Just to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild!
I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.
Suraurwanda, meaning “visit Rwanda” in honor of the growing tourism sector in Rwanda, was born into Mafunzo’s group on Nov. 30, 2018. His mother is Taraja, and because Mafunzo is the only adult male of the group, we do not need genetic testing to prove he is the father.
Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.
The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")
Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?
That's like saying that if my lamp uses 3W when I'm at my desk, surely it'll use 6W when I call someone over.
Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)
Fwiw the PoS network is already running, with $6 billion staked and 100,000 validators. Migrating the rest of the network is relatively simple, they're just being really careful with it.
Energy usage is a recognised issue and while it offers challenges they are understood and developers are keen to address this. If you want to start deconstruction of the industrial military complex that would be just fine and might really start to change things, until then I argue there are more worthy targets for your ire than the energy use of an emerging technology.
This is like saying that pollution is a recognized issue with fossil fuels and while it offers challenges they are understood and engineers are keen to address this.
There aren't always easy solutions and you can't hand wave aside a massive problem because 'our best people are on it'
If fossil fuels producers had had the same level of awareness of environmental issues when that industry began we might not have the issues we have now, I think it's a poor comparison, my comment was acknowledging the issue and positing that an iteration of the technology could mitigate the problem.
Humans - that is problem number one. Like agent smith said in the Matrix. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet.." - Advocating for this cure will solve all the problems..
The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?
Exactly that. We destroy our tourist destinations, beaches, food sources, areas where to live, landscapes for desktop backgrounds, the air and the water. Lost in useless economic abstractions.
I don't think that cryptocurrency energy consumption is as big a problem as it's been recently painted in the media. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.
Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison. Using VISA requires a working settlement layer (because VISA transactions are reversable), banks, bank employees, bank buildings, international transfer support, international settlement layer, people handling those settlements, regulation, regulation enforcement etc. If you include all that then the energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't look all that bad.
So is the global population of the banking industry comparable to 41 M ?
UK employees: 1.1M
US Employees: 8.3M
So I went round a few houses and there is a lack of solid stats. But I think I can go with a decent indicator.
The USA has about 7.5 % of GDP (1.5tn) in Finance Services, and 6.3M employees (2018). Now translate that up to the global GDP of 87TRN, and say the global finance sector is as large globally as in USA (generous assumption) and that give 7.5 % of 87TRN - 6.5TRN. At 4.2M employees per Trillion that gives us 27 M global employees.
Now there can be lots of hand waving, but if bitcoin uses same amount of electricity as Argentina, and Argentina has
around 1.5 many people as the global finance sector, then bitcoins electrical use does seem very excessive.
I didn't do the math on this one, but it seems to me that the whole financial system (and all that's needed to ensure it's reliability and security) uses a bit more energy than Ukraine or Argentina.
And mining Bitcoin requires chip makers (including rare earth materials), the tech industry and the whole internet. If you include side channels in visa, you'll need to do the same for Bitcoin.
Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.
What sort of calculation is that? Let's for a moment disregard the fact that banks do much more than just transactions, let's also ignore that there is more then the transaction energy in bitcoin (there are also people working for the miners, producing the hardware etc). Just the comparison between the number of transactions of the banking system (including credit cards) to the number of bitcoin transactions should tell you how different the scales are. There were around daily 400k bitcoin transactions. There were 100 Million credit card transactions per day in the US alone. That would mean if we were to transition to use crypto currencies as our main financial system we'd use more than all the energy we produce worldwide just for bitcoin. So bitcoin looks even worse after doing a bit more of a comparison.
> Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.
...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).
Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.
A token that needed a regular transfer of funds to retain ownership would be really quite neat.
A contract that showed I am the adoptee of Harry the gorilla, and provides a regular income for the charity. If I can’t keep up the payment I sell the token.
Fail to pay or sell the token and it reverts to the charity issuer.
