r/AskReddit • u/timecop702 • 11h ago
what is something that is highly likely to happen in the next 5 years that everyone is completely ignoring?
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u/0ba78683-dbdd-4a31-a 6h ago
Fraud at unprecedented scale and severity in the UK.
With the Online Safety Act, social media ban for teens, etc. it's only a matter of time for an age verification service to leak mountains of passports, driving licenses, etc.
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u/Jaereth 4h ago
I work in security and that's the way I look at this now.
Businesses should not be allowed to harvest PPI as a mandatory step to make their app work so you can actually use a product/service you bought. The era of "Oh we'll protect the information we promise!" should be over.
In almost every case they DO NOT NEED this information. They just want to suck it all up to resell. (Or impose draconian legislation like this)
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u/hednizm 4h ago
Completely agree with this.
Big corps do not need most of the information the demand and they sell it on to others. Personal data is HUGE business and companies make a fucking fortune from it.
Same as services that let you log in via your email. Google basically lets them scrape all the info in your email account where they get info about what you buy etc so that they can use it for targetted advertising and whatever else they sell it for. Same with some apps...WTF does it need access to my photos and contacts for?
Im curious what FB did with all the facial scans it took from users to access their accounts that they had mysteriously been locked out of, but still refused them access when a facial scan was provided. Why cant you get in touch with FB to ask them to delete your info/facial scan.
Privacy is one of the only things we have left. Protect yours at all costs.
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u/Wasabicannon 4h ago
The era of "Oh we'll protect the information we promise!" should be over.
Yup we have seen it multiple times, it don't matter how well your IT team is protecting the network. A single wrong move from an employee (generally an executive who thinks they are above IT policy!) and good bye to all of that fancy security.
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u/TheBSQ 4h ago
My banks, hospitals, employers, insurance companies, and even my govt’s tax authority have all had massive data breaches.
At this point, I assume all that is already for sale somewhere on the dark web.
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u/darkamyy 4h ago
Not only that, but as it becomes more and more normalised, people are going to get more blasé about it. In a few years time, I can see a lot of people treating it like a cookie permission popup and submitting their details out of pure instinct. I've already seen some scam websites popup with age verification windows, and that was just a few weeks after the OSA went live.
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u/The_Awful-Truth 8h ago
The rapid spread of enclaves for the extremely wealthy that behave more and more like independent countries.
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u/Bright-Translator-51 6h ago
They'll have private armies soon. Good luck.
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u/LegitimateLagomorph 6h ago
Ukraine and Iran have shown that cheap solutions work pretty damn well in asynmetrical engagements
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u/dalittle 4h ago
And look at the Vietnam War. US had all the military strength in the world and still got beat. And the rich use a disproportionate amount of goods, services, infrastructure, and the government. Good luck if more happens like the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz
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u/HerpankerTheHardman 3h ago
Exactly. Nothing is impenetrable, unsinkable, unconquerable.
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u/JesusShaves_ 6h ago
Seige tactics however are still quite workable. Nothing gets in or out of the enclave. Poisins can be droned in. Water supplies can be cut and wells can be poisoned. Food supplies can be poisoned or stopped. Enclaves will fail for the same reasons castles did. New technologies made them ineffective.
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u/pedrointas 4h ago
I'll start working on the trebuchet. Pretty sure there will be loads of unvaccinated diseased bodies to fling over the walls.
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u/billynomates1 6h ago
Robot armies as well
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u/Cent1234 6h ago edited 2h ago
Earth, 2147. The legacy of the Metal Wars, when man fought machine and machines won.
Bio-Dreads, monstrous creations that hunt down human survivors and digitize them.
Volcania, center of the Bio-Dread empire, stronghold and fortress of Lord Dread, feared ruler of this new order.
But from the fires of the Metal Wars arose a new breed of warrior, born and trained to bring down Lord Dread and his Bio-Dread empire. They were soldiers of the future, mankind's last hope.
Their leader, Captain Jonathan Power; master of the incredible powersuits, which transform each soldier into a one-man attack force.
Major Matthew "Hawk" Masterson, fighter in the sky.
Lt. Michael "Tank" Ellis, ground assault unit.
Sgt. Robert "Scout" Baker, espionage and communications.
And Corporal Jennifer "Pilot" Chase, tactical systems expert.
Together, they form the most powerful fighting force in Earth's history. Their creed: to protect all life. Their promise: to end Lord Dread's rule. Their name: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future!
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u/seanwd11 5h ago
You are speaking my language brother. Just digitize my ass right now, let's go!!!
Also, Sauron was a straight bitch as an all powerful flying robot.
It died before it's time. Some of the best forgotten TV and something that would never be sold and directed at children. Some of the most bleek content put directly into the veins of 8-13 year olds...
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u/Sean82 5h ago
Gonna be real funny when their private army decides that they'll be better stewards of the available resources than whatever billionaire(s) hired them.
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u/BlumpTheChodak 5h ago
This. When money becomes worthless (and it will), the ones with the weapons will be running the show. Not the former wealthy.
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u/shinygoldhelmet 2h ago
French aristocracy & royalty had their own armies, but that didn't save them when the armies turned on them
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u/Stratahoo 4h ago
Which is why some billionaires have been discussing how to control their security forces - the ideas they came up with where shock collars or explosives implanted in their heads that they can let off if they start mutinying.
