WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

But yeah, basically it's love.

"investors" would be wrong

""investors"" would be fine

How do you quote this type of quote?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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[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.

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

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?

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.

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.