> "both sides are the same".

This is a very weak take.

If you're offered the choice of drinking poison or having your toenails ripped out, those options are absolutely not the same. But that doesn't mean that we should all line up in pro-toenail-ripping and pro-poison camps and start defending our tribalistic in-groups.

Both of those are terrible options even if they have radical and substantial differences, and we might even describe one as objectively "better" than that other. The fact that there are a myriad of other options is also important information.

Here in the US, political parties are locked down by the voting system we use. There is a substantial effort to move away from that voting system, which has seen major successes over the past 10-20 years, and continues to do so. Please support /r/EndFPTP and related communities in moving forward, rather than just pushing false dichotomies.

> Who would you suggest comes in with the chair?

/r/EndFPTP would be my preference ;-)

Of course. It's a self-identification only and should not be read as meaning more than "they didn't want to identify as a specific party." The change in that over time is what's interesting.

Gathering data on party affiliation is hard work. Anything beyond the surface level (and to some extent even that) is fraught with all sorts of skewed reporting and biases, plus it's insanely expensive to gather comprehensive data.

Of course, how people actually vote isn't data that anyone gets, so to some extent, it's all guesswork.

The chart I've produced here is mainly intended to highlight the fact that there is a large and growing group who no longer publicly associate themselves with the two major political parties, and that at this point they are the largest demographic (they were a minority demographic in 2004).

Source: Party Affiliation, Gallup

Tool: Google Sheets, Chart tool, line chart without smoothing.

Series: each raw series provided by Gallup is presented in light coloration and overlaid with a 6-value-rolling-average in darker coloration.

Edit: My sheet with the data

It's not the pitch that is the concern, so much as the "shape" of the sound.

Panels can be turned into incredibly good speakers (example) but that's when they are flat. The surfaces in a car are going to created much more complex wave-fronts because they aren't flat.

I presume that what LG is showing off is some sort of system that compensates for this. I wouldn't be perfect, but it could potentially be good enough to improve on the speakers you can otherwise get in cars.

Of course, 17 year olds will use it to vibrate the rivets out of their cars because that's what they do.

Yes, the fundamental issue is that people stopped buying newspapers because easier ways of getting lower-quality news appeared. TV was a forced perspective on the News. You could watch it linearly on their schedule, the newspaper was still relevant in the age of TV news because it was non-linear and you could read on your schedule.

But as soon as the internet made it possible to randomly access whatever news you wanted, the quality of newspaper news became a much less powerful attractor.

The finance games in the OP are just the secondary effects of that transition.

Fun fact: if we are in the middle of a reflection nebula, we wouldn't know. It'd be too dim and diffuse from inside to tell without lots of measurements from outside of our solar system.

> galactic watch towers by aliens

You heard it here first, people! ;-)