Epic Games chief pays $15M to protect 7,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
He's used his profit from selling his share in both companies to buy over 2 million acres of land, and is in the process of restoring the it to original conditions (which is sometimes at odds with the interest of local ranchers).
Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Tompkins
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/the-entr...
I think it is one of the reasons why Chile is turning towards solar now.
Not very different from Trump's conservation easement donation in New York.
The article explicitly says 'Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has reportedly paid $15 million to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to permanently protect 7,000 acres of undeveloped land'.
That's an odd way to look at it.
Let's say I donate a car that's worth $10,000. I never plan on driving it again. Does that mean it's not worth $10,000?
When we say that all land is for sale and once owned is at the disposal of the owner in perpetuity, we rely on the good-will of the owner. In the majority of cases this is not enough.
We need to look at land ownership differently if we want to achieve real change. We have to bake in behaviour into the rules of our society. Right now we bake in land speculation and exploitation of natural resources for private good and often the public purse picks up the pollution costs later.
This donation, earmarked as a "conservation easement" (which typically require landowners to forfeit the right to develop, subdivide, or otherwise interfere with the preservation of a natural landscape),
Which is why we should not have any form of hereditary hand-me-down, including power and land, at best you are expecting benevolence which isn't even fair, why do they get to inherit such power.
This reminds of previous elections when the GOP candidate would talk about gutting social programs and protections and that private donors and churches and such will take up the slack. Its fairly unrealistic for even large amounts of private wealth to make up for federal cuts. The EPA and DOI collectively have a near $30bn budget. If Bill Gates liquidized all his wealth and donated it, it wouldn't even pay for three years of their budget. Practical plans to keep animals from going extinct require non-stop work, sometimes for decades. I doubt we'd have bald eagles today if Reagan tried to privatize these agencies, gave away their lands, or removed their regulatory powers.
Yes, it shouldn't come to that. Yes, that means abandoning jobs, income, etc and hanging out in a field for god knows how long. But, well, things aren't hopeless.
I made myself depressed writing that comment.
This bears repeating.
Congrats to him for playing it this way.
And by the way, Trump uses these deals extensively. When he builds a golf course he'll donate the right to build condos on ~30% of the property to avoid taxes.
What happens a couple of centuries from now, when the Eastern Seaboard is overpopulated and we have 40,000 acres of land being held in limbo by the Sweeney Foundation?
Having this land being preserved in its natural splendor for future generations to enjoy is a worthy and noble goal, but what happens when we need housing more than we need forests?
Granted, I know this is only a small portion of the land in North Carolina (62.5 sq. mi / ~53,800 sq. mi or roughly 0.12%), but if 2-3 billionaires every generation pay to keep land pristine and untouchable forever, it'll add up over the centuries.
Just something to think about.
2. You're not going to solve overpopulation, which is the result of a growth trend, by adding a constant amount of land to the equation. If you capitulate and give up the forest, then eventually you're left with overpopulation and no forests.
3. The literal answer to your question would be to develop elsewhere in the world, or in space.
4 We need forests too, for our health and sanity.
TFR is synthetic based on population behavior (I.e. Not solely intrinsic, such as genetic).
My point is that there is a feedback-loop at work here. Educated women self-select against reproduction because the consequences are more obvious. But under-educated women still have high TFR-- they will need to hit hard boundaries (starvation, dieback).
I don't think the process of overpopulation is ending, just clamped.
From the notes in this article, (http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/11/08/box...) I get the impression that Sweeney bought the land a fair bit of time ago (perhaps when the real estate bubble burst as indicated in the article). The inspiration for this recent protection came from an eminent domain issue a couple years back where a power company wanted to run a power transmission line through his property.
There's more information about this here as well (http://mountainx.com/news/community-news/rutherford_electric...).
It would be interesting to get a more local perspective; my first impression though is its not completely walled off from the public (guided hikes and a 10K trail run are mentioned). As long as local opinion is relatively in favor of keeping things unspoiled I see this as a positive.
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcas...
But it's a really cool tax dodge.
Long live to you, Tim!
Would that be such a bad thing though? Seems like lot better than not having protected land at all.