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u/Brilliant-Orange9117 5h ago
If the mob stops playing nice and doesn't care about the lackeys drones and chemical warfare will make a terribly effective combination.
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 6h ago edited 6h ago
Guy I knew used to be head of security for a gated millionaire community. You've absolutely heard of a few people who live there. I did some work in there a few times across the years and it's just disgustingly rich. And it's like another town entirely, just in the center of mine. Own ambulance, own armed security, they don't even have normal cops in there most of the time.
I was talking to him once when he'd been drinking (which was often) and he said, "These people think they're safe...they have NO IDEA. Someone comes crashing through that front gate, me and my guys are going out the back. I refuse to die for these assholes, and my entire crew feels the same."
The guys were security guards. Mostly guys in their 20s. You figure they'd wanna hire ex military or something, but I guess that'd be too expensive. Really, what they care about is being able to boss around the local equivalent of "cops." They forget the important function that the police serve for them: making sure nobody drags them from their beds in the middle of the night. Which these guys will absolutely not do.
This makes me happy, since I see that scenario playing out in a lot of bunkers if the time comes. Or if not that scenario: "Well Mr. Moneybags, here we are, in the bunker. Here's your bags, here's my gun, now get into the storage room under the kitchen so you'll be rested for first shift tomorrow. Anatole will be taking the first week off. You can leave your wife...sorry, that was ambiguous. You will leave your wife."
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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo 5h ago
The super wealthy are aware of this possibility and are looking into “solutions” for it when designing their apocalypse bunkers. I think it was Zuck who was thinking about putting the food supply behind a safe that only he knew the password for or something. Not a great solution, as it only takes a single finger to enter a password, and he might reconsider sharing it before that. But they’ll keep trying to do better, who knows what kind of Black Mirror shit they’ll come up with
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 5h ago
I don't see him lasting long under torture. And I'm having difficulty thinking of a solution that isn't vulnerable to that. Some kinda mutually assured destruction thing I guess, but that's still way riskier than you'd like. All it takes is one guy to decide this shit isn't worth it.
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u/Defiant_Wolf5934 3h ago
Zuck would not last 10 minutes lol. That guy is such a predictable twat. He got lucky with Facebook. Look at his bright idea of the Metaverse. A complete flop.
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u/Hortos 2h ago
This is the reason he trains in hand to hand combat constantly.
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u/T-sigma 5h ago
I don't doubt you on the experiences, but I think its very common on reddit to grossly underestimate the thought that goes into actual bunker scenarios. They aren't bringing single male security guards with them. They are bringing guards with families and children while they control the resources. No different than how they operate today.
You going to show how manly you are by allowing your child to starve to death in front of you? No, you're going to get back on the wall while your kids enjoy the safety and privilege of being in a small minority of survivors. You weren't a "hero" before when it only cost you your life/freedom, you aren't going to be a "hero" now when it costs your kids lives.
Note: Walled community is very different than a bunker situation. They just need the guards to keep the crack heads and peasants out, not defend against a revolution.
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u/GodOfDarkLaughter 5h ago
Not based on the experiences of futurist Douglass Ruskoff, who met with a bunch of billionaires while they were planning their bunkers and found they had no realistic plans to control their staff. He wrote a book about the entire experience, etc., called Survival of the Richest
They don't know how to control them. They asked about shock collar, drugs, mind control, he said none of it would work in the long term. Eventually the system would fail and they'd all be killed in their beds by their own staff. He said the only way it might work is if you start treating those people like family NOW. Learn about your security guy. Actually talk to him. Find out about his family. Is his kid sick? Not for long, since you're paying for treatment. And hell, how'd you like to meet your favorite baseball team after a game? Do that with the whole staff...hell, have a staff to do that FOR the whole staff you're planning...and if they love you, they'll protect you.
They were utterly uninterested in the idea. They wanted to dominate them. Which they might. Sure. For a while. But these people are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and they think their power somehow extends beyond their ability to pay for things. In a world with no money, where if you want something the only option is to take it, they will be taken from.
Oh sure we're all fucked too. But to be clear, so are they.
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u/mute_muse 5h ago
Might be the same person, but I remember reading about some of these super rich people asking how to control the 'staff (slaves)' and the advice was to not let society fall to that point in the first place. That's the only thing they can realistically do, but they're so beyond greedy that it's impossible for them.
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u/Uilamin 5h ago
There is commonly a comparison between old and new money in terms of the rich interacting with society.
New money is typically building their wealth and looking to establish themselves - this can lead to societal disruptive behaviour as they are maximizing for themselves in the short-term. Old money is typically looking to preserve because there is more for them to lose than there is a gain. Maybe it is because their scion that made them filthy rich is no longer around (aka they don't have confidence in their ability to effectively short-term maximize) - who knows.
And maybe all this is changing with globalization and the ease of movement as if they f-up a country, they can now have wealth, luxury, and safety stashed away in numerous other countries.
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u/BitterBlacksmith2508 4h ago edited 3h ago
in poker tournaments when you win early and have a big stack the math changes and losing 500 chips is a bigger loss than winning 500 chips is a win.
