$29M worth of XRP going to a good cause. Great, cash out and make good use of it.
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.
> Donating $29M worth of XRP costs them nothing since Ripple labs holds 80 billion XRP.
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.
It gets better. The intermediate layer is controlled entirely by Ripple and closed source. The coin only exists to provide 'liquidity' and improve confidence from financial institutions. In essence, Ripple is just a payment processor riding on the crypto hype and the coin is simply an unregulated stock. This is the latest attempt to pump prices and generate PR. No one makes money when prices are stable.
(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.)
> The coin only exists to provide 'liquidity' and improve confidence from financial institutions.
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 Eos, you need to own the tokens to run smart contracts on the network (mire you have, more % of processing power you get).
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)
The only reason Ripple is worth anything is because of PR to convince the world that a wholly premined coin that isn't even necessary to use the Ripple network holds any value at all. So... a $29 million PR move to boost a $22 billion PR move?
It's not necessary for the payments layer, Although the asset can be used for the settlement layer, as can a lot of other tokens be used (see ILP: inter ledger protocol), I have used bitcoin and ether, all I can say is that XRP is by far the cheapest and fastest way to settle right now.
When it actually costs something to the donor? If somebody living below the poverty line donates $100 to a cause it's a pretty selfless act. If Bill Gates does it then not so much.
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.
False. Those $100 are not enough to save people from malaria but the kind of money Bill Gates has did; doesn't matter how much you fought to obtain a single dollar and then you donate it; it helps just as little as it you found it on the floor.
Thought experiment: imagine that I'm a huge multinational company who makes billions in profit. Imagine that I evade (or "optimize") my taxes as much as possible using all the tricks in the book. Now I decide to invest a few hundreds of thousands of dollars to, say, donate computers to schools. It's great, isn't it? But wouldn't it make more sense not to do that and simply pay my taxes instead, which would probably end up contributing a lot more to the school system and the rest of the infrastructure? Isn't it effectively an empty PR move to make me look like the good guy even though I'm actually saving a lot of money by not paying what I really owe?
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.
Morally speaking you are a random nobody on the internet complaining about a guy's morals who has built an industry that has substantially increased our GDP and lifestyle and now is having a substantial impact on decreasing global poverty and is going to put all the value he fairly earned back into the economy when he croaks in 20 years
That is incorrect, Ripple committed to place 55 billion XRP (88% of its XRP holdings) into a cryptographically-secured escrow. You can read about it on Wikipedia.
No it doesn't, because at the end those kids will get 29 million dollars worth of materials and educational resources. I wish more PR moves were about donating and helping those in need.
It does to me because I value selfless donations more than those with an ulterior motive. Of course a donation to a noble cause is always a good thing regardless of that but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't discuss its motives.
I don't think anybody here is arguing that this donation is a bad thing.
I disagree. Regardless of intentions, the projects received money they otherwise may not have. Everyone knows this was likely for the attention, but look at what that PR desperation accomplished.
When I think about large-scale donations I think about Melinda and Bill Gates. They don't just donate large sums of money, they donate their time and talent and take their efforts very seriously. They work hard to see every penny well-spent in an effective manner.
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.
FYI - My wife had her project funded this year by ripple, but last year her projects were funded by Melinda and Bill Gates. In both cases her projects were less than 10k, but make a huge difference to the kids in her classroom.
On the one hand, I’m very proud of how much it can help with such a small donation. On the other hand, I’m depressed it has to come from donations. Seriously, what is wrong with adults these days kicking the door closed behind us?
Propaganda mostly from the Republican party has convinced a great deal of people that Education is a waste of money. This is obviously stupid and false.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.')
Got any more Huffington Post "web based surveys" to educate me on the merits of conservative ideology? That was so enthralling...
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...
The fact that there appears to be a sentiment that spending on education equates to a 'firehose of money from flowing directly to the teachers union cronies' sounds like it is part of the problem.
To be fair, I know 4 teachers, and all abhor their 'unions'. Its crooked, but they fear the alternative (loss of collective barganing power) more. Its a self-perpetuating problem of actual well meaning people playing CYA.
And I quite understand the sentiment, I'm not arguing that unions are great, I'm arguing that increase in educational spending shouldn't be seen as somehow funding unions.
Back to the people who earned it? That is their party platform, and the source of their 'small government low taxes' position. I care less for politics, but lets pretend to talk intelligently if we are going to broach them.
The Republican party has done little to "send money back to the people that earned it," given that their policies historically screw over... well any earner under a given wealth threshold.
Providing education is giving money back to the people that earned it, using the government's massive power of collective bargaining. Federally funded education research can accomplish a hell of a lot more than, I don't know, what's the republican version? A bunch of private bootstrapped citizens banding 3.50$ each to fund a private education study on new teaching methods?
This seems to be what made US-American culture difficult to understand to some first time visitors. From tips to donations and gun ownership society seems to have decided to make citizens take into their own hands many responsibilities which in other countries the government takes care of.
/e: Not to suggest that either approach is without flaws, just that the approaches are different.
>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."
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 think it's bad that people prize volunteering time and direct effort over monetary donations. Rich people are free to spend their time on whatever they like, of course, but comparative advantage applies as much to charitable efforts as it does to any other enterprise. If you're best at managing charities, you should do that. If you're able to earn vast sums of money doing something else, it's more efficient to do that, and then pay someone else to manage the charity.
>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.
Amancio Ortega, one of the top 5 richest person on earth and owner of Zara and few other brands donated 350M€ last year to the Spanish public healthcare system. We got new mammograms all over the country.