- Setup non-taxable charity - Inject $15M in charity - Purchase $15M of land, make it accessible to wealthy only for a price of $X with monthly/annual dues of $X - Accumulate $15M in non-taxable profits - Purchase $15M of land - Make first segment open to public, repeat process.
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/11/08/box...
Pay to not build
The guy who's in charge of Trump's EPA transition thinks that climate change is a hoax, that the Clean Power Plan is illegal, that the Endangered Species Act should be repealed, that the Paris Climate Agreement is unconstitutional.
The likely pick to head the DOE is a lobbyist for the oil industry who wants to open up Federal lands for energy exploration.
Good lord this election is going to have far-reaching consequences.
In four years, we'll either have a 1-party system or an N-party system.
Man, c'mon - why you gotta lump all conservatives in with these people? You can be a conservative without being an absolute anti-science/anti-intellectual/anti-environment/etc lunatic.
but you can't vote liberal without voting in bleeding-hearts. it's the same for conservatives. sooner or later you're going to have to vote for an absolute anti-science/anti-intellectual/anti-environment/etc lunatic.
when partisanship trumps all, almost none of it is so black and white. it becomes shades of grey.
Why when I decide climate change is super important do I also have to align with 15 other unrelated policies as well?
Parties are all-or-nothing and that's painful. Because I find that no party represents me in more than like 20% of my political positions.
I should be able to delegate better.
If we'd had a more nuanced system that allowed voting negative in addition to positive... pretty sure Johnson would have won.
We must prove that something which may be more complex than our current system is still just as fair (or more fair).
Also lots of countries have preferential voting systems. Lots of people in AU don't vote for the major parties.
The US system is just crazy.
For example rank voting. You rank the candidates when you vote. When counting, you count all the votes for each candidate. You eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes. Everyone who had that candidate as a first choice reallocates their votes to their second choice. Repeat until there's a winner.
Suddenly it's okay to vote for that third party, because through rank voting you can ensure that your third party vote does not end up propping up the candidate you like the least.
Why isn't it used today?
Does such a group exist?
You can either rank the vote manually or vote for a party and they get to pick how the vote is ranked between all the candidates.
Not just $5 here or $20 there. Donate to match your desire for a better future.
Instead we'd recommend one of the European-republic forks (E.g. Germany's federalism 2.0) or, if you're feeling adventurous, one of the smaller forks like 'Direct Democracy' or the nordic-style forks.
Please note that those newer implementations have significantly higher system requirements, usually calling for a well educated population that is willing to debate and compromise rationally.
Socially liberal fiscal conservatives might not like this administration's social changes, but conservative fiscal legislation will get much less scrutiny since the Democrats have almost no power. Vice versa for the rare fiscally liberal social conservatives.
This is the same thing I heard from Democrats in 2000 and 2004, and the same thing I heard from Republicans in 2008. It is unlikely to actually happen. People are too complacent, and a good chunk of America will be perfectly satiated by cheap prices at the pump.
Between
* extra energy consumption based on war efforts on both sides and rebuilding countries afterwards,
* as well as oil fields being literally set on fire,
that is a few tons of CO2 as well.
I don't like him but unless certain folks I respect that Americans disliked him less than the alternative.
This is known as "respect for the Democracy".
That said it seems he is less likely to start a war than the other candidate.
I guess my point is that if you want significant action on climate change (I do too!), you were always going to have to fight for it with your representatives (R or D) vs the industry donors.
There are cheaters and people making.. "clever use of game mechanics", let's say. But the vote does matter.
In fact, one of the main reasons the system is so broken today is because there isn't enough vote. Trump, like Obama, was able to get to power by inspiring people to vote.
> They didn't get there where they are because of paying attention to your opinion but because of ignoringt it.
You know, if it was that easy, I'd be the one sitting on billions of dollars right now.
We have to play games all the day where "the other party cheats anyway". But there are only two games where your efforts to make things work out are divided by 140.000.000. Election and lottery.
>> There are cheaters and people making.. "clever use of game mechanics", let's say. But the vote does matter.
Yes, votes does matter. And your vote matters as well. But its relevance is divided by 140.000.000. Good luck, man!
