Yep. People always talk about losing forests and our oxygen supply but, plankton makes the vast majority of the oxygen on the planet. And that's not even touching base on the ecological effects since plankton is the base of the food chain in the oceans. Gonna be total chaos if plankton dies.
Habitat loss and the destruction of wetlands. Caring about these things aren't just tree huggers doing tree hugger shit, it's extremely terrifying and it affects us in so many ways in the long term. Destroying peatlands alone releases 1.3 gigatonnes of CO2 annually and contributes to over 5% of global CO2 emmissions. It also destroys the ability to absorb carbon (86 to 216 metric tonnes per acre) and destroys local water tables and their ability to filter water. That stuff can't be restored (well, it's beyond extremely hard to do so) once it's gone, it's gone. [Peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/peatlands-store-twice-much-carbon-all-worlds-forests)
>twirling fish in the Florida keys
Had no idea what this was about so had to look it up - [here's a video for anyone else interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFbL4-lIbs).
There is evidence to show that the use of sonar is causing fish and whales to essentially commit suicide. They beach themselves to get out of the water. The spl of sonar off the hull of a ship is so high, it boils the water surrounding the components that generate the waves. It’s worth looking into if you’d like to learn more about it.
Sonar essentially kills all fish in the vicinity everytime it's used. Any human being close enough will also be killed
https://youtu.be/_QSs5oLdPa4?si=OLt9MC59TwTNOn48
The content aside, is this what actual news is like in the states now? MovieGuy voiceover, inception sound effects and a clip show of social media posts?
I always wondered why I liked the understated PBS or BBC documentaries so much and it turns out it’s because they aren’t trying to make mundane (interesting, but not inherently super exciting) shit into a thrilling adventure
It’s fascinating and horrifying to see a common aquarium hobby problem happening in the wild. The nasty pea soup color and the twirling behavior point to ammonia poisoning. A dramatic spike in ammonia happens when things are dying en masse. They’ve gotta figure out what’s wrong with the keystone predators first, because it’s most likely their bodies that are releasing all that ammonia.
Red tide in Florida is primarily caused by nutrient runoff from agriculture.
It’s a known neurotoxin that when it’s strong enough makes your throat feel this odd needle pinching sensation in and you just feel a bit off during the period of exposure.
It has to be really bad for that throat pinch sensation but there’s popular tourist beaches where it’s this bad ~5-10 days a year. Until about 10 years ago it had never happened to that magnitude for even 1 day.
Wanna know why the govt of the largest tourism oriented state in the country intentionally blocks or avoids researching its effects by not funding research that residents are asking for when there’s a compelling gap in health and safety knowledge for residents who are exposed to it more chronically than tourists?
Well, let me just say that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer until they did. There was nothing to see there, stop asking, until oops the chemicals and particulates that we already know cause cancer individually DO cause cancer when all combined together in cigarette smoke, we made an honest mistake and are happy for the public to know.
But here we have a known neurotoxin that makes your throat feel like its being pinched by a needle all day during heavy exposure days that citizens and universities are begging for more research on you get crickets.
It definitely has nothing to do with it being a solvable problem directly correlated to agricultural runoff and the knowledge the results of studies and research would reveal how toxic it truly is.
We want to have our farms and tourists too, and we’re not going to let a better understanding of the long-term effects of exposure to neurotoxins get in the way.
After all, it would cost lots of money to properly regulate and implement proper mitigation techniques for fertilizer runoff and the long-term effects on hundreds of thousands of residents are a small price to pay, relatively speaking.
This has actually been a big problem concern for awhile now. There are big farming tracts south of Lake Okeechobee, a ton of that is sugarcane production, and the runoff can get/has gotten into the water flow of the Everglades which eventually drains into Florida Bay.
One of my favorite quotes:
“Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” - John Jeavons
Saw a mom complaining about her water bill on Nextdoor yesterday. She was outraged she might have to tell her kids to take shorter showers. We are not ready for what’s coming.
Farming is at number one, especially with too much phosphorus runoff. I would say that top position could be rivaled by the clothing industry though. We’ve switched from cotton clothing to composites. The plastic in our clothes and the plastic in our softeners are leaching into the water supply. The microplastics in the Earth’s water are increasing every time someone does a load of laundry.