This is great for many of the projects but there's a down side to donors choose I wouldn't have realized before taking to some teachers. Anecdote warning: family member works in a public school district where the principal and committees won't even investigate funding requests till the teacher has put something up on donorschoose.
It really sucks that American public schools are so poorly funded. But maybe the principal and committees are just "playing the game" appropriately from their perspective. I doubt they have beanbag chairs full of cash that they're hoarding.
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?
They aren't poorly funded. I live in a suburban / rural area. The public schools here get ~$15,700 per student. Good private schools here charge ~$10,000 per student, and yet offer much better education with 2/3 the funding.
Where do you live? The private schools may also get funding, and public schools have much higher expenses for special needs students etc. who are often not allowed to enroll at private schools.
Several private schools I know in west coast burbs get by on <$10k and actually have higher staff ratios and more autistic kids than standard schools (many parents need the refuge because the public schools are especially ill-suited to the needs of many families with kids on the spectrum).
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!
It's not hard to find examples of inefficient spending in education (the depiction of Newark Public Schools in "The Prize" is particularly poignant), nor is it hard to find examples of dramatic underfunding (just ask any teacher in a low income area). But anecdotes on either side of the equation don't really lead us to correct policy.
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...
Here's my suspicion, coming from a long line of teachers, and I had an article to support this recently but I'm having trouble finding it right now - spending includes not just what the government/taxpayers are spending, but what teachers and students are spending, because in this insane system we have, somehow teachers getting 45k/year (hah, if that) are having to dip into their salaries to get whiteboard markers and notebooks for their kids that can't afford it. Meanwhile, parents are footing the bill for all the other supplies.
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.
How much of that is being spent on things entirely irrelevant to education, such as administration, "school sports" aka baseball/football stadiums and other amenities?
As much as I hated my HS principal, you still need administration. Sports, are underutilized and also needed by healthy humans. Sure, some schools disproportionately spend on sports, but they are in the minority, and tend to self fund. Why not kill art, music programs too? Just email assignments and hope for the best...
Public schools also run fundraisers, and most families seem to understand that these funds give their children a competitive edge that other schools may not be able to offer (after school programs, supplies, teaching assistants for lower grade levels, etc.).
Is there some story behind why the highest paid individual in the entire city is a "fire apparatus operator"?
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"?
How is that a downside? It's too bad that schools are underfunded and can't meet every funding request, but given that is the current state of affairs why not post a grant request on donors choose? It's not that difficult, and some projects that have no chance of getting funding from the annual school budget have a pretty decent chance of getting funding online.
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.
Imagine a corrupt foreign dictatorship. The ruler was planning to spend $x building a school for orphans, when foreign donors donated $x to build a school for orphans. This saves the dictator $x which he spends building a mansion for the chief of the army.
Have the foreign donors actually built a school? Or have they built a mansion for the army chief?
because it should be up to a knowledgeable central body of experts whose job it is to decide how best to allocate education money in order to do the most good
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
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?
Its both. They won't create more for philosophical reasons because the value would plummet. They won't create more for technical reasons because it needs an 80% majority of nodes to approve a change for it to occur.
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.
DonorsChoose.org is a fantastic site and project. As someone who has four teachers in the family, I know firsthand how challenging teaching is on multiple levels, and financial is definitely one of them. I’m happy to support the site as best I can and even happier to hear about this!
This is great, but since this move added no new traders to the market and instead added a bunch of people that will dump their XRP instantly, doesn’t this hurt current holders? I wonder how much this had to do with the 5% price drop today [1]. It seems like what they really did was take traders’ $29 million and donate it, except they had no choice in the matter. Not that this is a bad way to spend one’s money, but I’m sure at least some holders would have liked a choice in the matter.
Also, for the teachers, what happens if the price falls before they can dump and their projects have a shortfall?
Real currencies generally exist with a Government that requires taxes are paid in that currency. So there's always a baseline demand. Almost nobody in politically stable countries could completely stop using their currencies tomorrow if they didn't like how the Government sector (Government + central bank) spent money (without moving to another country).
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...
Beside how great of an effort this is, the main recipients seem to come from the US. Is the US really that poor of a country to need donations for basic school supplies?
Many people in this thread criticize this as a bad PR move and Ripple in general.
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?
Am I just being cynical but blindly funding every classroom project without oversight and due diligence may actually be a net-negative in the long term. Universally giving money does not solve problems. It takes the right causes and right people behind the causes to really improve things.
For perspective, Warren Buffett has donated $46 billion and Bill Gates has donated $18 billion to charities since 2000.
Fascinating. This seems like a great way to get more currency in circulation without pissing off the miners or current owners. If they just gave it away, they would have inflation. But the PR from this will generate enough demand that it shouldn’t hurt the value. In addition every dollar they give will likely circulate rather than be hoarded. And the teachers benefit. Brilliant!
One or their problems right now is their foundation owns too much of their own currency, which is a risk to their entire ecosystem. Without looking into the details, donating the money seems like a really great way to build good will while de-risking the ecosystem.
Further down in the wiki. I don't know what Ripple Labs is, but perhaps the donation is part of this 80 billion XRP??
>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]
Or the coin-holders. Folks who invest their money and then get scammed by folks who hide behind donations tend to put their money somewhere else next time. Short term win for some kids can mean a long term loss for everyone. Look past your nose, friend.
I am really happy for these schools, but what if someone is just trying to 'converting a lot of ripple into cash' look like effect from 'charity donation' event?
So that prices don't fall overall while this happens and some people cash out of it.
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.