The Foundation is funded on the sales of Raspberry Pi hardware, government contracts and charitable donations. More sales directly benefit the charity. This allows us to:
- Run the world's largest network of coding clubs for children, for free.
- Produce educational resources for schools and clubs all over the world, for free.
- Conduct research into CS pedagogy.
- Provide Pi 400s and monitors to disadvantaged learners in England.
- Support educators all over the world with free physical and digital publications.
I know nothing about an IPO of RPTL, other than what I've read in the media, but I can guarantee you that RPF will continue to be a non-profit charity, and continue with it's mission.
Call me cynical, but you are absolutely clueless. Once shareholders are involved (especially public) the management will be changed. This lovely piece appeared about a week ago here on HN:
https://reactionwheel.net/2021/11/your-boards-of-directors-i...
The RPi founders will be sacked in favor of profits. All those charitable things done for free will be stopped. The $35 Pi - nobody will mind if we raise that to $50. All sorts of things will change. Maybe not immediately, but they will change. The profit motive goes directly against the notion of a "non-profit" organization. Shareholders want ROI. End of story, end of Pi as we know it.
The argument "oh but the capital will allow all kinds of investments that will decrease the price in the long run" almost never holds up. Maybe it does in RPI's case, their innovation was supply chain based, after all. But my personal expectation, since a for profit company's interest is to extract as much profit add possible, is that RPI boards will move upmarket and become the premium option with an ecosystem advantage. Their position to do this is already quite good, they're basically already there. But the increased prices will also mean that companies operating on lower margins will become stronger - the Pine64s of the world.
That's the "bad case". The "good case" would be that they'll operate with low margins and compensate with scale and keep the educational stuff as marketing expenses. But that's hard to imagine.
I'm somewhat okay with either. Luckily the competition in the segment is healthy nowadays.
this has never been a "publicly" run company in the way you describe it. It has always been a private limited company.
The issue of concern here is that it is going from a private limited company where the shareholders are mostly to do with the rpi foundation, meaning that there is some chance that all the profit generated goes back to the foundation.
If its a public company, unless there are strict rules, it'll be open to shareholders buying control and changing the purpose of the trading company to something other than a tool to generate income for the foundation.
However thats not a given yet. I really hope that its something that is beneficial to the foundation.
If 100% of trading is going in the IPO then I think your predictions will be right on the money.
If the foundation retains the majority share and we're seeing 30/40% go to the IPO then it doesn't really matter how much profit the shareholders are demanding, the foundation can just continue to run things as it sees fit. Though the foundation may worry about the stock price tanking of course and still do what the shareholders demand.
Are you kidding? They clashes might be free for kids, but they can get charity donations, governmental donations, and it’s essentially a “buy our product” class. It’s great value for minor expense.
I see a lot of doubt in this thread, and while some of it seems to come from a confusion of the two entities, the rest seems to acknowledge their separation, but doubt that it will protect the foundation in the long run.
So, what would interest me would be how funding & staffing of the foundation works, if there are arrangements to ensure access to low-price material for the activities you list and such.
Edit: a link to an FAQ or such will do just nicely of course ;)
There are two[1] companies registered, the foundation, which is the oldest, and the trading company.
From what I can see the foundation appear to get a significant portion of the profits from the trading company: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
so long as that continues, then everything will be fine.
"The Raspberry Pi Foundation, formed in 2009, is a registered charity with a goal of putting “the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.” The famous eponymous SBC was designed to be affordable and champion programming in schools, hoping to repeat the home computer boom of the 1980s. Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary responsible for the engineering and trading operations of the foundation."
We're in a segment of time where companies are so over-valued by VC that when they go public they have no choice but to engage in egregious practices to maintain the stock price. It often alienates the customers/users/supporters that got them there.
Is this the inevitable outcome in all cases or is this a symptom of a flaw in our model?
Because it is, and you explained exactly why:
>We're in a segment of time where companies are so over-valued by VC that when they go public they have no choice but to engage in egregious practices to maintain the stock price. It often alienates the customers/users/supporters that got them there.
The problem seems to be that "investment" these days is all about selling to someone else at a higher price. Stock performance has decoupled from company value but people still try to "meet expectations" anyway.
One driver is low interest rates. Another is the 401k plans in the US where every middle-class employee is systematically pushing money into the market. this provides an ultimate sucker for every VC to sell to since the end-game is to IPO at astronomical valuations.