Well you can put the tweet up for sale or auction on eBay. Just like with NFTs, you wouldn’t actually be transferring the underlying asset, nor would the tweet actually be hosted within eBay (or an NFT chain) for some kind of archival purpose, nothing stops you from selling it again on Amazon or Craigslist or any other marketplace (or another NFT). If Amazon, EBay, or the company behind the NFT decides to close up shop, that’s it for your listing. Heck, just as with NFTs, you could put tweets you don’t even own in your listings, since you’re really just selling the listing with some media linked in it rather than transferring the media or the rights to it.
The problem of course is the word crypto doesn’t appear in any of the traditional platforms, so no hype/demand exists for your tweets there. Those users have also over time not only been trained to recognize scams, but are provided with a little bit of buyer protection if they end up buying something you couldn’t really sell them in the first place.
You don't need email either, just write a letter or send a fax.
The point is that here is a piece of new technology that's part of a new vision for the future. Maybe you think it's an unrealistic vision, but that's no reason to sneer at people who disagree with you.
Email is easier and provides more features than a letter or fax in most cases. (With both still having some use in specific cases like personal messages or gov regulated messaging) NFT is harder and doesn't seem to provide any features over current donations. (It's actually worse due to unstable exchange rates and large fees)
Unless the vision provides benefits we did not have before I will continue to sneer at "the same thing but on blockchain" ideas.
There's streaming (https://sablier.finance/), I'm sure this could be used. Although I'm not sure how it would be used in the NFT aspect. Maybe they could be used for gaming mechanism. "Upgrade your gorilla to a larger environment!" "Unlock a new toy!"
You can just delegate Cardano's ada and give those as Charity. Or check Wozx which is trying to bring efficient energy to industries so while helping animals you help save climate as well.
You can create NFTs which programmatically collect royalties on each sale [0]. This royalty could be used for continued conservation efforts. I don't know much about programming smart contracts but I think one could be programmed such that if it isn't transferred within a certain period of time it could be burned the next time the user tries to transfer it.
You "just" need to tie each NFT to a specific gorilla and raise enough to find someone willing to sell an annuity tied to the expected lifespan of said gorilla.
Or just raise enough for the average investment returns from the one-off sales to fund the charity.
But the person who the money/etherium is sent to could be the charity, no? As in, people donate their digital art or whatever to a charity and the charity auctions off the NFTs to raise money.
That’s the way real life charity fundraisers sometimes work: you donate a physical object and they sell it to raise money. The benefit over you selling at and donating the money is that you don’t have to deal with selling it. The usage of NFTs here would be to take advantage of the mass hysteria(?) surrounding them to drum up the price.
An NFT could work like that, though. There's nothing stopping someone from writing an NFT smart contract that directs a percentage (of any size, including 100%) of future sales to the initial cause.
The NFT standard itself is quite basic, nearly every NFT people talk about are controlled by smart contracts that expand on the standard.
A bizarre scenario would be a digital photo (NFT of sort) of the rare animal becomes extremely high value, and end up causing the animal to be extinct.
To be macabre, genetic sequencing an animal and then eradicating the species would increase the data value. Thankfully, posting an open sequence on the net would remove the rationale for the horrible part of that sentence.
'Virtual Trophy Hunt', the Big 5, surely owning a Lion gives you serious flex these days? Not much more genuinely limited edition than an Iberian Lynx.
That's along the lines I was thinking, then they could be freely traded by collectors with some kind of profit share going back to those in a position to help.
When a momma gorilla and a papa gorilla love each other very much... (and significant resources are dedicated to keeping them safe, content and ready to procreate, which is what I'm assuming Reddit has achieved.)
Okay, I laughed at this, but unfortunately gorilla mating is quite a bit more brutal than this, more like an aspiring young alpha discovers the last alpha has grown old and weak, murders him, then murders all of the children as well, enslaves the gorilla women, and periodically rapes them. All he really offers in return is he'll keep other up and comers from murdering their new babies until he also grows too old and weak.
Eh, female/male sexual relations amongst gorillas aren't as fantastically patriarchal as this, female Gorillas solicit males for sexual coitus themselves, including males other than the silverback, even after conception, and have even displayed homosexual tendencies[0][1][2][3], and they have preferences that have been genetically impressed on Gorilla males, which is why Gorilla males, unlike Chimp males, are not only amenable to interacting and playing with their own offspring but also those of others[4]. Their sexual lives aren't solely at the privy of the dominant male, waiting around for his urges passively, that's something of a fantasy. The dominant male is rarely the sire of all offspring in a troop, the has proven genetically.
