It's debatable whether "reciprocal altruism" isn't a contradiction in terms, and whether "quid pro quo" wouldn't be the more accurate descriptor for what is in essence "you scratched my back, so I'll scratch yours". Then again, I may just be griping because you made me look up Hegelianism in your other comment.

anglophone

English-speaking.

ISO-8859-1

An 8-bit character set (i.e., representing 256 different characters) suitable for many Western European languages.

Windows codepage 1252

Something very much like ISO-8859-1 but slightly different, used on computers running Microsoft Windows. It's slightly different because for some reason (there are more and less cynical explanations) Microsoft seem unable to use anything standardized without modifying it a little.

ANSI

Microsoft-Windows-ese for "an 8-bit character set whose first half is the same as ASCII". Specifying the second half is the job of a "code page", such as the "code page 1252" mentioned above.

not universally machine readable

Not machine-readable without knowledge of which "code page" (see above) it uses. If you know that, or can guess it, you're OK.

encryption

Not actually encryption, despite the term "encoding". A character encoding is a way of representing characters as smallish numbers suitable for storing in a computer. Strictly speaking, every time I said "character set" above I should have said "encoding". Every time you have any text on a computer, it's represented internally via some encoding. Common encodings include ASCII (7 bits so 128 characters, but actually some of those 128 slots are reserved for things that aren't really characters), ISO-8859-1 (8 bits, suitable for much Western European text, though actually nowadays the slightly different ISO-8859-15 is preferred because it includes the Euro currency symbol), UTF-8 (variable length, from 8 to 24 bits per character, represents the whole -- very large -- Unicode character repertoire). For most purposes UTF-8 is a good bet.

irregardless

Regardless. (Sorry.)

[EDITED to answer the question about "not universally machine readable".]

So, if I understand the implication, anything encoded in ANSI is not universally machine readable (there are several unfamiliar terms for me here "anglophone" "ISO 8859-1" and "Windows codepage 1252")? I probably won't look up all the details, because I rarely need to know how many bits a method of encryption involves (I'm probably betraying my naivety here) irregardless of the character set used, but I appreciate how solid of a handle you seem to have on the subject.

For future reference, ANSI is not Unicode. You can google up the gory details if interested, but basically ASCII is a seven-bit character set with 128 symbols. The so-called ANSI (it's a misnomer) extends ASCII to 8 bits and so another 128 symbols, but without specifying what these symbols should be. On most Anglophone computers these will correspond to ISO 8859-1 (or a very similar Windows codepage 1252), but in other parts of the world they will correspond to whatever the local codepage is and it can be anything it wants to be.

UTF-8, on the other hand, is proper Unicode. So it seems the closest you can get to plain ASCII is to use ANSI.

I'm impressed by how mindful you reflected on the content of LW. Your high level view of LW is interesting and provides an interesting data point of how newbies and outsiders perceive LW. The problem (besides the formatting) I see is that your post is quite long and I had trouble seeing the tread or objective of your post. I think a few reader will have trouble connecting to this. It is not exactly on topic. Also to me it appears a bit like stream of consciousness writing which I find difficult - but interesting.

Wow. My encoding options are limited to two Unicode variants, ANSI and UTF-8. Will any of those work for these purposes?

The formatting of your article is broken. It would be much easier if you could structure it into normal paragraphs.

okay I did that and am about to paste.

HURRAY! Thank you everyone who helped me format this! As far as reciprocal altruism should dictate, Lumifer, I owe you.

Turn OFF word wrap. You should also not be concerned with pagination at all. Separate paragraphs by an empty line.