>> In fact, one of the main reasons the system is so broken today is because there isn't enough vote.
And this is because the non-voters have better things to do with their lives than playing the sucker's game.
>> You know, if it was that easy, I'd be the one sitting on billions of dollars right now.
Only because we could not cheat our way to the top does not mean that the people at the top are saints. Maybe they are just better cheaters than you and me.
Once you remove the percentage of people who don't vote and take the electoral college into account, that number is way lower and we haven't even begun to touch how one person can mass influence votes.
Just because you yourself have one single vote doesn't mean your voice is one in a sea of hundreds of millions. Far from it.
> And this is because the non-voters have better things to do with their lives than playing the sucker's game.
Why do you think so much effort is spent on preventing various inconvenient groups of people to vote?
It's funny how a lot of people downplay their own voice in a democracy. You have far more influence than you can imagine.
You strike me as quite terribly close minded though, and I don't really feel like convincing people when they adopt such a cynical attitude, so if you're actually interested you can read the excellent Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
From google.
>> You're so focused on it.
I know. It is kind of "occupational disease". I do statistics.
>> Once you remove the percentage of people who don't vote
Not voting is also a voting. In fact it is voting against all of the candidates and / or against the voting system.
>> Just because you yourself have one single vote doesn't mean your voice is one in a sea of hundreds of millions.
Actually it does. Having one single vote among hundreds of millions means having only one single vote among hundreds of millions.
>> It's funny how a lot of people downplay their own voice in a democracy.
You mean the people who can divide 1 by hundreds of millions? It's funny how not all of the people can do the math.
>> You strike me as quite terribly close minded
You are right. Just because I have a different opinion than you I am terribly [put some negative attribute here].
My take on democracy: you have the right to build your own opinion and talk about it and you have to accept the opinion of others as well as the fact that they talk about it, even if you do not agree with them. Not agreeing with you does not mean being [put some negative attribute here] and you do not have to convince others of your being right.
You are wellcome.
What a waste of words.
I do not agree with you but I think there is enough place on earth for more than one opinion.
It is somehow ironic that you, son of the land of the free, have to learn this from someone born behind the iron curtain.
Perhaps this is it.
[1] suwa.org
People need to see it as an opportunity and then take it.
One note of caution, is that sometimes when private individuals buy up these big chunks of land from the government or big land-management organizations, they restrict access and traditional activities on that land in ways that mightily piss off the locals. It's a not uncommon point of contention in the north woods of Maine where I grew up; IP or Meade or Plumb Creek tends to be pretty lax about hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, etc, as long as their lumber is left alone and the roads aren't ripped up. Millionaires from away have a tendency to lock it down and post everything, in a modern-day form of enclosure.
(Scotland doesn't have trespass is the same sense that other countries have. The legal system is quite different from English law, which I believe (vaguely) is what the US system was based on.)
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!
And it's not just millionaires and wilderness. Anecdote: A friend lives in Oklahoma, on a few wooded acres. One day, he posts a photo on Facebook of some guys riding horses across the corner of his property. He didn't care (no reason to), but the first response, "Why were they there? Did you go after them?" Makes no sense.
tl;dr - The Land Reform Act 2003 codified the long-held tradition of unhindered access to open country. This includes the great estates, forestry land, etc. Basically, as long as you behave, you can hike, camp, cycle anywhere you like. Obvious exclusions would be somebody's yard adjacent to their home, areas with active livestock activity, etc.
It came after id software had developed smooth scrolling games (albeit only in EGA) and the scrolling in Jill just felt pretty bad. Smooth scrolling was certainly possible in 256 color VGA, and they could also have used mode X to perform fast blits (4 pixel moves). They didn't use the smooth scrolling registers, and it didn't seem like they used mode X - at least the game did not feel like it.
However, I think, keeping the scrolling implementation simple, enabled them to focus on gameplay and sound on the Sound Blaster -- a relatively cool and unique thing at the time! Thus a classic example of not getting distracted by the tech side of things, but focusing on user experience.
I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware!
