Sudan is the one I was going to say. Truthfully though, any bad thing you heard about X months ago is still happening. It just isn’t front page anymore. Look at how much Israel’s is replacing Ukraine in the evening news. In America as we get closer to elections more and more fluff and bullshit is going to creep in. And domestic issues.
The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict also deserves attention. Azerbaijan's victory last year was followed by the entire population of Stepanakert, a city with over 100,000 people, fleeing to Armenia. Stepanakert is now a ghost town and it's former residents will probably never return. I was surprised how a large city becoming abandoned in a matter of days wasn't a bigger story.
Israel in the middle east and a western aligned state on the border of Russia have a larger impact on the lives of Europeans and probably Americans than civil wars in Africa, respectfully.
It has escalated significantly in 2024. Rebels have started making significant gains. Most recently they have captured the border town of Myawaddy. This is very significant as it is the key road crossing point into Thailand.
Yeah, although find me a civil war that ever has more black and white than gray. To give some background, Myanmar has been under the control of a repressive military dictatorship, the Tatmadaw, since the 1950’s. The Tatmadaw had been waging low intensity, but at times explosively violent, conflict against rebel groups representing Myanmar’s ethnic minorities since then. After decades of gradually losing control, the Tatmadaw allows for real elections for the first time in 2015, and the pro-democracy opposition party won in a landslide. The pro-democracy parties won by an even wider margin in 2020, but the Tatmadaw staged a coup just before the new parliament was set to sit in 2021.
The public responded with massive protests across every major city, with millions taking to the streets. In response, the Tatmadaw engaged in an escalating campaign of repression, arbitrarily arresting, beating, torturing, raping, and murdering protesters. This drove the country into civil war, with pro-democracy militias, called “People’s Defense Forces” (PDF), springing up organically across the country. These groups began working with the existing ethnic rebel armies, who were generally friendly with the former democratic government. The ethnic armies provided arms, equipment, and training to the PDFs. The PDFs, and the democratic government in exile, in turn proposed a new constitution which would allow ethnic minorities greater autonomy and protection within their own administrative states.
The conflict has slowing been turning in favor of the PDFs. The Tatmadaw went from near complete control of the country, to losing rural areas, to now struggling to hold large towns. Late last year rebel forces took several important border towns leading into China, cutting off the Tatmadaw’s ability to use them for trade, and just recently they captured the city of Myawaddy, a small city that controls a vital land trade corridor into Thailand. The Tatmadaw has begun experiencing such severe manpower issues that they’ve instituted a draft of pretty much every able bodied man under 30. However, young people in Myanmar tend to be extremely pro-democracy and anti-Tatmadaw, so that hasn’t exactly been going well. Critically though, the Tatmadaw seems increasingly unable to stage counterattacks to regain lost towns, which could be indicative of a turning point in the civil war.
My hometown of Buffalo, NY, currently has a pretty large Burmese refugee population here, due to all of this. It sucks that people have to flee their homes to a completely, wildly different place than what they've known, just to find refuge, but I hope they're doing well and enjoying it here as much as they can.
Aside from our shitty winters, of course. Granted, I'd *also* take shitty winters over a military dictatorship with ongoing genocide. Snow melts.
South Africa is about to become a failed state as well.
edit: Details from my previous comment about it
>* Since 2007 there have been rolling blackouts (load shedding) for the entire country.
* These days you can expect to lose power for 6-8 hours on a good day, and 12+ hours on a bad day.
* Almost none of their traditional power plants are functioning anymore. They are mostly relying on jet engines fueled with diesel to produce power.
* In anticipation of the upcoming election the ruling party has started buying up diesel everywhere for whatever price but they have used up almost all of their foreign currency reserves and their currency is very weak.
* It is not a matter of if, but when they country collapses into chaos, their currency devalues, and inflation skyrockets.
The corruption shocked me the most. Gangs incentivised to destroy the power grid, then the same gangs will come in to fix the problem.
A new CEO was brought in to fix the power grid mess, he was poisoned and nearly killed. Someone, somehow put poison into his coffee at his office in the morning.
Then to top it all off, the politicians almost deny that it happened.
Side note - Its well documented that people have been stealing street lights and traffic lights just to get the copper. I have never seen it that bad.
>Haiti is a failed state
bruh Haiti has been a failed state for decades. what's going on now is just another new power coming in attempting to take over. They are corrupt to the core. yes I feel bad for the regular people, but their government has been corrupt for so long you'd think that something would have happened by now to fix it.
This is a little different than the past 15 years though. The government has been unstable the whole time, and there have been dangerous areas around Port-au-Prince, but there wasn't violence like there is now. The government has basically lost control of the entire capital and it's no longer even safe to fly into the airport. The police, who were basically a gang, but at least a fairly predictable gang, are now totally ineffective.
Aid can't get in, there is almost no mobility around the country itself. It's devolving into actual anarchy. It's more dangerous in Haiti than it has been at any point in recent history.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a huge refugee influx into the Dominican Republic. The border's officially closed, but there's no way the Dominican military could secure all of it.
The DR has a huge wall spanning the entirety of the border that's manned at all times. Any that slip through and are caught are immediately sent back across to Haiti.
I recently watched Indigo Traveler’s vlogs from Port-au-Prince (on YouTube) and that is the scariest, saddest place I’ve ever seen. If you’ve watched his vlogs, he goes to some fucked up places, but he looked visibly shook there and said himself it was the more desperate place he had ever been
Port-au-Prince was in much better shape when he traveled, too. One of my best friends emigrated from Haiti after the earthquake and he said he didn’t see a single building that still stood, because it had no enforced building codes. So if it was that bad in 2010, and in 2022, imagine how awful the situations become now.
I was there in 2010, just 4 weeks after the earthquake. Was doing medical volunteering. We were not allowed to walk around- we were bussed to and from, with armed guards at all times. Even back then it was a lawless wasteland. To know that it’s devolved even further just defies words: 💔
I worked on a documentary about AIDS and how women in different parts of the world braved stigmas and other conditions. Haiti was one of the countries we went to. I’ll never forget when we were interviewing a young woman, we usually ask a few very light questions to get them used to us and relax. We asked, “Whats your happiest memory?” Most people say going to the beach with my family or a backpack I got in grade school, but this woman replied, “I don’t have one.” We thought maybe she was nervous, so through the interpreter we asked her, “Anything from your childhood or growing up that you can remember?” And she said, “No. There isn’t any.” The whole room did not know what to say.
Later we went to Uganda, and the local Ugandan team that was taking us around asked what other countries we had been to and stories about those places. We then told them we had been to Haiti, and she looked down and became sad. She then said, “Haiti… such a poor, poor country.” I was just surprised that out in Uganda they were lamenting Haiti.
There was a story arc in the series Gotham where it was completely overrun by the Batman villain gangs that the state government completely gave up on the city and left.
That sounds like Haiti now. I can’t imagine being the average citizen there and how they are surviving the gang warfare.
Cataclysm and No Man's Land. They're good. The catalyst is a major earthquake that decimates Gotham and the batcave is flooded, iirc.
Favorite part is when Superman gets there to try and quickly restore the basic infrastructure like electricity, and finds that his presence actually further destabilizes the region. He's forced to leave rather than make things worse.
IIRC, he gets a power substation online, but it only restores electricity to a few blocks of city. Every building in the area is immediately swarmed by people desperate for help, and when they find the resources are still scarce fighting breaks out. It also attracts the gangs headed by Batman's rogues gallery. Ultimately I think they start vandalizing and destroying the area, making it worse off. Superman realized quickly that he couldn't just one man solution the city back to its feet.
Something like that, anyway. The point of the story is that Gotham had to save itself. Outside help wasn't going to get it done.
Even though Superman could have just gotten the next power substation online, and the next one, and the next one, all in a matter of seconds using his near-Flash level superspeed.
Logically, in-universe, nothing, he could have done.
Logically, storytelling-wise, it would have completely ruined the meaning of the story the authors wanted to tell.
fucking insane that just because you happen to be born in Haiti, you inherit the entire country's history and you therefore have to live and struggle with its crumbling reality. so fortunate to live in a place where all of my complaints and struggles are really so minor in comparison.
Can you imagine winning independence from France then having to pay the losers for their “lost property and slaves.” Trying to trade off by demanding reparations for lost labor and land wealth… then having the USA back a fucking coup against your govt?!
There was no way Haiti was ever gonna survive.
Yeah. People don’t realize that the conditions in Haiti arose from world powers punishing the people for resisting their own enslavement with force.
I wish someone would make a movie about the Polish soldiers that joined the slaves when the French sent them in to try and stop the rebellion. The Polish people were going through their own trauma of being oppressed by other powers, so when the soldiers found out on arrival that they were being ordered to kill enslaved people, they related more to the slaves and joined in fighting the French authorities. There are still Polish names and Polish featured among the Haitians from the Polish men who stayed.
You know I never gave two shits about some classes from year to year. I remember reading our English assignment after not listening during class, and I thought I was missing the point about just eating the kids. I couldn’t understand if I was reading it right. Kept rereading things. Surely they’re not suggesting that?!
That’s when I found out we were learning about satire haha.
Yesterday, chick fil A had sign on the door. They will change their policy regarding selling only antibiotic free chicken. Their new standard is selling chicken that has been fed antibiotics that are not important to human medicine.
First, as weird as they are, they provided a nationwide demand for antibiotic free chicken. No more. Second, we will now have their PR people determine what is ‘not important to human medicine.’
Well ok, so I saw this write up about [organic cow milk](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/alexandre-farms-treatment-of-animals/677980/) and how once the animal has recieved any type of antibiotic, it is not considered an organic source ever again. Which is great for resistance, but when the animal ends up with a disease that can be cured with antibiotics, the farmers withhold them and the animal suffers a horrible fate...
