Even assuming good intent, that was extremely silly from them to donate their money away when they don't have anything to begin with. This either assumes that the community is wiser at doing their work (doesn't sound to be the case), or that they were betting that it'll work out one way or another (most likely through another donation) – not realizing that such a donation is exactly what guarantees their organization's future.

They ARE "the community" that should be turning that money into actually useful things. Non-profits should not donate money. They should spend it or allocate it as grants.

I think that a charity that just funnels money to other charities is very suspicious and needs to be really on top of its stuff to not just seem like an enterprise for skimming money off other people's goodwill.

Who solves the problems if the leadership steps down, without any real resources to speak of?

I would imagine a condition of the funding would be to restructure and get the right people in place to continue the mission, ideally more responsibly.

Like, the entire article is saying "we fucked up in various ways" but there is no accountability piece to speak of. Just an ask for more money for a ground up rebuild.

> Just an ask for more money for a ground up rebuild

That seems to misunderstand what they're asking for. As far as I understand, they're asking for money to build version 5, by using everything they built so far. It's not a "ground up rebuild" by any measure, but funding for the next iteration seems to be missing.

I am literally referencing the article:

> It will mean rebuilding things from the ground up, which requires much more help and resources than before.

In what way is 'ground up rebuild' a misunderstanding of 'rebuilding things from the ground up'?

I guess there are two things at play. What "ground up rebuild" really means, and a mismatch between what the video says and what the article says.

The video, at the 300s mark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gTd36cQLzY&t=300s) mentions the current state, and where they are right now, and that they'd need funding to reach the last step. And that it would be a shame to lose the previous steps, when they're "so close" or whatever. So just doing that last step, while keeping the previous ones intact, wouldn't really be "rebuilding from the ground up", at least in my opinion.

But then yeah, the article says "rebuilding things from the ground up" but I'm not sure that's really "tear everything including the community down and start from scratch" but more about how to build "Version 5", about the machines and hardware itself.

But that's me trying to be charitable and understand something that isn't 100% clearly outlined, as you say.

I think the charitable middle ground no matter how you slice it is that whatever funding they receive should in part go towards bringing talent on board that can help them grow and avoid repeating past mistakes. Maybe nobody steps down but they invest in an experienced staff.

They specifically call out the sustainability of the organisation so if it keeps PP going and even just iterating on V4 or growing it such that they can innovate on V5, that's a good use of funding that could rebuild confidence in the team and keep the overall mission going.

If they plug it all into V5, which doesn't seem to be clearly defined, then at some level that might not be any different than giving away $100k to the community. It's a gamble from a donor's point of view, might as well crowd fund it on kickstarter.

You know these people are volunteers, right?

Even the ones getting paid, are making a tiny fraction of what they could in the private sector doing something more greedy with their time.

Life is not all startup exits and stock options. Some folks are actually trying to do good in the world.

Sure, they should have kept the 100k, but giving it away was well aligned with their mission.

There is a world beyond startup exits and stock options and it is a sustainable non profit public good entity. It blows my mind that HN doesn’t have this nuance but I guess the fog of war sets in outside of the Bay Area in California and nobody can see shit outside of the lingering mist of Silicon Valley.

Is it not better to be supported in your effort to do good by being able to volunteer for a stable non-profit over many years? That organisation would have a long term presence and huge influence. It could even lobby the local council or government.

In case you’re confused - the church does that and it is 100% dependent on volunteers who believe.

People see it just fine.

The difference is that startups are generally very motivated to spend their money well, and non-profits are... not.

It's the difference between the profit motive (simple and easy to understand) and just hoping that the nonprofit leadership is individually motivated (which is much more communicated and hard to verify).

When a startup blows up from overspending, a few investors are out their own money. When a nonprofit does, it tends to stiff the well-meaning public that trusted it with their cash.

The two are not the same. Nobody cares about the rich making a bad investment, but whenever a nonprofit blows up it gets so much harder for the remaining ones to raise money.

Your solution seems to include asking for a lot more money, to recruit outside leadership to work on what looks very much like an ambitious passion project right now, and coming up with a solution to turn it all around before funding runs dry while honoring the core idea behind the project (because that is what people will be donating/funding towards) — instead of betting on the current, apparently intrinsically motivated staff to maybe learn from their mistakes and do what they can to turn this around.

That strikes me, by far, as the more unrealistic solution.

My solution is actually to fuck off this mysterious version 5, that isn’t even defined, and to make PP a serious operation by growing v4 and putting a serious team around it.

Right now it’s not serious. It’s literally the gambler’s fallacy - “we failed but we’re so close”

They use that language, verbatim, in the post. Asking you to chase the loss with them. “We’re so close we just need your support!”

Call me cynical, but I see organizations as being right-wing simply by existing as organizations in the sense that somebody in in charge, they induce a hierarchy, etc. As an organization gets larger, more established and more "sustainable" you see increasingly that the purpose of a system is what it does. [1]

One problem I've been thinking of is how community organizations can stay in touch with people online without centralized social media. The backdrop is here [2] and a good example of an anti-social media local organization is [3].

