Nowhere in my comment did I describe anything even resembling a conspiracy. You’re pretending I did because you couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to disagree.

Reddit is not leftwing

This just shows how detached you are from reality, and how deep into your social media echo-chambers you are. It doesn’t matter how much research I show you because you won’t let reality get in the way of your feelings. For anyone else who might be interested, here is some research.

• Pew Research Center (2026): 32% of Democrats/Democratic-leaning Americans use Reddit, compared with just 20% of Republicans/Republican-leaning Americans. Democrats are 60% more likely to use Reddit. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabId=tab-3345cffa-94a6-4e74-9272-70dee1e0e213

• Rajadesingan & Chebrolu (2026): A peer-reviewed study classified 738,894 Reddit users as left-leaning versus 275,284 right-leaning, a 2.7:1 ratio. It also classified 332 political subreddits as left-leaning versus 148 right-leaning. This concerns the researchers’ politically classified sample, not every Reddit user. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261462091

• PNAS Nexus (2025): Researchers analysed 117 million political posts across nine platforms and found Reddit’s political news-sharing was disproportionately left-leaning, with relatively little right-leaning content. The analysis concerned the 2020 US presidential election. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf262

• University of Michigan (2024): Researchers examining local subreddits found both users and moderators leaned Democratic. On a 0–100 Republican-to-Democrat scale, the average user scored 58, while the average moderator scored 62. https://michiganross.umich.edu/news/new-study-reddit-explores-how-political-bias-content-moderation-feeds-echo-chambers

Now it sucks for everyone. That’s not an improvement.

They couldn’t afford to pay nurses and doctors and firefighters and police and social benefits and all the other things a functioning state would do. That’s the definition of a failed state. They recovered because we are so generous. You don’t speak for the EU either. You speak for yourself.

Greece isn’t a failed state because of the support we gave them. Greece recovered very well compared to most other failed states in history. We gave them hundreds of billions and all kinds of other relief. We are very proud of the support we gave a failed state, and we’re happy to see Greece recover so well, comparatively. We are not responsible for their failure, and we are not responsible for their lack of growth. They made many poor decisions over many decades. We wish them the best, and we hope they continue to make better financial decisions in the future.

I’ve used Reddit heavily for 16-17 years. The slide was slow and incremental and began at least 10 years ago. These are the reasons I would estimate have caused Reddit to become what it is now:

• Intentional political polarisation. The owners made their political affiliations clear over the years, and have not been shy about wielding their control. Every decision, from firing Victoria, to creating terms of service which excluded racism against white people, to hiring very left wing progressives as administrators and staff, to hiring Pao, to selective rule enforcement, has resulted in a place where even mild dissent is generally not tolerated. An echo-chamber in the truest sense. It’s so bad that it is now violent. We have cases of killers who became radicalised on Reddit. Something people may not know is that there is a very incesutous relationship between the moderators of the top subreddits and the owners and administrators. The larger subs are required to have administrators on the team, and they mostly control all of the large subreddits. It gets worse though, because the automated moderation system flags accounts which are banned by the moderators on those large subs. They get selectively tougher enforcement. Meaning that anyone who dares post in /r/Politics and doesn’t agree has all of their posts scrutinised to a much higher degree, and people are frequently banned from the entire website for innocuous reasons.

• The demographic became much younger over time. This is a product-led decision. Children are easier to manipulate and get addicted. They’re easier to control and indoctrinate. They’re an easy target to which to foment anger and “engagement.”

• The audience became much wider. Another product-led decision. The original demographic was male, 20-40, geek. Conversations were pretty mild, very respectful. With a much wider audience, all semblance of “Reddiquette” has disappeared. No one has a shared frame of reference anymore. The people who joined either didn’t care about civility, or were used to combative social spaces such as Twitter and Facebook. They brought those practises with them, and Reddit embraced it and encouraged it.

• Reddit embraced bots. They look great for advertising metrics. They foment that hate and engagement. I estimate that the majority of comments on Reddit are bots now. In some subreddits I would not be surprised if 90%+ were bots. Bots can’t be reasoned with. They’ll just keep spewing hate forever.

