It doesn't take much to write a single paragraph, though. I think the quality of their response will become much more clear later.

Have you ever drafted a public response for an issue receiving a lot of attention on social media when you don’t know the whole story but, from what little you do know, things aren’t looking great for the entity you represent?

You vastly underestimate how much effort and attention was put into writing that “single paragraph” because I promise you it sure does take much.

I personally don't have a ton of trust in polls like that (referring to the Russian one). It is a strong claim to make that Putin is more popular in Russia than Biden in the US.

It's not a strong claim. He is absolutely a lot more popular. Popularity doesn't work in the same way as in the U.S., in the Orthodox culture where there is no concept of independent opinion: doublethink is innate.

Russian thinking is wholly totalitarian, in the good old Hitleresque sense (while ofc, Russian state is absolutely NOT totalitarian, it's just a soft dictatorship not unlike vast majority of governments in the poor world). Totalitarian thinking means that Putin is "us", i.e. government, State overall, country, nation, and society are the same, they are inseparable: most Russians could not explain how is "society" is different from "state", or discard the whole concept of "society" as Western weed. Rejecting Putin thus means self-rejecting. Very few people can even think of it.

Let's be honest, most of the HN crowd probably has a paywall blocker extension. That, or they just turn their cookies off and the website can't keep track of how many articles they have left. Not so lucky people can probably do the same.

In my mind, a subscription model for these websites is essentially a donation model.

It sounds to me like you do agree with them. The OP wasn't saying Americans feel wealthier, but rather that the quality of life relative to the past is higher.

Libgen added a feature to download files with ipfs. It is ridiculously faster than a normal download.

I don't think that merely being a good writer will allow him to be "quoted beyond the lifespan of his contemporary readers." I agree with OP that I really don't see anything special about his writings, compared even with contemporary writers on technology like RMS.

I have a Firefox extension called bypass paywalls.

It's happened more at the elementary school level.

Collective bargaining is 100% better than individual bargaining.

But, collective bargaining is only a single aspect of unions. They're not voting against it because they dislike collective bargaining, but because of other reasons. Collective bargaining is likely not a significant motivator for them because their salaries really are fairly high for the area.

I think in many cases unions are good, and in many others they are bad. I disagree that you can point at overall data and use that decide a specific case. Union data likely has severe survivorship bias, since unions likely tend to exist where they are more helpful.

What a pretentious thing to say.

Maybe your critical thinking is eroded if you refuse to try to understand why people would vote against a union. I'm not saying you have to agree with their decision, but it's ridiculous to assume everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.

Are you an Amazon employee at Bessemer? I'm pretty sure any employee there is more qualified to make a decision about their own lives than you.