4 ms·

I live a couple hours drive from where this scat was collected; the local wildlife centre here has a box full of plastic "usually considered disposable items" t

I live a couple hours drive from where this scat was collected; the local wildlife centre here has a box full of plastic "usually considered disposable items" that came out of an albatross stomach on display. It's absolutely gross, you can start being concerned now please.

bacon_waffle 8y ago
While I've got an audience: I do embedded electronics/firmware for my day job, and literally this morning bowed out of a volunteer project building a monitoring system for that same local wildlife centre [1]. I have a good job, and am kept busy between it, upkeep of a small home, and a healthy-ish mix of fun and volunteer stuff - just can't make time for that project. It's a good life, I am very lucky and am not trying to complain. But, isn't it a bit weird that we collectively make decisions that lead to this sort of situation - where I'm spending my day getting a VoIP phone better (OK, posting on HN), instead of helping out make the world better? I'd love to be able to dial back the "real job" to put more effort in to this sort of thing, but it just doesn't seem like our industry would be OK with a 20-hour work week. And, it doesn't seem that the conservation groups would be able to pay market rates for engineering work, which is also a shame. How can we fix this? [1] https://albatross.org.nz/ https://albatross.org.nz/ Basically, what's wanted is a system to 1) alert the staff when people peek under the lids of nest boxes for penguins, and 2) attempt to read the RFID tags implanted in those birds, so that when one parent doesn't come home, their egg/chick can be rescued (lose 1 bird instead of 3).
- kinow 8y ago
  That's a very good question. I know a few companies here in Auckland that give their employees some days per year to work on volunteer projects. Maybe that could be extended to longer periods? Another alternative is to use industry veterans. We have few from programming background, but I believe that might change in a few years?
  - bacon_waffle 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure my employer would be OK with a few days/year too, but what I'm getting at is: Our society makes it impractical for skilled workers to put in more like months/year in to socially beneficial projects, what can we do to fix that?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- taneq 8y ago
  Sadly the overlap between "things that you think ought to be important" (like monitoring wildlife) and "things that are economically important enough for someone to pay you for" is pretty small. Saving an penguin chick is laudable but who's going to pay you for it? Maybe a charity-funded organisation, but (even if well funded) those seem to still use volunteers rather than paid work. Tech companies don't want 20hr/wk workers because of the investment required to bring a worker up to speed in any given company, and the amount of 'live' knowledge required to be productive. I'd expect two workers at 20hr/wk to be much less productive than one worker at 40hr/wk.
  - bacon_waffle 8y ago
    That seems like a restatement of the problem, but is worded like an explanation. So, I probably didn't word my post clearly and will try again: Imagine two people at retirement age, who have each worked full careers at a similar skill level and with similar devotions to their jobs. One of them worked at solving hunger* , the other worked on consumer electronics. Which provided more benefit to society, and by how much? The system we've got seems to say that the work done by the person who worked on consumer electronics is several times as valuable, and to me that seems wrong. I'm asking for ways that we could change the system, so that that penguin monitoring project (for example) doesn't have to be "volunteer time" rather than "work time". * or environmental conservation, social equality, curing cancer, whatever floats your boat.
- Iv 8y ago
  I used to make tools for people who model epidemics. Then our budget shifted to instead focus on making pretty graphs for decision makers. > How can we fix this? Politics. There is no way around it. Money will go into what rich people are interested in. Public spending is the way to make it go in other directions. Unless you have an idea to profit off wildlife monitoring, you'll need a public official convinced that this is a project worth doing.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  What had you tried? (I hypothesize that) electronics might be a problem with embryos whose future survival depends on reading correctly the magnetic field of the earth. 1) There are weight traps able to differenciate among a human and a small rodent or penguin. You should study that in your system. Is basically a plate buried in soil that acts as a switch when someone steps over there.

bacon_waffle 8y ago

While I've got an audience: I do embedded electronics/firmware for my day job, and literally this morning bowed out of a volunteer project building a monitoring system for that same local wildlife centre [1]. I have a good job, and am kept busy between it, upkeep of a small home, and a healthy-ish mix of fun and volunteer stuff - just can't make time for that project. It's a good life, I am very lucky and am not trying to complain. But, isn't it a bit weird that we collectively make decisions that lead to this sort of situation - where I'm spending my day getting a VoIP phone better (OK, posting on HN), instead of helping out make the world better? I'd love to be able to dial back the "real job" to put more effort in to this sort of thing, but it just doesn't seem like our industry would be OK with a 20-hour work week. And, it doesn't seem that the conservation groups would be able to pay market rates for engineering work, which is also a shame. How can we fix this? [1] https://albatross.org.nz/ https://albatross.org.nz/ Basically, what's wanted is a system to 1) alert the staff when people peek under the lids of nest boxes for penguins, and 2) attempt to read the RFID tags implanted in those birds, so that when one parent doesn't come home, their egg/chick can be rescued (lose 1 bird instead of 3).

kinow 8y ago
That's a very good question. I know a few companies here in Auckland that give their employees some days per year to work on volunteer projects. Maybe that could be extended to longer periods? Another alternative is to use industry veterans. We have few from programming background, but I believe that might change in a few years?
- bacon_waffle 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure my employer would be OK with a few days/year too, but what I'm getting at is: Our society makes it impractical for skilled workers to put in more like months/year in to socially beneficial projects, what can we do to fix that?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
taneq 8y ago
Sadly the overlap between "things that you think ought to be important" (like monitoring wildlife) and "things that are economically important enough for someone to pay you for" is pretty small. Saving an penguin chick is laudable but who's going to pay you for it? Maybe a charity-funded organisation, but (even if well funded) those seem to still use volunteers rather than paid work. Tech companies don't want 20hr/wk workers because of the investment required to bring a worker up to speed in any given company, and the amount of 'live' knowledge required to be productive. I'd expect two workers at 20hr/wk to be much less productive than one worker at 40hr/wk.
- bacon_waffle 8y ago
  That seems like a restatement of the problem, but is worded like an explanation. So, I probably didn't word my post clearly and will try again: Imagine two people at retirement age, who have each worked full careers at a similar skill level and with similar devotions to their jobs. One of them worked at solving hunger* , the other worked on consumer electronics. Which provided more benefit to society, and by how much? The system we've got seems to say that the work done by the person who worked on consumer electronics is several times as valuable, and to me that seems wrong. I'm asking for ways that we could change the system, so that that penguin monitoring project (for example) doesn't have to be "volunteer time" rather than "work time". * or environmental conservation, social equality, curing cancer, whatever floats your boat.
Iv 8y ago
I used to make tools for people who model epidemics. Then our budget shifted to instead focus on making pretty graphs for decision makers. > How can we fix this? Politics. There is no way around it. Money will go into what rich people are interested in. Public spending is the way to make it go in other directions. Unless you have an idea to profit off wildlife monitoring, you'll need a public official convinced that this is a project worth doing.
pvaldes 8y ago
What had you tried? (I hypothesize that) electronics might be a problem with embryos whose future survival depends on reading correctly the magnetic field of the earth. 1) There are weight traps able to differenciate among a human and a small rodent or penguin. You should study that in your system. Is basically a plate buried in soil that acts as a switch when someone steps over there.