Officially this is an estimate, but having been where these animals live, I believe we can have an exact count. Keep in mind that when we say “globally” this means a tiny region straddling the border between Rwanda, Uganda and Congo.
We are talking about a few families of gorillas, some of which are tracked daily. There is a massive conservation effort on these animals, at least in Rwanda and Uganda, they all have names and I don’t think a gorilla is born without someone knowing about it
If there are really 1063 I would think conservationists could know about almost every one individually. That's smaller than the high school I went to. I know they are spread out over a wide area in a dense jungle but I think it would be possible.
The title is confusing, perhaps worth changing "Reddit investors" to "Wall Street Bets users" or something similar. I genuinely thought the article would talk about owners of Reddit, not it's users.
"adoption" is the terminology used by the foundation, and symbolic adoption is a known quantity in this type of operation so I don't have a problem with it.
However referring to wallstreet bets users as "investors" does seem like a bit of a misnomer...
And more seriously, people actually do adopt animals and bring them home or to some enclosure. There are supposedly more tigers in captivity in Texas than in the wild.
So my guess was not that crazy. Especially considering that it would be a much more captivating if less noble story than "redditors raised money for gorillas."
I kind of agree with parent. While I don’t have a problem with symbolic use of adoption, I do have a problem with “multiple adoption”.
When I think of a donor “adopting” a case, I have a model of “this donation sufficed for lifetime care of that case”. If one donation isn’t sufficient, then maybe a group of donations would collectively be the adoption.
You shouldn’t have a scenario where there are more adoptions than cases (gorillas in this one). I mean imagine if a foster agency said they processed five adoptions but had only two children.
I guess in my mind, the point of the adoption is that the "adopter" has a point of personal connection with the funding they are providing, and they can hang a picture on the wall to remind themselves why they are supporting this cause.
Given that almost none of these "adopters" will ever see the gorilla in question in real life, it seems unreasonably jealous to insist that this organization should forgo funding so that they and they alone can have a financial relationship with this particular gorilla.
>Given that almost none of these "adopters" will ever see the gorilla in question in real life, it seems unreasonably jealous to insist that this organization should forgo funding so that they and they alone can have a financial relationship with this particular gorilla.
I never suggested or hinted at that, just that it was misleading to call it adoption, if they're not granted a kind of "owning" of that relationship, in the sense of that donor is "the" supporter of that gorilla [pair]. If they want to call it "supporting", I wouldn't consider that misleading.
My only issue is that "Reddit investors" means people that invest on Reddit, while the article is about people that speculate with stocks (kinda ok to call them investors) and use Reddit.
>also they don't adopt them, they fund their caretaking. this title is pretty poor.
We don't have to be mega pedantic about words not being used for its literal meaning. The Dian Fossey Fund uses the word "adopt" in a symbolic way like many other charities do:
It's not being pedantic, but accurate. It took me a confusing 30 seconds to understand that the gorrilas won't be coming home with the owners of Reddit.
Ok, if we're getting pedantic about it, adopting as a synonym for supporting is a misnomer or more specifically an attempt to conceal the conflict of wanting to support something, but being unwilling to become intimately involved with it. It takes away from the genuine act of adoption. So I'll stand behind not using the term.
using the phrase "adopt" to mean "funding the ongoing care of" is pretty common parlance, at least in US-based charities. You can, for example, adopt a highway:
Generic question: I see a lot of news articles stating that WSB has "10 million members". Does being a 'member' go beyond clicking the 'join' button on that subreddit? If so it's more like a 'follow this channel', isn't it?
It is striking how just about any subreddit is several orders of magnitude larger than their average engagement. It's seemingly no matter the size and affects huge and tiny subeditors. I guess there really are that many bot accounts on reddit.