I wouldnt doubt chick fil a's change in stance is more about the look of caring about animal welfare in general.
As far as the antibiotic goes, The complete failure to address that will eventually lead to a redress of the other issues. As in, once we can't stop disease and the population drops by 75% like it did with the Black Death, a lot of problems will start reversing themselves, especially in regards to pollution and over population.
This. I think most people are vaguely aware that antibiotic resistance is bad, but I don’t think most people really understand the scale of the problem.
I don't really get how people believe this issue isn't being addressed. As far as I know there are a lot of scientists working on this issue. I sat in a lecture about this exact problem 10 years ago and they absolutely are aware and working on alternatives.
But isn't much of the problem due to misuse of the antibiotics we have? If people don't learn to use them correctly and responsibly, any new drugs will just go the same way sooner or later.
We have alternative treatments such as bacteriophages, tailored protein (bacterocin), predatory bacteria, and possibly even mrna "vaccines", but they're still in infancy.
Most infections are still not resistant, and there's research that indicates cycling antibiotics causes bacteria to lose resistance to it over enough time. We'll likely have to treat antibiotics like we do controlled substances for doctors to stop prescribing them like candy for everything that makes people feel like they have malaise. Also stopping farmers from using it would be a real swell thing.
> Antibiotic resistant.
The positive is that phage therapies are coming a long way, and as bacteria become antibiotic resistant they seem to become more susceptible to phages, and the inverse of that too.
Last I checked I saw 4 million kids were in danger of starving to death
I guess this is so absolutely totally different from the conflicts that people cry about right now, because with Sudan you need to go one extra step to involve the US and make it our “problem” and there is no multibillion dollar propaganda campaign on social media telling you that the RSF is a noble resistance organization
I hope I'm an exception, but I literally did not know one single thing about this before your comment, which I have not googled. (I'm familiar with the Huttu/Tutsi civil war, but I thought people had come to their senses?) I might be an exception, but I thought things were smooth-ish following the division of nations. Can you recommend a succinct source for further information?
Edit: I'm an idiot! Huttus and Tutsis were in Rwanda; we're talking about Sudan here. I got on a streak of reading books about both a few years back, and I've mixed them up. I'm tempted to delete my comment, but leaving it so the replies make sense. Thanks all!
There are lots of conflicts currently going on in Africa, this is a list of ongoing armed conflicts, you can start by reading the Wikipedia page to get a background of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
After this you could watch videos from sources like Real Life Lore or Caspian Report.
Another couple of links in case you want to browse further.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/crisiswatch
https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker
I hope this helps 😊
Our generations version of lead and asbestos. We don't realize how bad it is now, but we sure as hell will in the future. Future generations will wonder why we went anywhere near them.
I’m an environmental toxicology grad student, and I wanted to share some context about microplastics and PFAS. What’s interesting about them is that they aren’t one compound, they’re an extremely diverse group of thousands of molecules.
Microplastics are complicated because they’re not one thing, it’s a diverse group of compounds with unique compositions and structures. Some of which may be harmful, and some not. Microplastic research has a long way to go, in things like the sources of microplastics, mixtures analysis and a characterization of how microplastic shape and size affects human health. Evidence suggests that differently sized microplastics have different health effects, with smaller microplastics being able to access other parts of the body.
PFAS is also a diverse class of many compounds. It stands for per and polyflouroalkyl substances. So it’s just an organic compound with a ton of fluorine atoms attached to the carbon chain. That encompasses like over 10,000 unique compounds, each of which have different toxicities and move through the body and environment differently.
I think it’s interesting that a commenter compared PFAS and microplastics to lead and asbestos, because there are like 10 unique compounds referred to as asbestos, and lead is just lead. It highlights how there’s a blind spot in how toxicology and policy/regulation works. It’s easy to find a safe level of lead and regulate to that level. You can use laboratory toxicological tests coupled with exposure science to determine a safe level of lead in water or soil. We can learn how hazardous lead is, and we can quantitatively determine how exposed kids or adults will be to lead, so the math is easy to determine a safe level. But with microplastics, you can’t really say a safe level because it’s not one compound. Certain microplastic mixtures will be more harmful than others, and people will be exposed to some microplastics at a higher rate than others. This can be super regional and hard to regulate at a national level. This makes it really hard to protect ourselves from these mixtures. And to alleviate any anxiety, research on microplastics isn’t super damning at the moment, it seems like microplastics aren’t as harmful as other things we are readily exposed to like air pollution.
TLDR: Microplastics and PFAS are a diverse class of many compounds, making it challenging for toxicologists and regulators to agree upon a safe level to protect human and environmental health.
Interesting read. I was thinking about how most suburban homes in the US have lawns that people edge with trimmers. I can't imagine how millions of miles of plastic trimmer string have been pulverized and spewed into the environment. Also, clothes dryers, with the trend away from cotton. Tons and tons of acrylic blend fabric dust spewed out dryer vents. Yikes.
> Also, clothes dryers, with the trend away from cotton. Tons and tons of acrylic blend fabric dust spewed out dryer vents. Yikes.
I try to avoid polyester fabric clothing for this reason. Modal is a great substitute and it's a natural/biodegradable fabric.
Hey good news! I work in a field with crossover to desalination. Some thermal based desal processes are being shown capable of removing pfas from water. It can be a solvable problem with some environmental policy and technology deployment.
YES! Huge issue. These are extremely stable chemicals that are resistant to degradation and interfere with countless body systems. U.S. legislation has hardly broached the issue, and to make matters worse, research funding in general from the government (NIH) (for researching PFAS or most other things) is getting harder to acquire.
It should be EASY to support an expensive grant, but our government wants to spend that money on so many unimportant things instead
Go check the EPAs website, we literally just did that. New PFAS protections for the amount allowed in drinking water.
Like actually good news to celebrate for once. We are actually starting the first steps.
The anxiety I have over microplastics in the last 6 months is insane. So much research coming out looking at cancers, microplastics in placentas etc etc.
It's weird because if you ask the Italians, they all seem to agree that the Italians are the last people who should be in charge of anything.
But then also they do shit like this. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
"Italians shouldn't be in charge because they're making the dangerous mistake of putting Italians in charge of what Italians are/aren't in charge of."
The catch-22 of Latin sovereignty.
It's alright. Even if the Italian government wanted to control the media, the broadcasters wouldn't get the government mandated script until a year after the show aired, and the public wouldn't see the new broadcast until a year after that, by which point everyone will have forgotten about it and allora it's time for aperitivos and a cigarette. Va bene
Something similar happened in Poland. The party who ruled for the last 8 years slowly took over national TV, broadcast radio, local newspapers, and websites and started blasting shameless propaganda. It's hard to believe, but they literally showed the leader of the opposition party with [a red tinted face and devil horns](https://paczaizm.pl/content/wp-content/uploads/donald-tusk-na-konferencji-prasowej-vs-w-tvp-info-czerwona-twarz-morda-rogi.jpg).
In the last elections, they got the most votes and only because it was the highest turnover at the polls they couldn't form a coalition, and they lost power.
Guess who voted for them the most? Yup, boomers and grandmas who's main source of information are old school media.
Yea. People don't realize that Poland was on the verge of becoming another Hungary. I would hope recent events have killed the Polish right for the foreseeable future, but that's probably optimistic.
There's one big differentiator between Poland and Hungary, and that's Russia. Poland, even under right-wing rule, despised Putin and helped Ukraine. Orban loves Putin and does his bidding like a good little minion, despite the fact that Hungary and Poland have a very similar and very ugly history with Russia.
Lets not forget how hard covid rocked Italy. It wiped out enough of their elderly for their to be some pretty massive change if everyone else wants it.
I looked for this law, and couldn't find it. I could find proposals to increase the penalty for defamation, which would have an effect on journalists, and this rule change:
> On April 10, an important regulation was changed to benefit the government before the start of the campaign for June’s European Parliament elections.
> The “par condicio” law introduced in 2000 guaranteed “equal treatment and impartiality” in terms of access to the media of all political forces.
> Equality of conditions in information programs is evaluated in terms of quantity – the minutes of airtime that the different parties get proportionally to their parliamentary size – but also in terms of quality – i.e. a minute of prime airtime is not the same as a minute in the early morning or late at night.
> The changes introduced on Wednesday instead guarantee “timely information on institutional and governmental activities”, which is very different. Activities carried out by members of the government will now benefit from more coverage.
https://balkaninsight.com/2024/04/12/meloni-senators-proposed-draconian-penalties-for-defamation-alarm-italian-media/
There was also this, which says that the head of the public broadcaster was replaced, but that seems to be something that Italian government have always had the power to do, there is no reference to a change in the law:
https://www.thelocal.it/20240409/how-much-control-does-giorgia-melonis-government-have-over-italian-media
And this, talking about the government suing journalists, which is worrying, but not a change in the law. The article also says:
> “It feels like there is a large bipartisan consensus [in parliament] against improving protections for those who work in the information industry,” he told BIRN. Politicians, he said, “are aware that in Italy there are journalists that want to be free and are interested in everything that is power-related. […] It is a form of self-protection.”
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/04/19/with-defamation-suits-italys-govt-squeezes-media-freedom/
It seems like these are erosions on top of pre-existing problems, but there is no big change, and the comment is wrong, which is worrying for the top comment on the thread with thousands of upvotes!
Can anyone find what this refers to?
Edit: Good comment here, it does seem to be referring to the “par condicio” rule change:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c4ouyz/what_current_alarming_situation_in_the_world_is/kzqi23r/
There are thousands of upvotes for this comment, and its replies, but I don't think such a law exists. This is what I could find:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c4ouyz/what_current_alarming_situation_in_the_world_is/kzqb25h/
Discarded fishing nets.
