Sure. I am interested in new economic models and Slow Money gave me a chance to explore investing with accredited and non-accredited investors into local enterprises, particularly those in or adjacent to the food system. This felt new to me, though it is a variant of impact investing which has been around for decades. My time was before the 0% interest loans, which is a new model that I haven't participated in. Woody has been in the financial and non-profit world for years, so this was a golden opportunity to get the chance to work next to him.
I believe you have a few levers to make change in the world:
* your livelihood
* your free time
* your spending
* your investing
I invested because I wanted to see what change we could accomplish with this group of investors. I learned how hard it is to properly evaluate lending to businesses (from many angles, including recruiting businesses to apply for loans, even low interest ones). To be blunt, the end results weren't good in terms of capital return. I do think we impacted the local food ecosystem in a positive way, but there's a reason risk departments are not run by committees of volunteers.
I'm excited to see the new experiments the Slow Money folks are working on. I think that is room and need for some new economic models and am encouraged smart passionate folks continue to work on this.
1. Worse. Geographic areas that already have a lot of wealth would receive a ton of investment, and poorer areas would struggle to access funds.
2. That'd be cool. Not sure how anything on the website addresses/encourages/works towards that.
3. We would need to use less commercial fertilizer, right?
(This is meant somewhat sarcastically - I guess I just don't understand what these questions are actually meant to drive at, because taken at face value they seem sort of meaningless to me.)
All organic matters are not all made equal. I have potassium in mind : mined potassium is essential to the high yields of industrial agriculture. You don't strictly need it and you can rely on locally sourced organic matters, but it'll never beat mining fertilizer and spraying it.
Besides that, if your soil is poor to start with, you'll need to concentrate organic matter from a large area into a small spot that will become arable. For example, my ancestors were living in a swampy marsh, aka Aquitaine coast 150 years ago. They were raising large herds of sheeps feeding on low nutrients shrubbery. Then all those sheep's would rest on one specific plot, where they would eventually poop. On that plot, barley would be grown, as thanks to the sheeps poop, the ground was fertile enough.
Compare that to area where the soil is very fertile (say, Ukraine or Moldavia)
1. Rich places would remain rich, poor places would remain poor, many far-away riches would stay untapped. Many dirty manufacturing plants would be closer to densely populated areas. Investing in geographically large things would become harder, with agriculture, forestry, and mining affected most severely.
2. Most companies would show very minimal or negative profits, as they already often do now. It's basically 50% tax on profits, only administered not by state but by the companies themselves. Some funds would be allocated better, some would be "given away" to various schemes funnelling the money back.
3. Maybe soils would be more fertile. Maybe the other way around: a bog is full of organic matter (drowned plants), but does not particularly teem with life.
What saddens me is that these arguments are poetic, not rational, but are positioned as a down-to-earth program. Such things are a recipe for disaster as often as unbridled greed is.
Beetcoin (some organization) takes donations. The Slow Money Institute (some other organization) then makes grants to local 0% loan groups (some other groups, and local to who?) which matches Beetcoin-donations with donations from other individuals (more donations from where?) to match (or what, it doesn't get loaned out?). What capital is this double-donation loan against?
https://beetcoin.org/movement (the original link, actually) has a list of the groups (you have to scroll down; the UX is, well, to say problematic is a bit generous).
It's crowdfunding for local food producers with 0% loans. Another comment mentioned Kiva. It's similar.
There is a button when you scroll down that says "If you're a boomer, you should click here". I feel like that's enough on its own to completely undermine any credibility and gravitas a site might have. I can't imagine donating money to be managed by a group of people who decide to inject generational politics into this for utterly no reason.
Clicking on the link (omg am I even allowed to?? I'm not a boomer!) yields some kind of manifesto about racism, 1%ers, AI, slavery, social justice, and silicon valley? What the hell am I even reading, honestly.
Yeah it's the website equivalent of your uncle that starts the conversation with a reasonable sounding topic to lure you in before unleashing all his beliefs about the government on you.
Yeah, that was a pretty big turn-off for me as well.
Like, I'm down for the 0% recirculating loans to local farmers (I like this a lot), but reading that manifesto really made me uncertain as to whether there were more goals besides helping out local farmers that I was implicitly signing up for too here.
If I want to donate some money to help out small-scale farmers, but don't want to eat the rich, is this still the place for me? Reading that link left me unsure.
In the context of this page, it looks like they are talking about literal baby boomers, by virtue of the author associating with them ("dear fellow boomers").
But whew, just using it as slang for somebody who is out of touch is some next-level condescension. Cut that out.
Boomer is a way of putting a group down. It's elitist and I'm shocked by the people who use it. Most would try hard not to offend other sections of society.
Someone who is out of touch with what exactly? TikTok memes? Its easier now than ever to be somewhat out of touch with whatever trend youth is following, but you cannot follow all that, have a full-time job, a family, and following the stuff which is relevant for you (as a 30/40/50/60/70/80/90 something).