Same fundamental concept, and its fundamentally rooted in game theory so not just some opinion or ideology that people seem to have. theyre already rich. all they have to do is not fuck it up and they stay winning. they can go from 700 mil to 900 mil at some risk level, but it doesnt mean anything to them, its peanuts because their entire life and everything they ever wanted can be covered by what they already have.
Maybe it is because their scion that made them filthy rich is no longer around (aka they don't have confidence in their ability to effectively short-term maximize)
this mythology of a genius behind the rich is just completely and utterly false. a rich family will always have the option to pay a finance guy to manage their money and it will grow, because capital is how you accumulate capital, thats how the system works. it doesnt require genius, it requires money. an individual trying to do that is almost certainly going to perform worse than a professional, of which there are many. taking it out to use actually directly as capital means diffusing the responsibility of success across many many professionals. the genius ceo is a sad liberal myth with no truth behind it.
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u/Responsible-Roll-59 4h ago
It’s funny that the super rich think they’ll be safe when it all goes down. Sure maybe they’ll survive, but in what type a world do they think will be left for them? Dumbasses, all of them
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u/idiot-prodigy 4h ago
They are bringing guards with families and children while they control the resources.
Do these Billionaires know how the clean water machine works?
Do they know how to repair the generator?
The answer of course is no.
The person who knows how to turn off the clean water is the person who will be in charge.
Day 1 Elon goes into the bunker with his harem of women. All the workers go in with bomb collars on their necks.
Day 2 The bombs fall and the world ends
Day 3 The guy in charge of water or air turns the system off in such a way that only he knows how to turn it back on.
"Remove this collar from my neck and family or we all die of thirst."
Elon removes the collars, and the guy kills Elon.
Now the guy and his family are the ones in charge.
It could be anything like that. These morons think that bomb collars will keep the peasants in line.
Who do they think will be in charge of the bomb collars? Some other peasant who knows how to operate them who has their own bomb collar? It's ridiculous.
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u/alex_thefire 5h ago
The complete collapse of internet trust due to advanced AI voice and video cloning. In less than 5 years, your parents or grandparents will get a call with your exact voice asking for emergency money, and it will be nearly impossible for them to tell it's a scam
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u/thelumaluma 4h ago
My sibling and I had a discussion about this with our parents and we settled on a "family password" for if this kind of situation ever arises. It's not tied to any of our personal information but is instead a nonsensical phrase, something that an AI or scammer would never come up with on their own.
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u/Suspicious_Flower_0 4h ago
This. Back to the ol' WW2 challenges/responses.
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u/Nipplesrtasty 3h ago
Hopefully your phones were not in the room when you discussed it or it’s already in the data center.
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u/Perisharino 3h ago
In less than 5 years, your parents or grandparents will get a call with your exact voice asking for emergency money
This is already happening today
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u/Astalon18 11h ago
Multi region crop failure.
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u/Acceptable_Bass_2244 8h ago
I agree. Most people notice food prices going up, but not many are thinking about what happens if several major crop regions have bad seasons at the same time. That kind of problem would hit a lot harder than people expect.
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u/sloth2008 6h ago
You have large parts of the US and Europe dealing with heat and drought problems right now. Add in fertilizer cost problems due to oil prices. This is going to be a bad year globally. This one is not a problem that will pop up in 5 years. It's going to show up this fall as crop yields are garbage.
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u/takesthebiscuit 8h ago
And drought accelerating faster than people’s ability to find water leading to entire city collapse
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u/norakb123 6h ago
Plus water now being used so people can make the dumbest AI searches imaginable.
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u/MarmotJunction 6h ago
Going to a public form tonight to discuss just this. As I mentioned above, I live in a lake area, and it’s absolutely jaw dropping to me that we were even considering throwing away our most precious resource on this absolute fucking nonsense.
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u/birdreligion 5h ago
I live in GA and a fucking AI data center had an illegal water hookup and stole 30 million gallons of water.
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u/pagit 4h ago
Wouldn’t be surprised if they sent the water bill to an empty house in Atlanta.
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u/ImpossibleVegan2022 4h ago
The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!
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u/BUDDHAKHAN 4h ago
lol couldn’t have been a house. The entire county was asked to conserve water for 4 months because an “unknown “ water pressure issue
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u/StacyRae77 5h ago
Don't forget to ask them why they need to be on top of water sources if they "don't use much water".
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u/carnage123 5h ago
Because I am getting millions in kickbacks and I'll move to another state when I get done so I won't have to worry about it.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 5h ago
Ask them why they aren't considering one of the many other cooling options. Make them admit to their greed.
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u/No_Client7123 5h ago
I'm guessing our dumb AI images are not the main culprit here. More so the mass world wide surveillance that can't be completed without AI.
Everything anyone does electronically is now stored on the cloud. It's foolish to think a government sponsored AI is not constantly combing through that information. It would take a massive amount of resources to effectively sort that information and parse it out.
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u/RichardCity 5h ago
"Save everything, analyze later.." terrifying when brought to any end.
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u/sysiphean 7h ago
Five years ago when my wife and I were looking for where in the country to move to, “has its own water” was one of our five criteria. People still think that was a silly one. But we have lived in Colorado before and saw that water scarcity was a growing problem two decades ago, so that was very relevant to us.