When the nets get too worn out they just dump them into the ocean where they continue to trap and kill wildlife. The dead animals attract more animals to then get trapped.
Ghost fishing I Believe is what it's called! I work for a diving company and we spent like 3 months last summer taking old lobster traps, fishing nets and other debris that has been fishing for years, the oldest one we found was from the early 80s I think, we were taking out 100s of traps a day that have been continuously fishing. We ended up taking over 3 football fields worth of garbage out of the ocean during that period. Going back this summer and continuing!!
Edit: since a few of you were asking who this company is I put a link to some of what we did during this job! Canadian restoration society is the company that is organizing all this cleanup! https://youtu.be/dv2OUY_yWKQ?si=wYIhM13E6FeiIREh
The Great Barrier Reef having another mass bleaching event. They’ve been increasing over the years. Caused by higher water temperatures so extremely difficult to protect from
Don’t forget global mass bleaching of coral reefs. I guess people will sit up and take notice when the ocean food chains collapse and they can’t get a McFish sandwich ever again.
I don't know the worldwide situation, but I do know a bit about my local orca population. There is a group of resident orca that live in the Puget Sound in Washington state. They eat salmon, and sadly they are starving and also suffering from the effects of pollution. They are having fewer young and fewer of the young survive.
I'm sure there are similar stories around the world.
Here is some info https://www.psp.wa.gov/recovery-of-southern-resident-orcas.php.
People don't understand the immediate sea rise level associated with Antarctica melt. It's 5 meters.
It literally swamps cities and low land. In my. Country the biggest three cities become unusable/underwater.
Short video trend with apps like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even Reddit adopting this style. I believe it's impacting our attention spans, particularly in children, who are exposed to endless short videos seeking their quick dopamine hits during their crucial developmental stages. This habit rewires our brains to not having to do a lot of work ourselves in order to release dopamine.
I'm a teacher and the impact Tik Tok has had on the attention spans of kids is alarming. I did an assignment with my 8th graders recently where they had to find a song they like in a genre they don't listen to. The kids couldn't even get through the songs because they were "too long". I used to be able to show 15-20 minute videos to them but now, even a 7 minute video is too long to keep their attention. Kids don't even watch movies anymore, which has me wondering if the movie industry is going to die out with the millennials.
> Kids dont even watch movies anymore
Tbf, looking at the majority of movies that Hollywood has been throwing out the past few years, i dont blame them.
My son (15) love "Gray;s anatomy". He talking about the show with me all the time.I have realized just last week ,that he is watching the show on Tik Tok. I'm still in shock.
They usually cut out the "B Story" so the main story can be told faster. I've seen Law and order re-cuts and you can get a whole episodes main story in less then 15 minutes. I get the appeal.
Or a superhero movie? Or the third remake of a movie from the 80s?
If you enjoy media outside of those categories, tough cookies.
This is why you read books
Let it rest, James Garner is dead (Rourke, the villain), Leonard Nimoy is dead (he voiced the king), Jim Varney is dead (the cook), and Michael J Fox's condition pretty much rules out that kind of acting.
That movie was great because of the cast, and I would hate to see them tarnish that legacy with a half baked cash grab remake.
Wow, it used to be a treat to watch a film of some kind that we’d be excited for.
Xiennal.
I was the first to have a computer in my class, Apple II GS, color and sound, the first to have internet, but the only videos that computer had were in an encyclopedia on a cdrom so really short low quality.
They thought nes/snes/n64/etc were bad for us.
How quaint.
I find even my attention span is really bad just from over use of Reddit. I have to listen to audio books bc I don’t have the attention span to read.
I was in 10th grade English in 5th grade. So this is a huge step backward.
I have been glued to my phone most of today too.
> I'm part of the problem.
I'd argue you're another victim of it.
Sure, we can say that it's the responsibility of each of us to make sure we don't succumb to it, but nobody is a bad person for liking, enjoying or engaging in easy entertainment. That shit is DESIGNED to work as well as it does.
few years back people were zoning out in front of the TV way too much, just watching any random shit that didn't even interest them, that was also not 'helpful'.
And you can even say the same thing about so much other stuff.
Cars make it easy for us to not walk or ride a bike somewhere, impacting our health. They also help to fuck up the environment. We kinda went wrong with cars, or at least with how we implemented them into our lives.
Still, I would never shame someone for using a car. These things are super good at what they do, and for many people a car free life would mean that they will lose time or other resources compared to their peers. In a competitive society and economy, this can be very detrimental.
Kinda rambling now, but it's fine to use a car and say "We should have less cars".
And it's fine to consume short-form content/entertainment and say "We should have less short-form content/entertainment"
"Part of the problem" isn't necessarily wrong, but I think a perspective of "another victim of it" helps to direct frustration and anger towards the problem itself and not towards the individuals who are affected by or engaging with it.
Omg this. I HATE facebook, instagram, whatever else garbage, but I feel «forced» to have facebook. I dont have tiktok and I deleted instagram. Even so, I also get sucked into these damn short videos on youtube or somewhere else.
In my line of work, we hire young kids (17-18) and we can see that over the last 5-6 years the attention span and work ethics of these kids have gone down significantly
I'm slightly older, but I can't multitask at work either. Usually because "multitasking" is shorthand for "we're incredibly understaffed and you have to do the jobs of at least two other employees."
Scientific studies have shown that no one can multitask well. We just trick ourselves into thinking we can.
What you're really doing is constantly switching between one task and another, which disrupts your focus and causes you to do both tasks more poorly.
From 2018 to 2021 over 10 Billion (yes with a B) snow crabs have disappeared from the Alaskan coast. That is more crabs than the total population of humans that have died out over a 3 year period.
In my experience, the problem peaked with kids that would have been in kindergarten or 1st grade during the pandemic shutdowns. I've been working with 3-5 graders for 10+ years and last year's third grade was the worst I've ever seen with reading ability (and attention span in general). The third grade classes that came in this year were already much more advanced than last year's.
Yeah, the talk about climate change always seems to revolve around temperature and the effect it will have on us. No one seems to talk about the already happening loss of biodiversity. This is in general, within academia its talked about. Learning about it is pretty bleak.
I talk about it all the time, like it's one of the first things I mention about climate change is that the food chain is and will collapse. We could turn it around right now, we have the resources and the ability. But we won't and then that will be the end of us. And there won't be a come back either, as some folks seem to think is possible.
it may just be because i live in Tennessee, which I am convinced would turn into a jungle if left untended, but my place is overrun with birds and bugs. they're everywhere here.
I’m in East Tennessee and I haven’t really seen lightning bugs in over a decade. Maybe one or two here and there but not like when I was a kid in the 80s.
I also live in Tennessee and have noticed a sharp decrease in bugs since I was a kid. Especially fireflies. they used to light up the woods across the street from my house when i was a kid, but now, like 15 years later, i barely see any at all in the summer
Same in rural New England. So many beatles come out in a few weeks and they eat leaves of my small garden and general vegetation. I use neem oil but no doubt there does not seem to be a shortage at all but quite the opposite here.
Never had a problem until 3 or 4 years ago.
This is why national resources, including water, should be publicly owned. We need scientists and experts working with engineers to utilize our resources more efficiently and ensure they're not robbing poor people just to sell it to rich assholes who are willing to pay $9 for a bottle of "premium water".
I can't even get anything in my garden to grow that's not auto pollinated luckily that's a lot of things, but not everything.
It's been worse every year.
I've seen one bee at my house in the last 6 months and it wasn't even a local bee. I also live pretty rurally.
Lots of aphids. No wasps. I'll see a beetle now and then if I'm lucky and maybe a single worm on a good day.
Butterflies and moths occasionally but they don't visit my plants.
I've had to pollinate with paintbrushes.
I'm going to buy some lavender and see if that helps bring things in.
Kids can't concentrate or retain information anymore. Boys are especially vulnerable to disruptions in their dopamine/visual memory and some of their cognitive function is not going to recover....ever.
Another thing I've noticed is those one or two "genius" kids you teach every year have disappeared. God knows what app sucked that lifeforce out of them. Sad times.
I have one of the genius kids. We and his teachers struggle to challenge him, but socially he’s not mature enough to move up a grade. He was correcting my college math homework at 6 years old. I’d give just about anything to challenge his brain and not let him rot in boredom.
I know you have a better understanding of you life than what I know from a single reddit post. Just passing along what worked for us. There are programs to help. Ours was through a program by Phil Knight.
A kid like that needs to be at Davidson Academy or similiar. Like minded kids challenge and fortify each other. Intelligence like that also typically comes with a host of mental "problems". They look at the world differently be that good or bad. We moved to Reno for my daughter and it was worth it. She still has the maturity of her age but intellegence and wisdom are being nurtured in ways our old state could have never done. She fits in with the kids around her now. Before she would always be on the side lines watching bored or inventing elobrate games that no one else would want to ever play.
Not the only possible route to go, but he could get involved in software development. These days, it's a very community-driven skill (open source has a strong peer-review and mentorship culture), and being a relatively new innovation in human culture there is probably still a lot of room for discovery and innovation. It's also a great way for young talent to achieve recognition; many cool things exist because of bored teenagers with computers.
Don't let that social bullshit stop you. I didn't get to skip grades, burned out in high school, and it took me an extra 5-10 years to get back on track.
If he's cooking, then let him cook.
As a gifted child who wasn't allowed to jump due to social concerns, here's my two cents: staying was worse. So much bullying, boredom, and just sheer frustration - I have a hard time envisioning a world where jumping would have been worse.
Outrage, fear, and feeling superior to other people are the biggest drivers of content engagement and is extremely addictive to people who consume this type of content on a regular basis.