Tech industry examples:
NISC, makes software for electric and telecom cooperatives (disclosure, I am a new employee here)
Tessitura, makes software for event ticket sales
venture communism instead of venture capitalism?
peer-to-peer communism instead of the client server state?
The aggregation of power into some kind of central authority system for the good of the people always ends up bad for the people.
You will find that this sentiment is quite popular among communists these days. The idea of achieving a classless, stateless society via the use of a central state is inherently contradictory. (Though that's not to say that the alternatives are necessarily more realistic)
It's just the wannabe communists who are still silly enough to think they'll get it right this time.
I cannot. It seems to be the inevitable end of that form of government.
`Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state. Communism is a specific, yet distinct, form of socialism. Communists agree on the withering away of the state but disagree on the means to this end, reflecting a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state.`
or just buy any amount of stock, and be a normal shareholder - go to the meetings and make your voice heard?
if enough of us even owned the minimum 1 share, the foundation / company would be in a better place
We know it sucks, but gotta get yours while you can right?
RPi has been structure as a for profit company owned by the charity for a long time. This IPO may result in a huge amount of money for that charity. It also doesn't say how much of a stake their selling. The charity may retain the majority share and so continue to have control along with a vast capital reserve to continue doing what they're doing plus a lot more.
I'm sure that an IPO would result in the charity getting cash but the aim does not seem to be that.
Now, the good thing is of course that the accounts of the foundation are public [1]. I am not impressed that only about 10% of their income goes to "charitable activities".
[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...
The other 90% gets classed as 'fund-raising', what is actually is is money going into raspberry pi trading. rpi trading made a profit of around £10m which goes back as income into the charity and has mostly been spent on charitable activities.
I'm not an accountant and don't have time to go over the details to check but it appears that the charity gets all sales income. This then goes to the trading arm to pay for its expenses, leaving a profit which goes straight back to the charity. The majority of which is being spent on their charitable activities, which moderate sums presumably being kept back to aid reserve building.
Trading exists to make the charity money, money the charity then spends on its charitable aims.
If the commercial subsidiary is here to make them money then it should appear under "income", not "expenditure", and it probably does just not explicitly in that pie chart (it's probably under 'other' or 'other trading activities').
Expenditure is what the charity spends its money on, that is, costs (offices, personel, fund-raising activities, etc) and charitable activities. Anyone donating to a charity wants as much money as possible going to charitable activities.
We could look at another charity to compare. Off the top of my head, a famous one I know is Crisis (homeless charity) [1]: Record shows 50%+ of income spent on charitable activities, which does make Raspberry Pi Foundation's numbers look quite unimpressive.
[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...
> If the trading arm is there to make them money then it should appear under "income", not "expenditure"
It does see page 15 (PDF page 17), the foundation lists an income of £71,436,388 from 'Other trading activities', if you follow the note (3) it clarifies that this is entirely from rpi trading.
A bunch of money then goes on to expenditure to cover the trading arm's costs. Which are indeed substantial as it's an engineering organization with lots of production to pay for along with staff salaries and other R&D costs, these are broken down in note 6, page 28 (PDF page 30).
The profit the trading arm makes then comes back to the foundation which is shown in note 5, page 27 (PDF page 29) as 'other income'
So yes it is a little complex, you've got the flow of revenue coming into the foundation, out to trading then back in again but it doesn't look like there's any untoward going on. Simply the charity is taking the strategy of running a profit making company to fund its charitable activities.
Considering that the raspberry pi product is developed by the commercial subsidiary and sold commercial this at best muddies the water, and is very misleading.
The point being that, approximately, for every £10 that they get through donations or any other source, £9 goes to costs and £1 to actual charitable activities. Personally I would not donate to such a charity.
From the accounts I linked they received a bit over £3.5m in donations that year (they're listed in two different places one around £400k the other around £3.1m I don't know why they're accounted differently), spending £7.8m on charitable activities that same year. So in a sense they're managing to double their donations via their profitable trading to generate money for charitable activity spending.
As for the same intro to computers as the 1980s, you can give kids a trash PC and monitor running Linux for less than a whole RPi setup these days and that probably has a better e-waste and environmental outcome too. Oh and the HDMI connector won’t suddenly fall off or the SD card go awry.
The mission of the raspberry pi foundation is to leverage the rose tinted glasses of the past to push a marketing ideology that overlaps with the maker ideology. Everyone can build a business from marketing and label it as “for the greater good” with such tags as affordable computing tied to it.
