Ripple fully funded every live DonorsChoose classroom project yesterday
donorschoose.org
donorschoose.org
The cynic in me sees this as a cheap PR move (an SVP of marketing promoting it doesn't help). Associating your token with a good cause gives it credibility in the eyes of the public which in turn leads to an increase in the XRP price in USD. Here's what I understand about ripple:
- 100 billion XRP was created at inception with 20 billion going to the creators and 80 billion going to Ripple labs.
- It's supposed to be a payment layer between financial institutions and XRP is the underlying token.
- Distribution of XRP is arbitrary. Ripple labs can allocate it to whoever they see fit.
Donating $29M worth of XRP costs them nothing since Ripple labs holds 80 billion XRP. Only 40 billion XRP is currently in circulation though and XRP's price is currently $0.5. I don't know, I find Ripple quite ridiculous. But the silver lining is donations such as these.
I don't think anybody here is arguing that this donation is a bad thing.
It's great that Ripple decides to donate money to charities but it's not like they're making a huge sacrifice here. Given the highly speculative market surrounding crypto the good PR this gives them might very well end up making them significantly more money than what they donated.
I'm not arguing that Ripple did a bad thing but I'm not in the position of somebody receiving the donation but rather in the position of a 3rd party who has to form an opinion about it. Clearly this is a good action on Ripple's part, as would be Bill Gates donating $100 to some charity but morally speaking it's not like it was a huge sacrifice. I'm very skeptical of the ethics of these cryptocurrency organizations and I'm not willing to suddenly consider them the "good guys" because they made a (for them) rather minor donation. As far as advertising campaigns go it seems like a pretty clever move that may well pay off way beyond $30millions for them.
There's no "False" or "True" when discussing the morals of these acts, you can make a good action for bad reasons and a bad action for good reasons. In practice it's great that Ripple did this though, regardless of the reasons, I agree with that.
> the value he fairly earned
I see what you did there.
(If anyone reading this likes their products, that's fine. Just realize what you're getting into first. It's actually a very entertaining currency to watch from the sidelines.)
Can u please elaborate what are the other traits a coin can exhibit other than providing value? And what are the other purposes of coins such as bitcoin/litecoin/ether etc.
In case of Ether, besides being used for transaction fees, it will be used for providing security/governance (token holders kind of voting on what the next blocks are), but also as an underlying store of value (e.g. as a collateral for tokens pegged to fiat currencies - see MakerDAO)
This is the key.
Ripple has donated $29M value out of the portfolios of their XRP-holders. The effect of this, might be a net-increase of that value, though, since the marketing-effect might even pump the price.
If you own XRP, you just donated a fraction to a good cause. Congrats.
Very similar to how Europe "printed" money to "save Greece" several times. A worthy cause, but paid by everyone holding Euro: every Euro just gets some inflation and the shaved-off value is used "for the good cause". I'm not saying inflation is bad, that is not my point. Nor that giving to good causes is bad, and my point is also not about wether or not the combined wealth of Europeans should be used to save a county.
My point is that giving away other peoples money is easy and hardly ever presented as such.
That being said, I would love to witness a super-rich person throw a one-time insanely large lump sum of money at some problem. Like, "Here's 50 billion dollars. Free mammograms to anyone on the planet until the money runs out." It would be nice to see a global respite from some sort of issue.
Apologies for getting political, but I come from a family of teachers in two red states (actually three now, thanks Wisconsin, you do love to hate yourself), and we're out of fucks to give.
EDIT: I know we don't like to get political here, but the question was "Why is America bad at education compared to other countries." First of all, it is bad, and it spends more than other countries, somehow. Makes sense when half the country has put their feet down stubbornly into the stand and said "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" Or some nonsense.
Here's a great analysis of the Republican platform vis a vis education: https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-education/2016/07...
Inevitable disclaimer: obviously not all republicans are opposed to effective, common sense education, and obviously not all democrats support it. But uh... compare the platforms.
