Billionaires living on an exclusive island near Miami are at the center of a heated debate over sewage disposal. With no system in place, they’ve proposed sending their waste to a nearby town, but the deal comes with a hefty price tag.

Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/indian-creek-surfside-billionaire-sewage.html

Without the paywall: https://archive.li/HrE38

Alternative: https://gizmodo.com/billionaire-island-where-bezos-lives-lobbies-state-gov-to-flush-its-poop-down-neighbor-towns-pipes-2000615795

Note

While the news is concerning, it seems Daily Galaxy had all the hallmarks of a content mill aping more legit sources. I had no idea because I follow a lot of RSS feeds and this had been sitting there for a while now. I choose it for the science stuff. Sorry. I honestly wasn’t aware.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    311·
    18 hours ago

    That’s fair, and hopefully here I can give you something more concrete than just saying “wow dumb source lol”.

    • The article is written by Arezki Amiri. This author puts out two or three articles per day on a very wide variety of topics, yet he lists no qualifications except: “expert specializing in health and technological innovations. He has extensive experience in sharing his knowledge on the impact of space technologies on health and science in general.”
    • A ton of words are bolded with no rhyme or reason. Far from being something related to accessibility, this is done so your brain keeps seeing bolded text and subconsciously thinks “something important; better keep reading”.
    • The article links to the Daily Galaxy at the words “sewage system” for absolutely no reason except for SEO. In this article about Bezos, it links to “1,300-Year-Old Royal Flush? Ancient Korean Palace Toilet Stuns Archaeologists!”. When legitimate news sources do this, it’s to enhance understanding; for example, a news outlet referencing an event from four years ago might link to one of their articles covering that topic for readers who may not be familiar.
    • The words in this article (and other articles of Amiri’s) feel like they were at least assisted by an LLM. A big tell is that LLMs love to say “it’s not X; it’s Y”. They also absolutely adore em-dashes.
      • “This isn’t just about sewage; it’s about how the wealthiest individuals […]”
      • “This move wasn’t about being unreasonable; it was about fairness.”
      • Other articles of theirs reek even worse.
    • Not a single one of their articles appears to be original reporting. It’s always a summary of one source.

    TL;DR: I’m 99% sure that every article from the “Daily Galaxy” is just taking an existing article (journal, news, etc.), running it through an LLM to summarize it, randomly adding bolds everywhere for atrophied, dopamine-starved zoomer brains, and published two to three times daily per author. It’s a content mill.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        18 hours ago

        If it’s any consolation, I can show you something similar to potentially swap in which actually is written by experts. The Conversation is always written by subject-matter experts (usually professors of the subject) and covers the same breadth of topics. The Conversation is basically what the Daily Galaxy wishes it were, and it’s one of my favorite items on my feed.

        • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOPEnglish
          6·
          15 hours ago

          Thanks. I actually follow those guys!

          I should mention that around the time of tripping upon and posting this article, I did catch their post about US supposedly investing in a carbon capture machine pretty close by on my feed reader. It seemed oddly out of place given recent events. Not to mention combined with all the other niche or local outlets I follow, some of which are specifically about renewable technologies.

          So, yeah, alarm bells were already ringing.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        14 hours ago

        I could’ve looked at other authors’ work, tried to find an editorial team, etc., but didn’t think it was worthwhile. When you frequently write and cite sources in said writing, this type of investigation often becomes second nature.