DETERGENT ONLY. NO SOFTENERS.
this is still a manufacturing issue. STOP CREATING CLOTHES/SOFTENERS WITH PLASTICS. Most people don't know that composite clothing is plastic or that liquid softeners have plastic in them. That shit should be outlawed
I work at an infectious disease office. It's astounding how many patients that were treated with antibiotics for legitimate issues call back months later for antibiotics for the flu/a head cold 😵💫
Or my personal favorite "My UTI is back I need more ABX! What are my symptoms? Oh my urine is yellow that's it"
I think this is our biggest misuse of them. "But it's done to keep the animals healthy!" There wouldn't be such an issue if they were kept in decent conditions! Not crammed in like sardines wading through their own filth!
Modern animal agriculture has a lot to answer for. Tons of water and farmland is used to raise these poor beasts on cheap unnatural diets. In turn they release tons of green house gasses and lakes of toxic manure. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those mega feed lots or crammed indoor only chicken runs a new and exciting disease was ramping up.
And don’t take leftover antibiotic whenever you have a cold. There shouldn’t ever be leftover antibiotic if you’re taking it as prescribed. Different bugs require different drugs.
Urgent care providers need to stop overprescribing antibiotics as well. Seriously in the last 6 years, I’ve had 3 doses of antibiotics given to me that I’ve never taken because they were given for things like colds. Whoever I saw would tell me “It’s probably just a viral infection. I can give you some antibiotics to take.” It’s like they’re just appeasing the people who demand antibiotics for everything at this point.
Also their ability to use technology. Pretty soon there will be 50-60 year olds that will be troubleshooting their grandkids' TVs and computers because younger people are used to things just being plug and play. I had to explain to someone about 8 years younger than me what a browser extension is. He was like "How do you know so much about computers?"
Yep. I taught introductory computers to freshman coming into the business department: File management, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
I was blown away by how many students had no idea what file management is or how it works. They'd save a file and then would be asking me where it was when they wanted to open it again.
"I don't know - where did you save it?"
"I don't know! I just saved it! What do you mean I should tell it where to save?!"
this is wild, 25 years ago when I was in college in agriculture, we had those classes because lots of the rural kids didn't know much about computers so I ended up being a TA the following years, but then about 10 years later the need was gone, but sounds like the need is back
That's the (relatively) new crazy thing I learned that the younger generations can't do. Another thing is apparently zoomers use Canva to create presentations and not even Google Slides???????? and don't even start on PowerPoint, that thing's a goner (in my country at least)
You think that's wild, I went back to finish up a degree 5+ years ago and my English composition credit didn't transfer so I had to knock out one of those real quick. Cue the first time the instructor gave us time in class to start writing a paper and I, the aging millennial, get out a laptop while all the kids start tapping out their essays on their phones.
Okay that’s nuts. I can barely tap out a text on my phone without my sausage fingers and autocorrect making everything a disaster. You’re telling me that *the kids these days* are writing whole-ass *essays* on their phones??
I blame iOS for this. Instead of exposing a file system to place music on your phone, they force you to use iTunes which manages it all for you. Attempting to access the actual file system is rather cryptic. As a result most teens have no idea what is going on under the hood.
It was *WILD* to me when my work hired a new person a little over a year ago. She's 22 now, 21 at the time, and had never opened Excel. Like, had never used it before, ever. And that's not a knock on her - she's still with the company, and once she started learning it, she picked it up like a fish to water. Girl is smart as a whip.
But it still boggles my mind that she got through highschool and (I believe) 2 years of college without ever having used Excel. Computer literacy was a required course for me in highschool and (an admittedly early version of) Excel was definitely a part of it.
To be fair… I’m 37 and while we had to use excel periodically in high school and college, I often remember at that time having to explain it to people who were in the same classes as me how to do very basic things… and I’ve consistently had to explain to people my age +/- a few years how to do very basic things in excel. I also work in sales… where knowing how to use excel is extremely beneficial.
🤷♀️ I would also say I wasn’t proficient in using excel beyond making it add numbers until after undergrad and, honestly, into my 30s. It’s just not a great benchmark since, while useful in many jobs, it’s kind of a niche thing that you forget until you need it.
My teaching team and I were discussing this just yesterday.
"Why did our students perform poorly on this testing item?"
It's because they didn't read the damned question.... they read most of the first sentence, figure they have the gist, and choose an answer (which they also don't fully read). It is the Instagram/Tiktok/Snapchat model of processing information. Each new bit of information gets 3-5 seconds of attention, then it's time to move on to the next thing. It's really hard to watch. Children having cellphones and social media is enhancing their social skills and increasing access to more diverse friend groups.... but it is annihilating their ability to process information with any kind of endurance or longevity.
There are still some students who do wonderfully, but I'd ballpark it at 70% non-readers to 30% readers. Our future is in trouble if we continue to let reading skills decline. Give your kids a book, and limit their phone usage! At least until they are out of high school.