That's a misrepresentation. Plenty of them some care very much about fixing education and funding it. Just the kind the find most effective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Zh96wc01k
The difference, as the video mentions, is that they always gets attacked as being 'anti-education', depsite intentions and data supporting their efforts, largely by the heavily entrenched people and organizations who have most to gain from keeping the same status-quo systems. Ie, the massive top-heavy administration that controls pubic education, unions, pension funds, etc. They have plenty of political pull.
Ultimately that is very much equally propaganda, is it not?
The right also tends support more state financing and control of education, and funding towards education has increased dramatic in states for decades. The only thing that has stagnated (but hardly declined) is federal spending:
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending
And percentage of GDP spending for education has hardly dipped under republicans either:
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_chart_20.html
Words are always valued over actions and the ideology of a few extremists always seem to always take precedence over data and tangible outcomes. Which is why I hate debating this subject.
That would be partly because it is true http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisi... ('Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact on U.S.')
And its not helped by the fact that much of the GOP is apparent anti-science, and anti expertise https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/american-trust-scient... ('A 54 percent majority of Democrats, compared with just 13 percent of Republicans, say they have “a lot” of trust that what scientists say is accurate and reliable.')
I find it hilarious how often US Democrats want to use the lowest common denominator, with their half-baked grasp of politics, economics, science, history, etc, to define their party's credibility (and to be clear I'm far from either American democrat or republican). As if the intelligence of the entire voting base (or whom either group decided to convince to vote for them) defines the merits of the ideology behind 0.0001% of the population who reside in congress, senate, and the white house.
Personally I'd rather seek out the intellectuals from either side (for ex: [1]), but also ideas from outside the two main left/right groups, and also from historical ideologies... and then decide what is best for society from that. And from there try to influence particular parties to adhere to the most rational and ideal ideas.
If /r/politics is any indication, the more people you have the dumber the conversations gets. It went from "somewhat annoying political tribalism" on Reddit to completely unbearable inane echo-chamber debates as it scaled up to millions of people. And these same people STILL think they are superior to 24/7 news media talking heads, which is the channel which most influences the wider population.
Is this the means from which we should determine the merits of particular political ideologies?
But by all means, let the opinions of the lowest common denominator, web surveys, and shamelessly biased 'news' websites like Huffington Post be your guiding voice on what's best. I'd personally rather not...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-Left...
/e: Not to suggest that either approach is without flaws, just that the approaches are different.
>Like, "Here's 50 billion dollars. Free mammograms to anyone on the planet until the money runs out." It would be nice to see a global respite from some sort of issue.
That would cover one mammogram for every woman in America. If donated to anti-malaria charities, it would save about 25M lives (more or less, according to GiveWell's estimates, which may not scale to that much funding). According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that's a little over half of what it will eventually cost to eradicate malaria.
Solving the world's problems is expensive.
I feel like that's a dangerous plan. The Gates Foundation invests a lot of time and energy into making sure its money is well-spent and effective. Throwing a "one-time insanely large lump sum of money" at a problem sounds like a recipe for graft and embezzlement on a colossal scale.
The toughest problems are the ones that resist throw-money-at-it solutions. You can't just give money to poor people; you have to do it in a way that coincides with guaranteeing they understand how to use it to escape poverty, guaranteeing it won't be stolen by a corrupt regime, etc. etc. etc.
I could see a scenario where, sure, the teacher's proposal is great. But what makes their proposal any better than the thousand others that cannot be funded?
The point, though, is that there is an incredible amount of bloat in the public system. Funding amounts themselves are not a primary problem, though perhaps allocation of funding is!
There are costs to operating a school district that have increased dramatically in the past 30 years (most significantly: employee benefits, special education compliance) and have not been met with comparable increases in funding. Additionally, we've dramatically raised the expectations we have for schools (holding schools accountable for "No Child Left Behind" and raising the rigor of instruction with the Common Core & new assessments).
From this vantage point, it seems clear to me that we need to either narrow the scope of what we ask schools to do or increase funding to meet additional burdens. And it'd be nice if we can improve operational efficiency while we do this...
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pd...