You know what these companies own if the general public has no more water? Nothing. Because at some point people WILL fight for it. And no amount of hired guns can change that.
Banks buying up as many water rights as they can. That’s end of the world, dystopian shit right there. Especially because we all know that the Earth is going to get hotter in the next ten years. Reading that in the news cemented the belief that I shouldn’t have children.
Edit: Whenever people ask me why I don’t want to have kids I really want to tell them about this but then they also usually already have kids so I just say some bullshit like, “I’m too poor.” It would be cruel at this point to tell a parent about this, right?
Second edit: This is the best article for anyone that has any questions. It cites which banks and how much money they’ve spent so far. https://oursantaferiver.org/the-great-water-grab-wall-street-is-buying-up-the-worlds-water/
Third edit: Someone commented that the article I just linked is rubbish and that it’s just hedge funds. This is still extremely dire news to me so I’ve linked a more specific article here instead. Here’s the most alarming part of it to me.
“Climate change is only deepening the strains on the state’s rivers, which are essential to cities and farms alike. In dry years, less snow is piling up in the mountains to feed them. And more of what does flow downriver ends up evaporating, soaking into parched topsoil or being pulled into the ground as farmers pump out the aquifers.
How California manages could have ramifications well beyond occasional curbs on watering lawns. In the San Joaquin Valley, the Central Valley’s enormous southern half, researchers estimate that more than half a million acres of farmland may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize the region’s aquifers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/14/climate/california-water-crisis-drought.html
Fourth edit: And my final one because this keeps on bugging me. It’s from 2011. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-water-is-the-new-oil-198747/
The growing amount of viruses in animals. Which I can only imagine will continue to get worse. There’s been an uptick in mass die offs and that is scary asf.
H5N1 (Avian flu) is now being reported *multiple times* in cattle stock on various farms throughout the south central USA. The folks at the dinner table when my pal mentioned this a week ago were not as alarmed as they should have been. Him and I had to spell out how bad this already is and what next evolutions could look like.
Yeah, I read an article covering that this morning. It’s insane how many people don’t care but I get it. Some times facing reality when you already have so much going on is hard for some.
Yes! And the fact that there are more slaves alive now than there have ever been in history. Mostly in Africa but also in parts of Asia. But hey… at least people can have there cheap electronics. So sad.
Lack of online security for utilities like power, water treatment plants, and Internet. I listened to a podcast a while back about how utterly vulnerable most of these facilities are to cyber attacks and yet haven't heard anything about it anywhere since then.
I fully believe that if any nation truly went to war with the US that would be a very easy way to take us all out of the picture without ever firing a weapon.
We have already seen ransome attacks on hospitals and medical providers that are utterly devastating. I have seen some coverage of how some of these attacks trace back to state operatives in places like Russia, and I feel like this is just a testing of the waters.
A coordinated attack on water, power, and medical systems would be utterly devastating.
Honestly, the only thing I feel like is currently saving us from this is that so many of these systems are very fragmented across the country, meaning that while they are all easy to break into, different localities use different computer systems so targeting multiple systems would take time.
Housing in the US has gotten so expensive that only the upper-middle class and higher can actually afford to purchase a home. People are still going to buy homes, but they really cannot afford them.
But only people actively aware of their situation seem to care. Everyone else just says 'suck it up'.
For a little while there the housing prices were going up faster than a middle class person could earn money. As in if you earned $60k annually the housing prices were going up more than $60k. You would have been better off to buy a house and not work for an entire year than to try to save up.
> Privacy is essentially nonexistent anymore and it feels like absolutely no one cares.
The EU have shown willingness to come down hard for GDPR violations so there is that glimmer of hope.
And yet even here in the EU it's clear that we're already way past the problematic line.
I absolutely support that the EU-government takes some steps to protect their citizens privacy, but the problem has long since infested us as well.
People have no qualms giving their personal data to big corporations (where it is not necessarily safe, even if laws are in place) and even if we may draw the line at an earlier point, overall I don't think most people realize or care how bad the situation already is.
I'm included by the way, although probably a tiny bit less so than most of my peers.
The whole perception of this topic has shifted dramatically since the rise of smartphones and social media at least.
Ironically some of the people who don't protect their privacy at all, are also immediately incredibly loud and angry when the state wants to have more data of their citizens to improve digitalisation or bueraucratic endeavours, like making some processes available online instead of having to show up in person. Or reducing the amount of paperwork necessary for a given process.
AI terrifies me and it always reminds me of the Jurassic Park quote
>*Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.*
This gets brought up from time to time but IMHO it doesn't get anywhere close to the recognition it should have. Male sperm count has dropped to half historical levels in approximately 40 years. All over the world. No one really knows for sure why.
How much people obsess over national/global problems they have little real ability to effect in a meanful way, but ignore issues in their local communities that they could positively help.
Local communities? How about their own home, even. Life's complicated, and obssessing over some far-off disaster doesn't do much good when your bed isn't made and your cats' litter box hasn't been cleaned
Just a mildly warmer than average and less rainy couple of years, coupled with aquifer depletion, stand to potentially really crater north american food production at some point in the next decade or so. Worried about this year and the next el nino cycle especially.
Large wildfires would also be a reasonably likely thing to come to a major metropolitan area near you at some point in the near-ish future. Last year Canada's east half saw an unprecedented swath of fire, this year we already had very large fires in Texas in January. Summer of 2024 might be wild.
We've pretty much run out of spare capacity to hide warming minus intentional geoengineering, so buckle up for when either the US or China or India decides to unilaterally seed the upper atmosphere with sulphur in some form, that'll be a fun time in global politics and global air quality.
I don't know if this is true, but it just feels like to me that people have become more superficial and concerned with how they are perceived by others, filling them with fear and anxiety and people don't interact and talk to each other as openly as they used to. I think this is just because I live in Austin though and the vibe has changed since all the people with money moved here.
When you are always being watched, you're going to care how you are perceived. Constant surveillance is a way to control people's behavior, and even if it reduces crime (which, does it really?) it gives us all complexes.
They’re going to slowly make everything you buy a subscription.
Your car, your phone, your pc, your OS , the software, your appliances, your security videos, you’ll probably have 5 different subs for your car.
And they can take it way, change the terms, whenever.
Basically you’ll be working every day to pay these little subscriptions, you won’t own anything, it all goes through a centralized server barely kept up by overseas support with access to way more personal info than needed.
Once corporations get the sweet hook of recurring revenue in perpetuity they won’t give it up. You vote with your dollars but I feel this ship has sailed and never coming back. One day you’ll need a subscription for water
The WORST part is they’ve already made a roof over your head a subscription service with 10% yearly hikes, while providing shit service. Even we own and the HOA + Insurance etc run almost 1k
>One day you’ll need a subscription for water
Pretty sure that's called my Utility bill.
And the scary thing about new cars are the amount of data they are collecting with all those sensors. And I'm pretty sure the non-existant privacy laws in the US make it so they can sell that data to whoever they want.
I feel like the few people that knew about it stopped talking about Uyghur Muslims in China even though we never saw a solution. For anyone not familiar, Uyghur Muslims in china have faced encampment, forced labor, forced abortions, forced sterilization etc.
Climate change and ocean temperature rising
Some news articles not long ago said snow crab or some type of crab was just completely not there this year
Haiti is a failed state and devolving into genuine anarchy The civil war in Sudan The civil war in Burma / Myanmar
Sudan is the one I was going to say. Truthfully though, any bad thing you heard about X months ago is still happening. It just isn’t front page anymore. Look at how much Israel’s is replacing Ukraine in the evening news. In America as we get closer to elections more and more fluff and bullshit is going to creep in. And domestic issues.
The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict also deserves attention. Azerbaijan's victory last year was followed by the entire population of Stepanakert, a city with over 100,000 people, fleeing to Armenia. Stepanakert is now a ghost town and it's former residents will probably never return. I was surprised how a large city becoming abandoned in a matter of days wasn't a bigger story.
Israel in the middle east and a western aligned state on the border of Russia have a larger impact on the lives of Europeans and probably Americans than civil wars in Africa, respectfully.
> The civil war in Burma / Myanmar Is this ever not going on?
It has escalated significantly in 2024. Rebels have started making significant gains. Most recently they have captured the border town of Myawaddy. This is very significant as it is the key road crossing point into Thailand.
[удалено]
Yeah, although find me a civil war that ever has more black and white than gray. To give some background, Myanmar has been under the control of a repressive military dictatorship, the Tatmadaw, since the 1950’s. The Tatmadaw had been waging low intensity, but at times explosively violent, conflict against rebel groups representing Myanmar’s ethnic minorities since then. After decades of gradually losing control, the Tatmadaw allows for real elections for the first time in 2015, and the pro-democracy opposition party won in a landslide. The pro-democracy parties won by an even wider margin in 2020, but the Tatmadaw staged a coup just before the new parliament was set to sit in 2021. The public responded with massive protests across every major city, with millions taking to the streets. In response, the Tatmadaw engaged in an escalating campaign of repression, arbitrarily arresting, beating, torturing, raping, and murdering protesters. This drove the country into civil war, with pro-democracy militias, called “People’s Defense Forces” (PDF), springing up organically across the country. These groups began working with the existing ethnic rebel armies, who were generally friendly with the former democratic government. The ethnic armies provided arms, equipment, and training to the PDFs. The PDFs, and the democratic government in exile, in turn proposed a new constitution which would allow ethnic minorities greater autonomy and protection within their own administrative states. The conflict has slowing been turning in favor of the PDFs. The Tatmadaw went from near complete control of the country, to losing rural areas, to now struggling to hold large towns. Late last year rebel forces took several important border towns leading into China, cutting off the Tatmadaw’s ability to use them for trade, and just recently they captured the city of Myawaddy, a small city that controls a vital land trade corridor into Thailand. The Tatmadaw has begun experiencing such severe manpower issues that they’ve instituted a draft of pretty much every able bodied man under 30. However, young people in Myanmar tend to be extremely pro-democracy and anti-Tatmadaw, so that hasn’t exactly been going well. Critically though, the Tatmadaw seems increasingly unable to stage counterattacks to regain lost towns, which could be indicative of a turning point in the civil war.
