FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.

*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.

The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.

…

As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/

Welp, I’ve taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.

Emigrants likely consume less traditional media of their home country than people who still live in their home country, so they are more likely to form their opinion based on the (mis)information that they are fed on social media and hearsay gossip instead. Simion in particular is apparently very good at meme messaging: https://euobserver.com/digital/ar13f54193

Social media memes are very good for spreading populist propaganda like “easy solutions to complex problems” and “hatred of the other”, but bad at nuance and informed discussions. They’re a populist’s wet dream.

The emigrants also do not face the real consequences of their choice. If Simion increases corruption/graft in Romania, hijacks traditional media, breaks education, … The Romanian not living in Romania, will be far less affected by this than the people living in Romania. Same as what happens with the German Turks who vote for Erdogan: they don’t have to build their lives in Turkey, but thanks to the wrecked economy their Euros are worth much more, so they get to live as kings when on vacation in Turkey.

Access to safe drinking water was a known issue in loads of places at that time, not just in developing countries. My dad grew up in the 1950s and still drank table beer in his elementary school. There’s no way that a 1960s food scientist would have been so incompetent, to not know that not everyone had access to clean drinking water. We can also know that they weren’t acting in this way out of ignorance, because they continued with their unethical practices for years after the consequences became public knowledge. They only stopped because of the world wide consumer boycott. And only a few years after they promised to do better, they started rule dodging again. They simply don’t care about people, only profits matter.

From the study summary: We combine birth record data from over 2.6 million infants across 38 countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) with reconstructed historical data from annual investor reports on the timing of Nestlé entrance into infant formula country markets. Consistent with the hypothesis that formula mixed with unclean water could act as a disease vector, we find that infant mortality increased in households with unclean water sources by 19.4 per thousand births following Nestlé market entrance, but had no effect among other households. This rate is equivalent to a 27% increase in mortality in the population using unclean water and amounts to about 212,000 excess deaths per year at the peak of the Nestlé controversy in 1981. https://haas.berkeley.edu/ibsi/research/mortality-from-nestles-marketing-of-infant-formula-in-low-and-middle-income-countries/

Seems pretty damning to me, but will it have any consequences for Nestlé or any of the big honchos at Nestlé from that time? Probably not as usual, since corporations are apparently allowed to kill people as long as they do it in an obfuscated way.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[b] is an initiative of the second Trump administration tasked with cutting federal spending which it characterizes as “waste, fraud, and abuse”.[8] It emerged from discussions between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and was established by executive order on January 20, 2025. DOGE’s actions have included accessing government data systems; organizing mass layoffs of federal workers; and cutting climate change initiatives, scientific research, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency

It seems like every time that I read Serbia’s population number, it’s less than the last time. 30 years of population decline must suck for a society.