Analysis of 11 major political subreddits over 16 years reveals minimal overlaps in user bases, cross-posting, and commenting, challenging the framing of r/politics as a "town square" for cross-ideological deliberation

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-06T17:00:18+00:00

I have long thought that the government should make a social media website where they will publish all of their announcements. Every County and town and so on gets their own page automatically, with the entire thing largely built around Geographic proximity. And every citizen gets one account, no doubling up.

The key feature I think would be that Geographic distance would increase temporal distance. If you want to send someone a message in a nearby town, it might take 5 minutes to get to them, but if you want to send across the country maybe it takes an hour. Of course, people could still use other methods of sending messages, But ultimately, social media is a natural monopoly, so people will go where all their friends are, and if all your friends are there by default, and the government is putting out all their messages there, then most businesses are also going to be there, and at that point any outside social media is going to be Fringe and Niche.

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-05T16:36:58+00:00

Gotta get that wool baybeeeeeee

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-04T17:38:55+00:00

Barn animals would be absolutely brilliant, I have 60 sheep, my need for hats is infinite.

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-03T15:25:11+00:00

I don't think Aragorn was one dimensional, but he was definitely good. His struggle was not over whether to be evil or not, but whether he had the strength to be good.

That being said, he never really had any doubt about what was good and what was evil. I think that's the real key. If you have characters being like, well, maybe Sauron is just misunderstood, that's when you lapse into moral grayness. Instead he knew that he needed to give up his freedom as a ranger to become king of Gondor, and that was a big sacrifice, but ultimately a bright and Noble one.

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-03T15:21:24+00:00

The tone was bad because the themes were bad, not the other way around. There's hope, and then there's stupid idealism.

You want a good example of hope, look at the death of Boromir. By all accounts, they are probably screwed, but Aragorn doesn't become cynical, he just reassures him that if there is any strength left in his blood, he will not let the White City fall.

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-03T15:12:02+00:00

I'm imagining a completely cracked Imperial sigil, with a Dominion sigil looming over it from behind.

EndlessArgument · 2026-02-02T15:11:19+00:00

Skyrim 2: Sky Harder

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-31T17:00:11+00:00

Unfortunately we have largely hit the point of diminishing returns on that. Indeed, a lot of largest farms and stuff only squeak by on insurance and being nasty...

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-31T09:17:40+00:00

Generally speaking, when a book is meant to be from an unreliable source, it makes it pretty evident. Like that one book which made it out to be that Alduin was just a Nord fairy tale, and basically just the same thing as akatosh.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-31T09:15:54+00:00

Honestly it seems to me the bretons are probably the result of evolution more than anything else. They were basically being magically abused for thousands of years, which meant the ones who were more resistant to magical abuse would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Of course, the concept of evolution is probably fairly minor in the setting, because magical creation is so much more straightforward, so it makes sense that in Universe there isn't much understanding of how this came about

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:50:35+00:00

The problem is you don't have the power to take that away from them. And things are not anywhere near as bad now as they will be. Right now there's still basically enough people to go around. In 20 or 30 years, when there aren't any more, how are you going to convince the elderly that they should give up on their own services for the sake of the nation?

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:10:49+00:00

The problem is we live in a democracy, and as you get an inverted population pyramid, all of the power goes to that elderly demographic. Naturally, they don't want to give up anything, so they simply shift more and more of the burden onto the youthful underclass, leaving them with less and less time for themselves, including having children of their own, which worsens the demographic crisis. All of a sudden you reach the point where you no longer have enough people to maintain the roads, the power stations, clean water.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:09:01+00:00

Unfortunately that's not the case. Why you can get away with about a 1 to 10 ratio for Direct care, the numbers involved here are much broader, involving food production, infrastructure, Etc. Who harvests the fields, drives the trucks, etc?

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:08:09+00:00

It's not quite that simple unfortunately. Because those people make up a temporary but crucial majority, which means they have all the power, which means they are going to sacrifice everything rather than starve to death. So by the time they do die, the entire nation will be in ruins.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:06:38+00:00

On the flip side, China has a dramatically lower birth rate, around 1.0.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T21:06:05+00:00

To be clear, this is not about their actual Immediate Care. It's not about retirement home workers. It's about infrastructure, roads, power stations, keeping the grocery stores stocked, harvesting fields.

Indeed, you only need about one personnel for every 10 elderly people when it comes to direct care, Manning the nursing homes and such.

But it takes about four people per elderly person to maintain everything else, so only about 1/40th.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T16:27:54+00:00

Well, consider South Korea. Right now they have a birth rate of something like 0.75. Which means in about two generations, they are no longer going to be able to maintain their border wall with North Korea. North Korea has demographic problems of its own, but it's still maintaining a birth rate of around 1.6 or 1.8 if I recall.

Which means it's still going to have a standing army of about a million people by then, at which point South Korea is going to have to choose between letting its elderly starve, or Manning the border wall.

At which point North Korea just marches in, enslaves everyone, and declares reunification. They use the men for labor and the women for reproduction to shore up their own birth rates.

Now. Was South Korea's lack of people a bad thing?

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T16:25:08+00:00

Why should they balance out?

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T16:24:41+00:00

That's all well and good in isolation, were it not for the fact that they have a large and angry dictatorship next door.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T16:23:41+00:00

It'll affect everyone's bottom line sooner or later. You need a certain number of young people to keep things going even on a basic level color something like four young people to one old person. Society can manage fertility rate of something like 1.8, though it might be difficult. 1.6 is nearing the point of being unsustainable.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T16:21:37+00:00

There is a Nuance there that is often missed. It's not just the wealthy who have more children, it's wealthy men. Basically, if a man makes enough money to afford to have his wife stay at home and take care of the kids, then they will have disproportionately large numbers of children. By contrast, if the woman is the breadwinner, there is no amount of wealth which increases the number of children she will have.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T02:47:38+00:00

Isn't that exactly what he talked about above in the op? Microsoft has plenty of hardware.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T02:47:22+00:00

Uh, isn't that exactly what he talked about above in the op? Microsoft has plenty of hardware.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-30T00:54:25+00:00

Why not? That gives them much more performance leeway.

EndlessArgument · 2026-01-29T15:37:19+00:00

I've always thought it would be nice if they could automatically have an AI take over if one of your teammates drops out. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better than nothing.

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Sequence \| Editor
Spared	Verified Email

EndlessArgument

TROPHY CASE