Many people (including myself) will just not post. If you want to see what’s going on with a subreddit in your feed, you have to subscribe/join it. You can manually visit all your favorite subreddits but that can be very tedious and doesn’t fit the “news feed” type of behavior that people want to use.
No, it's indeed the number of users in that subreddit alone. The daily threads there regularly amass 100k comments. Reddit has grown really quite large.
Worth noting they've also adopted whales, belugas, sloths, falcons, and probably a lot of other animals I didn't notice when scrolling the past few days.
Well, if the evil side can exploit this phenomenon to great success (e.g. drone strikes allowing to kill people halfway across the world, and making it feel like playing a video game from 1990s), why can't the good side? We can despair about the nature of man all we want, but if in the meantime, we can get rich people here to spend a lot of money on helping people far away, that's still a huge net benefit for the world.
There may be a tradeoff between the distance of someone you want to help and effectiveness - how much do you really know about their problems or the solutions you are funding? Have you ever tried to figure out requirements for a project at work that depend on a group of co-workers on another continent in a different culture?
There's also so many faraway causes, how do you prioritize?
The people I know, and the problems that I or they have, are not necessarily the most important in the world. But I have a better chance of doing something appropriate about them, because I'm not limited to vague stereotypes.
Trying to help with something that you know about firsthand also increases the odds that you will be addressing a problem which is common but overlooked by society because there isn't enough money, glamour, or self-actualization involved.
I strongly believe that a personal connection is not just a gimmick for these reasons.
The exact opposite argument can also be made here: they weren't remotely funding some specific measure that they think could solve the problem, which admittedly could be distorted by distance. They are funding an organization whose goal is solving that problem and has experts who are close to the issue. It's basically outsourcing.
Interesting read, and I definitely wasn't trying to say that outsourcing was great. But if you do your due diligence, your chances of actually fixing the issue you care about are much higher if you pick a reputable organisation to donate to, rather than funding actions directly.
Since philanthropy is usually fueled by emotions, you might be tempted to fuel actions to stop trophy hunting of endangered species, but according to many sources (see the wikipedia page and its references), that might actually be detrimental to the conservation efforts. Similarly, you might fund the planting of trees to restore forests, while those cutting existing forests down with no regard for the environment face no opposition (sound familiar?).
There's a lot of harm possible if you outsource to the wrong people, but if you do your due dilligence, a dedicated group of experts will be able to use your money far more effectively than you could.
As for "fixing the issues close to you" - you need to realise, that people who have money to throw around are rarely close to, let alone experts in, any such issues. They might want to help the homeless, for example, but if they just buy up a bunch of apartments and let them live there, they might not be solving much. Someone working with the homeless on a daily basis would know to put money towards rehabilitation, education and finding them employment first (from what I've heard - I, too, am not an expert).
That's a specialized version of the question, is it really evil to kill evil people? But it's also a bit off-topic; the more important one is, are only evil people getting killed by drone strikes executed by people who (claim to) try to kill only evil people? The answer to that is a resounding no. We can debate the specifics of this, but it wasn't my point.
My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one[0], and drone strikes are the usual example - the killer has no personal risk, and the act itself involves operating video game controllers while watching a low-resolution image of distant events. And, for many practical reasons, this has been embraced by the military. Cheaper, less trauma for soldiers, less bad press, less likely the soldier will hesitate or spare the lives of their targets.
And thus I'm asking: if that works so well for killing, and there isn't a big pushback against this[1], then why criticize the case where the similar levels of detachment are making people more likely to do good deeds? If people are more likely to donate to good causes further away than they are to those close to them, then why not be just happy that more people are donating to good causes?
--
[0] - It most likely has a formal name in psychology, but I'm not aware of it.
[1] - There is some pushback, but I don't see it rising to the level actually influencing any decision-making in the US.
Am I missing some context here? This keyphrase gives me some articles about how UNICEF is helping mitigate the problem of arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh. This is good, right? Or are they, or other charitable initiatives, somehow responsible for causing it in the first place?
>My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one
It seems that you are again assuming that drone strikes are evil immoral acts.