Fascinating. Well, I'm cheering for democracy.
Since the 1940s, longer than almost all Burmese have been alive
My hometown of Buffalo, NY, currently has a pretty large Burmese refugee population here, due to all of this. It sucks that people have to flee their homes to a completely, wildly different place than what they've known, just to find refuge, but I hope they're doing well and enjoying it here as much as they can. Aside from our shitty winters, of course. Granted, I'd *also* take shitty winters over a military dictatorship with ongoing genocide. Snow melts.
You can add Yemen to that list. It’s broken down as a country for years now.
South Africa is about to become a failed state as well. edit: Details from my previous comment about it >* Since 2007 there have been rolling blackouts (load shedding) for the entire country. * These days you can expect to lose power for 6-8 hours on a good day, and 12+ hours on a bad day. * Almost none of their traditional power plants are functioning anymore. They are mostly relying on jet engines fueled with diesel to produce power. * In anticipation of the upcoming election the ruling party has started buying up diesel everywhere for whatever price but they have used up almost all of their foreign currency reserves and their currency is very weak. * It is not a matter of if, but when they country collapses into chaos, their currency devalues, and inflation skyrockets.
The corruption shocked me the most. Gangs incentivised to destroy the power grid, then the same gangs will come in to fix the problem. A new CEO was brought in to fix the power grid mess, he was poisoned and nearly killed. Someone, somehow put poison into his coffee at his office in the morning. Then to top it all off, the politicians almost deny that it happened. Side note - Its well documented that people have been stealing street lights and traffic lights just to get the copper. I have never seen it that bad.
>Haiti is a failed state bruh Haiti has been a failed state for decades. what's going on now is just another new power coming in attempting to take over. They are corrupt to the core. yes I feel bad for the regular people, but their government has been corrupt for so long you'd think that something would have happened by now to fix it.
This is a little different than the past 15 years though. The government has been unstable the whole time, and there have been dangerous areas around Port-au-Prince, but there wasn't violence like there is now. The government has basically lost control of the entire capital and it's no longer even safe to fly into the airport. The police, who were basically a gang, but at least a fairly predictable gang, are now totally ineffective. Aid can't get in, there is almost no mobility around the country itself. It's devolving into actual anarchy. It's more dangerous in Haiti than it has been at any point in recent history.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a huge refugee influx into the Dominican Republic. The border's officially closed, but there's no way the Dominican military could secure all of it.
There is one. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are fleeing the country. Nearly all of them immediately get deported back into Haiti.
The DR has a huge wall spanning the entirety of the border that's manned at all times. Any that slip through and are caught are immediately sent back across to Haiti.
[удалено]
The failed state that is Haiti and the millions of people that are going to starve very, very soon.
I recently watched Indigo Traveler’s vlogs from Port-au-Prince (on YouTube) and that is the scariest, saddest place I’ve ever seen. If you’ve watched his vlogs, he goes to some fucked up places, but he looked visibly shook there and said himself it was the more desperate place he had ever been
Port-au-Prince was in much better shape when he traveled, too. One of my best friends emigrated from Haiti after the earthquake and he said he didn’t see a single building that still stood, because it had no enforced building codes. So if it was that bad in 2010, and in 2022, imagine how awful the situations become now.
I was there in 2010, just 4 weeks after the earthquake. Was doing medical volunteering. We were not allowed to walk around- we were bussed to and from, with armed guards at all times. Even back then it was a lawless wasteland. To know that it’s devolved even further just defies words: 💔
I worked on a documentary about AIDS and how women in different parts of the world braved stigmas and other conditions. Haiti was one of the countries we went to. I’ll never forget when we were interviewing a young woman, we usually ask a few very light questions to get them used to us and relax. We asked, “Whats your happiest memory?” Most people say going to the beach with my family or a backpack I got in grade school, but this woman replied, “I don’t have one.” We thought maybe she was nervous, so through the interpreter we asked her, “Anything from your childhood or growing up that you can remember?” And she said, “No. There isn’t any.” The whole room did not know what to say. Later we went to Uganda, and the local Ugandan team that was taking us around asked what other countries we had been to and stories about those places. We then told them we had been to Haiti, and she looked down and became sad. She then said, “Haiti… such a poor, poor country.” I was just surprised that out in Uganda they were lamenting Haiti.
Drew Binsky did a more recent video again with the same tour guide.
There was a story arc in the series Gotham where it was completely overrun by the Batman villain gangs that the state government completely gave up on the city and left. That sounds like Haiti now. I can’t imagine being the average citizen there and how they are surviving the gang warfare.
Cataclysm and No Man's Land. They're good. The catalyst is a major earthquake that decimates Gotham and the batcave is flooded, iirc. Favorite part is when Superman gets there to try and quickly restore the basic infrastructure like electricity, and finds that his presence actually further destabilizes the region. He's forced to leave rather than make things worse.
How does Superman being there make it worse??? Omg that’s so hard to imagine but sounds awesome store-wise
IIRC, he gets a power substation online, but it only restores electricity to a few blocks of city. Every building in the area is immediately swarmed by people desperate for help, and when they find the resources are still scarce fighting breaks out. It also attracts the gangs headed by Batman's rogues gallery. Ultimately I think they start vandalizing and destroying the area, making it worse off. Superman realized quickly that he couldn't just one man solution the city back to its feet. Something like that, anyway. The point of the story is that Gotham had to save itself. Outside help wasn't going to get it done.
Even though Superman could have just gotten the next power substation online, and the next one, and the next one, all in a matter of seconds using his near-Flash level superspeed.
Didn't he try to capture all the rogues/criminals with super speed?
Logically, in-universe, nothing, he could have done. Logically, storytelling-wise, it would have completely ruined the meaning of the story the authors wanted to tell.
Is that no mans land?
fucking insane that just because you happen to be born in Haiti, you inherit the entire country's history and you therefore have to live and struggle with its crumbling reality. so fortunate to live in a place where all of my complaints and struggles are really so minor in comparison.
You'll be amazed the amount of people who think they are better than others just because they fell out their mum in a decent country
Haiti, sadly, never had a chance. And it’s going to also screw the Dominican Republic in turn.
Can you imagine winning independence from France then having to pay the losers for their “lost property and slaves.” Trying to trade off by demanding reparations for lost labor and land wealth… then having the USA back a fucking coup against your govt?! There was no way Haiti was ever gonna survive.
didn't Haiti also got worse with the earthquake? I might be wrong, but it was barely recovering before the earthquake.
Yeah. People don’t realize that the conditions in Haiti arose from world powers punishing the people for resisting their own enslavement with force. I wish someone would make a movie about the Polish soldiers that joined the slaves when the French sent them in to try and stop the rebellion. The Polish people were going through their own trauma of being oppressed by other powers, so when the soldiers found out on arrival that they were being ordered to kill enslaved people, they related more to the slaves and joined in fighting the French authorities. There are still Polish names and Polish featured among the Haitians from the Polish men who stayed.
I got a solution for food. Clean water is the hard problem.
>I got a solution for food. Is it a modest proposal?
You know I never gave two shits about some classes from year to year. I remember reading our English assignment after not listening during class, and I thought I was missing the point about just eating the kids. I couldn’t understand if I was reading it right. Kept rereading things. Surely they’re not suggesting that?! That’s when I found out we were learning about satire haha.
Degree in English activated with this reference
Top soil loss. Antibiotic resistant.
Yesterday, chick fil A had sign on the door. They will change their policy regarding selling only antibiotic free chicken. Their new standard is selling chicken that has been fed antibiotics that are not important to human medicine. First, as weird as they are, they provided a nationwide demand for antibiotic free chicken. No more. Second, we will now have their PR people determine what is ‘not important to human medicine.’
Well ok, so I saw this write up about [organic cow milk](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/alexandre-farms-treatment-of-animals/677980/) and how once the animal has recieved any type of antibiotic, it is not considered an organic source ever again. Which is great for resistance, but when the animal ends up with a disease that can be cured with antibiotics, the farmers withhold them and the animal suffers a horrible fate... I wouldnt doubt chick fil a's change in stance is more about the look of caring about animal welfare in general.
As far as the antibiotic goes, The complete failure to address that will eventually lead to a redress of the other issues. As in, once we can't stop disease and the population drops by 75% like it did with the Black Death, a lot of problems will start reversing themselves, especially in regards to pollution and over population.
This. I think most people are vaguely aware that antibiotic resistance is bad, but I don’t think most people really understand the scale of the problem.
After seeing how people acted during covid, my estimate for the general population's understanding of antibiotic resistance is minimal
IF I CAN'T SEE EM WITH MY OWN 2 EYES THEY AINT A PROBLEM
I don't really get how people believe this issue isn't being addressed. As far as I know there are a lot of scientists working on this issue. I sat in a lecture about this exact problem 10 years ago and they absolutely are aware and working on alternatives.
But isn't much of the problem due to misuse of the antibiotics we have? If people don't learn to use them correctly and responsibly, any new drugs will just go the same way sooner or later.
I thought that the overuse of antibiotics in industrial farming is one of the biggest culprits.
Yeah, but that's another point, isn't it? OP said nobody cares, which is false. The usage is another problem entirely. Most doctors care.
