USA brain drain. Seriously, most of my friends in academia are trying to GTFO because they know they’re lucky to have the credentials and money to do it.
Conservatives who are getting their face eaten will not learn a single thing from anything
Woah, look at Nostradamus over here
Trump will die and a new religious movement declaring him to be divine will gain a significant foothold among people who call themselves Christians in the US.
Evangelicals will decide that, despite being nominally Protestant, they’re suddenly OK with sainthood again.
Okay, I could see this one happening.
There is already a religious following in his noxious wake. They literally think he’s heaven sent.
I think Trump’s loyalists are more after what he pretends to offer. As one uncle said, “He made me rich!” If you take away the potential earnings, there’s not much to the guy but bullshit. Like, he’s not even good looking enough to hang his portrait on a wall without getting tired of his face.
Famine around the world. Global political instability + climate change + economic downturn = food scarcity.
A high profile political assassination in the US or Europe.
The first time a ceo or politician gets assassinated by drone-strike will cause some severe lockdown on those things.
No matter what country it happens in.
~the very last part at least~
Donald Trump will either still be President, or be dead.
Or both!
Ooh, the Kim Il-Sung option.
Famine will enter the American lexicon again.
2008 was known for the Great Bush recession.
2025 will be known for the Great MuskRat Depression that Trumped all other depressions.
This time though the U.S. will feel the brunt
Great Bush recession
I’ve literally never heard it called that, is this a non-US term? I’ve heard “great financial crisis”, “great recession”, or “housing crash” before.
I just call it what it is. All those you say are attributed to the president’s policies.
So maybe I’m also calling that too.
I’ve heard the Bush recession a few. I’ve also heard it called the Obama recession from some obvious bootlickers trying to rewrite history but that don’t make sense since Obama administration reversed it.
Major roadblocks to piracy and porn in the US. Piracy will never be eliminated, but the barrier to entry will become too difficult for most folks. I’ve subsequently been hoarding all of the media I can get my hands on in case this happens - I refuse to pay for 20 streaming services just to watch movies and TV.
something I don’t understand about piracy is,
if you torrent to get rid of centralization, why have all the torrents saved on one website that can be taken down? Wouldn’t it be better to have them all on a torrented .html file or sthm?Look up DHT and magnet links.
I imagine discoverability and avoiding forks or just stale copies would become a big issue.
Drone attacks and drone based spying will be huge and hobby drones will be highly restricted.
As a casual drone enthusiast I’m already filling in all of my flying now because the free flying days seem to be numbered.
I saw an anti-drone fear article just today, actually. I hope this doesn’t happen, though.
It already feels overdue considering drones are quite popular for drug drops, even directly to prisons. Once some big events happen like high profile assassination, terrorist attack ir even something menial it’ll be game over for free flying.
Having a drone is such an eye opener tho and I really recommend getting one before it becomes too complicated to own one. Seeing your environment from 100 meters up is such a perspective change. Taking a drone on a road trip and thinking “I wonder what’s behind that boulder there” and actually being able to find out is a very grounding experience :)
Google goes offline for plebs, billionaires go mask off and start discussing population control via drones.
What do you mean by the first part?
You go on your computer one day, to find all your search engines give an error.
I think they mean all Google docs gone unless we buy a $1,000.00 per month subscription, or something.
We see that kind of massive price shift in business to business contracts all the time.
Someone is bound to try it on regular consumers, and Google currently has the most leverage.
In fairness to Google, they actually have better data export tools than most of their competitors… At least today.
That said, not my prediction, I don’t think it’ll happen in ten years. I do think someone will try it. My money was on Evernote, but I think their best opportunity passed already.
$1000/month? Really?
Google Docs (and their online office programs) aren’t even the only valid option anymore. I mean even Office is only $6/month if you only want the web version, or $12.50/month if you want desktop apps.
$1000/month? Really?
Some exaggeration may have occurred.
But yes, 10x increases from previous business to business prices have been common lately. I’m just waiting to see which direct to consumer service tried it first.