Prior to marketing fronts like this existing, there was already significant interest in parties doing stuff like we did in the 80s. Everyone I knew had a PC with a parallel port with some random junk hanging off it. Some really weird people still had Amigas held together with tape. I was programming PIC microcontrollers off a cranky old Pentium 90 I found in a skip outside work.
You cannot have any kind of a company without profit. Period. I am not sure where the vilification of profit comes from (not addressing you in particular but rather the general concept), its just silly.
Companies have layers upon layers of costs in their financial equation. Employees and ongoing operational expenses being the easiest to understand. If you operate without profit, the company dies. The simplest visual for this might be that if no-profit means zero dollars in the bank account at the end of the year. After all, "no profit" or operation "near cost" would result in exactly this kind of a situation. Which would, in turn, kill the enterprise almost instantly.
If you want a company to produce and evolve products (any kind, physical or otherwise), it must be profitable. Without profit there is no innovation or longevity. At best you get a slow painful death.
In addition to this, the pandemic has to have taught everyone the other dimension of the necessity of profit. When things go wrong --for whatever reason, pandemic, economic downturn, market shifts, etc.-- a business must have sufficient financial backing, reserves and strength to navigate the storm and survive. Without this they would have to instantly lay off massive numbers of employees, shut down operations, cancel leases and contracts, etc.
In short, if you (plural, not addressing the poster I am responding to) care a company --whether it is cause driven or just a good product company-- you have to care about them making a profit or watch them evaporate.
Here's a challenge for anyone who does not believe this:
Provide the names of ten companies of non-trivial scale who have operated with zero or near zero profit for, say, 25 years, without external donations or other financial inputs to make-up for the lack of profit. Just ten companies. If I am wrong, it should not be too hard to present such a list.
Hint: Even charities have to operate at a profit. Without this they would not have people, offices, marketing and the means to perform their stated charitable objectives.
Most restaurants. Many did, indeed, "instantly lay off massive numbers of employees, shut down operations, cancel leases and contracts, etc." during the pandemic as a result.
Amazon made basically no profit for two decades, as a fairly notable example. Every penny earned got plowed back into the business. Lots of revenue, lots of expenses, no profit. It wasn't until recently they turned the profit spigot on. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-...
Uber didn't make its first profitable quarter for a decade. https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-posts-first-small-ad...
I think you're mixing up profits with revenue. A charity that brings in $1M and spends $1M has no profit, but they can (theoretically) remain a going concern indefinitely at that rate.
Restaurants: Shitty business. Most are constantly gasping for air. Yet, they do make a profit, which they use to hire people, pay for supplies, rent, etc. and keep the doors open. If they do not make a profit their choices are reduced to two simple paths: Close the doors or go get money (loan or investor). A lot of restaurant operators are up to their necks in loans, second mortgages, etc.
In many ways restaurants are the best example of why good profits are important. Those who do not generate substantial profits are nothing but a brutal slog. Those who do, thrive, grow and expand.
Amazon: C'mon. Please. They plowed PROFITS back into the business. Their annual net revenue was zero or near zero for a long time. It should be way beyond self-evident that you can't grow a business like Amazon without profits. Are you suggesting Amazon grew WITHOUT PROFITS? Seriously?
What I post does not come from a 30 second google session. It comes from having had significant skin in the game, succeeding and failing. Most people think they understand business. And most people have never run a non-trivial business. It's like trying to explain what it is like to fly like a bird without being a bird. Most simply can't get it because they have no context whatsoever.
When things go bad and you have to mortgage your home and top-off your credit cards to keep people employed and keep the doors open, you understand things you cannot possibly comprehend any other way. I've been there.
Be well.
https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+first+profit
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+first+profit
make it fairly clear how people use the terms.
A nonprofit wants to donate $600K to feed children.
It will cost $400K in operating expenses to be able to do this.
They need to generate $1MM in revenue and $400K in profits in order to be able to make use of $600K in support of their cause. Without this "profit" there is no nonprofit and no support for the cause. It is profit.
One way to define profit is something like what you have left after delivering a product. This hypothetical nonprofit takes in $1MM, delivers $600K in product and has $400K in profit that is used for operating expenses and (likely) to put money away for future needs, growth, etc.