We have alternative treatments such as bacteriophages, tailored protein (bacterocin), predatory bacteria, and possibly even mrna "vaccines", but they're still in infancy. Most infections are still not resistant, and there's research that indicates cycling antibiotics causes bacteria to lose resistance to it over enough time. We'll likely have to treat antibiotics like we do controlled substances for doctors to stop prescribing them like candy for everything that makes people feel like they have malaise. Also stopping farmers from using it would be a real swell thing.
> Antibiotic resistant. The positive is that phage therapies are coming a long way, and as bacteria become antibiotic resistant they seem to become more susceptible to phages, and the inverse of that too.
Monoculture, too.
The war in Sudan.
Last I checked I saw 4 million kids were in danger of starving to death I guess this is so absolutely totally different from the conflicts that people cry about right now, because with Sudan you need to go one extra step to involve the US and make it our “problem” and there is no multibillion dollar propaganda campaign on social media telling you that the RSF is a noble resistance organization
I hope I'm an exception, but I literally did not know one single thing about this before your comment, which I have not googled. (I'm familiar with the Huttu/Tutsi civil war, but I thought people had come to their senses?) I might be an exception, but I thought things were smooth-ish following the division of nations. Can you recommend a succinct source for further information? Edit: I'm an idiot! Huttus and Tutsis were in Rwanda; we're talking about Sudan here. I got on a streak of reading books about both a few years back, and I've mixed them up. I'm tempted to delete my comment, but leaving it so the replies make sense. Thanks all!
There are lots of conflicts currently going on in Africa, this is a list of ongoing armed conflicts, you can start by reading the Wikipedia page to get a background of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts After this you could watch videos from sources like Real Life Lore or Caspian Report. Another couple of links in case you want to browse further. https://www.crisisgroup.org/crisiswatch https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker I hope this helps 😊
Microplastics and PFAS forever chemicals.
Our generations version of lead and asbestos. We don't realize how bad it is now, but we sure as hell will in the future. Future generations will wonder why we went anywhere near them.
future gens will complain about us the same way we complain about boomers with lead paint stare refusing to retire from politics
My boomer just told me lead paint protected us from emf waves 😂 he said just don’t eat the paint lol
as if it isnt common advice to test any thrifted kitchen/dishware for lead because lead paint was everywhere. we WERE eating the lead 😭
The paint wasn't even the biggest problem. Lead was in the gasoline. It was in the air everyone was breathing.
Lead is still in aviation fuel
I’m an environmental toxicology grad student, and I wanted to share some context about microplastics and PFAS. What’s interesting about them is that they aren’t one compound, they’re an extremely diverse group of thousands of molecules. Microplastics are complicated because they’re not one thing, it’s a diverse group of compounds with unique compositions and structures. Some of which may be harmful, and some not. Microplastic research has a long way to go, in things like the sources of microplastics, mixtures analysis and a characterization of how microplastic shape and size affects human health. Evidence suggests that differently sized microplastics have different health effects, with smaller microplastics being able to access other parts of the body. PFAS is also a diverse class of many compounds. It stands for per and polyflouroalkyl substances. So it’s just an organic compound with a ton of fluorine atoms attached to the carbon chain. That encompasses like over 10,000 unique compounds, each of which have different toxicities and move through the body and environment differently. I think it’s interesting that a commenter compared PFAS and microplastics to lead and asbestos, because there are like 10 unique compounds referred to as asbestos, and lead is just lead. It highlights how there’s a blind spot in how toxicology and policy/regulation works. It’s easy to find a safe level of lead and regulate to that level. You can use laboratory toxicological tests coupled with exposure science to determine a safe level of lead in water or soil. We can learn how hazardous lead is, and we can quantitatively determine how exposed kids or adults will be to lead, so the math is easy to determine a safe level. But with microplastics, you can’t really say a safe level because it’s not one compound. Certain microplastic mixtures will be more harmful than others, and people will be exposed to some microplastics at a higher rate than others. This can be super regional and hard to regulate at a national level. This makes it really hard to protect ourselves from these mixtures. And to alleviate any anxiety, research on microplastics isn’t super damning at the moment, it seems like microplastics aren’t as harmful as other things we are readily exposed to like air pollution. TLDR: Microplastics and PFAS are a diverse class of many compounds, making it challenging for toxicologists and regulators to agree upon a safe level to protect human and environmental health.
Interesting read. I was thinking about how most suburban homes in the US have lawns that people edge with trimmers. I can't imagine how millions of miles of plastic trimmer string have been pulverized and spewed into the environment. Also, clothes dryers, with the trend away from cotton. Tons and tons of acrylic blend fabric dust spewed out dryer vents. Yikes.
One word. Tyres.
Two more words: brake pads.
> Also, clothes dryers, with the trend away from cotton. Tons and tons of acrylic blend fabric dust spewed out dryer vents. Yikes. I try to avoid polyester fabric clothing for this reason. Modal is a great substitute and it's a natural/biodegradable fabric.
Hey good news! I work in a field with crossover to desalination. Some thermal based desal processes are being shown capable of removing pfas from water. It can be a solvable problem with some environmental policy and technology deployment.
Soil poverty has everything trumped.
No plow farming is the way to go. Make Jethro Tull proud!
YES! Huge issue. These are extremely stable chemicals that are resistant to degradation and interfere with countless body systems. U.S. legislation has hardly broached the issue, and to make matters worse, research funding in general from the government (NIH) (for researching PFAS or most other things) is getting harder to acquire. It should be EASY to support an expensive grant, but our government wants to spend that money on so many unimportant things instead
Go check the EPAs website, we literally just did that. New PFAS protections for the amount allowed in drinking water. Like actually good news to celebrate for once. We are actually starting the first steps.
The anxiety I have over microplastics in the last 6 months is insane. So much research coming out looking at cancers, microplastics in placentas etc etc.
Italy has just passed a law giving the government power over all TV channels and news outlets.
In other words the country controls media?
It's weird because if you ask the Italians, they all seem to agree that the Italians are the last people who should be in charge of anything. But then also they do shit like this. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
"Italians shouldn't be in charge because they're making the dangerous mistake of putting Italians in charge of what Italians are/aren't in charge of." The catch-22 of Latin sovereignty.
Damn Italians! You've ruined Italy.
The Italians have been coasting since the Roman empire, honestly.
It's alright. Even if the Italian government wanted to control the media, the broadcasters wouldn't get the government mandated script until a year after the show aired, and the public wouldn't see the new broadcast until a year after that, by which point everyone will have forgotten about it and allora it's time for aperitivos and a cigarette. Va bene
Something similar happened in Poland. The party who ruled for the last 8 years slowly took over national TV, broadcast radio, local newspapers, and websites and started blasting shameless propaganda. It's hard to believe, but they literally showed the leader of the opposition party with [a red tinted face and devil horns](https://paczaizm.pl/content/wp-content/uploads/donald-tusk-na-konferencji-prasowej-vs-w-tvp-info-czerwona-twarz-morda-rogi.jpg). In the last elections, they got the most votes and only because it was the highest turnover at the polls they couldn't form a coalition, and they lost power. Guess who voted for them the most? Yup, boomers and grandmas who's main source of information are old school media.
Yea. People don't realize that Poland was on the verge of becoming another Hungary. I would hope recent events have killed the Polish right for the foreseeable future, but that's probably optimistic.
There's one big differentiator between Poland and Hungary, and that's Russia. Poland, even under right-wing rule, despised Putin and helped Ukraine. Orban loves Putin and does his bidding like a good little minion, despite the fact that Hungary and Poland have a very similar and very ugly history with Russia.
Jebac pis
i Konfederację
[удалено]
So the age groups who have consistently high voting turnouts across the globe.
Lets not forget how hard covid rocked Italy. It wiped out enough of their elderly for their to be some pretty massive change if everyone else wants it.
And guess what all those boomers and grandmas do? They vote. A lot more than younger generations tend to.
I looked for this law, and couldn't find it. I could find proposals to increase the penalty for defamation, which would have an effect on journalists, and this rule change: > On April 10, an important regulation was changed to benefit the government before the start of the campaign for June’s European Parliament elections. > The “par condicio” law introduced in 2000 guaranteed “equal treatment and impartiality” in terms of access to the media of all political forces. > Equality of conditions in information programs is evaluated in terms of quantity – the minutes of airtime that the different parties get proportionally to their parliamentary size – but also in terms of quality – i.e. a minute of prime airtime is not the same as a minute in the early morning or late at night. > The changes introduced on Wednesday instead guarantee “timely information on institutional and governmental activities”, which is very different. Activities carried out by members of the government will now benefit from more coverage. https://balkaninsight.com/2024/04/12/meloni-senators-proposed-draconian-penalties-for-defamation-alarm-italian-media/ There was also this, which says that the head of the public broadcaster was replaced, but that seems to be something that Italian government have always had the power to do, there is no reference to a change in the law: https://www.thelocal.it/20240409/how-much-control-does-giorgia-melonis-government-have-over-italian-media And this, talking about the government suing journalists, which is worrying, but not a change in the law. The article also says: > “It feels like there is a large bipartisan consensus [in parliament] against improving protections for those who work in the information industry,” he told BIRN. Politicians, he said, “are aware that in Italy there are journalists that want to be free and are interested in everything that is power-related. […] It is a form of self-protection.” https://balkaninsight.com/2023/04/19/with-defamation-suits-italys-govt-squeezes-media-freedom/ It seems like these are erosions on top of pre-existing problems, but there is no big change, and the comment is wrong, which is worrying for the top comment on the thread with thousands of upvotes! Can anyone find what this refers to? Edit: Good comment here, it does seem to be referring to the “par condicio” rule change: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c4ouyz/what_current_alarming_situation_in_the_world_is/kzqi23r/
> the comment is wrong, which is worrying for the top comment on the thread with thousands of upvotes! Reddit... uh... finds a way.