Most people view civilian casualties in war as a trolley car problem, (e.g. a necessary evil in an overall moral action)
I don't really care what most people think. If I chose my beliefs based solely on what most people thought, I would be guilty of committing the bandwagon fallacy. So don't hide behind "most people". What do you think about this issue?
My own personal view is this: The Geneva convention forbids the killing and torture of non-combatants. The Geneva convention exists for a reason: without it, war would be more brutal and kill many more innocent people. Sure, it's easier to destroy the enemy if you don't worry too much about civilian casualties. But if both sides reason that way, the advantage to each cancels out, and the net outcome is just more civilian deaths.
It's cheap to say "oh it's a trolley problem" when we're talking about killing some innocent people thousands of miles away in order to take out an enemy general. Imagine if the civilians killed by each drone strike were all Americans. Want to kill that enemy commander? It'll cost you 5 American lives. Same logic from a trolley problem standpoint, but I expect you'd get some very different results on your poll.
Also, it is a created trolley car problem not the trolley car problem. And creating such a situation instead of coming across it is definitely morally evil.
Yes, because these are extrajudicial killings with high death tolls and serious injuries for bystanders.
Suppose China, Russia, or the EU would conduct drone strikes on US soil but only target evil people such as Donald Rumsfeld, who is known to have ordered torture and initiated a war under false pretense. However, many bystanders including women and children would be killed as well. Would you be against it?
For every person that is labelled "evil" by the US, I'm sure there are thousands who would consider them "good". I would hazard to guess that there are more people who considered Osa Bin Laden "good" than consider you "good" and could make a case that you are "evil". Does that means that they have a right to kill you? Or does the US government only get the right to designate people Good or Evil?
I'm not personally against usage of drones in some totally general way, but we should keep in mind why the Bush to Obama shift was made. Aside from the technology simply maturing and growing more viable, we went away from having teams of special operators apprehend terrorism suspects in surgical snatch and grab operations and toward just murdering them with drones for two basic reasons.
One, surgical snatch and grab operations sometimes result in high profile failures where US operators are themselves captured or die in the process, which becomes a huge local media sensation. Two, when you arrest people, you run into the issue of what to do with them. Hence, all of the continuing problems with Guantanamo. Do you give them rights? Transfer them to regular prisons? Release them? Hold an actual trial at some point? We still haven't figured it out, and the easiest answer is just stop arresting people and kill them instead.
I leave it to you to decide which of the two options is more ethical, but the reasons we did it have nothing to do with ethics. And drones are inherently less precise and also kill whoever happens to be nearby a lot more often than Seal Team Six.
When another country or organization turns their drones on us because of our antiquated human rights ideas, inability to form consensus, and extreme ideologies - from their perspective - opinions will get much clearer.
Best way to stop the drone wars at this point are for us to stop now.
I hadn't seen it before, but I suspect it's a prod at wealthy Western philanthropists who spend a lot of money on children in Africa or Asia- meanwhile ignoring the homeless & starving in their own town.
Ugh, those prods reek of Western superiority. If a dollar goes further in an impoverished place I don't see what's wrong with directing it accordingly. Moreover, taxes (in theory) should already be directed to help those locally.
I haven't done too much research and I direct my donations both domestically and abroad.
Reddit has always been a place where you can find spontaneous generosity with a fun twist. Just one example: there was a popular sub many years ago called "randomactsofpizza" where Redditors would send pizza to other Redditors who were hungry or down on their luck.
I don't know why we should assume Redditors are less charitable than people at large when if anything they've demonstrated otherwise.
The subreddit is /r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza and still in operation. /r/RandomActsOfPizza was a copycat started with the explicit purpose of bartering nudes for pizza (forbidden in the original). It was later shut down when it turned out it was run by a scammer.
On the gorilla front, the AR15 subreddit helped the anti-poaching squads with technical advice and parts to help protect gorillas.
It's a good venue for charity and people helping others.
No one who has spent much time with humans should be shocked that the same people are also sardonic assholes at times.
There is still an imgur user doing this regularly.
I think username is pizzaguy
They used to do it on their own, and now they organise pizza nights, where a bunch of users sign up to donate, and those who need pizza sign up to receive.