Profit is necessary. We might not call it profit when it comes to these types of organizations, yet they cannot exist without this part of the equation. Call it what you want. They have to make more than they spend --a lot more-- or they cease to exist.
Also, in the US nonprofits are not banned from making what one might term conventional profit. They just can't distribute it. This means they can put money away and grow like crazy. Look at the mega-churches in Texas as a perfect example. If that not profit, I don't know what is.
Salaries of people doing the work are costs, not profits, and so on.
Here's an interesting article on nonprofit pay:
https://www.causeiq.com/insights/highest-paid-nonprofit-ceos...
From the article:
"The highest-paid nonprofit leaders — CEOs, Executive Directors, etc. — all earn at least $900k per year, and into the tens of millions for the largest of hospitals and health systems. While the highest-paid nonprofit CEOs are in healthcare and financial services, things get more interesting when we look at normal charities."
It's interesting that Financial institutions and categories such as "Promotion of Business" are listed in their survey. Nobody imagines an entity promoting the use of petroleum as a nonprofit. Most people think of churches and benevolent community organizations ("feed the X") as nonprofits. Nobody thinks hospitals, oil companies, credit unions, insurance, etc.
I call a lot of their overhead "profit" because, in this day and age, It feels obscene that an organization purporting to "help the X" would need to consume 40% of revenues, own/lease lavish buildings, etc. to deploy the capital they receive. How many on HN could setup a system that could administer, say, a hundred million dollars in donation while consuming just, say, 5% of that to run the show? My guess is many.
If you read through the list of nonprofit CEO salaries on that page you should get a good sense of where my perspective come from. This is profit. We call it something else. Fine. To me this is the individuals running the organization extracting profit from an organization under the cloak of a legal classification with a benevolent sounding name. Who doesn't have a soft spot for anyone who operates without making a profit? Right?
Well...let's look at CEO pay:
Christus Health: $13MM with a $5MM base pay
Star One Credit Union: $12MM
NY Presbiterian: $12MM
Banner Health: $11MM
American Petroleum Institute: $11MM
Electric Power Research Institute: $2.5MM
Jazz at Lincoln Center: $2.3MM
-The CEO takes 9% OF REVENUE as compensation!!!!
University of Minnesota Foundation Investment Advisors: $1.5MM
- This represents 36% of revenue!
Another way to look at it:
Profit is what you use to run the organization. It's a percentage of revenue available for this purpose. It is important to understand the difference between gross and net profit.
I buy a blender from a wholesaler for $10 and sell it at retail for $20. My gross profit is $10. My net profit takes into account all the other costs, the ones that are required for the organization to exist. If that boils down to $5 per unit, the net profit is $5 per unit or, 25% of gross income.
In the case of an organization classified as a "nonprofit", things are different. They don't generally sell anything (well, hospitals and others do). They get a million dollars gross income from whatever activities. It could be donations. In the case of the company that promotes the use of petroleum, it is likely to be large membership fees paid by oil companies. For hospitals it is whatever they bill for services. Etc. That's their gross income. From that they have fixed costs in the form of buildings, leases, loans, etc. And now we come to what I am going to term the murky water portion: Salaries and other expenses. Million dollar compensation for executives and advisors. Lavish trips. In the case of the church my mother in law worked for, a couple of top-tier Mercedes Benz cars for the pastor and his underlings. Fully paid luxury vacations all over the world. Fully paid conferences at top tier resorts and hotels (think Waldorf Astoria), etc. Profit? I think so.
Anyhow, we can agree to disagree. I think the nonprofit category is deeply abused and a lot of people are getting incredibly rich through this mechanism. Frankly, had I understood this mechanism when I was a young man I probably would have figured out how to start some kind of an engineering nonprofit. I am being a bit sarcastic, of course, but I can imagine some kind of a scheme where someone creates a nicely profitable engineering consulting firm, pays themselves 40% of revenue and laughs all the way to the bank without paying taxes for decades. I am sure this already exists. That's why I call it profit. These are not poor little innocent organizations. They are some of the richest in the world. Let's start with the Vatican as a prime example.
EDIT:
To be clear, I am not saying all organizations legally classified as "nonprofit" are evil. What I am suggesting is that the classification is likely often abused for profit in various forms. One form would be lavish salaries and benefits (cars, trips, etc.). Another motive could be generating profit for allied or supporting organizations, a good example being oil companies financially supporting the American Petroleum Institute a "nonprofit" that likely generates billions for oil companies and whose top management is showered with multi-millions dollar salaries and benefits.
