6,537 karma · joined May 16, 2011
Email: hn at my handle dot com
I've been an climate tech entrepreneur for the past 7+ years, and the most reliable way I've found to accomplish the combo viable-business + climate-impact:
1. Get a job at a revenue generating climate-change-fighting company (solar, EVs, policy/regulatory consulting, etc.).
2. Keep your eyes open for pain points that your company (or especially you in your position) would pay money to solve.
3. Quit and start a company solving that pain point (or if you're not the founder-type, go work for a company trying to solve that pain point).
I suppose this kind of strategy would work in many other industries, but it's especially effective in climate tech, because:
(a) As OP mentions, the pain points are very hidden to the general public, so you really need to be actually working inside the industry to find and understand them (since energy often has very complex business models and regulatory constructs).
(b) By focusing on finding pain points for already climate-change-fighting companies and solving them, your impact goals are already built-in, since you're enabling more impact by default. So you don't have to worry as much about finding the magical combo of viable-business + impact.
(c) The climate-change-fighting sector is so young that many of the pain points are still major issues and don't have many viable solutions yet. In other more mature industries, many pain points already have established companies solving them, so there's less of green field for new companies.
Anyway, for people looking to fight climate change, by far the biggest thing you can do is join the industry and make a career out of it. There's so much ceiling here!
This process keeps your vote anonymous.
https://supporters.eff.org/shop/laptop-camera-cover-set-ii
Been using them for years, and they work great!
If you're a business that can get its products embedded into the "default procedure" of your customers and only get noticed if you don't work (e.g. Stripe, Twilio, AWS, etc.), customer churn is minimized and continued revenue is the default.
https://jalopnik.com/alex-roy-reveals-transcontinental-run-c...
That combined with Firefox Containers would make for a very powerful combination since you could have different containers that would be your logged-in interface to a specific site, without then having to allow other sites be able to set cookies.
It's is highly likely that these high numbers continue for additional weeks because all the people who couldn't get through will manage to get through in upcoming weeks.
The reason that helicopter money won't lead to hyper-inflation is because the entire rest of the world is just as fucked as we are, so the dollar will remain the safest currency no matter how much the money supply is increased.
Low oil prices can delay that cost intersection, but won't prevent it from eventually happening because internal combustion vehicles are more complex and costly to maintain even without taking into account fuel costs. So as long as EV manufacturing costs continue to decline and electricity continues to get cheaper from low cost renewables, ICE vehicles will eventually become obsolete no matter the oil price.
> (In reply to lilydjwg from comment #30)
>> I'm glad to here that, but what about support for Firefox on X11? Is it given up?
> Hardware decoding is platform independent so it generally works under X11 as it's implemented as Bug 1616185.
> For whole playback chain see Bug 1610199 what's needed to be done fox X11.
> I was closing this one as it refers to HW decode only, not the playback.
> The overall video playback is tracked at Bug 1210726.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that we (at least in the US) will find the political will to change the law that says if you give your data to a third party, it is no longer protected by the fourth amendment and doesn't require a warrant to obtain.
So self-hosting your own data seems to be the only way you can keep your data protected by the fourth amendment.
I feel that migration is often ignored or discounted. For example, Facebook in the early years was considered mostly harmless, but now has migrated to being exploited by state actors to brainwash populations into hating each other, interfering in elections, or at worst performing genocide on a minority group. We need to stop assuming that just because a software application is harmless now, that it will stay that way, and we need to adjust its "correctness" accordingly as it migrates along the harmless <> life-and-death scale.
Software is becoming more and more depended on for life and death use cases every day.
https://www.kut.org/post/texas-suburbs-are-slipping-away-gop...
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/elect...
Also, for energy, how wide do you want to cast the net? Solar and wind generation is now more cost effective than fossil generation, so traditional utilities and utility vendors are now doing huge climate-change fighting efforts, just because it's cheaper. For example, GE has a solar division that is developing huge commercial projects that offset a fuck ton of carbon. Should GE be on the list?
I worry that this list is giving the impression that fighting climate chance is a selfless endeavor, when nowadays much of the carbon offset work (especially in energy) is done by established entities because it's simply cheaper and in their self interest.
Also, what about governments? Countries, states, cities, and regulators are passing more and more 100% carbon free mandates. Those are vastly more impactful that anything else on this list. Shouldn't they be included on the list?
Finally, a search or full list to Ctrl+F would be nice so I don't have to click through multiple categories to see if a company is included.
Thanks very much for the effort to put this list together, and I wish you the best of luck!
That provides protection for if someone manages to get a malicious script into your blog, they can't start making authenticated requests (since it isn't the same origin).
That... sounds like just regular investing. Rather than trying to save the VC brand (which is already pretty tainted in entrepreneur circles), why not come up with another name and scale that?
Hmmmm, isn't being a VC kind of exacerbating this problem? The business model of being a VC is entirely based around moonshots, which means that you are pigeonholed into only making bets on certain types of founders that either (a) already have extremely high risk tolerance or (b) can be pushed by VCs to take risks beyond their personal risk tolerance.
Which makes your "right people" statement come off slightly disingenuous, since the VC strategy seems to disproportionately attract more Mark Zuckerbergs than Matt Mullenwegs (for category (a)) and often exploits founder naivety for the benefit of the VC (for category (b)). I'd argue that many if not most of the "right people" who can solve problems are in general not a good fit for seeking VC investment.
Do you have suggestions for other investments strategies that may be more compatible for potential founders that don't fall within these two categories? Have you thought about branching into those investment circles?