you can’t refute my main point that…

This is the part where you’re dense as fuck. As I said from the get go, I wasn’t trying to do that, you absolute insecure buffoon.
Go back and re-read the first comment, and try not being insecure and combative. I was literally, as you say, correcting a typo (Although then using that typo in math makes me feel like it was a misunderstanding of the numbers and not a typo).

You can keep ranting about irrelevant details and then agreeing with my original conclusion.

“Wikipedia has a half billion cash and is evil for asking for more” is really different from “Wikipedia isn’t in as bad a situation as you might think, and donation isn’t as crucial as they might lead you to believe”.
Your first comment is grossly misleading. I don’t really give a shit about your conclusion, since I’m ambivalent about donating. See also: the paragraphs I quoted from your second article I liked.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s like I’ve been saying and you refuse to accept: I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, I just actually cared about accurate numbers. If you actually care about accurate numbers for drawing conclusions, like a person who goes and reads financial audits might, then perhaps they aren’t “irrelevant details”. Or, as I like to call them: A $320 million dollar error.

You’re the one who can’t accept that someone saying “hey, their financials are by no means weak but they don’t have decades of cash saved up” isn’t a disagreement with your main point.

Then you went off on insane ad hominem tangents and refused to believe that maybe someone isn’t attacking you.

given that I’ve roundly quashed all of your efforts here

You really haven’t. If you’ll recall: “what the fuck are you even talking about”? Insecure gibberish isn’t the masterful debate strategy you think it is. You aren’t coming across as cleverly as you seem to think you are.

You’re a surprisingly dense person. You’ve managed to mistake a news article for a financial audit, misread a number of comments, misinterpret numbers, think that the phrase “article I agree with” means I don’t agree with it, and somehow take “hey, your number’s wrong” to mean “your numbers are wrong, your conclusion is wrong, and everything you say is wrong”.

I wrote assets, because I was talking about total assets

Except, you didn’t. And neither did the article I said was inaccurate where you plainly pulled that number from.
Maybe go actually read the second article you shared, which doesn’t get their cash or assets wrong or make grossly inaccurate assertions about their financial status.

Also, congrats on actually running with “bold of you to assume I can read”.

You’re confusing cash with assets. $80 million is nowhere near $400 million cash.

dozens of accurate numbers from two articles, one of those many numbers in one of those articles you have picked out to focus on

Except $300 million cash isn’t in the article I said was a good article.

“Dozens” of good numbers don’t really matter when the one you use to make your point isn’t one of them.
They don’t have $400 million dollars cash, so they can’t run for 40 years just on cash on hand. Which is the entire thing I was talking about.

I sort of assumed that basic literacy meant you could understand that a question doesn’t have to end in a question mark. For example: I’m curious what you think I’m making up.
Note how that doesn’t end in a question mark, but is clearly a request for information.
And, for pedantic ness: “what the fuck are you talking about?”

What “mistakes” are you correcting? I’m referencing their financial audit. Where do you think those news articles you’re not understanding get their numbers?

You can’t just pick a number off a page, say “yeah, that one’s big, it’s how much cash they have”, then round up and add $100 million dollars and wave it off as a typo. At best, it’s a typo compounding a gross misunderstanding of the financials.

So again, what “mistakes” are you correcting? You keep saying you’re correcting some mistakes, but … You’re not. You haven’t actually done anything other than share some bad data and be offended someone would point that out.

We colloquially call a lot of things I’ve cream that aren’t labeled ice cream, and aren’t legally ice cream.

The US has tediously long definitions for different foods, and ice cream needs specific proportions of milk products, as well as limits on other physical properties.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=135.140

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=135.110

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=135

So while I might pick up some sherbet and say “I got ice cream”, and people would know what I meant, it would never be labeled ice cream.
I also like oat milk ice cream, but it’s actually labeled “frozen dessert” because it doesn’t contain dairy.

The company isn’t allowed to use a term that might mislead a unwitting or uninformed consumer, but the consumer is free to have a more relaxed definition, and stores can put things where you would expect.

From your source: "After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March”.

From you: “they have at least 400 million in reserves now”.

Their financial audit, that I linked to, shows that they have nowhere near that much cash. They don’t even have that much total assets if you count their endowment, real estate, and computer hardware.

The entire reason for my comment was that I read that number, thought “wow, that number seems preposterous”, and looked up their financial report which shows that indeed, it’s a totally bogus number detached from reality.

You seem deeply upset that someone might not just accept your opinion at face value, and it seems to be making you respond like an asshole instead of “not responding because you don’t care”, or actually giving some sort of response.

Har har har.

I’m honestly curious what point you think I’m responding to that you didn’t make.
You did actually use grossly inaccurate financial data when the tax documents were publicly available.

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.

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.