Peak human population will occur within the next ten years. Previously this was driven by falling birth rates. Now it will be driven by rapidly rising death rates. Within the next ten years, I think 300 million - 1 billion dead from starvation due to bread basket collapse is a conservative estimate.
Could have just said the knicks will win the world series and left it at that, jesus
Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don’t kill the messenger. The media does a piss-poor job of really nailing home to people the short and medium term impacts of climate change.
Did you know that in the last 15 years, global farm yields per acre have been flat? This is despite miraculous improvements in farming technology. Genetic engineering, farm automation, finance markets extending industrial agriculture to underdeveloped countries, satellite planning, innumerable tools and techniques.
Our global average farm yield per hectare should be soaring. Instead, it’s been flat. We’re swimming against the current, above a giant waterfall. All our advancements in farming technology are going into keeping us one step ahead of mass famine.
It’s been projected by insurance industry studies that if we hit +3C above preindustrial levels, that would correspond to a halving of the global human population. And with how fast climate change is accelerating beyond our previous overly conservative models, that could easily happen by 2050.
Again, the media has done an absolute shit job of explaining the perils of climate change to people. You think grocery prices are bad now? You haven’t seen ANYTHING. This is NOTHING compared to what is coming. The real danger of climate change isn’t slow sea rise or even wildfires. The real danger is the fact that at any given time, the planet only has a few weeks of food reserves stored up. We need to continuously make enough food to feed 8 billion humans. And if climate change causes multiple simultaneous bread basket failures? If we don’t make enough food for 8 billion humans? Well, quite quickly we will not have 8 billion humans anymore.
If you really want to understand the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, I suggest conceptualizing it in terms of wars. All of the fervent efforts in government and the private sector are trying to address climate change? All of them are trying to constrain the casaulties over the next few decades, to merely WW2-level casualties. We’re already going to face that; that’s already locked in. We’ve already guaranteed a loss of life on the scale of the Second World War. We’re trying to keep the casualties from spiraling up to “global thermonuclear war” levels of destruction.
Because the climate is becoming hotter, wetter, and highly unpredictable.
And we grow our food outside.
I think you might be missing something. If food yields were soaring that would decrease the market value of food. The current agriculture system is designed with profit as the goal and feeding people as a secondary result.
Is a supply chain inefficient? In the current system that’s alright, it lets a company charge more to make up for losses and gives them something tangible to justify price hikes.
There’s also massive surplus waste and other problems that are prevalent in the current system. Growing to feed local populations rather than growing for export would drastically shift the situation alone and is currently entirely possible, but not nearly as profitable.
Can we get enough food for everyone? Yes. Can we do it while maintaining record high margins? Probably not
There isn’t some vast array of technologies that exists but that we’re holding back from employing. We’re employing everything. Are there inefficiencies and manipulations from a capitalist system? Yes. But that has been the case for generations. Food yields per acre were increasing quite regularly for decades prior to 15 years ago or so. This is a relatively new phenomenon. And even in the greediest of corporate systems there’s pressure to develop as efficient a supply chain as possible, and to make use of available land as profitably as possible. Ruthless profit seeking could decrease the total number of acres under production, but it shouldn’t restrain the productivity per acre. Land doesn’t come cheap.
They aren’t concerned primarily with employing people or crop yields, agribusiness is a business.
Your sentiment holds entirely if agriculture was entirely dependant on staple crops.
The plateau didn’t come out of nowhere. Staple crops are being pushed aside in favor of high margin crops for biofuel and luxury goods. Large agriculture still focuses on short term gains.
Profit per acre is going up. Businesses don’t care about increasing yield past a certain extent. If the business is set to profit and is currently profitable then all of these issues are non issues to the business.
Following the path of other regimes around the world, the USA builds their own “great firewall”, segmenting most people here away from the global internet. At around the same time, personal VPNs become explicitly illegal. We might also see the government seize control of at least one certificate registrar, if they don’t fire up their own, thereby “owning” TLS online.
