That isn't what I said. 50% of the country can not read. People, myself included, are susceptible to influence. Democracy is dead because of money in politics, low intelligence of voters and a 2 party system that heavily manages the ideas and people that appear on the ballot.
IMHO its mostly been proven that special intrests , corporations hold more influence than the electorate. To that extent that bot wings of the uniparty basically persue the same agenda with very little variation in econ/pol while distarcting everyone with nonstop culture war bs.
Ergo its more feasible to playact at parades thsn it is to have a proper industrial policy for example that would mean hosing Wall Streeet profits to do. so.
For-profit is the delivery system, which should save taxpayer money. Systems where the institutions are directly administered by taxpayer funds and their attendant public employee unions also have political/financial incentives.
Either way - publicly-run or private contractor, if the government is a good steward of public funds, they'll monitor well to avoid waste and remove people who are trying to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the officials are incompetent or corrupt themselves, they'll fail to recognize when those things are happen, or participate themselves. I don't see a big difference in public vs. private unless I imagine a fantasy government run only by officials who are smart and highly ethical.
In an oligarch owned media ecosystem, with obvious corruption of the regulators (FCC, DOJ) to ensure proper use of the public radio spectrum and monopoly restrictions, having a non-partisan publicly funded independent media is vital to the health of democracy.
The US is not a "free society".
Which is why the BBC, ABC, CBC, etc exist in civilized societies.
I think it's worth putting a finer point on the dynamic that the US's real state-run media IS FOX, NBC, and their ilk. The main power structure in the US is the corporate conglomerates, whose owners/managers may compete with one another like players of a sporting team compete with each other, but are ultimately all playing against the People. So invoking "state run media" to talk about PBS/NPR/CPB taking a little public money and trying to produce a different angle of public good rings totally hollow. If you don't like what they end up producing, you can always not tune in! But by the time you're rejecting them on ideological grounds, you should have already rejected every other single station on the air apart from community access type channels.
Actually it is PBS that bears responsibility here. Very likely the decision by PBS to hire OSS was corrupt (OSS are just a reseller of Iron Mountain) and they made no other provision to backup the files a second way, like AWS Glacier.
> is PBS that bears responsibility here. Very likely the decision by PBS to hire OSS was corrupt
Don't blame corruption for what was most likely extremely strained budgets. Local public access TV stations like KETC (Nine PBS) tend to be severely understaffed and underpaid.
Realistically, they went with OSS because the quote for a local MSP was cheaper than the cost of hiring additional headcount (a $70k salary ends up costing roughly $100k for an employer).
(Source: occasionally dealt with these kinds of accounts back when I was an SE and later PM)
Edit: I'm right - they only have 1 IT/Software employee managing the entire organization which only has a budget of $30M after losing $1.8M in federal funding.
Oof, that is a horrible position to be in with so many dicks on HN. You'd assume SWEs would have sympathy for other SWEs.
Some HNers should have been taught better manners by their parents or should have at least internalized the lessons from Arthur as a kid [0].
If that employee sees this post - I want to say THANK YOU. It's a hard job.
I have - this is my throwaway account, and my primary account has been alive since a little after YC moved from Boston.
I hate HN and how it has gotten worse and worse as the years go by. There are a couple basic changes that the mod team could do to help alleviate the degradation but they aren't doing it.
> Very likely the decision by PBS to hire OSS was corrupt (OSS are just a reseller of Iron Mountain)
That's making a lot of assumptions. I host some of my backups on what is effectively a reseller of S3; was that decision corrupt?
But, yes, PBS does bear some responsibility here. If you leave your car in a parking lot overnight with the door open and the key in the ignition, the thief is still wrong for taking it, but there's a limit to how much indignity you can have.
Although you are correct, the statement is still arguably correct.l, even if only accidentally.
As the parent entity, the national PBS has a responsibility to guide and even mandate policies and provide best practice guidelines or even offer support and assistance in burden sharing arrangements.
PBS has long now had major structural challenges due to things like internal corruption and overbearing control by the well funded chapters without commensurate responsibility.
As with many such decentralized membership organizational structures, incentives can often be very misaligned between verticals and laterals.
Note, this wouldn't be PBS the national organization, this would be the local PBS affiliate who would have made this decision. The affiliates are extremely independent.
https://usunrome.usmission.gov/why-were-dismantling-the-icc/