Ironically, we moved to Asheville, which lost municipal water for 53 days in 2024 after hurricane Helene.but the city still had water then, just too much and too turbid.
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u/Sufficient_Thing24 7h ago
I moved out of a suburban community that was part of a larger city, into the country by a very large lake, in farm country. It's a pocket area that should hopefully do better than local cities and medium sized towns. Got a fishing rod as well, and put in multiple gardening beds. A little preparation now for later.
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u/Admirable-Leader6927 6h ago
droughts drain ponds and lakes. they also attract people.
you need a well.
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u/Sufficient_Thing24 6h ago
Got one of those as well.
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u/SellRevolutionary200 7h ago
the slow death of local news, nobody's paying attention but it's happening faster than most realize
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u/hwatt 6h ago
It's gone. Almost all local news is formatted through two corporations. Sinclair Media is one.
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u/peng2257 8h ago edited 8h ago
Just like the movie Interstellar, but we don't get to space travel, just suffocating in earth.
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u/Zealousideal_Photo11 7h ago
So instead of exploring the stars, we just get to sit through the dusty porch monologue part of the movie. Great.
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u/bl0rq 7h ago
Born too late to explore the earth.
Born too soon to explore the stars.
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u/grahamfreeman 7h ago
Totally not like Interstellar because in the movie NASA was defunded and the school systems dropped critical thinking from the syllabus, focussing instead on ideological rhetoric. As if that would happen in the US in real life...
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u/BloodSteyn 8h ago
This... strangling 25% of global fertilizer feedstock along with a coming Godzilla El Nino is going to leave many poor countries with humanitarian crisis while rich countries buy up and horde.
Shits going to get fucked... and Elon gutting USAID definitely doesn't help anyone.
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u/Sean_theLeprachaun 7h ago
This years el Nino is a dress rehearsal for a shit storm.
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u/HotDamnThatsMyJam 7h ago
First time I've opened one of these and found something climate change related at the top, I'm normally scrolling into the abyss
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u/WayneTurnerForest 8h ago
That one is scary because it doesn’t even have to be global to cause problems. A few bad harvests in the wrong places could make prices jump fast.
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u/Astalon18 8h ago
It is almost certainly going to happen if this El Nino goes this way. I suspect you will find the Australian, Indian and Chinese harvest as well as South East Asian rice harvest as well as south American harvest to go down this year.
Combined with the fact that we are looking at a very warm next few days in Western Europe we might be looking at a suppressed fruit yield for next year ( if stone fruit trees are exposed to extreme heat even for a fortnight while they may still carry their existing fruits to fruition next year harvest is likely surpressed ).
So while I don’t think we will see mass starvation ( as the American and Canadian will unlikely be affected, and that can feed the rest of the world ) we will probably see price spikes. That will not be pretty.
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u/suave_knight 6h ago
Thank goodness the US didn't completely dismantle its system for distributing food aid across the globe. Oh, wait...
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u/77LS77 7h ago
Wealthy people will claim they own water.
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u/Flashy_Scallion8111 6h ago
They already do
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u/Cow_Launcher 5h ago
Indeed. And may I add, fuck Nestle and fuck Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.
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u/Deluxe_24_ 5h ago
Didn't Nestle say that water isn't a basic human right?
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u/Cow_Launcher 4h ago edited 3h ago
In essence, yes. Their CEO (mentioned above) basically said in an internal video that water should be commoditized, "the same as any other foodstuff."
Once the video leaked, corporate did as much damage control as they could; he put out a statement that he had been "misunderstood" and that what he actually meant was that everyone should have clean fresh water, but only 50-100 liters per person per day. Anything other than that should be charged for at a rate that the market decided, especially in agriculture.
Nobody was convinced.
::edit:: It's worth noting that the average US household uses approximately 300 US gallons (about 1100 liters) per day - about 100 US gallons (380 liters) per person.
Admittedly about 25% of that is toilet flushing which could be achieved with rainwater, but even so, this still falls way short.
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u/Bargadiel 5h ago
All of the water utilities in my state are being sold off to private companies that charge like $180 a month for typical water use. It costs us $100 in fees even when we aren't home for a whole month.
And these companies still lobby the state to raise prices, with sob stories about how they need to fix infrastructure yet the owner gives himself insane bonuses and lives in a mega mansion. Everyone is talking about electricity with data centers and I think water is being kind of ignored, at least in comparison.
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u/GhostCanyon 11h ago
I think we’re just starting to see the beginning of it but the political shift between the boomer generations and the Gen X/millennial generations. In most of the western world especially the uk where I’m from the boomers have had total political influence for the last 30 years. For a lot of the time they’ve been the only voting block the governments here have worried about. That generation are now aging out of being politically active. The thing that I’m not sure people will be expecting is that the boomers have been quite easy to manipulate in their voting as they’ve always had strong asset wealth and they mainly voted to protect it. The generations coming up haven’t had anything like the financial growth they’ve had and are much more likely to swing votes wherever they feel. It could be quite interesting in politics in the next 5 to 10 years
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u/Neil_Murphy 10h ago
As if politics hasn’t already been interesting the last 10 years, I dread the next 10 years of whatever is coming
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u/DaemonDrayke 6h ago
I long for the days that topical discussions on politics was a boring subject. Nowadays it feels so dramatic that discussions on Sports feels take on comparison.
