The justification for many of these stations is emergency preparedness. They're maintained for the ability to receive and transmit emergency alerts despite power outages or transmission line cuts. The daily programming is mostly incidental beyond maintaining listenership
The cost is having the satellite systems in place, working, and available. You don't save money by not using the tiny amount of bandwidth when it isn't "an emergency"
Same reason communities still maintain HAM radio clubs and rely on them for emergency communications in a grid down situation - it's an interesting (though expensive) hobby that has some merit for isolated communities.
People don't maintain HAM clubs for the potential use in an emergency, any more than people learn to fly in the hope of being able to rescue a commercial aircraft when both pilots are incapacitated.
They enjoy HAM radio as a hobby in and of it's self. It's doesn't come free to the government either, I'm sure some HFT organisation would pay handsomely for some of the bands currently used by HAM radio.
That's simply not true, many HAMs in remote areas join to learn how to operate radio equipment and assist crisis responders - especially in the northern frontier states. There's a big appeal in my community - but we might not be the norm.
Look into the ARES program (ARRL).
They absolutely also enjoy it for personal use, but in areas where dying from exposure is a real concern in winter, the radio is an important lifeline.
The burden on taxpayers would be significantly less if the government simply paid to run the system rather than additionally funding two sets of attorneys to duke it out in court to make an out of control executive actually execute the law. It's getting harder and harder to believe that this fascist movement was ever earnestly about saving money.
It doesn't look like the Federal Government is being erased. In fact, it and its debt are rapidly growing. I'd say the motte is autocratic authoritarianism (ie fascism).
I remember the exploration of alcohol consumption stats from one of Michael Hobbes' podcasts and how hard it is to untangle both self-reporting and confounding factors. Like, the population of reported non-drinkers is dominated by both religious abstainers who may otherwise differ culturally from the broader population, and alcoholics who've needed to cut out drinking entirely
The quoted number is awfully specific. Monthly active devices? Why not licenses since that's what they are theoretically in the business of selling? Active devices would be relevant to their ad revenue, so I'd be interested to know what's the context for the statistic and what they're actually tracking. Are enterprise and other installs that block ad telemetry included?
The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.
"Then came his eureka moment: “I discovered that no one had ever gone to every country in the world completely without flying [in one unbroken trip].” (A British man, Graham Hughes, has set foot in every country without flying, but took two breaks from the journey for personal reasons.)"
There are so many layers of fraud to make this scam work. Fake enrollment seems easy enough, but financial aid requires a valid identity with real tax info. If you've already stolen an identity to snag a tax refund, I guess might as well file a FAFSA.
But, the lion's share of financial aid goes directly to the school while only any remainder after tuition and fees goes to the student.
I feel like unless this is happening at scale committed by relatively few actors, the return isn't worth the effort... if there isn't some further institutional coordination helping things along
At a community college, the lion's share of aid goes to the student for books, living expenses, etc. If they get a maximum Pell(~6K), a scholarship for underserved(~3K) and student loans (upwards of 10k) for 4k tuition, they are pocketing quite a bit. The community college can then dip into the state and national funding (TRIO, job readiness, local employer support). One student eligible for financial aid at a community college is worth about 3x what one student paying their own way is worth. How difficult would it be to verify identity and enforce attendance? THey don't to inflate their numbers.
AI necessarily offers strategies that are already available, and at this point can't be expected to reason out if anything is especially effective. There are services like rocketmoney that can identify subscriptions that you may no longer want or gain savings through mechanically gamed processes, and AI could certainly copy that.
It's true that the top line tuition is generally discounted through financial aid, but that's been the case for decades. People aren't shocked at the absurd tuition, but at the rate of increase that vastly outstrips aid, making the normal discounted cost increasingly unaffordable.
The actual shocking costs are buried well below the top line as services and facilities that you'd expect to be paid through tuition are separately charged but mandatory fees.
YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.
