Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something distasteful about them wanting high pay and extra donations to cover an unseen expense.
$800k is an experienced engineer's salary where Khan Academy is based.
Lol, what
Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
201–210 of 232 posts
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#202If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as "suspicious", now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn't seem to implement 3DSecure. What's grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.
I had a similar experience now. Never had to do reCaptcha on a payment form with my phone before. And then the payment was rejected. I am a normal US credit card payer. I ended up using PayPal.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have an income source, though.
Their income source is donations. They do not monetize their users, so an increase in users is pure cost.
I'm talking about the "Earned Income" section they show here:
https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (you have to scroll down to the second piechart)
It's separate from donations and gifts.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since it’s a non-profit there are no shares or shareholders and he has no equity, ie the salary is the only way he financially benefits from the success of the organization. 800k is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem outlandish to me, considering the impact and popularity. Why should you need to choose between doing good and doing well?
That's all well and good until you start asking for extra donations during a pandemic that will be followed by a major recession. If you are going to do that, you should probably make a gesture as well. CEOs of various companies have been cutting their pay as a gesture for the duration of the pandemic.
CEOs at other companies have other types of compensation through stocks and bonus pays, years before. Sal Khan's societal impact is huge.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#205Khan Academy is a $40m/yr non-profit that provides better lessons than the multi billion $ government enforced Prussian-pedagogy propaganda centers (at infinite scale and for close to zero charge for the end user)
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
If what he's doing is so worthwhile as you say, shouldn't he donate?
He probably has. He's asking for amounts from $5 to $100 dollars. What makes you think he hasn't donated at least that much? How much did you donate?
You have a point, maybe he's in the job he's best at, he's worth double that to the organization so he's effectively donating $800k/yr, and that's the optimal amount to give to charity given his preferences. If so, no foul.
When I was a student I gave on the order of $100 per year.
Anyway I feel sorry for you because you attack people instead of ideas, that must be really draining.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#207(Replying to a trollish comment, but don't want to push it to the top). There was a comment about the salary that CEO Sal Khan takes, with is over $800,0000 per year. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.
Think about this: Khan Academy is asking for increased donations right now because of their success. Any other for-profit company in their predicament is benefiting very naturally from revenues increasing with higher demand for their product. That is not true for a non profit structured at aiming to provide a free service.
Should a ceo reduce his income because his company is succeeding? The unfortunate element here is that their fundraising does not scale (or scale well enough) as a function of additional reach.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#208Seems like governments should be funding Khan Academy during this period, since they are effectively replacing regular public education.
If taxpayers could get vouchers for the money going to education, I'd send mine to KA instead of public schools. It would be money much better spent.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?
Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.…
Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?
Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.…
Very cool and interesting thanks for your response!