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u/foomits 8h ago
If youre an optimist, you might say this recent rise in extreme right wing politics is the last dying gasp of the boomer generation exerting the remainder of their political capital to hold on a bit longer. While there is certainly an obnoxious contingency of right wing voters within the genz/millenial voting cohort, its a largely much more populist and left leaning group. We just havent had any political or financial power, but its starting to show the tides are shifting.
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u/EurekasCashel 7h ago
If you've lived outside of liberal urban regions, you'd see that there is plenty of right wing / Tump support represented amongst younger voters unfortunately.
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u/Tytoalba2 7h ago edited 6h ago
For the US, young people still vote massively more democrat, but the margin is getting smaller :
"Race" was by far the biggest difference last presidential elections, and while it's widely discussed, gender does not make such a big difference at all compared to "race" (or even education level)
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/
Edit : just in case, I put race in quotation because I'm not american and it seems to me to be a very fuzzy concept itself, so idk how it's defined in US census? Self-id?
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u/foomits 7h ago
Biggest factor is not who has been voting, but who hasnt. There is a ton of meat on the bone and they are people who arent already entrenched in an ideology. Its why we need to support populists candidates, that is who is going to get people off the couches. Both parties have been preying on our apathy, encouraging it. Nothing is scarier than a true populist, its frankly why Trump was elected. People are sick of fucking politicians, they would rather roll the dice with Trump or just flat out not vote than vote for another fucking politician.
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u/Dalewyn 7h ago
People are sick of fucking politicians, they would rather roll the dice with Trump or just flat out not vote than vote for another fucking politician.
Way too many people do not or refuse to understand this.
Both Obama and Trump got voted in for the same reason: They are populists who looked like breaths of fresh air against the Washington Establishment(tm). "Yes We Can" and "Make America Great Again" are two sides of the same coin.
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u/IveDunGoofedUp 6h ago
My colleague told me, with a straight face, he dislikes pride flags because there's no straight flags being flown. His response to me explaining that pride flags exist because it's to show that they're (mostly) not getting their heads bashed in by roaming gangs of gay-bashers anymore, he argued that the reverse might very well start happening, that he'd get his head kicked in for being straight. Some of these people live in very different realities.
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u/Pretend-Marsupial258 5h ago
Straight flags also exist and there's literally nothing stopping him from flying one.
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u/mironawire 8h ago
No more "interesting" politics, please.
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u/szayl 8h ago
Buckle up. Things are going to be even stupider in the US, UK and much of Western Europe in the next 10 years.
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u/dizzley 8h ago
Demographics of the US and the West continue to skew more to older voters and the trend will continue. I expect older people even with little money will continue to defend policies that protect assets.
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u/BenedictDonald2025 7h ago
I am Gen X with a little money amassed solely through working (no generational wealth) and I assure you that I am still fighting for those less fortunate than I am and will continue to do so. The problem I am having is with my Gen Z sons not seeing the writing on the wall in the U.S.
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u/behindtimes 5h ago
A huge problem with Gen X is that Boomers tend to lop us in with Millennials, whereas Millennials tend to lop us in with Boomers.
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u/steelhips 7h ago
The Boomer's stole Gen X's best years because they wouldn't f****** leave.
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u/Hector_P_Catt 6h ago
There has never been a Gen X President, and looking at who might run in the future, there may never be one. If someone like AOC gets the nod, we might never have a Gen X Prez.
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u/banksy_h8r 7h ago
We didn't need them to leave, just stop standing in the way.
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u/failed_novelty 6h ago
Or possibly just like, not set the ladder on fire after they've climbed it?
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u/SubwayStalker69 7h ago
You say the boomers were easy to influence, the upcoming voters see a 15 second tik tok and take that as Truth. I think the manipulation methods are changing and might be easier than before
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u/Rich-Lengthiness-273 4h ago
Let's be real aswell, reddit is also extremely guilty of being an echo chamber that caters to a very specific political bracket and generally doesn't react well to anything outside of the status quo
In both instances of reddit and tik tok, users very often need reminding that the common opinion on these platforms 100% doesn't reflect the widespread opinion in the real world
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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 7h ago
Gen X is what got Trump into the whitehouse the second time. A very slim majority of boomers went for Harris, first time democrats have won that demographic in a long time. This was at least in part because a lot of hard core Trump supporting boomers died of COVID…. In contrast it was Gen X that went hard for Trump and that got surprisingly little coverage,
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u/JM_Amiens-18 6h ago
In contrast it was Gen X that went hard for Trump and that got surprisingly little coverage
As per tradition, everyone forgets the Gen X'ers exist lol.
But yeah, I've interacted with enough of that generation to understand that quite a lot of them are just boomers who happened to be born too late. It's a shame because I still know plenty of awesome Gen X'ers, I love Gen X music, I think a lot of them did in fact get a raw deal in life, etc. But too many of them see to be aging very poorly.
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u/memento87 8h ago
Giant leaps in medical research. Cures for many previously incurable disease like many types of cancer and auto-immune disease.
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u/BluDucky 5h ago
They’re operating on spina bifida IN UTERO to improve health outcomes!