Here's another one: The NRA (National Rifle Association) is legally classified as a nonprofit organization. Technically, from an accounting perspective, I am sure it is. Does it exist for profit? Absolutely. Does anyone doubt that at all?
The category, the classification, is being abuse for profit disguised as something else. Not by all, yet likely by quite a few.
A friend of mind died in 2009 from the sheer stress this moment in history caused him as his business crumbled. That December I penned an email from the darkest place I have ever been. One that was prompted by a revelation I had that day: I experienced a level of clarity I had never before experienced. In a moment, I understood, in no uncertain terms, why someone would commit suicide, jump off a bridge, walk in front of a train or shoot themselves due to undue business pressure and financial troubles. I emailed a friend to let him know I now understood this. I wasn't quite there, but, for some strange reason, I had to share. He drove to my office and spent the rest of the day with me.
So, yeah, I don't know what to say to someone like you. My less-than-intellectual impulse is to deliver the most vile insult I could. Yet, that would mean descending to a level I am not interested in visiting.
I'll leave you with this: I hope you never get to experience some of what many entrepreneurs have to live through when things take a turn for the worse. If you do, I hope the experience humbles you and you become a nicer person.
Be well.
There is a difference between making a profit and maximizing profit. A publicly traded company is legally bound to do the latter.
That's a lie.
There is NO such legal requirement at all. None.
Google it.
Here's a starting point:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Are+U.S+companies+legally+ob...
https://apexlg.com/are-the-managers-of-traditional-corporati...
This is factually incorrect. Charities (at least in the UK) are legally prohibited from making a profit.
They take a percentage of their income and use it to cover these expenses. Right?
Well, this is semantics. A conventional business does exactly the same thing. They take a percentage of their income and use it to cover the cost of doing business.
Laws for non-profits generally allow for such things. Which makes sense, because they would not be able to survive without being able to slice off some "profit" to stay alive and grow.
If you've ever seen the massive church campuses in Texas you'd get a sense of the idea that this is, in fact, profit.
The range a typical nonprofit spends on administrative or operating expenses is wide. I would say that 40% isn't rare, with 25% being fairly common. This tracks with the profit margin of small to medium for-profit businesses. In fact, there are millions of for profit businesses that do not enjoy such margins.
The key legal distinction (at least in the US) seems to be that nonprofits cannot exist for the benefit of shareholders (no distributions). Other than that, they can easily spend 40% of what comes in on operations, grow cash in the bank and more.
Sure. Revenue minus expenses = profit/loss. "Net income", "bottom line", etc.
Make more than you expend, and you've got a profit. Spend more than you make, and you've got a loss. Equalize them, and you've got no profit and no loss.
Businesses can optimize for profit. Charities are allowed to have a profit, but they don't get to distribute it to shareholders like a business can; it stays with the charity. It's legal for a charity to have a rainy day fund and a positive bank balance, but their legal purpose is not to run it up.
Churches in the US get funky at times, and I'm of the opinion that the IRS should be empowered to crack down the abuses of the non-profit status you highlight, but if they're spending their revenue on buildings, staff, etc., they're eating into their profits when they do so.
The term "nonprofit" is a misnomer that might be the reason for this distinction, at least in the US. The term implies the idea of zero profit, which could not be farther from the truth.
You are right to highlight churches. I remember the first time I went to Texas on a sales call at one of the mega churches. The only way I can describe it was a campus with several buildings the size of a Home Depot and more. You do not do something like that without profit. People might want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that it isn't, because we legally call them "nonprofits". All we are doing is lying to ourselves. They make a ton of money. And we don't tax them.
I am sure there are churches and religious organizations who do a lot of great value for their communities. I also know there are tons who are there for "management" to live the life of the rich and famous. Not to go too far, my wife's mother worked for a church for a while. The head pastor owned several luxury cars, went on amazing trips to expensive resorts all over the world --all paid by the church-- and more. Profit.
Note I am not saying profit is inherently bad. We would not have most of the things we enjoy in modern life without profitable business pursuits. From clothing to medicine and everything in between, without profit, it would not exist. Can it be abused and misused? Of course. That is true for almost anything that is part of the human experience. We abuse food, power, the environment, other people, position, etc. All good things until they are abused, including profit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29404841
Do you think the Vatican is profitable?
