Neato
One thing that wasn’t touched on much is how many creators I’ve found due to the dozen or so d&d subreddits I subscribed to. I found a dozen map makers, half a dozen homebrew item creators and adventure creators each that I love and use regularly. Many I purchase from or support. That’s my primary source for finding new creators that I use to enhance my digital games. Hell I never would have heard of Sly Flourish without them. It’s what I’m going to miss from Reddit.
Another is that it’s where I get my d&d news. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as informed, nor as quickly, about the OGL fiasco without dndnext, dndnemes, onednd, etc.
Lastly, I disagree that I could “leave” the non DM communities there. I get that’s the best place for Sly to advertise so he engages with it the most. But the general discussion and meme subs were where I found a lot of rules discussion, balance discussion, etc.
Also discord sucks for most of this. It’s a chatroom, not a forum. Enworld is great and had great info but I really prefer the tiered discussion threads better than time based.
Jocat didn’t get cancelled, he got bullied and his family threatened to the point he quit.
After every major war there were economic booms.
Need citation for this. War is a net negative every time. War destroys resources and kills people. This leads to a labor shortage. It also destroys property so it leads to housing crisis and famine.
Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.
That is a death spiral. You can consider the labor involved with caring for the elderly a sort of tax on labor. It’s a net drain but required and is directly related to previous generations of labor. The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment. The more labor done for raising children, the more labor there will be next generation. Even though the labor for children is higher than the labor for the elderly, it results in a net positive.
If you have vastly fewer children in the following generation, you end up with a higher percentage of elderly labor compared to the labor pool. If the labor for children goes down enough to more than make up for it, you don’t have a per capita labor deficit. BUT you do have less total labor.
Now we get into the real issue: maintaining society. It isn’t just about the labor to care for each other. But technology, infrastructure, food, etc all need a certain amount of labor. And most of these tasks are scalable so it requires less labor per capita as population increases. If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.
Less humans mean less innovation. It means less energy and then less emissions total, but that’s irrelevant long term. Without enough labor to support industry growth and technology, we’ll be more on the sustaining ourselves side of labor. Which means we’re far more likely to relapse into fossil fuels. Especially if the depopulation is rapid which will destabilize industries.
It might be easier and quicker to digest in podcast form from people who did the research: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-ronald-and-nancy-reagan-29967299/
In short: deregulation, wealth transfer to the rich, harming rights of labor, and genocide.
