[Someone]

Originally Posted by Someone

And sorry, but I'm with Johanna. If you are actually interested in talking about pronunciation variants, learn at least a little about phonetic alphabets. It's just no good trying to muddle your way through with things like hAWt vs hAHt.

This is definitely one of my pet peeves. Can you guess why? The dictionary respelling schemes they insist on are no simpler than the IPA, but at least they have the advantage of being inconsistent and incomprehensible due to how idiosyncratic and vague they are.

But learning the IPA or even SAMPA (Which is pure ASCII! You can type it!) would be an admission that they don't always know best, and that's a blow to the ego.

Another little pet peeve of mine is how many people seem to need to see conspiracy and complexity in absolutely everything especially when it makes no sense.

OK, stay with me. This requires a little thought.

You know how money laundering works, right? You set up a business which takes in legitimate income and increase that income with illegal funds diverted into its cash stream. If you have a restaurant, instead of selling $20 of food, you sell $200, and now you have $180 worth of ill-gotten gains fully accounted for.

So I can see where people who see restaurants with very little apparent walk-in business might think they're laundering fronts. Ditto laundromats, for that matter. The only requirement is that the money laundering business has to... you know... have an income. It has to have some prospect of legitimate inflow if you're going to use it to hide illegitimate inflow.

The discussion in the linked thread turns to radio stations which are run at a complete loss. No ads, no donations. No income whatsoever.

So... what does MichaelEmouse, Super Genius, suggest? Guess. Try to guess it. You'll never get it. You'd have to be a moron.

Ready? Here it is:

Originally Posted by Someone

The stations that seemingly don't need money: Could it be a form of money-laundering? If not, what else could explain it? How much would it cost to run a station like KCDX for a year? How much do radio songs tend to cost to air?

KCDX could be a few things, from a vanity project to an eccentric's MP3 player to a publicity stunt, but a money laundering scheme is not one of them.

Jesus Fucking Christ. It's like Zoolander in how purely airheaded that question is, how impossibly brainless it is in terms of understanding what money laundering is.