Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

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You can go straight to the source, i.e. the audited FY2023 financial statement[0]. You're right that revenues from CPB contracts amount to single-digit million dollars (roughly $7mm in 2023) a year, out of >$300mm of total annual revenues; but also from the same document:

> National Public Radio, Inc. (“NPR Inc.”) a nonprofit membership corporation incorporated in 1970 following passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended

> [American Coalition for Public Radio, a wholly-owned subsidiary,] supports the educational mission of publicly funded, noncommercial, educational radio stations, networks, and systems (collectively, “Public Radio”) [...] aims to secure robust federal funding

One can register some legitimate disappointment in a "national public" radio organization, breathed into law by Congress, turning into something rather nakedly partisan. That only 1% of revenues come from tax dollars has little to do with that part.

[0]: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2023/Nati...

> That only 1% of revenues come from tax dollars has little to do with that part.

If the public creates something but doesn't fund it very well, that thing has to go out and find other kind of funding, which means they have to sing for their supper. This will most definitely influence their content and reporting, because otherwise they simply don't get to exist at all.

That's a fair point, but the other perspective is that perhaps the organization grew far beyond its original remit, and is now run by its insiders for the benefit of its insiders, a la Robert Conquest's laws. The public not willing to fund it "very well" could be an indication that the organization itself should remain small and bounded by its charter.

$210mm of $323mm, or roughly two thirds, of 2023 expenses incurred by NPR were for employee compensation and benefits. $58mm of the compensation were unrelated to content production and distribution; that is, booked under SG&A and not COGS. $42mm of it was for management. At least 26 individuals made a salary of more than $250k[0]. I suppose their singing voice is quite good, to receive such a supper.

[0]: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2022/2021...

They collect a lot of donation money during their funding drives, it’s obvious they have a fan base. College radio stations also get a funding source via NPR, and they provide a venue for local programming, but yes, colleges are going to be way to the left of…anything really. If people didn’t want NPR, it would be gone already, but the fact that those people aren’t everyone…well, the only kind of news that wouldn’t offend anyone would be as dry as C-Span.

I don’t really have a radio in my car anymore so it’s a moot point, I just stream whatever short newscast they have while driving just to catch up. I get the feeling that a lot of drivers are like this now, and they might be scrambling for a new model to match, and that’s going to cause some content upheaval (and if they didn’t adapt, they wouldn’t exist now, we wouldn’t be talking about them at all).

do you know why "mm" (which to me means "millimeters") is used with $ values? I mean, a house can be $ 250K, a mansion might be $ 1.1M, and our national debt might be $ 34.4T. OK, I understand those.

How does 'mm' equate to 'M'? And if it does equate, why not use 'M' as a simpler way to designate a quantity of "millions" ?

It’s Greeks vs Romans.

Western finance/accounting industries adopted ‘M’ from the Roman numeral for 1,000 to mean “thousand”. MM (or mm) meaning “thousand thousand”, or a million.

Separately, when the French invented the metric system they used the Greek prefixes for multiples (kilo, derived from the Greek for “thousand”, being the best known). Which is why ‘k’ denotes thousands in most other industries.

Conversely, the metric system used Roman prefixes for submultiples, which is where centi- (same root as Centurion) and milli- come from.

Thank you.

As for SI, I have never liked the 'non-thousands' submultiples e.g. centimeters. I think it's confusing. You have km, m, and mm. factors of 1,000. Seems reasonable. Just like we have F, mF, uF, nF, pF for capacitors.

I think the various units are there because people like 'comfortable' numbers; e.g. people seem to prefer 8.9 cm to 89 mm ('8' is a number between 1 and 9, the most preferred numbers -- because we can count them on our fingers?).

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