going, truly giving up control will be psychologically difficult.
Very much agree in terms of the best strategy being simply to start a plain-jane Kapitalgesellschaft, probably either UG or GmbH, and go from there.
It is indeed possible to have a so-called "kein-Mann GmbH" where the company has bought back all of its shares, though my understanding is that it's a bit of a legal grey area, and certainly not settled law.
I agree that the legal infrastructure is almost certainly there, at least in the sense that there are absolutely plenty of lawyers and lawmakers that specialize in this area. My point is simply that, because it's so much less common, basically every situation ends up being unique, which means that the work that the lawyers are doing is almost always a one-off, which makes it really expensive. And so it's just not worth the effort.
https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?
Thanks for the pointer!
Ecosia also recently announced a partnership with Qwant to build their own search engine index! This is great for the open web and I'm very excited to see where Ecosia goes next
Unless you bound compensation, a proclamation of "non-profit" rings hollow.
Does anyone use Ecosia every day? How does it compare with DuckDuckGo and Qwant?
They just use Bing and Google Search https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...
I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).
Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.
It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.
Yes, I haven't used Qwant though. I'd say it's pretty equal to DuckDuckGo, maybe a little better after they started mixing in Google results. Generally speaking I do think that the Bing powered search engines does much better than Google, but Ecosia had a few specific searches where it's would fail me, that's gone now.
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.
I just checked Ecosia, seems to be less censored at a very quick glance, at least in comparison to DDG and Google.
Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but...
Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
Yeah, I've got similar worries since there has been plenty of greenwashing that has happened with planting trees. I'd be sad but also not surprised if some of those trees being planted are sitka spruce wood plantations or so.
This is my main problem with Ecosia as well. I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.
It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).
Since we are all doing it: I'd rather they support nuclear energy.
Rather than make promises of dubious enforceability, why not just share the index as a public resource.
The index: https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
What index? Their results are sourced from Google and Bing
https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
Given how bad Google search has gotten recently, I'd give this a try even without the trees. If they can provide a decent search experience _and_ reduce CO2, even better.
I have and still use Ecosia Daily.
Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines.
Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.
Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.
Ad revenue is then used to plant trees
you cant complain about that
apparently you can - see this thread.
We have legal structures with which to make statements like this about nonprofit status, structures which bind the promise so that we don't have to take your word on it.
They've used those, this is a blog post for humans who care more about the intent from the ceo rather than the specific legal frameworks.
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.
According to Wikipedia, ecosia launched in 2009 and this is from 2018, so they must have already had traction by then.
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 think there is a lot of truth in this, but presented in a way that misses some nuance.
It's true that if your goal is to regenerate native forest, which it generally[+] should be where that's an option, then it's indeed true that you want to allow existing forest to regenerate as naturally as possible. The problem in these cases is either land use (land is used for forestry / agriculture / etc. so there's nowhere for new trees to grow) or over-grazing (either by livestock such as sheep or by high populations of wild herbivores such as deer). In those cases you need to solve the underlying problems rather than just counting the number of saplings in the ground (in a heavily browsed area planting may have the advantage that you tend to put in tree guards. Ideally one could instead install appropriate fencing around the entire area to reduce herbivore numbers below the problematic levels).
However you aren't always in that scenario. For example if you're in a landscape with few seed sources then natural regeneration might take an implausibly long time. An extreme example of that would be "regreen the desert" type projects where you need to bootstrap the conditions for tree growth by putting in a lot of trees in a short space of time, although those have a high failure rate. You might also be worried that natural regeneration is too slow in the face of changing climatic conditions, and want to plant trees right for the anticipated climate 100 years hence (although that itself is likely to be controversial).
And of course frequently in the real world tree-planting projects have goals totally unrelated to climate change e.g. just forestry, and as such one shouldn't expect those things to be especially good for the climate, or at all good for biodiversity.
Anyway, I like the idea of companies dedicating part of their revenue to tackling severe global problems like climate change. But I tend to agree that Ecosia's continued focus on tree planting as their headline activity makes them look a bit naive to the audience that is likely to be most receptive to changing products specifically for environmental reasons. Hopefully some of the other project types they're moving into look better in the details than just tree planting.
[+] But not always of course. Converting peat bog to woodland, for example, is going to reduce its effectiveness as a carbon store, and likely reduce biodiversity as well.
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.
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.
But what if there was a way to make a profit planting trees? Wouldn’t this accelerate the rate of trees?
> Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company.
It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
The model they use is relatively well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership
My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.
You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.
Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.
No, that alone does not make it a worker-owned coop.
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AI has gotten cheaper and it will be even more in the future. This will eventually break even, comparing the cost of conventional web search vs AI on some cases. It is not the same as bitcoin where it requires more energy to get less value
... because AI Chats are consuming more energy than search? This is a flawed argument. Internet search also started out using more energy than looking up things in your local library, so maybe we should go back to that?
There is no way around increased AI usage. Would be great if Ecosia plays a key part in its adaption to balance it with environmental goals.