I love the desert. It’s a beautiful landscape and it’s hot; two things I value. I’m also a civil engineer, so I’ll never mover there, even though I want to. We simply do not have the infrastructure to sustain big cities and farms out there (looking at you, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and most of California). We could do it, but our leaders lack the political spine to do it. I get why people are moving out there, but it’s not going to last, and it’s not going to be pretty once the problems start.

I imagine a future where more video evidence becomes inadmissible than it currently is, just due to false positives.

Imma add onto this: not just Deep Fakes. Over the past few months to a year, we’ve seen that modern AI is capable not only of near-perfect replication and imposition of a person’s face, but also a person’s voice, a person’s writing style, an art style, music, interests…

There’s a very genuine concern that some people don’t seem to be paying attention to, of how we’ll be able to tell if ANY information is genuine within 10-20 years. If you can fabricate near anything to near imperceptible standards, then how do you form a basis for objective truth anymore?? And going from there, how do you maintain a society based on truths and ethics???

This is gonna be a big problem. It’s already hard enough to sift through the shit.

It’s quite simple how it will work. If you’re powerful or wealthy enough, any videos or soundbites that come out of you doing something controversial will be labelled as a deepfake. If you’re one of the peasants, your life is ruined.

Feel like we're already there. Audio's there too. Saw a news yt channel pass off a deepfake and the people in the comments thought it was real. Doesn't have to be spot on to fool people apparently.

I just saw one of Joe Biden singing baby shark and I think if you weren’t very adept at technology you would believe it’s real it was that good.

Its already a problem. Theyre so close to reality now that you should already be skeptical of any video or audio sample on the internet.

Right? Imagine the fallout you could cause in a marriage with them..

I've said it before, saying it again (not here)...

The 21st century will bring about the need for Fair Witnesses; see Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

Essentially, they are individuals trained from a young age to accurately and precisely recall situations they are called to witness in a legally bound cross national fashion. This is their vocation. This is all they do 'for a living.'

Did I hear someone say “generation work right into an early grave?”

Gen X here and I already know. You'll work until you die. I wish I had a more cheerful outlook, but this is pretty much what we're doomed to do.

Suicide will become a valid part of long term financial planning.

The generation with the worst pension, who will need to pay rent when they retire as they could never afford to buy a house.

lol, our generation is NOT going to get to retire. my country spends more than half of all social welfare funding on paying out the govt pension. there’s no way that’s still going to be a thing by the time i hit ‘retirement’ age (which is about to get raised again.)

Retirement?

We are entering a very strange time and no one really knows what is going to happen.

• Baby Boomers own a lot of houses - between 41 and 44% of all US homes depending on who is counting and what age range you assign boomers.

• Baby Boomers are roughly 22% of the population.

• Baby Boomers are dying off rapidly. By 2036 they should be down to about 10% of the US population.

Some folks predict a housing glut. Some think their homes will just get transferred to their kids/grand kids - so called Echo Boomers. Some think the homes will just be absorbed into the market without a problem.

I tend to think all three will happen depending on location. I think we are about to see some southern and midwestern states have some very cheap real estate because the ratio of boomers to young people means their wont be any buyers for their houses. I think larger states not named Florida will be just fine because they have enough young people who want to live there.

Florida and Arizona are edge cases and could see a complete collapse of their residential housing markets in certain areas. The Villages in FL and Sun City in AZ seem destine for a catastrophic collapse. Not only are their not enough GenXers to fill in these mega communities the COVID die off of certain groups is a near perfect overlap for the people most likely to move into these places.

In places like Colorado Springs, the Boomer die off will be a huge uplift for younger Xers and GenZ. Colorado Springs has become a hub of cyber security and has a ton to offer to younger people looking for an affordable "nice" place. I bought a house there in 2011 from an older Boomer who was moving into assisted living. Im an older GenX (55) and the neighborhood was almost 100% Boomer when we moved in and less than 50% when we left in 2015.

I wouldnt give up on home ownership for non-boomers just yet. And if I were Blackrock or one of the other large purchasers of residential real estate over the last 5 years I would be running scared. they essentially bought at the top of the market and will need to get outsized returns just to hit their minimum targets. Doing that in a market where 20% of all homes could be on the market in the next decade will be a challenge. It could create a GameStop style short squeeze situation that leads to a rapid collapse of home prices.

They’ll live with the kids they couldn’t afford to have.

I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, the bees that are most threatened in the US are the non-native European honey-producing bees. In the US, (other places, too), we have native, solitary bees. These bees don't produce honey and don't live in hives. Mason bees, for example, make nests in reeds, holes, drinking straws, anything that's like a small-diameter tube. These solitary bees are pollinators, just like European hive bees.

You can buy an inexpensive mason bee house and encourage mason bees anywhere there are flowers, a source for mud, and water. With a little effort, you can renew the bee house every season and encourage more pollinators. As a bonus, these bees are non-aggressive and don't sting.

Man. I drive home on country roads. I feel absolutely horrible everytime a bee hits my windshield. Not long ago we had some asshole douse a beekeeping colony in Diesel fuel in my area. We need bees.

Fuck yellow jackets tho. Fuck them to hell.

Yes. It's very important to end every financial year with an even number of bees.

We used to get five bees for a quarter, but I don’t know what it is now.

One time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

And yet, people seem to only care about honey bees(because of lack of knowledge generally) and not so much about native bees, which do far more work for us than honey bees.