On the upside, there’s a chance we will see more grass-roots efforts to reboot a lot of institutions that were co-opted by the rich. You’re just never going to hear about that through conventional channels. For instance: local newspapers with real journalism behind them. Or more small businesses with the intent to last, rather than sell. It’s possible that more of those things will be co-ops, union shops, or even Mondragon inspired. Either way, there’s a path forward for more community, real communication, and eventual prosperity, provided folks keep their heads and take things offline where necessary.
Significantly populated areas of the developed world are going to be deemed inhospitable due to climate change
Parts of the American South are getting close, but are holding on as long as their power grids do.
That said, a good chunk of Texas won’t remain that way forever.
but are holding on as long as their power grids do.
This is a big thing. Where I live, there’s long stretches of time where the temperature differential inside vs. out might average 50C. That might be hard to imagine if you’re not in a place like this, but it’s totally possible to live somewhere hostile to life with the right technology.
To be fair, the laws of thermodynamics are working against you if it’s hotter outside. Heat can’t really be destroyed very easily, only moved. AC units are universal in the US, but aren’t a good solution in the third world, and if something happens to them you’re in a much scarier situation than just having to bundle up and drain your pipes. Still, I expect the trend towards overly hot places like Arizona growing will continue.
And that’s the point, I reckon.
Heating a home is easy, we’ve done it forever and have some easy ways to do it without the government providing power (so long as you know how to use a wood stove).
Cooling one though? That’s not so easy without electricity.
I suppose. I’d be surprised if the US got poorer to the point they can’t provide electricity and maintain the units, though.
(so long as you know how to use a wood stove).
Fun fact, the Inuit made do with no wood or quality fuel of any kind, even. Just body heat and maybe a little whale oil and fur lantern. What they lacked in sources they made up with lots of insulation.
It depends on where in the US we’re talking about.
I mentioned Texas specifically because the power grid there has had some high profile failures and issues in the last 5 years. They’ve fixed some of it and embezzled money for other repairs. Now they’re farming crypto on it.
The surveillance of chats and the prohibition of encryption in many Western countries must have a purpose. It mostly makes sense if democracy is dismantled.
Since the West doesn’t show signs of sharing resources voluntarily, my prediction is that the West is willing to fight a nuclear war to preserve its lead which cannot happen in a democracy.
Without that war, Asia will take over as the center of commerce and innovation. The brightest will move there, which means that the remaining people in the West have to be innovative without the main ingredience for innovation.
I’ll go with Hanlon’s razor there. The cops and politicians don’t really understand the magic boxes, let alone the game theory of adversarial uses layered on top of them. People use the boxes for bad things, they say just add a way to stop them, EZ. (Of course, we can’t and it’s not)
Since the West doesn’t show signs of sharing resources voluntarily
Which resources? The “only” tangible advantage the West actually has is strong institutions, and to a much lesser degree momentum. The science behind the technology is free for anyone to learn - even in excruciating detail if you go looking - and natural resources are actually less depleted in poor countries at this point.
That advantage could have been given up and shared. Instead it is defended, even with military power. Why fight those wars now and make enemies?
That advantage could have been given up and shared.
Strong institutions cannot be put in a crate and shipped overseas, no.
Countries like Japan, Singapore and South Korea slowly built their own, and are also developed now. Most poor countries just haven’t managed it yet for one reason or another.
That other reason, too often it’s Western intervention.
As a consequence, I believe that there won’t be a peaceful transition into a multipolar world, because that could have already happened.
If China escalates to cause war in Asia when other countries are sufficiently pissed off by them trying to steal territory and harass others non-stop, then that plus a potential Chinese real estate market collapse could cause pretty serious problems in the region.
we follow the trajectory of Nazi Germany
only THIS time, America will NOT be sweeping in to save the day. there IS no one to save the day this time.
so imprisonment and death for millions…and a world war. if we are very lucky , there might be an after…but then again…maybe not.
There will most certainly be an after. Unfortunately, very likely not for a lot of us.
China has the manufacturing capacity and manpower to challenge the increasingly inefficient American military in a protracted war of attrition. Assuming the nukes don’t drop.
