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?

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.

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.

What? No, I just like making ice cream and I research my hobbies. Why would you think I hate dairy?
Closest I get is thinking that it’s silly to insist that something like oat milk ice cream isn’t ice cream.

It’s actually because icecream has a defined air and fat content, and if you leave those guidelines you stop being icecream.

Changed with ice cream in general? No. But there are things that have been possible to add to ice cream for a while that do what you describe. It could be that you’re just starting to notice, you shifted brands, or the brand you liked shifted formulations.

Many people dislike the things that get added to ice cream, and so there are definitely brands out there that don’t include those things.
In my opinion the worst of the additives is not nearly as bad as a lot of people would make them out to be.

In the broadest sense possible ice cream is sugar, fat, water and thickener where the fat has been cooled to a solid and allowed to just start to re-form into a lump, the ice hasn’t been allowed to form crystals big enough to notice, and the thickener and sugars glue the fat and ice together such that they trap miniature air bubbles.
Some people insist that the fat and thickener have to come from cow milk in the form of milk fat and milk proteins, but that’s a bit pedantic for my tastes.

The easiest way to cheap out on ice cream is to add a lot more air. Since we sell it based on volume, if we churn more air into it we get more ice cream to sell for the same quantity of ingredients, and the only effect is that the ice cream is lighter, softer and fluffier.
There’s a legal maximum to how much air you can mix in though.

The next hurdle you run into is that milk proteins are actually kinda shit at keeping those air bubbles trapped. Adding things like guar gum or carrageenan will make it much gloopier and hold those air bubbles better.
This makes the ice cream last longer in a warehouse without the bubbles getting out and leaving your ice cream as a brick.

Next is rampant ice crystal spread, which can turn the ice cream into a brick in the warehouse. This can be slowed down using something called methylcellulose. It’s basically processed plant fiber ground into a powder. It’s also used in pills as the inert binder, and as a dietary fiber source.
It’s popular because is known to be safe and inert, it’s very cheap, it prevents ice crystal formation, and it has the fun quirk of getting thicker as it warms, for the added property of keeping your ice cream fluffy and areated as it warms up on your drive home.

Finally, you can tweak the fat blend. This one isn’t as common because milk fat is already insanely cheap since we subsidize the hell out of the dairy industry.
Changing the blend to use fats that are solid at higher temperatures does have utility for things you expect to be eaten slower, at higher temperatures, or if you want parents to not be mad that your ice cream makes kids extra sticky.

By far the biggest way that I’ve cream will save costs is by putting as much air in it as possible. It lets them sell you less in the same size box for the same price.
It’s a case where shrinkflation means making things bigger, which is fun.

The brands that didn’t take that route invariably rebranded as “premium” ice creams, so they can charge more for the same thing without raising consumer ire.

Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.

A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.

If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don’t really matter in terms of what the outcome is.

Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.

You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.

For the most part it’s not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It’s an engine for producing text that’s most like the text it’s seen before, or for telling you what text it’s seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I’ve actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I’ve seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn’t doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as “wrong”.

I mean, it’s not because they’re Puerto Rican, it’s because they live in Puerto Rico. Someone from Iowa who moved to Puerto Rico would also not get a vote.
This is because our system allocates votes to land, not people.
US citizens don’t get to vote for president. They get to vote for who their place of residence votes for.

Up until the 60s, people in DC also didn’t get a vote, because by default only states get a vote, and it’s explicitly not a state.