Do you think that a nonprofit that pays their CEO 36% --yes THIRTY SIX PERCENT-- of revenue is profitable?
Do you think that the American Petroleum Institute, which pays their CEO $11MM in salary (4.5% of revenue on $238MM in receipts) exists with a real non-profit objective despite what their balance sheet might say?
You see, we get lost in this legal "nonprofit" classification and fail to understand that a lot of these organizations exist for the profit (the enrichment) of either the individuals running them, associated commercial enterprises (oil companies) or both. If we refer to them as "X4132 organizations" (made-up name) we would have no emotional attachment or a mental model to go against what they actually do. When people hear "nonprofit" they think something like "feed the X" scrappy entities with idealistic workers and managers all eating ramen noodles to conserve every dime for their worthy cause. That is FAR from reality. Very far.
And that's why I tend to call it "profit". Yes, sure, this does not fit the technical definition of profit, but it is hard to argue that a CEO taking 5%, 10%, 30%, 40% of revenue isn't actually the profit element of the organization. I give the example of the lavish cars and trips for the pastor and management paid for by the church my mother in law used to work for. That's profit. We might classify it some other way, but it isn't charity.
No idea. I'd have to take a look at their accounts.
> Do you think that a nonprofit that pays their CEO 36% --yes THIRTY SIX PERCENT-- of revenue is profitable?
No idea. I'd have to take a look at their accounts.
> Do you think that the American Petroleum Institute, which pays their CEO $11MM in salary (4.5% of revenue on $238MM in receipts) exists with a real non-profit objective despite what their balance sheet might say?
No idea. I'd have to take a look at their accounts.
> Yes, sure, this does not fit the technical definition of profit,
It is the opposite of profit. It is what you structure if you want to reduce your profit so you don't get taxed.
> I give the example of the lavish cars and trips for the pastor and management paid for by the church my mother in law used to work for. That's profit.
No, it isn't. It might be embezzlement, from the sounds of it.
I get the point that you are trying to make, but doing so by redefining common terms and hoping anyone is going to take it seriously strikes me as remarkably unlikely to succeed. The word you are looking for is not "profit", it is "enrichment", as you say here. They are not the same. Words matter.
Well, then you lack a sufficient exposure to business that is required to understand what I am talking about. It's like someone who never built a brick wall arguing with a master mason and actually believing they understand the craft because they googled a few things. That's OK, most people are in your shoes. As my wife loves to say "A google search isn't a substitute for my medical degree". The same applies to understanding business. No worries.
I am not in the habit of posting comments about things I don't know anything about. I just don't do that. I have done business with people with direct experience working with and through the Vatican, either as direct customers or intermediaries. The only thing I'll say is: The Mafia are amateurs compared to some of the shit that organization has in its history. And I am only talking about the financial part of their closet.
Anyhow, here's the good part.
Ready?
You don't have to agree with me.
Done deal.
Have a great day.
Incorrect. I understand perfectly what you are talking about. You do not have privileged knowledge. You just aren't saying what you think you are. Your words and your meaning are misaligned, apparently intentionally.
You came into this thread with this:
> You cannot have any kind of a company without profit. Period.
That was your opening gambit. It was factually incorrect then, it relied on your being able to emotionally manipulate readers into taking a different understanding of "profit" than any of them likely did, and all you've done since is alienate people from your core point by talking nonsense and claiming to be better than them.
Where did you expect this comment to go?
> Provide the names of ten companies of non-trivial scale who have operated with zero or near zero profit for, say, 25 years, without external donations or other financial inputs to make-up for the lack of profit. Just ten companies. If I am wrong, it should not be too hard to present such a list. > Hint: Even charities have to operate at a profit. Without this they would not have people, offices, marketing and the means to perform their stated charitable objectives.
It is literally, trivially, obviously wrong, and you've said nothing prior or since to change that other than try to crowbar in irrelevancies about what you think a specific form of legal entity should be allowed to do.
> I am not in the habit of posting comments about things I don't know anything about. I just don't do that.
And yet here we are. You may have a point. I may even agree with it. But the way that you are expressing it does not come across as good-faith in the slightest.
> I have done business with people with direct experience working with and through the Vatican, either as direct customers or intermediaries. The only thing I'll say is: The Mafia are amateurs compared to some of the shit that organization has in its history. And I am only talking about the financial part of their closet.