I'd trust a rag-tag group of web developers working on their own account to have a good chance of doing a good job of building out and promoting this kind of platform. If you could just pay people without having an organization or fundraising, $500k would go a long way. If a big non-profit, say the United Way, gave it a try, it would value groupthink more than competence and I think would struggle to develop an effective team and the budget would stretch into the $5-50M range. It would certainly spend more on overhead than it would on action. Worse yet, a group like that might solicit grants, but grants would go to people who are good at getting grants, not good at making web sites, so you might as well piss the money away.

"Sustainable" is the word non-profits use for "profitable" and if there is a big risk in non-profits it is that they are every bit if not more niggardly than billionaires yet without the profit motive you can't approach management and say "we can improve our process efficiency by 5% and pocket the improvement" (radical when repeated) or "here's a new venture that could expand our market by 30%"

I don't understand his situation completely, and I can also understand that making this into a real business (profit or not) is necessary to make it sustainable, but I can also see the fear of creating a monster [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_or_Die

[3] https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

[4] Oxfam, Bill Gates, and company will do anything for Africa except help them develop a real economy that the state can tax and provide services

There's a famous essay about unstructured groups. They aren't actually free of hierarchy and structure, it's just informal.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

That essay is important but I think looking back it over 50 years it poses a question that hasn't yet been answered.

That kind of unstructured group can advocate for (say) women, but if you add enough structure it becomes a group that writes checks to Democratic candidates. The most effective activist organizations I've been with have been temporary and deal with the structure/structureless/sustainability problem of melting into the crowd and reforming when necessary.

(...I just think you haven't channeled enough of your schizotypy here :)

(I suspect one can find under-interpreted arguments in Graeber that support your unpopular claim but...)

In contrast, what seems really interesting (to me, &/or not just HN-blasphemous) is the alternate framing that

  Free markets can be extreme left-wing 

Can follow up on the discussion if you're interested-- maybe the real trouble is that Glen Weyl & Freedman haven't been proven crackpots

>That essay is important

In order to NOT be distracted by Freeman's essay, consider that it most likely hasnt ever crossed their minds that markets that look free can have much more intricate structure than the most uh thoughtful institution? Whether structure correlates with sentience is then the nub?

Then there's the apparent counterpoint of a field known as "institutional econs"; not quite as friendly a framing to schizos :(

This Graeber

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

?

More specifically:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535498

(The HN just for completeness; didn't see any remarkable dismissals there.. ntheless some (schizoid?) comments seemed worthy of being kept in my background eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548795 )

https://archive.is/latest/www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/0...

>After such a catastrophic embarrassment, orthodox economists fell back on their strong suit—academic politics and institutional power.

From what I've seen of the Precious Plastic project and its offshoots over the years (mostly from afar, though), I think would find quite a few people asking similar questions and having intense discussions about such subjects there. ;-)

I’ll call you cynical and say your entire first paragraph about organisations being right wing is total and utter tripe. And the rest of your diatribe doesn’t improve on it.

I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.

I can't shake the feeling that this a dream that was pursued by people who (at least for a time) didn't need the income, and not technology that was under any pressure to actually work. Something like a lifestyle business, but in this case, maybe a lifestyle charity.

The article is full of "community" this and "local people" that, and very low on details. The little that is there raises red flags. For example: The fact that their rented machine shop had to close down is given as an explanation for them having to sell all their machines below cost and then not having the money to buy the machines back when they found a new place. That doesn't add up: temporary storage spaces exist and aren't even expensive, given that you can choose a remote location. It seems like a crucial detail was left out, maybe one that would paint them in a bad light.

I gather that they sell (apparently unsafe?) wood chippers, presses and some injection moulds, probably at cost. I don't understand what else is there. The "version 4" release thing mentioned in the article might be their open-source "academy" [1, 2] that's supposed to teach you how to start your local recycling shop. It includes valuable tips like "add all your expenses" and "don't forget to include taxes" and comes complete with an empty Excel sheet -- I'm sorry, a "Business Calculator". No commits since 2020, so the "version 5" of this guide that they claim to have been working on for five years must be hosted somewhere on a private GitHub fork instead. I'm sure it's awesome. Best of luck.

[1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/business/works...

[2] https://github.com/ONEARMY/precious-plastic-kit

Moving a machine shop is not easy. A decent knee mill is about 2000 lbs. Disassembly is possible but you need a hoist or crane of some sort. Then you have to lift that into a vehicle like a pickup truck, trailer or box/flat bed truck. Then repeat the process at the storage location, then all again to move it to the new location. It seems the people involved did not want to or have the ability to tackle this. Paying a rigger is possible but the cost is very high.

I'll just assume they sold below cost to get people to bring their own equipment to take the machinery away at zero cost to them.

Or they bought warehouse space without doing due dil and they were holding the bag on a property that wasn’t up to code.

So that’s actually on them, too.

Due diligence won't catch every single problem every time. Luck is as much a part of success in business as solving the right problem at the right time. Supporting small business matters to ensure that enough people try to succeed as is necessary to get over the multitude of challenges that impede progress.

I'm reminded of a clip of Mark Cuban talking about his biggest WTF?'s from Shark Tank. One business owner made a product for $15 cost, and sold it for $30, but they were burning cash.

Mark's story is that he asked the owner about it and noticed she was offering free shipping "to make the customer happy". Cost of shipping was, of course, $16.