[LeonenTheDK]

That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more deceptive way?

[shermantanktop]

Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water comedy. “It’s like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!”

[pfdietz]

With lots of Assyrian butt jokes.

[yyx]

You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit for recent example.

[InsideOutSanta]

In pre-scientific societies, "let's just murder a bunch of people and see if it helps" seems to be a surprisingly common way of handling all kinds of things. Google "Children of Llullaillaco" for an absolutely heartbreaking example of this.

[pfdietz]

Those societies were usually operating in a state of Malthusian equilibrium. There were always surplus people around who were going to die anyway. Culling this surplus was a problem they constantly had to solve; I imagine this drove warfare, for example, just to use some of the surplus before it inevitably died off in a lean year.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

There is a non-zero chance I will be part of the stand-in pool for the USA in the next 4 years :) It's not gonna help anything, but you know

[barbazoo]

They didn't even have a control group?!?