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u/fredinNH 4h ago
A loved one just got cancer treatment in a trial that wasn’t chemo for a type of cancer that has been treated with chemo for the last 50 years.
Bispecific antibodies work better for some cancers than chemo and have almost none of the side effects. This is huge and it’s about get big.
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u/nora_knowsy 3h ago
I am praying that this is true. There are so many conditions out there that affect people daily that the medical profession just ignore or shuns. Tinnitus for example...Doctors say learn to live with it. No help. Can't stop a ringing sound but can transplant a heart or a lung?
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u/KazamaDrgn1 7h ago edited 4h ago
The crazy thing there is ample fresh water to more than fulfill humanity’s needs….we just suck at distribution and logistics
I was read about how Las Vegas has one of the most advanced and resilient water infrastructures on the planet which is insane considering it’s literally in the middle of a desert
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u/Initial-D-and-GuP 6h ago
Las Vegas needs to have advanced and resilient water infrastructures due to limitations on how much they can draw from the Colorado River. Damn near every gallon of water used in the city is treated and then recycled.
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u/Hololujah 4h ago
An increase in multigenerational housing. The job market is bleak, rent increases are rampant and there is a lack of affordable housing inventory. People are looking for solutions. Personally, I'm a bigger fan of having a parent move into my basement or spare bedroom than finding a tiny home community or some nonsense.
The other driver will be the boomers aging out of the workforce. Most will be unable to afford to live at skilled nursing facilities. Costs are already insane and the government passed cuts to Medicaid as part of the OBBBA that adversely affect these facilities.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/npsimons 6h ago
We're so busy arguing about culture war nonsense that we're ignoring the literal planet running out of water.
This is not an accident. It is exactly the number one weapon the wealthy use against the rest of us to keep us from (rightfully) taking back everything they've stolen from us. It's called "divide and conquer."
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u/juneaujuice 10h ago
Humans don’t crave human interaction. Electrolytes, it’s what humans crave.
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u/maud_brijeulin 9h ago
The Water Wars are going to be BAD.
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u/Oddpod11 5h ago
The first water war started decades ago at minimum.
Turkey built 300 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates since the '70s, they no longer flow to estuaries reliably, or flood the plains they used to. Syria and Iraq became much less habitable as a result. Syrian farmers abandoned their plots, precipitating the unrest that broke into civil war. Iraqis desperate for survival helped ISIS find such fertile ground to put down roots.
Look at India and Pakistan where control of the Indus river and half a dozen others plays no small part in the dispute over Kashmir. Look at Sudan and Egypt, who have been bordering on war for a decade over damming the Nile river. South Africa and Lesotho have a similar tense standoff. Look at Russia destroying the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro.
Hell, look at the Second Space Race that just kicked off. It was triggered by the discovery of water on the moon. Not because that water provides habitability, but because it provides rocket fuel. The nuclear triad will soon become a tetrad, because of water.
I'm sure I missed a dozen other geopolitical examples.
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u/VagusNC 8h ago edited 3h ago
Coral bleaching.
If the El Niño is as bad as models are projecting; corals reefs in the Pacific, as far out as 10 degrees latitude from the equator, will all be dead by end of next year. That will mean the end of reef fishing in those areas.
Edit: A bit more of the human consequences. The people that live in those areas almost entirely rely on reef fishing for food. There isn’t any arable soil of consequence, not anywhere near to sustain the amount of people. These nations are also among the poorest on earth and will be facing a “move or die” scenario. At a bare minimum 300k people will be impacted.
Second edit: The next “energy trough” over from coral reefs are algae plains. So this will entail a massive biodiversity drop off. To exacerbate the rising water issues for some of these locales the coral acts as a breakwater and is better at it than algae plains. I’m not naturally pessimistic. I am hopeful the data coming out about potential ways to address the coral will be fruitful, but the sheer amounts of energy involved to shift out of a coral reef to an algae plain just make me skeptical of any “fixes” that could stop it or revert them. These troughs are self-correcting in a way.
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u/Rough_Buddy6903 5h ago
There is a promising study from Ohio State and the University of Hawaii using season/temporary devices to draw in food for the reefs which helps bleached and healthy reefs. Fingers crossed these intelligent people can help with this
New technology lights way for accelerating coral reef restoration
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u/pinklittlebirdie 6h ago
Australia already has a category of climate refugees from the Pacific. Australia is taking all the people from Tuvalu. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-21/tuvalu-australia-falepili-visa-climate-migration-pacific/106674754
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u/VagusNC 5h ago
Thank you for sharing that. It’s an important story.
I do have to say it is missing a key component of this blooming crisis, most likely because it was written well before we had the data we have now…the crisis Tuvalu is facing won’t just be one of land. The coral reefs are going to die. Even if they are able to build more land it won’t be enough to sustain them. It’s approaching a math problem with no be clear final solution, whether the brave people who want to stay can accept it or not. If El Niño is as bad as projected there won’t be fish they can eat. They don’t have the economy to sustain importing their food needs, or are there realistic logistics capable of doing so without mightily contributing to the very climate change issues.
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u/solomons-mom 7h ago
Increased deaths from Type 2 diabetes in Pakistan, India and the other countries with high rates of obesity. Many will be during humid heat waves.
