https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality

So we're tracking (population / avg_group_size + misc_males) objects, as opposed to the entire population.

Example on the other end would be snow leopards (130+ sq km) and grizzlies (380+ sq km), which are mostly solitary and have huge ranges.

At the worst point their numbers dropped to the mid 100s.

The main threat to them is poaching, and local wars.

For further info: https://gorillafund.org/

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.

[0] https://rarible.com/create/erc721

Or just raise enough for the average investment returns from the one-off sales to fund the charity.

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.

The NFT standard itself is quite basic, nearly every NFT people talk about are controlled by smart contracts that expand on the standard.

But yeah, basically it's love.

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.

I wasn't questioning the merits of working in groups.

However, the only way to have done "due diligence" practically speaking is to engage with an organization that operates near you and deals with something that you have experienced or known someone who's experienced.

Meeting the people who work for an organization, volunteering your time to work with them, observing what they do in your community, is how you do due diligence.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-is-selling...

[1]: https://v.cent.co/tweet/20

[2]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

If Jack Dorsey sold the "rights" to the first ever tweet, I'm confident someone would pay at least $1 million for it, even without an NFT involved.

The fact that there's an NFT involved makes it more valuable, because now the buyer can show off in more ways than one. But that's it.

There have always been, and always will be, rich people with more money than sense, who want to demonstrate their great wealth and worldliness by buying silly stuff to show off with.

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.

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?

I would be against that, no doubt about 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?

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.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/05/28/public-conti...

"investors" would be wrong

""investors"" would be fine

How do you quote this type of quote?

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.

Still, I don't know how to improve the headline.

There's so much knee-jerk opposition to "blockchain" stuff just because some nerds get too excited about it (and some people are trying to get rich off it). It makes no sense to me.

If it is moral to minimize the deaths by pulling a lever, shouldn't it also be moral to invent the lever?

Someone can certainly argue that drone strikes are not always an effective way to save lives, but if they are, I don't see an argument that makes them evil.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/05/28/public-conti...

That is how the story goes. Millions of wells were dug via aid that turned out to be contaminated with arsenic then ingested by tens of millions of people. Many of whom suffered over the years thinking they were "cursed".

I don't know how culpable the aid organizations really were, but even if it's just one of those "truthy" things that isn't quite true, it represents what can happen when people are detached from consequences of trying to do good very vividly.

Do you really hold that that it isn't acceptable to kill 1 non-combatant to save a greater number of non-combatants at a future date?

You can change the conditions or description, but it is still a trolly problem.

1. Drone strikes aren't saving lives in an immediately obvious fashion ("these targets were about to launch an attack on us"), but only indirectly, if at all ("these targets may or may not have been planning some sort of attack in the future, which they may or may not have been able to execute; but we're sure they won't be planning or executing anything when they're dead"). The hundred million tracks are meant to show the degree of uncertainty about possible future attack and its casualties. Any given drone strike is unlikely to have saved anyone at all.

2. The people killed by drone strikes are of different nation than the one that does the killing. This is illustrated by the blue/other color split, and red/yellow illustrates enemy combatant/enemy civilian split. That they latter are tied together describes collateral damage.

3. The risk grows over time if the drone strikes continue. This is illustrated by the iteration rules. In the example, as long as the trolley keeps killing redshirts and yellowshirts, the number of blueshirts on the tracks tends to grow over time - and if it goes on long enough, the trolley will eventually follow the main track despite the switch being flipped, and will run over some blueshirts. This illustrates how each drone strike generates more hatred on the other side, creating more potential attackers and increasing motivation for performing an attack. Done long enough, an attack is guaranteed to happen. Conversely, stopping the strikes deescalates the issue, reduces the hatred - as illustrated by the game having a chance to end early if you don't flip the switch.

3a. The exact point I'm trying to make here: US drone strikes are creating and perpetuating the problem they are claimed to mitigate. Stopping them is the actual way to mitigate the problem.

