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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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