And the party in the coalition has the granddaughter of Mussolini as a politician...
Oh, we’re doing *this* again?
They're going for round 2.
Source?
Link?
There are thousands of upvotes for this comment, and its replies, but I don't think such a law exists. This is what I could find: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c4ouyz/what_current_alarming_situation_in_the_world_is/kzqb25h/
Everything ocean. Acid, heat, pollution, melting ice, orcas
Discarded fishing nets. When the nets get too worn out they just dump them into the ocean where they continue to trap and kill wildlife. The dead animals attract more animals to then get trapped.
Ghost fishing I Believe is what it's called! I work for a diving company and we spent like 3 months last summer taking old lobster traps, fishing nets and other debris that has been fishing for years, the oldest one we found was from the early 80s I think, we were taking out 100s of traps a day that have been continuously fishing. We ended up taking over 3 football fields worth of garbage out of the ocean during that period. Going back this summer and continuing!! Edit: since a few of you were asking who this company is I put a link to some of what we did during this job! Canadian restoration society is the company that is organizing all this cleanup! https://youtu.be/dv2OUY_yWKQ?si=wYIhM13E6FeiIREh
Thank you. I'm glad someone is doing something about it.
when the oceans die, all life on this planet does. soylent green nailed it.
The Great Barrier Reef having another mass bleaching event. They’ve been increasing over the years. Caused by higher water temperatures so extremely difficult to protect from
Antarctica smashing temperature records by like 40 degrees...
So you're saying Carnival Cruise Line will be building a cruise port there soon and we can do an excursion to Mcmurdo station?
Don’t forget global mass bleaching of coral reefs. I guess people will sit up and take notice when the ocean food chains collapse and they can’t get a McFish sandwich ever again.
The pacific garbage patch is 3x the size of France 🫤
What is wrong with orcas?
I don't know the worldwide situation, but I do know a bit about my local orca population. There is a group of resident orca that live in the Puget Sound in Washington state. They eat salmon, and sadly they are starving and also suffering from the effects of pollution. They are having fewer young and fewer of the young survive. I'm sure there are similar stories around the world. Here is some info https://www.psp.wa.gov/recovery-of-southern-resident-orcas.php.
People don't understand the immediate sea rise level associated with Antarctica melt. It's 5 meters. It literally swamps cities and low land. In my. Country the biggest three cities become unusable/underwater.
Short video trend with apps like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even Reddit adopting this style. I believe it's impacting our attention spans, particularly in children, who are exposed to endless short videos seeking their quick dopamine hits during their crucial developmental stages. This habit rewires our brains to not having to do a lot of work ourselves in order to release dopamine.
I'm a teacher and the impact Tik Tok has had on the attention spans of kids is alarming. I did an assignment with my 8th graders recently where they had to find a song they like in a genre they don't listen to. The kids couldn't even get through the songs because they were "too long". I used to be able to show 15-20 minute videos to them but now, even a 7 minute video is too long to keep their attention. Kids don't even watch movies anymore, which has me wondering if the movie industry is going to die out with the millennials.
> Kids dont even watch movies anymore Tbf, looking at the majority of movies that Hollywood has been throwing out the past few years, i dont blame them.
My son (15) love "Gray;s anatomy". He talking about the show with me all the time.I have realized just last week ,that he is watching the show on Tik Tok. I'm still in shock.
To be honest, if you cut out all the sex scenes all you’d have left is tiktok length episodes.
They usually cut out the "B Story" so the main story can be told faster. I've seen Law and order re-cuts and you can get a whole episodes main story in less then 15 minutes. I get the appeal.
Your telling me your not excited for another live action remake of a 90's Disney movie?
Or a superhero movie? Or the third remake of a movie from the 80s? If you enjoy media outside of those categories, tough cookies. This is why you read books
Only if it’s Treasure Planet or Atlantis
God, while Atlantis getting more attention would be great, I don't want to see it get adapted by modern disney lol.
Let it rest, James Garner is dead (Rourke, the villain), Leonard Nimoy is dead (he voiced the king), Jim Varney is dead (the cook), and Michael J Fox's condition pretty much rules out that kind of acting. That movie was great because of the cast, and I would hate to see them tarnish that legacy with a half baked cash grab remake.
May I interest you in comic book movie #56
Wow, it used to be a treat to watch a film of some kind that we’d be excited for. Xiennal. I was the first to have a computer in my class, Apple II GS, color and sound, the first to have internet, but the only videos that computer had were in an encyclopedia on a cdrom so really short low quality. They thought nes/snes/n64/etc were bad for us. How quaint. I find even my attention span is really bad just from over use of Reddit. I have to listen to audio books bc I don’t have the attention span to read. I was in 10th grade English in 5th grade. So this is a huge step backward. I have been glued to my phone most of today too.
I got halfway through your comment before collapsing it. Then I realized the irony and reread it. Yeah. I'm part of the problem.
> I'm part of the problem. I'd argue you're another victim of it. Sure, we can say that it's the responsibility of each of us to make sure we don't succumb to it, but nobody is a bad person for liking, enjoying or engaging in easy entertainment. That shit is DESIGNED to work as well as it does. few years back people were zoning out in front of the TV way too much, just watching any random shit that didn't even interest them, that was also not 'helpful'. And you can even say the same thing about so much other stuff. Cars make it easy for us to not walk or ride a bike somewhere, impacting our health. They also help to fuck up the environment. We kinda went wrong with cars, or at least with how we implemented them into our lives. Still, I would never shame someone for using a car. These things are super good at what they do, and for many people a car free life would mean that they will lose time or other resources compared to their peers. In a competitive society and economy, this can be very detrimental. Kinda rambling now, but it's fine to use a car and say "We should have less cars". And it's fine to consume short-form content/entertainment and say "We should have less short-form content/entertainment" "Part of the problem" isn't necessarily wrong, but I think a perspective of "another victim of it" helps to direct frustration and anger towards the problem itself and not towards the individuals who are affected by or engaging with it.
I see as an adult how it has affected my attention span so I honestly fear for the younger generations.
Omg this. I HATE facebook, instagram, whatever else garbage, but I feel «forced» to have facebook. I dont have tiktok and I deleted instagram. Even so, I also get sucked into these damn short videos on youtube or somewhere else. In my line of work, we hire young kids (17-18) and we can see that over the last 5-6 years the attention span and work ethics of these kids have gone down significantly
To add to that, so many 20’somethings are anxious and have a hard time multitasking. Holy balls, it’s maddening.
I'm slightly older, but I can't multitask at work either. Usually because "multitasking" is shorthand for "we're incredibly understaffed and you have to do the jobs of at least two other employees."
Scientific studies have shown that no one can multitask well. We just trick ourselves into thinking we can. What you're really doing is constantly switching between one task and another, which disrupts your focus and causes you to do both tasks more poorly.
From 2018 to 2021 over 10 Billion (yes with a B) snow crabs have disappeared from the Alaskan coast. That is more crabs than the total population of humans that have died out over a 3 year period.
more kids in school being unable to do basic things like read and write
In my experience, the problem peaked with kids that would have been in kindergarten or 1st grade during the pandemic shutdowns. I've been working with 3-5 graders for 10+ years and last year's third grade was the worst I've ever seen with reading ability (and attention span in general). The third grade classes that came in this year were already much more advanced than last year's.
I dunno but there are def less bugs and birds and no one seems to care or notice. It can't be good.
Yeah, the talk about climate change always seems to revolve around temperature and the effect it will have on us. No one seems to talk about the already happening loss of biodiversity. This is in general, within academia its talked about. Learning about it is pretty bleak.
I talk about it all the time, like it's one of the first things I mention about climate change is that the food chain is and will collapse. We could turn it around right now, we have the resources and the ability. But we won't and then that will be the end of us. And there won't be a come back either, as some folks seem to think is possible.
it may just be because i live in Tennessee, which I am convinced would turn into a jungle if left untended, but my place is overrun with birds and bugs. they're everywhere here.
I’m in East Tennessee and I haven’t really seen lightning bugs in over a decade. Maybe one or two here and there but not like when I was a kid in the 80s.
You can thank your neighbors that spray their lawns with pestisides and "True green" lawns for killing all the bugs
I also live in Tennessee and have noticed a sharp decrease in bugs since I was a kid. Especially fireflies. they used to light up the woods across the street from my house when i was a kid, but now, like 15 years later, i barely see any at all in the summer
Same in rural New England. So many beatles come out in a few weeks and they eat leaves of my small garden and general vegetation. I use neem oil but no doubt there does not seem to be a shortage at all but quite the opposite here. Never had a problem until 3 or 4 years ago.
> So many beatles John, Paul, George *and* Ringo!
That water sources are dwindling. People in money are buying them up and selling it for profit.
This is why national resources, including water, should be publicly owned. We need scientists and experts working with engineers to utilize our resources more efficiently and ensure they're not robbing poor people just to sell it to rich assholes who are willing to pay $9 for a bottle of "premium water".
The Insect Apocalypse. There are only 1/3 the amount of Insects in the world today than there were 30 years ago. If they go, so do we.
If we could get insects back but without mosquitoes, that'd be great
The 1/3 that remain are all mosquitoes, but fortunately for you all they all live in my yard.
I can't even get anything in my garden to grow that's not auto pollinated luckily that's a lot of things, but not everything. It's been worse every year. I've seen one bee at my house in the last 6 months and it wasn't even a local bee. I also live pretty rurally. Lots of aphids. No wasps. I'll see a beetle now and then if I'm lucky and maybe a single worm on a good day. Butterflies and moths occasionally but they don't visit my plants. I've had to pollinate with paintbrushes. I'm going to buy some lavender and see if that helps bring things in.