So what? That makes precisely zero difference to the definition of profit. It does not answer the question of whether the Vatican makes any. Is it a grasping, rapacious, self-aggrandising, amoral organisation? You probably have an answer to that. It is utterly irrelevant to the question of profit.
> You don't have to agree with me.
Quite. As someone once said: you are entitled to your own opinions. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
Yes, of course, the accepted definition of profit does not align with what I have presented. That much is obvious.
And yet, "nonprofits" like the American Petroleum Institute, the National Rifle Association and many others exist precisely for profit in two forms. In some cases it is for the enrichment of those who run the organization. There, I used a different word. Happy? In other scenarios, they exist to generate massive profits --sometimes in the billions of dollars-- for supporters. If I remember correctly, the American Petroleum Institute generates some $250 million dollars a year in revenues. These are not $25 donations from Bernie supporters. These are massive membership fees paid for by the oil companies for which this organization works to generate billions in profits.
Disagree as much as you'd like with my out-of-the norm take on the realities of how nonprofits have devolved. The difference is you are bound by the dictionary definition of a word. I am looking at the realities on the street.
Seriously, it is naïve to actually believe these companies are not for profit. The mechanisms abound. A church purchasing manager gives a lucrative multi-million dollar contract to a contractor in exchange for under the table kickbacks. This crap happens all the time. The Vatican has done this kind of thing in transactions worth tens of millions of dollars while servicing as the financial arm for the buildout of television stations in Africa. The problem is you don't know what you don't know and a single-point dictionary definition of a single word is the extent of what you will look at as evidence to fight the idea that the nonprofit thing is seriously broken. But, hey, you are right, the word is defined precisely as you indicate. Good job.
Some guy gets paid ten million dollars to sign over checks to feed the children and you think that's overhead. I think it is an abuse of the system that, while not currently legally defined as such, should be classified as profit. And taxed accordingly. Better yet, it should be capped and the children should get more money.
Since you seem fond of little intelligent-sounding sayings, here's one that's applicable:
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Nonprofits: In practice, they are not. Not all of them.
BTW, I actually help run a small --real-- nonprofit. We setup a legal nonprofit organization to fund a local high school robotics team. We take-in donations and spend the money to pay for anything the kids need (usually tool, parts, etc.). Fully 100% of the money we receive (about $25K per year) is spent on what the kids need. 100%. Not a single penny goes towards anything else (OK, the occasional bank fee is another expense). Every mentor is a volunteer and most of us are actually donors as well. That's a real nonprofit, in the full sense of the word. Because nobody within the organization derives any kind of financial profit from it. There are no conflicts of interest whatsoever, no murky lines. Not sure what "nonprofits" who consume 40% of revenues should be called.
> They take a percentage of their income and use it to cover these expenses. Right?
> Well, this is semantics. A conventional business does exactly the same thing. They take a percentage of their income and use it to cover the cost of doing business.
Yes, and in neither the case of the charity nor of the conventional business is that profit. That is operating costs, and gets deducted from revenue before tax is paid on what's left precisely because it is not profit.
That's BBC Micro: https://microbit.org/
I think it's quite clear this is not the case. They have plenty of clearly business oriented board designs like these:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4/?varia...
Teach the kids Raspberry Pi and then they'll know Raspberry Pi and hopefully push to use it in their jobs 10 years later or whatever. Maybe that's the idea (too)?
I have no links whatsoever to any RPi organisation of any sort, so this is purely guesswork, but I could imagine that operations have grown to the point where they are interfering with (or at least a distraction from) their original educational mission.
Perhaps this move is to offload that distraction and allow them to re-focus on the original idea?
Why must it be assumed that this is a greedy move that works against their mission?
I am not sure, I can only hope; but I would really love them to be a Frame.work competitor with their established logistics and reach. Possibly cheaper as well. Maybe not as high end.
Because it might be years before something like Framework reaches places like my country (if they don’t go bust by then)
Companies have some leeway in how to interpret this goal, but publicly traded companies will only ever do the "right thing" if it is a net positive (or at least neutral) for their shareholders.
Owners of privately owned companies, on the other hand, can choose to do things they believe are good, even if it will be a net negative after factoring in the potential good PR.
I thought the whole idea was to produce boards, priced near cost, for educational/inspirational purposes? ie to give today's kids the same kind of intro to computers (you have to program it) as kids enjoyed with the home computers of the 80's.
The profit motive inherent to a public company does not seem compatible with that mission.