4. As per point 1, the amount of lives saved by these attacks in the long run is unknown, but unless military intelligence is not an oxymoron it's claimed to be, it's most likely negative.

4a. From this follows my belief, reflected by using 1e8 tracks in the example, that the chance of actual attack happening and killing people is much smaller than the chance the enemy will lose their interest in the fight if they're no longer being terrorized. Not pulling the lever and waiting for the game to finish is a loss-of-life-minimizing strategy in my example.

5. There are ulterior motives, and there are many of them. That's somewhat of a side topic, though. But I do claim that these motives are enough to blind the decision-making apparatus to the point 3a - drone strikes are causing the risk, not reducing it.

> Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.

That's the right view in the abstract, but in reality, the professionals running the show are professional PR people ordering professional lever pullers to pull the lever. That's not to say the politicians and the military are bad at their jobs - they're OK, but they're also not focusing on minimizing loss of life long-term.

> I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.

It isn't always evil to pull the lever here - it just almost always is. Exceptions are few and far between.

> 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.

This is a line of reasoning that's commonly used to defend intelligence agencies - "they won't announce out loud when they save everyone from doom, because that would be defeating their ability to stave off another disaster". However, as far as I know/read, to the degree various journalists and investigators were able to dig out information, there aren't any secret success stories they're hiding. So I'm biased strongly against trusting this line of reasoning alone.

> Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.

That's true, but the lever pullers are also good at playing up the need for pulling the level, and then there's also the trolley company - which is meant to depict, in a generalized way, how the military–industrial complex makes money on perpetuating the killing.

https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a...

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.

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.

For what it is, it consumes ENORMOUS amounts of energy.

The energy usage is only used for mining, it's not even used to secure and ensure its reliability on exchanges whose energy consumption is actually counted against the mining energy. The energy consumption will grow simply because Bitcoin is going up, not because Bitcoin is processing more transactions or providing value in any form. Yes bigger banks need more energy but they can also provide more services thanks to their increased size.

Bitcoin doesn't even compete with Banks because Banks offer loans, consolidate small deposits into large capital reserves, etc. Bitcoin doesn't compete with stocks because Bitcoin ownership doesn't represent an ownership stake in the Bitcoin industry or any other industry. Bitcoin doesn't compete with payment providers because it is too slow and expensive. Bitcoin doesn't compete against cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum with its uniswap protocol may do so but that's not Bitcoin. Ethereum provides more value for less energy consumption than bitcoin. The only thing Bitcoin really competes against is gold because of the proof of ownership. You own your Bitcoin in your wallet the same way you own your car or house (after paying your mortgage or car loan off of course).

Bonus:

Why did I compare Bitcoin to a piece of paper? Because the people working in finance are part of the finance system. In Bitcoin only the miners are part of the system. So ultimately you just have a fancy piece of paper on which you cannot write lies on. With the finance system it is closer to bodyguards guarding the paper and making sure nobody can write on it. Again, people are part of the system. It's not just the paper that is important.

Since bitcoin zealots have moved to pretending that it's a "store of value", you can compare Bitcoin to the energy used to secure the gold in the world. Hint: it's much more worse.

The energy one technical component uses versus the energy that all the people that use another technology uses.

Bitcoin also have support systems around it, hardware production lines, and a lot of people who use it that you don't include in your comparison.

It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.

It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.

Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt

[1] - https://coinmarketcap.com/

When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.

What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.

If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.

Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.

There is some accuracy to that. Would raise the stakes and the resources involved in funding a war. The last 70-80 years of US hegemony have been based off of the market tolerance for US debt and slowly being paid their money back, in US dollartoken. And before then, US hegemony was not a thing.

So there is nothing to say that the market won't find a way to have fractional speculation on bitcoin/crypto asset backed securities, and there is nothing to say that a governing body won't find a way to sustain itself and gain compliance with its peers through it. But there is also not a history of US hegemony supporting it either. Not a panacea because the world was much more of a tinderbox before US debt based hegemony.

Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..