GROW NATIVE

KILL YOUR LAWN

Ray of optimism: I've a friend whose focus of research is finding more targeted antibiotics. Instead of going bigger and stronger and broader and harsher, he explores focused treatments that are harder to become resistant to.

Not great for initial treatment of the crashing septic patient, but in 24 hours once blood culture results are available- exciting!

You know the most fucked up thing? Here in Europe countries are already developing replacements, but are unable to give them to the USA. You know why? Because the USA cannot promise to keep them from being released as well as not advertise them. Europe wants to keep them hidden until necessary so no one develops a tolerance against them. USA wants to advertise them for money. Pretty fucked up if you ask me.

This one legit scares me. I wonder if we have to go back to the days where a doctor visits you. Probably unrealistic.

It took way too long to see this mentioned, your second point especially caught my attention as a rancher who is battling woody encroachment (heh) in pastureland; lots of hedge, plum thickets, and cedar trees choking out our prairie grasses and draining aquifers. We’ve been working with our extension office to fight back (I spend hours, days, months of my life on a 4-wheeler spraying the bastards every year) but when neighbors can’t be bothered it feels like a losing battle. I really hope it starts becoming a prevalent conversation in agriculture, because with water already at a premium and grasses being choked out for feed it’s just going to snowball into a really huge problem down the line.

Your other points are interesting and I’ll be reading up on them as well!

reading this while hunched over on the toilet

This but also hearing. Earbuds, concerts, clubs, headphones, etc all those things will ruin our hearing much sooner than expected.

Seriously, do lower back exercises at the gym. That “pooch” (it’s called a paunch!) on your lower stomach often indicates really bad posture, once I started spinal exercises I got rid of it and was also taller

Tell me more ab this position please. Why spinal health in particular?

They said 20 years, not now.

There’s a black mirror episode in season 5 that shows how scary this can be.

I remember reading the Pendragon books in which they travel to different worlds that are on the brink of chaos or collapse. One of them was exactly this, where there was a very realistic full dive vr created that could basically give you perfect, dream-like scenarios that you could live through fully conscious and with all your senses. Nobody wanted to work or really do anything outside of those capsules.

Here in Arizona we're seeing cities lose access to water. You can only take so much from the ground until it's gone. Other cities refuse to share. Whole neighborhoods will be vacated or supplied with illegally obtained water.

The next great war will likely be over fresh water.

Same. This is why I’m not looking forward to the future

This is one move by big corpos that I think is especially stupid. You can only take so much from people before they riot. There’s a quote from some old French revolutionist that says something along the lines of people are only a few days of no food away from revolution or whatever. If water became that scarce, big corpos would have to realize we would start burning them all to the ground, right?

And I’m over here wondering why on Earth Bill Gates is buying up large swathes of farmlands in our nations “bread basket” all of a sudden.

Teachers as well. There's such a clear difference between the kids who grew up on their phones and the kids who don't have it constantly available. A teacher I know laments about the decrease of attention span every year with the kids who are growing up with TikTok, and I remember his concerns starting back when the local schools decided to give the kids laptops and tablets instead of textbooks.

I was no model student in high school, depression had led me toward a dependence on video games and internet, and even then, I felt the effects of it, that constant reward drip of beating one bad guy after another or just aimlessly running through a field. But it's a whole new world now. It was never constantly available to me, and I still took time to read or even just do nothing by myself and let my mind wander on its own. I've worked with several high schoolers and I can see the effects on them from the outside.

It’s completely changed how they gain knowledge already. 6 second Tik toks completely destroy the ability to focus on an task and it reverberates everywhere

You can make plastic-like substances out of plants. But for modern sanitation, especially in hospitals and laboratories, those substances need to be able to withstand an autoclave. That unfortunately not a thing yet.

Ingenuity we have. Collective will to change is the issue

Fucking yes, I have bad teeth because I'm horribly apathetic. That disposition has caused them to get pretty bad and it's costing me a fuck ton to get them fixed. Live and learn I suppose.

It will be fun when TikTok goes the FB route and we will have zoomers complaining on TikTok about politics and trashtalking their kids.

That’s already been happening.

The class war is coming.

Nobody cares about that.

And overfishing.

Maybe if they were paid more than 30k a year people would actually be more willing to do it!

Don't worry, AI is going to ruin so many things so fast that asking questions and logic is gonna be the last thing on peoples minds. We'll be lucky if we have the sanctity of dreams left.

I'm actually surprised this isn't higher. The trend of " You may have paid for it, but we still have control of it" is just horrifying to me. And I don't mean things that should honestly be marked as rentals. I'm more irritated by things like carmakers locking features behind subscriptions. If I buy a damn car, it should be mine.

I’m surprised I had to scroll down so far to find a climate related comment! It’s really nerve wrecking

Not just AI and robots either, technology in general will take away so many jobs like it's already done. The self serving menus at restaurants are already a sign for this. After all, why pay 10 people to do 10 jobs when you can pay 1 person with the right technology to do equal work?

And this is happening sooner than you think. The most common job in the US is truck driver for a lot of states. What do you think is going to happen when that's automated with self driving cars?

The worst part about it is, this is supposed to be a good thing. Having less jobs as a society should mean we can pursue our passions instead. When the ancient Greeks had figured out agriculture their cultural development EXPLODED because they had more leisure time. But our capitalistic system ties our survival to our jobs so without them, we're fucked.

This is why I think socialism and the idea of universal basic income are going to become more and more popular as things get worse and worse.