For people who call themselves "retards" and "apes" with the perchant for doing reckless if not outlandish sh#t - I think it's very much in character and quite apt.
What you are missing is that this allows people who are otherwise unable to help to do so.
Helping animals has always been somewhat more popular than helping people because people have more agency and also tend to suck.
What do you suggest we do for the people struggling in front of us? Also that is a broad brush you are painting a lot of people with. It's likely that many /r/wallstreetbets users donate to other charities. Americans tend to be quite generous.
I don’t have hard facts, but I believe I’ve read that basically the generosity of the American people is largely the same amount as the surplus taxes of Europeans. And in better functioning European countries that money will benefit people much more than animals — so in a way it helps explain the difference in the quality of social nets.
In charity or volunteering, it's similar to the template of "adopt-a-<noun>". Examples such as "Adopt-a-Highway" or "Adopt-a-Child" to sponsor a hungry child in Africa.
You send some money to an org and they look after a gorilla for you. Usually not so directly tho. They just calculate how much their operation costs per gorilla and send you a bill for it.
> What if the real value was paying poachers to not poach?
You wouldn't believe how many animals I haven't poached today. Where's my cheque?
Ultimately, you're describing Coasean bargaining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem). However, in this case there's a real problem of demonstrating commitment (preventing a poacher from betraying the deal) and more critically in induced demand; if I pay you not to poach then your neighbour might decide to enter the now-vacant industry themselves.
For Coasean bargaining to work, you need a very well-defined and well-enforced set of property rights, such that if the "legitimate" poachers refrain then nobody else can take up the slack. Since poaching is illegal to start with, this set of rights does not really exist.
1) demand, mostly from Asia, for body parts of endangered animals. Unfortunately, the customers are willing to pay a lot of money (a single rhino horn for example can fetch 15.000 $!), and don't care if they actively contribute to the extinction of a species.
2) Enormous poverty in the regions where these endangered animals live. The median wage of South Africa is 17.000 $ - so it's no surprise that many turn to poaching.
Basically the West would need to impose drastic sanctions on China and other Asian countries that act as demand for rare animal parts (not made easier by the fact that the West has a shoddy history itself in that regard, e.g. ivory, and so such politics always has legitimacy/neo-colonialism issues), while at the same time directing massive amounts of money towards eliminating the poverty and establishing alternative, legit jobs for former poachers.
Pay to poach the poachers. Or large sums of money to rat out organizations so they need to deal with internal revolt of some poachers throwing everyone else under the bus for their payout.
To be honest, I don't. I was more interested in having intelligent conversation around it. I feel (generally) that when people don't have aligned incentives, there can't be aligned outcomes. To me, that means there's a conversation to be had around how do we get groups with differing priorities to have aligned incentives.
Harambe is definitely a factor. But it's probably primarily related to the somewhat recent, self-deprecating meme of calling themselves "monkes"/apes (implying some acknowledgement that they are less "sophisticated" investors than traditional retail or institutional). I'm kind of glad to see this new meme because the older self-deprecating memes were pretty insensitive and made it easier to paint the crowd as malicious.
Why doesn't hackernews adopt something or do something like this? Software developers are rolling in money, and it's not that expensive. Guess we're too busy eating the world.
I think it’s just because HN isn’t really a community that has many consistent themes/cohesion. It’s very active but only on individual news items rather than across posts.
But I think if the mods could potentially put up a link for donating to something, it’d get decent traffic. I just wouldn’t expect that initiative to arise organically from the user base and get significant traction.
Philanthropy is one of the greatest evils of our time.
Philanthropists steal money from workers via monetary inflation and financial schemes.
Then they give away a tiny portion of it to the world's poorest. In the meantime their financial schemes squeeze everyone in the middle; those who actually produce all of the world's economic value.
In this case, they steal money from working humans and give it to a bunch of gorillas who should have been left alone in the jungle in the first place.
Not surprising that many of these displaced working humans turn to poaching and other illegal activities to make a living. Their salaries are constantly inflating away, they can't save anything on normal salaries. They can't start their own businesses, they can't compete against those who have access to the money printers.
I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.