Doesn't seem to be very clever to me.

Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.

Yes, he has cut expenditure but what has been critiqued was WHERE he did that.

USAID for example.

And yes, he did fail to save (much) money in the process and it will cost the US even more in the future because the loss of soft power, intelligence, etc. USAID alone provided is unmeasurable high.

And this is just USAID as an popular example. There are thousands of veterans who lost their jobs. Waste, fraud, or abuse are missing and what remains is a cringe clown rising his arm because he's so edgy and needs attention very very desperately.

People hat the troll. From all around the political spectrums (well...maybe not on their far edges), people have been disgusted by what Musk has become and everything around him has became toxic because of it.

You don't have to make it about politics. It's just about being a morally civilised human.

We just use those.

What more do you want??

Nobody said that's the goal. Ads are the last step. Attention is the product, and the ranking system is tuned to maximise it. Harm is what falls out of that optimisation. If engagement weren't the business, there'd be no feed algorithm at all.

> It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people.

Partly true and beside the point. People produce the content. Zucks enterprises decide whose content reaches whom, how often, and at what age. That's not a users' choice, it's a design choice. The LA jury in March didn't rule on content either. It ruled that the product was built to addict.

> What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses.

If we could all manage those impulses, there would be no advertisement industry. We already agreed as a society that it doesn't work on children, which is why you can't advertise alcohol, tobacco or gambling to them. You're arguing against a norm that's been law for decades.

> In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.

You picked the one example that proves my point. Liquor stores need a licence, check ID, can't advertise to minors, and get sued for serving someone visibly drunk. Apply that to Meta and I'll take the analogy.

> in a democracy people get the institutions they deserve, by definition

"By definition" means it can never be wrong, which means it isn't an argument. And Zuckerberg has steered politics: he scrapped US fact-checking and rewrote the hate speech rules on 7 January 2025, two weeks before the inauguration. Trump said it was probably because of the threats he'd made.

You have to fight for democracy. Against people who want to harm or misuse it. Like Zuck. This is what the counter-weight is on this freedom machine.

So now, this ideology which you displayed here is quite toxic and anti-social. I know it because it became quite common in bubbles which cross here. I would like to know how you got there. Can you elaborate? I am really interested.

I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?

I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.

I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.

I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?

Why should anyone ever trust this man again?

> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.

Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.

This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.

Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.

This comparison is absurd.

"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...

So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.

...compared to Elon for example.

Author should read Iain M. Banks.

Maybe he wouldn't want to because it's easier to handle caricatures of utopia and dystopia in such a way that you could replace them with "heaven" & "hell". This is theology aimed to make Protopia look sane.

(Utopia doesn't mean an absence of problems. People working together to solve problems would be an aspect of Utopia. Something worth aspiring.)

I liked the idea of growing choices as an indicator however it also shows where the author likes to not look at. Going from farming to web developer is nice. The American Dream! And it happens. However the more likely path is: farmer to driver with their children having to struggle to climb the slope.

This and the diminishing choices in the middle classes are what show that this is rather just another path towards dystopia. Yes "we" have progress. But there is a strong inequality within those who profit from it. The author notices that half the world can be crap and still calls the direction progress, but never asks who is holding which half, or whether that split is itself widening.

So what is this Protopia the author describes here actually? Any state of the world can be called slightly better than last year if you choose the metrics after the fact.

What observation would count as evidence that we are NOT in it?

The difference is: they COULD walk if they wanted.

You can't if there is no walkway.

Maybe you should take a closer look how those prices come to be.

Every single nuclear watt is being subsidised and has been for decades.

Last time they wanted to play the free market game, they had to bring the company back into the forgiving hands of the French taxpayer.

I have rather Germany invest into future tech then waste it on rotting reactors which are obviously unfit for the current state of global warming already.

Nuclear was clogging up the grid with it's expensive energy. It is gone now and the grid is diversifying while it follows the path of complete decarbonisation.

There is absolutely no reason to look back for Germany and only those whose ideology is "looking back" seriously do that currently.

If you can spend a Dollar only once, you might end up with renewables. People can be economically motivated too. No reason to draw politics in an already heated discussion.

It looks more like you're the anonymous author attacking the hard work of the author of this blog post.

The blog post alone has more relevance then the ad-post.

In this case here, OP is obviously overdramatising the situation. Adding to this is the lack of details. This happens really often and the cause is many times not in the hands of the people who are confronted with the problem.

So you can assume that if someone took their time to read your complains, they would have taken the time to consider it. Therefore chances are quite good that the answer you've gotten really means that you're the problem.

I don't say there is no lazy support. It happens but just because you get the "your problem"-answer, doesn't mean it's always lazy support.

But they don't have to.

On the other side, suggesting that it is a general issue with those programs is wrong. Which is what I have been actually pointing out. This gives you the chance to check your devices and seek help if necessary.

This doesn't make my comment "bad support". I am not the tech support guy for HN.