ricecake

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.

His supplement business was under the same business ownership? That's preposterously stupid and hilarious.

I can actually forgive this one. A lot of medical devices regulations require that if you function as something or make it available, then you need to pass the certification for offering it.
You can't just relabel a device as something else if you clearly intend for it to be used as a medical device. Shady Bob's emergency electrical heart massager isn't going to fly.

In the US, hearing aids required a prescription until 2022. What I can glean from translated sites is that India still has that requirement.

Lives in the same building for one of the examples given. And we're not DAs, we get the benefit of OP telling us their state of mind and intent which involves very explicitly making choices of dress, behavior and demeanor for the explicit purpose of quite literally menacing women for his own amusement.

Difficult to prosecute doesn't make something legal.

Depends on jurisdiction, but in a fair number it would be "menacing".

A person is guilty of menacing when by some movement of body or any instrument the person intentionally places another person in fear of imminent physical injury.

That's Delaware's, but different states do it differently, and some out that classification under stalking.

Following someone around intentionally and knowingly causing them fear of injury is illegal. Why on earth would you even for a moment think you're allowed to do that? It's like thinking guns are legal so you can point your gun at someone on the street.

There's none. They would owe him money, so he'd have to get in line with all the other creditors to request that the court prioritize his debt over someone else's.