ricecake

What are you even talking about?

Check engine light? That's fine, if it goes wrong it's just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That's a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?

Just a reminder that the national review is a garbage rag and a biased source.

The judge had questions about the process used to decide the onion had won, and reviewed the information. That's not the same as blocking the sale.
A hearing is normal after the sale of assets, and the people making the claim that it's not are the other buyer, which is ... Alex Jones.

Jones was accused of peddling the narrative that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers twelve years ago, was a massive hoax designed to get federal gun-control legislation enacted. The plaintiffs alleged Jones defamed them on his show and inflicted emotional distress.

That's a very slanted way to say "Jones was convicted of defamation and inflicting emotional distress on the families of a school shooting by insisting their children weren't real".

https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-infowars-auction-onion-how-d42e7b2c916205b348628686c8b8dd4a

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lb3hecp7l22k

Looking at the profiles for the executives, you definitely get the feeling that they're either the sort that prioritizes "my work put good into the world and you don't need to squint to see it" over cash, so "yeah, that lets me live" is sufficient, or their seemingly going for a high score for number of "oh, nice!" organizations they can put on their CV, and the total compensation from them all is probably more than competitive.

first article that popped up with reliable numbera

Except...the numbers weren't reliable. Where did they get $400 million in cash from? That's just not a thing.

$100 million is purely cash on hand, it doesn't take into account any otger WMF assets.

It's $80 million cash, $274M counting all assets, like it says in the audit and my comment.

unsurprisingly, the WMF reports that WMF are spending their money responsibly and are barely managing to sustain themselves

Are you saying that their financial audit is fraudulent? "Wikipedia is committing tax fraud" is a pretty hot take, not gonna lie.
Their financial report also doesn't claim they're barely scraping by, so I'm not sure where you're getting that.

Wikipedia has plenty of money, they spend it irresponsibly

That's a different argument which you seemingly haven't actually argued. "They make enough money, here's some incorrect financial claims to justify it" is very different from "I don't think they spend money wisely, and need to change what they spend on".

it's nice that you're excited about Wikipedia, and it can be a useful resource, but these are not contentious facts.

I never actually made a statement for or against donation, I only pointed out that your information was incorrect. "$400 million cash" is a very different situation than "$80 million cash".
I'm gonna disagree very strongly that these are "not contentious facts", because they're not correct in the slightest. Being off by $320 million dollars strongly undercuts the credibility of an argument.

Honestly, I'm confused about why you seem so angry at Wikipedia.

Yes, I am ageist about facts. What a weird thing to take issue with. The financial state of an organization two years ago doesn't have as much bearing on if they should get donations as the current financial statement does.
Does this financial statement from 2006 feel just as relevant and make you want to donate to them?

That article is at least accurate in how it describes their financial situation. It's also kind of amusing that the author concludes that donation is reasonable:

So, bottom line: Should someone with financial means donate when they see Wikipedia’s banner ads running in December? It depends. In my view, people who volunteer a lot of time improving Wikipedia’s content have already made their “gift” and should feel no obligation. For everyone else, the calculus is personal. One volunteer suggested donating to smaller but allied organizations like OpenStreetMap, which provides map data that is used for Wikipedia pages. Other contributors said that even if Wikipedia is only indirectly supported by the WMF, the WMF is still the best-positioned organization to advance free knowledge overall by virtue of its scale and connections.

Clearly, Wikipedians are right to engage in vigorous discussion about how donations are solicited from visitors and to oversee how those funds are actually spent. For me, there’s also the small matter of the external environment. In recent years, Wikipedia has been attacked by authoritarian regimes and powerful billionaires—people who do not necessarily benefit from the free flow of neutral information. If $3 helps hold them off, then that’s coffee money well spent.

I donate a bit each year, and I wouldn't say they are bothersome. I get an email once a year where they ask if I'd like to donate again, not counting the receipt from the actual donation. It seems disingenuous to complain about the receipt.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikimedia_Foundation_2024_Audited_Financial_Statements.pdf

https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

They have approximately $80 million in cash, and it costs them about $100 million to pay their staff. They have $274 million in total assets, counting endowment investments.

It's extremely unclear where that site came up with $400 million.

I'm not sure why you'd link to a two year old opinion piece on it, when all of their financials are publicly available and provided without commentary.

They received cash in excess of expenses of about $6 million, and including non-cash assets their total assets increased by about $16 million in 2024.

Their CEO makes about $500 thousand a year, and the rest of their executive team ranges in salary from $300 to $100 thousand.
It's not a small salary, but it's not preposterous for one of the most visited sites in the Internet that also operates as a charity to have decently compensated executives.

They are not in financial trouble, but it's not accurate to say they can keep the lights on for the next 50 years.

Not sure I get what you mean by "slow".

And it's not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we've been building and less of the one we stopped building.

He kept his two income streams tied together, so that when one ran into trouble it took the other one down with it. He could have just as easily kept the business separate and potentially been able to keep one of the income streams working when the shit hit the fan.

Depends on what he means by "ultra-processed", but you can bet that it's probably not a reasonable criteria that he'll be using.

The man isn't rational, and doesn't base his conclusions on sound reasoning.

Note the call to lessen regulations around "raw milk, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine". That's pretty insane.

And I can almost be certain that what they'll do is eliminate funding for snap benefits and school lunches going to what they'll classify as "ultra processed foods", without adjusting funding to account for what they left behind being significantly more expensive. Some definitions of "ultra-processed" include things like "store bought bread", "frozen meals", "soup concentrate", "yoghurt" and "sausage".
Call me cynical, but I think if you apply the stricter work requirements for benefits they always want, while reducing the scope of the benefits to cover fewer things, and almost nothing helpful for the people with the severe time restrictions the work requirements can cause you'll end up seeing people use the benefits far less often, because they give less usable food for the money. Then they'll use that to justify reducing the size of the program even further.

We expect people making school lunches to make hundreds of meals that finish at the same time, to have the meal be nutritionally complete, tasty, and now also not use frozen or premade ingredients. We give them literally $1 for the ingredients for these meals, and maybe another $2 for operational overhead like labor costs and equipment.
Saying you can't use canned tomato sauce, peanut butter, pre-packaged bread or ground meats is basically just cutting funding for feeding children under the guise of not paying for a scary sounding classification of food.

Ha! I didn't see that at first. I love "fuck you so hard that we can and will put a significant dollar value on it being more humiliating".

The assets were auctioned off to pay his debt to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting.
So effectively they gave money to the families of children killed in a school shooting that he slandered in cruel and vile ways.

Given that the families pretty reasonably dislike him, the added bonus of his creation being used to openly mock him and promote a message they endorse is quality icing on the cake.