I honestly think Reddit is a dead man walking. Even the hyper partisan left wing people hate the site now. Everyone is waiting for an alternative. This is Digg all over again, but at a larger scale.

Greece defaulted because it spent so much more money than it had. They defaulted in 2012, then missed payments to the IMF in 2015. Europe then provided €256.6 billion in emergency loans, plus substantial debt relief and banking support.

To characterise this as the fault of Europe betrays a fundamental gap in your understanding of this entire event. No one is disputing that Greece continues to grapple with the problems it created. I was pointing out that it survived and is doing pretty well compared to most other examples of failed states in history.

I’m right there with you. I’ve been on the FIRE path for about a decade. I’m close to being able to retire in my late 30s. It’s been hard though, especially in Denmark. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices, working long hours in jobs I hated. I drive an old car, take modest vacations, and buy second hand stuff. For me the freedom of financial security feels better than any nice car, any nice vacation, or any nice clothes. I want to be able to spend my days reading books, listening to music, and hiking.

Retired French people now have higher incomes than working people. France already has near the lowest retirement age in Europe. It’s 70 for me in Denmark and it frequently gets later as medical technology and expected lifespans are projected to increase.

For context, France faces a severe and worsening structural debt problem. Public debt recently reached €3.6 trillion (119% of GDP), compared to 60% in 2000 and 98% in 2019. It’s getting much worse, very fast. They recorded a €152 billion deficit (5.1% of GDP) in 2025, while government expenditure consumed 57.3% of GDP. This is spooking the bond markets, so the cost of financing is skyrocketing. A 10-year French bond yields reached 4.76% a few days ago. Annual public-sector interest costs are projected to rise from €79.2 billion in 2026 to €91.2 billion in 2027.

Maybe they could survive this with massive and immediate spending cuts but they also have a demographic crisis. 22.2% of French residents are now 65 or older, versus 16.4% in 2006, while fertility has fallen to just 1.56 children per woman, its lowest level since the First World War. This aging population increases pension and healthcare pressures relative to the working-age population. Lowering retirement to 60 is basically a direct promise to cause runaway inflation and a debt crisis, culminating in a bailout by the IMF and Greek-level austerity measures.

I’m not making any of this up. All of this is publically reported.

France had a chance to be moderate on finances but they fucked it up so badly over so many decades that there is no moderate path anymore. I suspect they’re going to drive the car off the cliff and complain when they’re forced to cut spending under threat of the entire nation collapsing. Surprisingly, things worked out pretty well for Greece, so maybe that’s not the end of the world.

It appears they’re taking the stance of the UK Green party: if they just have a cozy coffee with Putin, he’ll understand how mean he has been and stop. In the mean time, let’s dismantle our military and ensure we cannot defend ourselves. Literally nothing could go wrong.

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Tesla is killing it in Europe. The Model Y is an unbeatable combination of range, performance, boot space, software, and price. No other EV offers the same value. Contrary to what Redditors believe, most people aren’t chronically online and don’t make large financial decisions based on memes.

Chinese EVs are starting to make inroads, and I’m seeing more of them in Denmark. Quality is still in doubt but if they hold up well over the years, I think we’ll see a lot more of them.

So many different opinions, so I might as well weigh in.

I’m a classic story of starting with a 1TB external HDD to now my 160TB server. I just kept going and didn’t know when to stop. It’s very affordable to make sure your server is extensible. Start with a decent case with lots of HDD bays. A Fractal R6 is excellent. A modern Intel CPU does great transcoding for x265 and AV1. No GPU required. Then you just need 8-16GB RAM (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Maybe 256GB SSD (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Get one HDD right now. Whatever has a good price/TB. They’re also expensive right now.

The more important question is the OS. I actually prefer Windows. It’s free (if you look on Google how to activate it for free). If you get more than one HDD you should consider DrivePool to pool your drives. Works great and cheap one time cost. If it’s data you can just download again you don’t need to worry about backup. RAID is a good intermediary step, and for that SnapRAID works really well. You’ll need one HDD for parity, and a good rule of thumb is no more than 5-6 HDDs per parity. RAID means that if a disk dies, you can restore the data. Much cheaper than cloud storage.

This is what I use and it’s great. Low power, cooler, quieter, and in the current economy, MUCH cheaper.