Has anyone talked with/lobbied the Gates Foundation on factory farming? I was concerned to read this in Gates Notes. "On the way back to Addis, we stopped at a poultry farm established by the Oromia government to help young people enter the poultry industry. They work there for two or three years, earn a salary and some start-up money, and then go off to start their own agriculture businesses. It was a noisy place—the farm has 20,000 chickens! But it was exciting to meet some aspiring farmers and businesspeople with big dreams." It seems a disaster that the Gates foundation are funding and promoting the rapid scale up of factory farming in Africa, and reversing this seems potentially tractable to me. Could individuals, Gates insiders or the big animal rights orgs take this up?  

Brazil has been dealing with massive criminal wildfires for the last few weeks, and the air quality is record-breakingly bad. Besides other obvious issues (ineffective government response in going after the criminals setting fires, climate change making everything worse), hardly anyone is talking about how to deal with the immediate air quality problem. It's a bit bizarre. People aren't widely adopting PFF2 masks and air purifiers. These remain somewhat niche topics even though pretty much everyone is suffering. To be fair, there are occasional media reports and government alerts about how to deal with the situation, but these feel too little, and one only gets them if actively looking for them. 1. It's affecting tens of millions of people (scale ✓) 2. Barely anyone is really addressing it (neglectedness ✓) 3. We have simple solutions that could help a lot (tractability ✓) It feels like there's potential for some serious impact if one approaches this right. It may be a severe case of availability bias, but all this is making me value air quality more as an EA cause area.

Someone needs to be doing mass outreach about AI Safety to techies in the Bay Area. I'm generally more of a fan of niche outreach over mass outreach, but Bay Area tech culture influences how AI is developed. If SB 1047 is defeated, I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of such outreach ended up being a decisive factor. There's now enough prominent supporters of AI Safety and AI is hot enough that public lectures or debates could draw a big crowd. Even though a lot of people have been exposed to these ideas before, there's something about in-person events that make ideas seem real.

Nonprofit organizations should make their sources of funding really obvious and clear: How much money you got from which grantmakers, and approximately when. Any time I go on some org's website and can't find information about their major funders, it's a big red flag. At a bare minimum you should have a list of funders, and I'm confused why more orgs don't do this.

The original website for Students for High Impact Charities (SHIC) at https://shicschools.org is down (You can find it in the Wayback Machine), but the program scripts and slides they used in high schools are still available at their google drive link at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_2KLuBlcCg4QWtrYW43UGcwajQ Could potentially be a valuable EA community building resource