The second to last sentence in the article. Maybe they have. "I want to be the president of China," said three-year-old girl, Liu Xiao Liao. "Then people will be scared of me."

NPR the main organization gets about 2% of revenues from the government. All in competitive grants.

Member stations might get as much as 14% from government (individual stations) and I'll bet most of that goes to stations that service areas thinly populated but I can't find figures.

As for bias, it will depend upon your on point of view but the best NPR shows have a bias to the truth. Air Talk with Larry Mantle has had some of the best reporting on an issue and he is comfortable calling out speakers who don't tell the truth on the air.

I've seen that very few NPR shows will call out a speaker's comments when they contradict fact, no matter if the speaker is conservative or liberal.

As long as the news is just a mouthpiece for groups to put their own spin on facts, truth suffers. We need more reporters like Larry Mantle who call out speakers who don't tell the truth.

No body likes the truth-sayers though (ask any whistle blower) and I doubt there's much of a business model for truth these days.

German or Designer board games often balance things by auctions or player choice. There are still first move advantages but auction do help balance.

Though different game groups often have different balance points. I've played with some groups that valued items differently in Princes of Florence than my usual group did.

Some games like Power Grid reverse the turn order to give advantages to players behind.

And Agricola has different players all picking from exclusive actions where each player is trying to follow their own strategy based on some of their cards (minor improvements and occupations).

Designer board games are fairly well balanced but skill will generally put you ahead. They are often designed to play with the entire family (most have rules about the youngest player going first usually a kid playing against parents).

Sure some of these games can be considered lightly themed, but the interesting part of the games are the mechanics not the theme. Some of the better games have mechanics that go well with the theme. Other games are less successful in matching theme to mechanic. Some of us are more interested in the mechanics though.

If whatever Nasa is working with developers to build is similar to the old Earth Orbit Stations (obviously updated as it's 20 years old)
there is a lot of potential for game play.

Certainly there's no reason to build a Diku type MUD/MMO where each player is a character. It probably doesn't have to be a persistent world either in the sense of going in and moving around, but persistent in keeping track of what projects you have attempted.

They could easily simulate multiple countries or companies racing for objectives. First team to capture a comet and deliver it to moon orbit for volatiles.

They could allow experimentation with different types of fuel. With SSO or stage designs. Try different ways of building a beanstalk.

And on the business side, clearly there's a minimum size but if it is popular enough then they can plan for expansions. It's the web so updating it should be part of the project plan.