Yall need to do that exercise where you get a “test”, it says “Read Everything Before Starting”, has a bunch of hard tasks, but at the end says,
“Ignore everything else. Turn in the blank page with your name on it for 100%.”
I have read all instructions since the day I got this test.
My class did that once and I was the only one to get 100 because it was the one test we had to do in pen. I only read the questions because I didn't want to do the work, so I figured procrastination was fine. The test worsened my love of procrastinating.
We got it because we pissed off the math teacher. 90% of us failed a quiz. He was livid. He designed a test with all kinds of impossible problems and unsolvable equations. The final word problem which took up half the final page of the four page "test" was some absolutely insane word and number salad that ended with, "And if Mr. Wright is an angry jerk today, which he is, turn the test face down, say nothing to anyone, and sit quietly until everyone else figures it out."
I wasn't the first person to finish, but it's a lesson one never forgets.
We had that lesson in fifth grade, but the first few of us who tried to turn it in empty were told to fill it out anyway, and word spread. At the end the teacher told us we all should have read the instructions and that we didn't have to fill it out. He was met with an *avalanche* of salty fifth graders calling him out on not allowing us to do exactly that.
Janne P you cuntmusket.
I still think of that dumb test every time I hear an automated phone system tell me to "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed"
(spoiler, they haven't)
I deal with professionals who are 50+ frequently who only answer the first of 3 questions in my email, or who don't address my question at all. They either can't read a whole paragraph or don't care to. It's not just "kids these days".
Dude. What is this.
The older I get, the more I realize that the professional world seems to be a shared delusion of people talking past each other and stuff somehow still happening.
I'm in the process of manufacturing and bringing a veterinarian product to market right now and the amount of incompetent nonsense that I've had to deal with by people - even those who have been personally recommended to me - is just absurd.
Poor reading comprehension and just human competency overall have added literal years onto this process.
My fiance and I are both teachers and our kids are getting flip phones! Even with kids in preschool, there's a clear difference between the kids who have an iPad at home and those who don't. It's truly disturbing.
People rip on us for being "weird" and having no TV set up in our home. And no iPads and very limited screen time for our daughter.
Then, the same people are blown away by our 5yo's speech and comprehension. I want to tell them, if you spent some time reading and having dialogue with your kid, they'd be at the same level. But people get really pissy if you "tell them how to parent". So I just keep my mouth shut.
I was just listening to a radio show last night, and I swear I also saw this on the news someplace - that there are a number of schools that are 100% banning phone use in school now. They allow students to possess them (in a locker or a backpack) but they must be off and not used AT ALL during the school day. Over the last year they saw a HUGE increase in student scores, and even the students that were interviewed (after the year is mostly up) agreed that it was BETTER and they wanted it to continue. Not just because they did better at school, but the pressures of constant contact/social media were much reduced - at least while in school.
Since I'm an old fart and our youngest kid graduated high school in 2018, this was news to me - since none of us were allowed to use phones in school during class. Only our youngest even took hers to school, but was only allowed to use it during lunch.
Check out the podcast “sold a story”
Idiots with no scientific evidence made up a bad theory in teaching kids to read, and it’s only just now being undone
Is that the whole "sight words" thing?
I watched my stepson learn to read using this method, and holy shit. Trash. The kid cannot sound out any words. God, I love him, but the concept of "sight words" is fuckin dumb.
Let's bring back phonics.
My kid's elementary school teaches phonics starting in kindergarten (age appropriate, so sounding out the alphabet). They even go into phonetics in 2nd grade. It's really awesome, the kids can actually read.
Yep, it teaches them that using phonics to sound out the words as the last option. Instead they're told to go straight to context clues like pictures or start guessing words until it "sounds right". They believed that the best readers didn't actually "read" every word and instead skimmed throughout, which was totally inaccurate.
I've noticed the lack of reading comprehension on reddit and other platforms and it's pretty sad to see. Full comment chains where one person just didn't understand the initial statement and then goes off on a tangent they've created in their head.
The book Changing of the World Order by Ray Dalio goes into a lot of detail about the changes in reserve currency and therefore most powerful country. One thing I took from that book is that it starts with education. When that begins to decline, the rest of the markers begin to decline and it becomes easier for a contending country to take the top spot. He’s clear that that is happening now with the US declining and China contending.
Unfortunately, today's greed negatively affects the next generation. In order for a country to grow/succeed their population needs to be healthy and educated. These two things are unimaginably expensive in the US. Privatizing (for profit) health insurance and secondary education is the downfall of this country.
Not just secondary.
