That trust is lost in big parts.

…due to a barrage of malicious propaganda.

If people suffer

The standard of living in Germany is close to the highest it’s ever been.

Truthful education would have prevented the current situation.

How? An extremely tiny minority of the population has any semblance of education, it’s not realistic to expect to be able to educate the masses up to the standard required to steel oneself against an endless barrage of malicious propaganda.

Balanced is already giving an equal share to lies.

No, “balanced” means calling out lies for being lies - but the truth is still nuanced. You can’t hope to compete with simple propaganda slogans and oneliners through nuance and thoughtfulness.

You’re missing the point, and not comparing apples to apples (influencers are only a small segment of the ad market; public broadcasters do much more than report news).

Yes, those €8 billion could be spent more effectively from the perspective of tackling fascism by stooping down to their level and flooding the waves with propaganda against fascism. This is not the situation we should want.

As long as public media remain committed to (trying to) reporting in a balanced way - as they should! - it can never compete with fascist propaganda that is not afraid to willfully lie. It is the fascist propaganda that must be tackled at its root.

The “funding” comes from advertisement on social media, which is the dominant way people, especially those most likely to fall victim to propaganda, consume news. Sure, public media still exist, but they are far less relevant.

This isn’t about “alternatives,” it’s about a failure to adequately regulate. Imagine if Der Spiegel posts an anonymous article - without verifying the identity of the author - alleging that Jews are coming to enslave your children. Yet this situation is exactly what social media are currently like, and the kind of content that spreads on there like a cancer.

It’s tempting to find the good in other people, and if they vote for obvious racists, there must be something to it other than racism. And while people are not innately evil, the vast majority can be easily manipulated by the forces of evil weaponizing people’s lowest instincts. It is those forces that should be tackled at the root, instead of letting them run rampant and ineffectively trying to quench the fires they start.

Surely you can’t believe the current economic situation in Germany is worse than in the 1990s - especially in East Germany?

The reasons people vote for racist parties is well-understood, and it has nothing to do with “economic” issues. The big difference between the 1990s and today is that the media are nowadays flooded with racist propaganda, whereas back then the media landscape was still dominated by public media and intellectuals. People are not any more racist than they were back then, but people didn’t usually vote according to racist beliefs (aside from a handful of NPD voters) since public debate was dominated by non-racist issues. So it is precisely the opposite - economic issues have become less important to voters.

The way to defeat this surge of fascism is to start adequately regulating (social) media, for example by banning astroturfing and medical misinformation and holding those who host such content accountable.

Life expectancy globally is around 71 years. Only a handful of countries (Afghanistan and a few sub-Saharan countries) have a life expectancy below 60.

Yo dawg, I heard you like reports, so here’s a report from our reporter, reporting on how reports say our reporter has been investigated for their reporting.

In my experience, they work as engineers, engineers or engineers.

You guys could just, you know, remove him from office. Introduce a modern democratic system while you’re at it. Might have to convince some of your countrymen it’s a good idea.

Also, EU countries are cutting research and education budgets to make room for military spending.

Signed, former EU scientist now working in the defense industry.

A shotgun and a fuel canister. What was the plan here exactly? Shoot all of the Secret Service, and burn the evidence? Start a fire and shoot at the ones fleeing the building?

Yes, he also has a problem with men, in particular the ones who aren’t complete bellends.

Both the standard of living in a society and the rate of innovation are strongly positively correlated with the progressivity of the tax system. Yet we should believe the author’s unsourced “research” that supposedly proves having wealthy people live in slightly smaller mansions will dampen innovation somehow. Horseshit. Both the Netherlands and Switzerland, countries that are more prosperous and more innovative than the US, have wealth taxes (albeit not very high ones) and far more progressive income tax brackets as well (albeit not at Nordic levels).

The amount (usually much less - unless there was some marauding army nearby) aside, it was more complicated than that. Taxation was delegated across a hierarchy of various stages; at each stage a mixture of negotiation, deception and coercion would be used to determine the taxation amount. The lowest-level tax collectors typically worked akin to a mob protection racket, and their own livelihood depended on extracting a surplus above what their employer (typically some noble) demanded.

Certainly substantially less transparent and simple than clicking through an online form in a few minutes.

Pretty sure filing taxes (taking all of 5 minutes) is a heck of a lot simpler for me than for any medieval peasant or minor nobility.

$100 today is about $40 in 1990. In those days games were made by a handful of people or even a single individual in one of two years of development. Chris Sawyer started work on the 1994 classic Transport Tycoon in 1992 and wrote the entire codebase in x86 Assembly. The price isn’t really that crazy considering the comparatively massive undertaking that is GTA6 development.

Having said that, it’s rare nowadays for any AAA game to release anywhere near its best state, so it tends to be worth it to wait even if money isn’t the concern.

There is a strong correlation between shitty health care and low life expectancy.

Makes sense. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is notorious for helping paedophiles in the UK.

The argument that because the epa didn’t put a warning on there they are free to not warn people about dangers they know exist is incredible. Because we corrupted the federal regulatory agency, we are free to poison everyone that trusts the system with impunity.

This isn’t really a fair representation of the situation. Here’s the current version of Wikipedia’s article on Roundup concerning its potential carcinogenic properties:

There is limited evidence that human cancer risk might increase as a result of occupational exposure to large amounts of glyphosate, such as agricultural work, but no good evidence of such a risk from home use, such as in domestic gardening.[31] The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity.[32] Organizations such as the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues and the European Commission, Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency, and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment[33] have concluded that there is no evidence that glyphosate poses a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans. The final assessment of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority in 2017 was that “glyphosate does not pose a carcinogenic risk to humans”.[34] The EPA has evaluated the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate multiple times since 1986. In 1986, glyphosate was initially classified as Group C: “Possible Human Carcinogen”, but later recommended as Group D: “Not Classifiable as to Human Carcinogenicity” due to lack of statistical significance in previously examined rat tumor studies. In 1991, it was classified as Group E: “Evidence of Non-Carcinogenicity for Humans”, and in 2015 and 2017, “Not Likely to be Carcinogenic to Humans”.[35][36]

One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.[27] The variation in classification between this agency and others has been attributed to “use of different data sets” and “methodological differences in the evaluation of the available evidence”.[32] In 2017, California environmental regulators listed glyphosate as “known to the state to cause cancer.” The state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment made the decision based in part on the report from the IARC. State Proposition 65 requires the state office to add substances the international agency deems carcinogenic in humans or laboratory animals to a state list of cancer-causing items.[37]

Why is Bayer setting aside billions to settle claims specifically in the US? Because they know how incredibly broken the US legal system is, and they may very well face expensive legal judgements issued by easily manipulated juries and/or “judges” looking to score career points - despite the lack of any convincing evidence Roundup is carcinogenic.

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Not a “nice” or “beautiful” tourist experience, obviously, but an extremely impressive one. I’m not a very emotional person, and have no personal link to the Holocaust, but one of the few times of my adult life I cried was when I visited the memorial site.