So for me, that slang just means people who are older than me who have a different reference because they are in a different point in life.
However because 'we' (those who have passed youth and young adolescence) are older we are supposed to feel empathy for youth. We've been their age, but not vice versa. So I suppose that is the goal, with an explanation of what is different in this time compared to when I was young (e.g. 2001 vs 2021).
Where's the investment sense in zero-percent loans (regardless of whether they're made to farmers or not)? If you're asking people to finance in something without an expectation of return, then call a spade a spade and call it a charity.
33 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.9 ms ] threadI believe you have a few levers to make change in the world:
I invested because I wanted to see what change we could accomplish with this group of investors. I learned how hard it is to properly evaluate lending to businesses (from many angles, including recruiting businesses to apply for loans, even low interest ones). To be blunt, the end results weren't good in terms of capital return. I do think we impacted the local food ecosystem in a positive way, but there's a reason risk departments are not run by committees of volunteers.I'm excited to see the new experiments the Slow Money folks are working on. I think that is room and need for some new economic models and am encouraged smart passionate folks continue to work on this.
Why not? Do you not enjoy investing with guaranteed 0% return (actually negative return factoring in inflation) but all the regular risk?
There's a couple of books as well: https://slowmoney.org/publications
What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?"
The goal is to relocalize economies (particularly food) through local investment.
1. Worse. Geographic areas that already have a lot of wealth would receive a ton of investment, and poorer areas would struggle to access funds.
2. That'd be cool. Not sure how anything on the website addresses/encourages/works towards that.
3. We would need to use less commercial fertilizer, right?
(This is meant somewhat sarcastically - I guess I just don't understand what these questions are actually meant to drive at, because taken at face value they seem sort of meaningless to me.)
All organic matters are not all made equal. I have potassium in mind : mined potassium is essential to the high yields of industrial agriculture. You don't strictly need it and you can rely on locally sourced organic matters, but it'll never beat mining fertilizer and spraying it.
Besides that, if your soil is poor to start with, you'll need to concentrate organic matter from a large area into a small spot that will become arable. For example, my ancestors were living in a swampy marsh, aka Aquitaine coast 150 years ago. They were raising large herds of sheeps feeding on low nutrients shrubbery. Then all those sheep's would rest on one specific plot, where they would eventually poop. On that plot, barley would be grown, as thanks to the sheeps poop, the ground was fertile enough.
Compare that to area where the soil is very fertile (say, Ukraine or Moldavia)
2. Most companies would show very minimal or negative profits, as they already often do now. It's basically 50% tax on profits, only administered not by state but by the companies themselves. Some funds would be allocated better, some would be "given away" to various schemes funnelling the money back.
3. Maybe soils would be more fertile. Maybe the other way around: a bog is full of organic matter (drowned plants), but does not particularly teem with life.
What saddens me is that these arguments are poetic, not rational, but are positioned as a down-to-earth program. Such things are a recipe for disaster as often as unbridled greed is.
I second this. Leveraging the crypto trend with the term "Beetcoin". The whole site feels like a hippie inspired marketing scam.
> This is probably the best short explanation: https://slowmoney.org/about/principles
This is marketspeak.
> There's a couple of books as well: https://slowmoney.org/publications
Pointing to long-form high level abstracts is not an explanation.
https://beetcoin.org/how-it-works is a nightmarishly poor breakdown.
Beetcoin (some organization) takes donations. The Slow Money Institute (some other organization) then makes grants to local 0% loan groups (some other groups, and local to who?) which matches Beetcoin-donations with donations from other individuals (more donations from where?) to match (or what, it doesn't get loaned out?). What capital is this double-donation loan against?
It's crowdfunding for local food producers with 0% loans. Another comment mentioned Kiva. It's similar.
Clicking on the link (omg am I even allowed to?? I'm not a boomer!) yields some kind of manifesto about racism, 1%ers, AI, slavery, social justice, and silicon valley? What the hell am I even reading, honestly.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Like, I'm down for the 0% recirculating loans to local farmers (I like this a lot), but reading that manifesto really made me uncertain as to whether there were more goals besides helping out local farmers that I was implicitly signing up for too here.
If I want to donate some money to help out small-scale farmers, but don't want to eat the rich, is this still the place for me? Reading that link left me unsure.
https://www.kiva.org/lend/filter?sector=Agriculture&countrie...
But whew, just using it as slang for somebody who is out of touch is some next-level condescension. Cut that out.
So for me, that slang just means people who are older than me who have a different reference because they are in a different point in life.
However because 'we' (those who have passed youth and young adolescence) are older we are supposed to feel empathy for youth. We've been their age, but not vice versa. So I suppose that is the goal, with an explanation of what is different in this time compared to when I was young (e.g. 2001 vs 2021).