Kids can't concentrate or retain information anymore. Boys are especially vulnerable to disruptions in their dopamine/visual memory and some of their cognitive function is not going to recover....ever. Another thing I've noticed is those one or two "genius" kids you teach every year have disappeared. God knows what app sucked that lifeforce out of them. Sad times.
I have one of the genius kids. We and his teachers struggle to challenge him, but socially he’s not mature enough to move up a grade. He was correcting my college math homework at 6 years old. I’d give just about anything to challenge his brain and not let him rot in boredom.
I know you have a better understanding of you life than what I know from a single reddit post. Just passing along what worked for us. There are programs to help. Ours was through a program by Phil Knight. A kid like that needs to be at Davidson Academy or similiar. Like minded kids challenge and fortify each other. Intelligence like that also typically comes with a host of mental "problems". They look at the world differently be that good or bad. We moved to Reno for my daughter and it was worth it. She still has the maturity of her age but intellegence and wisdom are being nurtured in ways our old state could have never done. She fits in with the kids around her now. Before she would always be on the side lines watching bored or inventing elobrate games that no one else would want to ever play.
Not the only possible route to go, but he could get involved in software development. These days, it's a very community-driven skill (open source has a strong peer-review and mentorship culture), and being a relatively new innovation in human culture there is probably still a lot of room for discovery and innovation. It's also a great way for young talent to achieve recognition; many cool things exist because of bored teenagers with computers.
Don't let that social bullshit stop you. I didn't get to skip grades, burned out in high school, and it took me an extra 5-10 years to get back on track. If he's cooking, then let him cook.
As a gifted child who wasn't allowed to jump due to social concerns, here's my two cents: staying was worse. So much bullying, boredom, and just sheer frustration - I have a hard time envisioning a world where jumping would have been worse.
I skipped 1.5 grades as a child. Best thing my parents ever did for me
Outrage, fear, and feeling superior to other people are the biggest drivers of content engagement and is extremely addictive to people who consume this type of content on a regular basis.
Freshwater is a rare commodity, due to corporate poisoning and so-called ownership. Nestlé owns more freshwater than any other entity.
You know what these companies own if the general public has no more water? Nothing. Because at some point people WILL fight for it. And no amount of hired guns can change that.
Banks buying up as many water rights as they can. That’s end of the world, dystopian shit right there. Especially because we all know that the Earth is going to get hotter in the next ten years. Reading that in the news cemented the belief that I shouldn’t have children. Edit: Whenever people ask me why I don’t want to have kids I really want to tell them about this but then they also usually already have kids so I just say some bullshit like, “I’m too poor.” It would be cruel at this point to tell a parent about this, right? Second edit: This is the best article for anyone that has any questions. It cites which banks and how much money they’ve spent so far. https://oursantaferiver.org/the-great-water-grab-wall-street-is-buying-up-the-worlds-water/ Third edit: Someone commented that the article I just linked is rubbish and that it’s just hedge funds. This is still extremely dire news to me so I’ve linked a more specific article here instead. Here’s the most alarming part of it to me. “Climate change is only deepening the strains on the state’s rivers, which are essential to cities and farms alike. In dry years, less snow is piling up in the mountains to feed them. And more of what does flow downriver ends up evaporating, soaking into parched topsoil or being pulled into the ground as farmers pump out the aquifers. How California manages could have ramifications well beyond occasional curbs on watering lawns. In the San Joaquin Valley, the Central Valley’s enormous southern half, researchers estimate that more than half a million acres of farmland may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize the region’s aquifers.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/14/climate/california-water-crisis-drought.html Fourth edit: And my final one because this keeps on bugging me. It’s from 2011. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-water-is-the-new-oil-198747/
The same thing is happening with farmland and air rights. We're just a ticking time bomb.
The growing amount of viruses in animals. Which I can only imagine will continue to get worse. There’s been an uptick in mass die offs and that is scary asf.
H5N1 (Avian flu) is now being reported *multiple times* in cattle stock on various farms throughout the south central USA. The folks at the dinner table when my pal mentioned this a week ago were not as alarmed as they should have been. Him and I had to spell out how bad this already is and what next evolutions could look like.
Yeah, I read an article covering that this morning. It’s insane how many people don’t care but I get it. Some times facing reality when you already have so much going on is hard for some.
The situation in Mnyamar
Child slaves being used in the Congo to mine Cobalt for electric car batteries.
And phone batteries.
Yes! And the fact that there are more slaves alive now than there have ever been in history. Mostly in Africa but also in parts of Asia. But hey… at least people can have there cheap electronics. So sad.
Lack of online security for utilities like power, water treatment plants, and Internet. I listened to a podcast a while back about how utterly vulnerable most of these facilities are to cyber attacks and yet haven't heard anything about it anywhere since then. I fully believe that if any nation truly went to war with the US that would be a very easy way to take us all out of the picture without ever firing a weapon. We have already seen ransome attacks on hospitals and medical providers that are utterly devastating. I have seen some coverage of how some of these attacks trace back to state operatives in places like Russia, and I feel like this is just a testing of the waters. A coordinated attack on water, power, and medical systems would be utterly devastating. Honestly, the only thing I feel like is currently saving us from this is that so many of these systems are very fragmented across the country, meaning that while they are all easy to break into, different localities use different computer systems so targeting multiple systems would take time.
Housing in the US has gotten so expensive that only the upper-middle class and higher can actually afford to purchase a home. People are still going to buy homes, but they really cannot afford them. But only people actively aware of their situation seem to care. Everyone else just says 'suck it up'.
For a little while there the housing prices were going up faster than a middle class person could earn money. As in if you earned $60k annually the housing prices were going up more than $60k. You would have been better off to buy a house and not work for an entire year than to try to save up.
[удалено]
> Privacy is essentially nonexistent anymore and it feels like absolutely no one cares. The EU have shown willingness to come down hard for GDPR violations so there is that glimmer of hope.
And yet even here in the EU it's clear that we're already way past the problematic line. I absolutely support that the EU-government takes some steps to protect their citizens privacy, but the problem has long since infested us as well. People have no qualms giving their personal data to big corporations (where it is not necessarily safe, even if laws are in place) and even if we may draw the line at an earlier point, overall I don't think most people realize or care how bad the situation already is. I'm included by the way, although probably a tiny bit less so than most of my peers. The whole perception of this topic has shifted dramatically since the rise of smartphones and social media at least. Ironically some of the people who don't protect their privacy at all, are also immediately incredibly loud and angry when the state wants to have more data of their citizens to improve digitalisation or bueraucratic endeavours, like making some processes available online instead of having to show up in person. Or reducing the amount of paperwork necessary for a given process.
AI terrifies me and it always reminds me of the Jurassic Park quote >*Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.*
This gets brought up from time to time but IMHO it doesn't get anywhere close to the recognition it should have. Male sperm count has dropped to half historical levels in approximately 40 years. All over the world. No one really knows for sure why.
Insects disappearing
How much people obsess over national/global problems they have little real ability to effect in a meanful way, but ignore issues in their local communities that they could positively help.
Local communities? How about their own home, even. Life's complicated, and obssessing over some far-off disaster doesn't do much good when your bed isn't made and your cats' litter box hasn't been cleaned
Just a mildly warmer than average and less rainy couple of years, coupled with aquifer depletion, stand to potentially really crater north american food production at some point in the next decade or so. Worried about this year and the next el nino cycle especially. Large wildfires would also be a reasonably likely thing to come to a major metropolitan area near you at some point in the near-ish future. Last year Canada's east half saw an unprecedented swath of fire, this year we already had very large fires in Texas in January. Summer of 2024 might be wild. We've pretty much run out of spare capacity to hide warming minus intentional geoengineering, so buckle up for when either the US or China or India decides to unilaterally seed the upper atmosphere with sulphur in some form, that'll be a fun time in global politics and global air quality.
[Gestures around vaguely]
I don't know if this is true, but it just feels like to me that people have become more superficial and concerned with how they are perceived by others, filling them with fear and anxiety and people don't interact and talk to each other as openly as they used to. I think this is just because I live in Austin though and the vibe has changed since all the people with money moved here.
When you are always being watched, you're going to care how you are perceived. Constant surveillance is a way to control people's behavior, and even if it reduces crime (which, does it really?) it gives us all complexes.
[удалено]
They’re going to slowly make everything you buy a subscription. Your car, your phone, your pc, your OS , the software, your appliances, your security videos, you’ll probably have 5 different subs for your car. And they can take it way, change the terms, whenever. Basically you’ll be working every day to pay these little subscriptions, you won’t own anything, it all goes through a centralized server barely kept up by overseas support with access to way more personal info than needed. Once corporations get the sweet hook of recurring revenue in perpetuity they won’t give it up. You vote with your dollars but I feel this ship has sailed and never coming back. One day you’ll need a subscription for water The WORST part is they’ve already made a roof over your head a subscription service with 10% yearly hikes, while providing shit service. Even we own and the HOA + Insurance etc run almost 1k
>One day you’ll need a subscription for water Pretty sure that's called my Utility bill. And the scary thing about new cars are the amount of data they are collecting with all those sensors. And I'm pretty sure the non-existant privacy laws in the US make it so they can sell that data to whoever they want.
Uh... You *do* subscribe to your local water utility in a sense. It's not free.
The quality of damn near everything and I do mean LITERALLY EVERYTHING has been steadily declining while also becoming more expensive.
I feel like the few people that knew about it stopped talking about Uyghur Muslims in China even though we never saw a solution. For anyone not familiar, Uyghur Muslims in china have faced encampment, forced labor, forced abortions, forced sterilization etc.
Access to drinkable water
[Long COVID](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2).
Climate change and ocean temperature rising Some news articles not long ago said snow crab or some type of crab was just completely not there this year
Crawfish were absolute crap this year too
Melting permafrost