My assumption is that they are not handling mail pieces and just outsourcing everything via the PostGrid API. Public pricing for a domestic 4x6 full color postcard $0.74. [1] There's no international pricing listed, but given that a domestic postcard stamp is $0.48, printing is ~$0.26 so add international forever stamp ($1.45) so $1.71/card. Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30 ($0.39 on $2.99). They are using Twilio so that's $0.01 for an inbound/MMS and just under $0.01 for the outbound SMS with a stripe link.
Profit per card would be $1.84/card domestic and $0.98/card international. Excellent margins for a $2.99 product with no need to handle inventory.
Seems like a great side project creating glue between three REST APIs (PostGrid, Stripe, Twilio) and I'd expect it'd generate sufficient free cash flow to cover its server costs and buy a few beers.
In my experience reading hundreds of IRS 990 forms these number are not out of bounds for non-profits at their scale. Healthcare and university may skew the absolute numbers, but are similar.
Specifically a great executive will personally move the fundraising needle in organizations (+1-5% or more) and mediocre executive can cause losses/missed opportunities in the opposite direction of a similar magnitude. The conventional thinking is the relative fundraising impact of a great vs a good executive may 10x their total compensation, so it's probably worth trying to retain the best.
Anecdotally, I know of a not-for-profit COO who offended an NBA player killing the relationship. His successor COO repaired the relationship, ultimately resulting in multiple millions of new donations and a co-marketing agreement with the team. When the COO was hired there were rumblings because he'd negotiated +$50k over his predecessor.
With no equity and the poor optics of commission compensation or cash-bonuses, big severance packages are one of the few ways an organization can reward employees following years of great service.
The problem isn't that Wikimedia is paying employees too much, so much as it is that they have too many of them. Their COO compensation is not out of line for the scale of Wikimedia - But Wikimedia is way too big of an org without relation to serving their core goal.
Explorative projects like their New Editor Experience[1] were interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful moonshots. That one wrapped up (without anything to show for it, as far as I can tell). They didn't take the hint and downsize, they doubled down.
This is an incredibly common problem for organizations - "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" as was put by Oscar Wilde.
The banner probably drives enough small donors to give the big donors confidence that they are force multipliers and not just propping up a one-off thing.
This seems to state All but local currencies are prohibited. I have first hand knowledge from 2014-2016, 2020 during covid, as well as after the war, that USD and EUR is commonly used by both people and businesses. And Banks. In fact, when I wire cash every couple of months to my friends stuck there, they prefer it in dollars.
So this statement is extremely confusing because it completely contradicts reality and official bank operation there.
BTW, after the 2014 war started, I visited both Kiev and Moscow quite a bit. RUB folded 3x almost overnight after Obama's sanctions. Most well-off people and the businesses they visit, simply switched to dollars. This did not happen in Ukraine because no one had dollars. What happened instead is the many Ukranians who took out bank loans in dollars, had their lives destroyed.
Yeah, but it's hard to argue with the fact that pairs/ipairs in loops are 25% to 2.5x slower than using `for i = 1,#tbl do v = tbl[i] end`. Performance isn't everything, but it's not nothing either.
PAR2 (libpar2/par2cmdline) continues to see active (if sporadic) maintenance. The most recent tagged release was 2020-02-09 but there've been a handful of PR's merged since. [2]
PAR3 has a reference implementation and alpha spec (libpar3/par3cmdline) which is based around Blake3. [3]
OG PAR (libpar/parcmdline) is legit unmaintained; the last release was 21 years ago. [1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20230630025508/http://www.thehis...