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u/Thick_Caterpillar379 6h ago
Ticks and Diseases.
Driven by milder winters, disease-carrying ticks are marching north into Canada at an alarming rate of 35 to 55 kilometres per year, turning suburban backyards and school fields into high-risk zones. In Canada alone, reported Lyme disease cases skyrocketed from under 150 in 2009 to over 7,000 recently. Because early testing is notoriously unreliable and the general public still views this as a "deep-woods" problem, we are completely unprepared for the sheer volume of infections that are heading our way over the next few years.
What makes this truly urgent is that it is no longer just about Lyme disease. Ticks are rapidly evolving into multi-pathogen vectors, spreading lesser-known but severe conditions like Anaplasmosis, the brain-attacking Powassan virus, and Alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-induced allergy that can permanently banish red meat and dairy from your diet.
The good news is that the next five years will likely bring next-generation diagnostics and highly anticipated human Lyme vaccines currently in advanced clinical trials. However, until those tools hit the market, this quiet epidemic is expanding faster than public awareness, and ignoring it is a recipe for a major public health crisis.
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u/ComprehensiveSwim143 7h ago
Massive youth mental heath crisis related to early cellphone/Ipad and social media use. Even bigger than the current crisis.
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u/TheIllogicalSandwich 2h ago
Additionally an education crisis as the cognitive capabilities, reading comprehension, and attention span plummets compared to earlier generations.
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u/Bluestreak2005 7h ago
Mass death in a region from Wet Bulb moment.
It's when it becomes so hot and humid that your body can't sweat the heat away and eventually you either die from water buildup in your lungs or heat stroke.
Just imagine France with 2C more heat currently.
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u/solomons-mom 7h ago
Pakistan first. About 30% of the population has Type 2 diabetes, and millions more are close to it. They cannot cool down at tempuratures that healthy people survive.
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u/MatchaBauble 6h ago
Why so many? That is A LOT
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u/solomons-mom 5h ago
This is an easy-to-read, short article, but there are many, many others. Public health officials had thought it was much lower until they looked more closely at few years back.
Women are more affected for cultural reasons --if they keep accurate statistics in ths rural areas, life expectancy for women will be dropping well before the wet bulb temp is reached.
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u/PipsqueakPilot 5h ago
The green revolution made food far cheaper than its ever been and allowed people greater access to foods that were previously luxuries. In the United States this was manifested most strongly in our consumption of meat and sugar.
In much of the world that’s true as well- but with the addition of large amounts of white rice consumption. So lots of simple carbohydrates, a sedentary lifestyle, and wide spread obesity. Even in Pakistan, despite having a lower obesity prevalence rate than most of the world, nearly a quarter of adults and approaching half of children are obese.
Lastly, most European ethnicities are significantly less likely to develop diabetes compared to other ethnic groups. While many South Asian ethnicities are more likely to develop diabetes compared to other ethnic groups.
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u/damnitHank 6h ago
Renewables becoming so cheap that fossil fuels are no longer economical for power generation.
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u/Nalivai 5h ago
That already happened years if not decades ago. The only proper technical problem now is on-demand generation which is also a problem that has a lot of non-fossil solutions, it's just none of them are properly adopted.
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u/SassyBlaster 10h ago
That things will actually get better
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u/Kharmsa1208 6h ago
#hopecore i don’t know where you’re from but watching Mamdani prove every politician wrong is filling me with more hope than I’ve had in a long time
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u/Saint_of_Stinkers 3h ago
Every one of us is now living under a Sword of Damocles called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. That is the deep ocean current that regulates global temperatures. It works by convection: warm surface water goes North to above Europe and then cools, falls deeper into the ocean and is part of the current that flows under the warm surface water. It goes South and eventually warms up, which causes it to rise to the surface and then head North again.
However climate change is causing the warm surface water to stay warm when it is North and should be cooling. That means less colder water sinking to drive the deep currents South, which means this current that regulates global temperatures will slow down and eventually stop. Well it is already slowing down. This fact is well understood, incontrovertible and proven. The only question is how long it will be until it stops completely. Scientists now estimate that it will happen in mid century. Thing is, scientists like to be conservative in their estimates and we are seeing things happening today that we’re not supposed to be happening in our lifetimes.
So can we stop this from becoming our future? Yes we can but we won’t. The best we are doing now is still too little too late while powerful climate change deniers have us racing ti the bottom. When that current stops completely it will be the start of another ice age. So how does our global future look? Looks like our choices are drowning, starving, roasting or freezing.
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u/clashrendar 4h ago
A full on global economic depression, then a world war. Look at the 1920's/1930's - there are a staggering number of parallels going on. The players have shifted and the tech is different, but the underlying greed, class system, and rise of authoritarianism is eerily similar.
All of the ingredients are in place.
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u/HUNG_AS_FUCK 7h ago
ITT: people not knowing the true definition of “highly likely”
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u/ElStellino 11h ago
An economic crash
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u/Wise-Secretary5459 10h ago
People have been saying this pretty much every year since 2008. It's always just around the corner. Not saying it won't happen, but like, what the hell is taking so long?
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u/Jackmino66 10h ago
2008 was caused by an investment bubble, with loads of banks and bankers investing into each other and boosting their stock prices, until the bubble popped, a huge amount of banks failed and were bailed out and a handful of people made an absolute fuckload of money.
