In the summer of 2024, in Europe, there was this petition to #TaxTheRich that needed to get 1 million signatures. Had this number been reached, the EU politicians would *have* to discuss the topic.
We had a year to get the 1 million signatures, but even after 10 months we still had only 250,000 signatures.
No sane working-class person can be against #TaxTheRich, so I figured it's only because nobody even hears of the existence of this petitition that it never took off.
As the deadline came closer and closer, I saw the petitition shared more and more on Mastodon. But Mastodon is a tiny network. With our cozy little bubble we would never find 750,000 signatures in less than two months. What we needed was a person with a massive reach to boost the initiative. A single "influencer" with a few million followers could get us the 750,000 missing signatures within a day.
So I figured a promising winning strategy is to write to a few YouTubers with large followings. You can imagine how that went, but I thought it worth a try, and then I could at least say I didn't leave a single stone unturned.
I wrote to Ali Abdaal, since he had already mentioned (and made a few videos about) the "10% Pledge", about donating to charities for the rest of his life.
aliabdaal.com/giving-what-we-c…
At the time, in the summer of 2024, he also flew his entire team to Turkey for some "off-site"/"workcation". He apparently ran out of ideas for videos to create to keep the needy YouTube algorithm happy, so he just filmed himself and his crew having a holiday in a rented mansion with a swimming pool, masquerading as work and planning quarterly goals or whatever. Imagine the CO2 emissions of flying 15 people or so to an "off-site"/vacation.
Of course I never received an answer from Ali Abdaal, who was portraying himself being serious about giving away 10% of the money he makes. Of course I foresaw that beforehand but thought it worth a try. The deadline passed and #TaxTheRich didn't even come close to the necessary number of signatures.
Only later (after the deadline had passed) did I learn that "Giving What We Can" is founded by Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Bernadette Young. It's Effective Altruism.