I did the same, but with the 486 in 1993! And I wasn't connected at all, no BBS:es, just sharing copies of copies of copies of floppies (etc etc). It's hard to imagine the dearth of information nowadays, and how valuable every scrap of information was. Now and then you'd get across this goldmine of information (in the form of some source code), and spend weeks/months understanding it all.
I spent so much time experimenting with Turbo Pascal, inline assembly and VGA mode 13h and mode X. And trying to build the ultimate sprite and tile engine...
The good thing about not being connected though: it was easy to stay concentrated on one issue at a time.
What I was trying to say:
"Wow, it's so awesome that someone who started out with a little self-developed PC game in the early 90s got so rich that he could afford this."
Just a reflection: people are really downvote-happy on this site - in the case when something perhaps, conceivably could be perceived as being negative. I think this is a bad thing. I find my self guarding statements, sprinkling in superfluous positive statements ("And I like X").
I think the unofficial (?) "be positive" motto has gone full circle in this regard and is now being used to downvote neutral statements.
It wouldn't be HN without autistically pedantic nits on scope and definition that add nothing of value to the discourse.
I'm afraid it helps cement a certain understanding in the readers.
Or, perhaps more importantly, it will be used as training data for someones AI based HR startup which will go on to filter out perfectly good candidates for being "autistic".
I did not expect that point... crafting comments with future ML efforts in mind. I don't think we should care that much about it - you can't feel personally responsible for every idiot using overhyped technology to do stupid things at scale.
It was meant as a joke at the end of an otherwise serious post.
I think this joke in particular does have some really interesting possibilities.
Someone could make a thriller or sci-fi out of this.
I have no horse in this race (not the original commenter) and I support the idea that people should speak freely without fear of off-topic chastisement, but it just seems a little more good hearted to find a different word.
It's tech, there is very high chance nearly everyone is on the spectrum in some way, and if fact its a trait that gives you advantages (but comes with some drawbacks depending to the degree you have it). It's almost self deprecating humor, we all have tics/obsessive behaviors where we miss the forest for the trees during social interactions where we know what they "meant" but it's not exactly "what they said" and so we give each other grief for it so we can try to do better when interacting with others.
There is nothing wrong with actually being autistic, but certain characteristics we should try to keep in check.
If there is nothing wrong with being autistic, then it's poor communication to use it as a pejorative. And if there is something wrong with being autistic, then it's cruel to use it as a pejorative. Either way, there are other, better ways to express oneself.
I'm not going to discuss a blanket assessment of all tech industry workers as "on the spectrum." That's not my area of expertise.
I had a friend who is really short. I used to tease him a little about his height (we didn't exactly see eye to eye), but one day I noticed that he seemed hurt by my jokes so I stopped.
Autistic people have enough social challenges and confidence issues. You'd have to have ice water in your veins to intentionally add to that. They deal with enough difficulty as it is.
Sometimes it's about sensing how the other guy feels. The coolest guys try to draw attention to their friends' good qualities, big up the confidence of those around them, and help their peers stand taller. Obama did this once in a crowd that said a cutesy "aww" when a fourth-grader came up to ask a question; the President immediately interrupted the crowd, said that the boy was a big guy, and suggested that they let him speak.
Here's the video: https://youtu.be/BewOcp1JtDU
Autistic people don't deserve to be used as a punchline or pejorative. If you really mean "clueless," then say "clueless."
Yes, I recognize the irony in pointing this out. I also recognize the irony we're even having this conversation because its due to the exact tendency the person was trying to describe, when in the grand scheme, no one cares.
There is even someone in the comments whose Autistic who says they're fine with it, they're adults, give them more credit. the coddling betrays a lower opinion of them then an average person.
I can't believe you actually think it's 100% cool to go around calling stuff autistic. This whole wall of text basically boils down to that for me.
Features of these disorders include social deficits and communication difficulties, stereotyped or repetitive behaviors and interests, sensory issues, and in some cases, cognitive delays.
The HN crowd tends to realize that a policy of "never build anything ever again" is a bad idea in SF, but is a great idea as long as the area in question is mostly trees not in their backyard.
He has also bought other property for the same purpose.
He created this easement partially because a developer sued to use eminent domain to force him to allow them to construct a power line across the property.
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/11/08/box...