Scratch further and beneath the ad business you'll find more incentives to allow fake engagement. Man is a simple animal and likes to see numbers go up. Internet folklore says the Reddit founders used multiple accounts to get their platform going at the start? If they did, they didn't do that with ad fraud in mind. The incentives are plenty and from the people running the platform to the users to the investors - everyone likes to be fooled. Take the money out and you still have reasons to turn a blind eye to it.
The biggest problem I see is that the Internet has become a brainwashing machine, and even if you have someone running the platform with the integrity of a saint, if the platform can influence public opinion, it's probably impossible to tell how many real users there actually are.
The LLMs that take 10 attempts to un-zero-width a <div>, telling me that every single change totally fixed the problem, are cracking the hardest math problems again.
They didn't even. They announced a time-plan to stop buying Russian gas eventually. Russia weaponized gas deliveries and stopped delivering. In fact, even before the war and any "unfriendly" action by Europe, they underdelivered to keep the gas storages (which they owned) low and drive the prices up. This alone should make anyone not want to buy Russian gas again.
The fact that these threads are always full of lies with all these twisted narratives show you who's doing the talking in all of them really. This thread was a few minutes old when someone had to mention that "The US blew up the pipeline" and this shit doesn't even collect downvotes or gets flagged, it rises to the top.
I clicked on two accounts posting lies and saw Russian software companies mentioned in their scant posting history, which in itself is not a crime, but also a fitting signal.
Europe has roughly divided by 5 its imports of Russian gas.
As to the Nord Stream, German prosecution services have arrested a Ukrainian national, Serhii Kuznetsov, in their ongoing investigations. The NY Times, the Spiegel, and Washington Post (all very well-known KGB mouth pieces), strongly point to Ukraine as well.
So my question is, are you really in a good position to lecture everyone about "fake news" on those topics ? I guess you were also telling us all that Trump was a KGB agent, before that got debunked in court ?
They got 8% of the votes in 1987, up from 6% in 1983, didn't even make it past the five-percent hurdle in 1990 - so what justifies the obsession with the Greens, when the large majority of Germans rejected nuclear energy after Chernobyl? Why must all nuclear energy threads on HN pretend a fringe party ruled Germany with an iron fist?
When issue will start going widespread, mainstream parties will latch onto it too to prevent voters from switching. It was not Green who decided to exit the nuclear, it was CDU government.
In 2011 the Greens won key conservative regions with their Fukushima fearmongering and outright lies (see GP comment). They drove massive anti-nuclear protests. And with all this they forced Merkel to u-turn on nuclear or she would lose power.
"Policy Reversal: In May 2011, just months after extending reactor lives, Merkel's government announced a total phase-out of all nuclear plants by 2022."
This is literally what we are discussing in this comment thread. Facts.
> Eight German nuclear power reactors (Biblis A and B, Brunsbuettel, Isar 1, Kruemmel, Neckarwestheim 1, Philippsburg 1 and Unterweser) were declared permanently shutdown on 6 August 2011, following the Japanese Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The only thing worth discussing here is how a domain with like 10 snapshots on archive.org - half of them nginx errors - has this submission trending on Reddit and HN.
I think Russia did, successfully for quite some time, attempt to direct anger towards the countries supporting Ukraine. Russia would drop a bomb on Ukraine and 90% of the comment section would hate the West for it. The goal was to fuel defeatism and infighting. The latter they encouraged from the start. Reading Reddit, you would have thought Germany had attacked Ukraine from the western flank. In the days and weeks before every major pending Ukraine decision in the US, you could see a noticeable uptick of Russian-friendly talking points. Before the US election, a suspicious amount of Redditors claimed that Trump would give Ukraine more weapons than Biden. These days, they are encouraging the Europe is weak rhetoric. If a toy drone gets spotted somewhere, the only acceptable response is nuking Moscow and EU should disband if they don't dare - that inane take to me is also trolling.
Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers.
And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.
> Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
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