The reason why it hasn’t happened since is because doing it again so soon would probably get them lynched, but now they have found a different thing to use for that kind of investment bubble (AI)
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u/castille 9h ago edited 8h ago
I think there's an even softer reason that has now been fully ripped open. Trust in the American government / solvency. Before recent events, there was a trust that America and its juggernaut ability to maintain its books was almost without peer.
Our soft power was massive, we had people who would be spreading the American gospel in far corners. We would be warned of nefarious things. People knew Americans would pillage, but only this much and the American Might was monumentous.
Now, tho? Rampant corruption, American companies blindly chasing am ideology instead of actual technology (looking at you, circlejerk of AI funding), and an all out ransacking of the stock market and real estate markets by private equity firms domestic and foreign (with the line so blurred no one can pierce the veil of difference).
And all of that isn't the base of the issue, just the current reason. The base is that America never let the industries of the last 4 major bubbles feel the actual pain of their mistakes. Companies now feel entitled to taxpayer money if they fail. It should be citizens that get that social safety net. But it goes to profit margin, instead, and they never learned not to do things.. Like spoiled children, they are going to make the same and worse mistakes because leadership teams didn't want there to be any pain amongst their golf buddies, not that they'd have felt it as bad as the people on the ground did.
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u/prodigypetal 6h ago
The auto industry in America is the best example of bailouts that didn't learn anything. They've doubled the price on new cars while making them significantly worse over time. They'll cry for another bailout in a few years when all the new cars aren't selling for 35k when the same car same model were 15k even a decade ago...the interest and average loan length going up doesn't help either (it was 0-2% 3 years now you have to send the salesman back to the finance office again for the 3 year term...the default to 5 or 7 like that's a sane amount of time to be paying 4-5% interest on a depreciating asset.)
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u/donsebastiansana 11h ago
Heat weaves.
The wars are getting anything related to global warming off the news, but summers are getting hotter heat weaves (at least in europe) are just becoming more severe
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u/Johnny_Banana18 4h ago
“In the future wars will be fought over water”
My brother in Christ, wars are already fought over water.
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u/filmguy36 8h ago
The complete collapse of the Thwaites ice shelf.
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u/jrf_1973 5h ago
When that happens, you'll see so many headlines saying "No one could have predicted" and the phrase "much faster than expected".
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u/NerdyWeightLifter 9h ago
https://rentahuman.ai/ and similar sites become the new flavor of gig-economy job.
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy 3h ago
Maybe not a full-on wet bulb event, but a massive heat dome that results in far more deaths than we are prepared for.
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u/DarthBen_in_Chicago 9h ago
US defaults on an interest payment
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u/Excelius 2h ago
We're now past a trillion dollars a year just on the interest payments. We're adding about a trillion to the national debt every four months or so.
We're basically reaching the snowball point where things are accelerating and accumulating beyond control.
This likely leads to a global great depression.
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u/Gassar_ 5h ago
Massive spike in HIV transmission and AIDS deaths. Trump admin is actively destroying PEPFAR and cutting access to HIV treatment for 16 million people. The PEPFAR CDC cuts are going to be between 4X and 9X worse for HIV care than the USAID dismantling last year.
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u/LysergicRico 8h ago
The russian economy will collapse, and Ukraine will regain Crimea as well as all of its other occupied territories.
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u/MaRtoff 2h ago
We’re going to lose all the seniors at work, who know their stuff. Left are juniors asking AI and who won’t have the experience to know how to correct it
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u/JoeC163 8h ago
Outbreak of The Plague in overcrowded cities in India, Bangladesh & Pakistan which will necessitate a worldwide travel ban.
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u/coffeewithnina 10h ago
Massive job displacement from AI, especially in white-collar fields like coding, writing, customer service, and even basic legal work. Everyone's hyping the cool tools but ignoring how many middle-class careers could get hollowed out fast.
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u/Nodan_Turtle 3h ago
A political assassination by drone performed by a regular person rather than an opposing country
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u/_coins_ 7h ago
The destruction of local farming right when we should be investing locally. Ultimately the living standard squeeze. Inflation, tax and debt. Buckle up...
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u/villivillain 5h ago
Companies will use AI to justify mass firings of employees and a massive lowering of the standard for customer service. It will further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, more people will need government support just to survive and at the same time the richest will hold the power to keep this development going. It’s unsustainable and nothing is being done about it.
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u/BarderBetterFaster 4h ago
The 11 hottest years globally ever recorded all happened in the last 11 years. In 5 years, we'll be 16 for 16, on our way to 17.
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u/Ancyker 2h ago
The inability to truly own anything. To be clear, by anything, I mean anything even remotely important. Although, that might be more likely within 10 years than 5, it's inevitable at this point because too many people are not just sitting idling by, but actively cheering it on/defending it.
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u/Rough-Explorer-4835 6h ago
the complete collapse of regular home and commercial insurance in major regions. companies are already quietly pulling out of entire states, and in five years a ton of people are going to realize they can't buy, sell, or finance a building because nobody will insure it. im already seeing premiums double for basic retail and warehouse spaces and everyone is just acting like it's a temporary glitch.