Non communal education means costs are spread out means they're higher. The government could bulk purchase, for example, notebooks, at pennies. Instead, students have to get packs of them at a couple bucks. I know this won't be the case for everyone here, but some of you reading this might have the thought, "a couple bucks, really? Just skip starbucks for a couple days!" I recommend you read "Evicted" and learn a bit more about poverty in America if you have these thoughts, or we can email and chat more about it.
In any case, yea, education costs more here for the same reason healthcare does - America is caught between forward-thinking longterm investors that know that a healthy, educated populace is good for the economy, and, well I don't know what shitty excuse the other side is using lately but they're about short term gains and spreading costs among private individuals rather than communising them.
He pretty much doubled his salary with overtime.
And there are way too many city salaries over $200k in my opinion. Judging by the job descriptions and requisite educations for those jobs, I'd say they are way, way over market rates.
In what fantasyland do you need to pay $250k a year to find and retain a talented individual to be an "EMT supervisor"?
My wife's school strongly suggests that she submit a project every year. If it's funded, good for her and the students in her classroom. It's also good for the school since they can then allocate available funding for infrastructure or larger programmatic support (e.g. ESL, special needs, etc.). It's not that the administrator doesn't want to fund her projects, it's just that her requests sit in a huge pile of unfunded requests and something has to give.
Source: wife is a teacher who has successfully funded projects through donors choose.
not arbitrary private citizens who see a “good idea” (that might turn out to just sound like a good idea) that helps a small segment of the population
*edit: i’m saying if you fix the education system, take that donor money and then make it available to all then everyone could benefit equally without having to beg for scraps for literally a countries future generations
How is that a downside?
Have the foreign donors actually built a school? Or have they built a mansion for the army chief?
Page isn't loading but this is from the subject of the blog;
#BestSchoolDay 2018: Every Project Funded! MARCH 27, 2018 STEPHEN BURKENEWS
#BestSchoolDay is here! Last night, Ripple fully funded every single live DonorsChoose.org classroom project. That’s over 35,000 projects in one enormous $29 million dollar act of generosity. We literally don’t have words to express our gratitude, so we had to invent some. We’re flabbermazed. Astonified. It blew us away, knocked our socks off... WOW! Here’s a message from Ripple and our founder, Charles, talking about why Ripple chose to support our creative community of teachers with this [Read more...]
edit: Someone's going hard on downvoting every comment in here. Do you not like teachers receiving money to help their students?
It's a shame that you need charities for such things.
1. FUND MILLIONS OF STUDENTS (I don't think anyone can overstate how awesome this is)
2. Give Ripple Labs good press and put them on the front
3. Increases the supply of XRP which:
- Means more XRP in the market in the market for more users
- Drops the value per XRP making transaction costs cheaper
Wait, it does? I thought one of the unique aspects of ripple was that all of the coins were pre-mined so the supply is finite. Right?
Some people will tell you they control the validating nodes, but thats only really a half truth. Ripple controls 3 out of 50+ nodes, and also controls the default list of approved validator nodes. There's no reason why you can't deviate from the default list of validators, but its hard to say if anyone actually does in practice.
Also, for the teachers, what happens if the price falls before they can dump and their projects have a shortfall?
Also, it's different because since currencies have goods and services that you can buy with them, monetary expansion isn't actually inflationary to the price level unless it pushes aggregate demand (spending) above the supply of goods and services available in that currency. Whereas all this Ripple likely is going to straight to be sold off so the recipients can actually buy things...
Not to take anything away from Ripple: good for them!
Still, the utilitarian view on this is only good - it helps a good cause and is better than nothing. donorschoose only gains from this and every pledge that stands behind donorschoose.
People are always quick to scrutinize everything, but what do you do to help the underprivileged?
For perspective, Warren Buffett has donated $46 billion and Bill Gates has donated $18 billion to charities since 2000.
Either way - good to see good projects get funding.
Are they profitable? How can this kind of thing be justified to shareholders?
>Of the XRP80 billion that Ripple Labs was gifted, Ripple follows a distribution strategy that encompasses payments to business partners such as gateways, market makers and charitable organizations.[24]
They don't need to derisk their ecosystem.
So that prices don't fall overall while this happens and some people cash out of it.