kotrfa comments on Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Less Wrong

80 Post author: RobbBB 13 March 2015 03:11PM

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Comment author: kotrfa 13 March 2015 04:24:34PM *  7 points [-]

Can I know to who and where the money for the book goes?

Comment author: alexvermeer 13 March 2015 04:40:17PM 13 points [-]

From Amazon, 30% goes to Amazon and 70% goes to MIRI.

From e-junkie (the pay-what-you-want option): 100% goes to MIRI, minus PayPal transaction fees (a few %).

Comment author: DanielLC 14 March 2015 02:25:19AM 7 points [-]

Couldn't you pay $0.00, send the money to MIRI, and avoid transaction fees?

Comment author: alexvermeer 14 March 2015 03:38:23AM 1 point [-]

Yup, but those are convenient distribution platforms.

Comment author: RobbBB 15 March 2015 05:55:49AM 7 points [-]

Yeah. Main reason to do it this way is fear of trivial inconveniences.

Comment author: malo 15 March 2015 04:17:38PM 3 points [-]

Depending on how you sent money to MIRI, we'd incur transaction fees anyway (donating through PayPal using a PayPal account or CC). ACH donations have lower fees, and checks don't have any, but both of those take staff time to process, so unless the donation was say $50 or more, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 March 2015 05:26:18PM 1 point [-]

What about Bitcoin?

Comment author: ike 15 March 2015 06:21:31PM 1 point [-]

They use coinbase, so according to this it's free up to $1 million.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 March 2015 07:29:12PM 1 point [-]

It should be free, period. Coinbase doesn't charge fees for registered non-for-profits.

Comment author: malo 15 March 2015 11:56:30PM 5 points [-]

No fees, but also takes some extra staff time (additional bookkeeping/accounting work is involved), so there is some cost to it. If we got more BTC donations it would reduce the time cost per donation, due to effects of batching, but as it stands now, they are usually processed (record added to our donor database and accounting software) on an individual basis.

One thing that takes a significant amount of time is when someone mis-pays a Coinbase invoice (sends a different amount of BTC then they indicated on the Coinbase form on our site). Coinbase treats these payments in a different way that ends up requiring more time to process on our end.

All that being said we like having the BTC donation option, and it always makes me happy to see one come in. So if making contributions via BTC is your preference, I'm all for it :)

Comment author: adamzerner 15 March 2015 01:32:04PM 3 points [-]

Perhaps this should be noted in the main article. I was thinking about buying it through Amazon until I saw this!