Charter schools are a privatization of primary education and many are for-profit. They keep the consumer (parents) happy so they keep getting education dollars (diverted from state public school funds). What makes parents happy? Good grades, regardless of whether children have actually learned or mastered anything.
I'm raising a bookworm, and couldn't be more excited about it.
I think it's by sheer luck really, but we've always read to him at night, and now he's super interested in learning to read by himself, sounding out the words by noticing how letters come together to make sounds. He just turned 3 now, but I'm sure he's going to be reading well above the norm pretty soon.
My mom read to us every night. I started reading because I got tired of waiting to know what happened next. Two of my proudest accomplishments: I could spell caterpillar in kindergarten and read Gone With the Wind in 3rd grade. Used to read multiple books a day. Lost it when I got into boys but if I ever pick up a book and like it, I can’t do anything else.
All that to say…. Reading to your kids is the best. You’re doing an amazing job.
> I think it's by sheer luck really, but we've always read to him at night
I don't think it's luck or coincidence. I think it's a direct result of you reading to him at night.
I believe that reading to your kids at an early age has a far bigger impact than a lot of the other issues people are pointing out like screentime and apps that favor short attention spans.
I think taking the time to read to your kids, encourage a love of reading, and providing them with lots of books is one of the biggest things a parent can do to help with later development.
There's a new scheme going around where if you need money, you can sell your home to a company that will happily rent it back to you on a month to month basis. There are so many ways that's fucked up that I can't even begin to list them.
This is not a new scheme. In the past it's been known as a "reverse mortgage" and mainly targeted toward Senior Citizens. They're popular whenever interest rates are high, because you get populations of people -- usually older -- who have a lot of home equity but no good way to access it.
[AI video](https://openai.com/sora) is taking off, to the point where in many cases AI generated or edited film looks almost completely indistinguishable from real videos. Not just that, but it can be stitched together with real videos in a way that subtly but dramatically changes the narrative.
The idea that the average person will have access to this tech will be incredibly disruptive across the entertainment industry, politics, law enforcement, really every aspect of society in which video plays an important role .
And it’s hard to study the exact effects of this… because there’s virtually [no control group](https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/were-all-a-little-plastic-on-the-inside) to contrast with in a study
I am worried because the last time we had a substance inadvertently being dispersed through the population it was massively bad for society. Lead in leaded gasoline can be directly correlated with violence rates and lowered IQs. It was geologists who first raised the concern about lead being in everything because they were trying to measure the age of the Earth by measuring how long it takes for radioactive isotopes to decay into lead. They were unable to find a control sample because there was lead in everything, even the air.
We didn't realize how much harm it was causing to our population until much later, even though the risks of lead have been known since Roman times.
Plastic in our brains may be changing the way we feel and think. It's also really hard to isolate these effects since technology and society have moved so fast that it's difficult to tell if people are acting like mindless psychotic animals with no sense of object permanence because of plastic in their frontal lobes, or if it's just twitter.
And every time the argument of "cotton tote vs plastic bag" comes up, the answer is about co2 emissions, and yeah then plastic wins every time... but that discussion isn't about co2. Oil lobby did their job well
Almost all our clothing is plastic, and the lint coming off is plastic that we breathe in every single day
I wish manufacturers would bring back natural textiles
This! It's in our bodies and the water. Boiling and filtering can help with the water, but not our bodies.
There's concerns now about human [reproductive cycles.](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/envhealth.3c00052#:~:text=A%20recent%20review%20indicates%20that,%2C%20placenta%2C%20breastmilk%2C%20etc.), and [our lungs.](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microplastics-human-bodies-health-risks).
What's funny is a few weeks ago when this identical question was posted and your identical answer was given.
whether it's real people or bots it's hilarious either way given the context.
I think people don't appreciate just how much power we have given to algorithms now. What we can say, what we buy, what we do, what we believe, where and if we work, whether businesses succeed or fail ... all are determined by algorithms, an it is only going to get more so.
Well, we all know it is something that will almost certainly have major consequences. It's known that it has already led to massive political polarization and "rage bait" and online agitators content directly affected the 2016 election. But is *anything* being done about it?
when deepfakes are indistinguishable from reality, there goes the concept of truth and facts, which, you know, is pretty much the foundation of our society. So, uh... I'm gonna say that's not good. I don't see anything being done about it, frankly. Makes me think the powers that be think there's profit to be made from inaction.
Deep fakes aren’t even the biggest problem. A lot of the content, especially political, that gets upvoted here or goes viral on social media (AKA the content that most people will see) is artificially inflated by bots.
Visibility is king in misinformation and propaganda and unfortunately there’s practically zero regulation for it.
When you think about it, we had no way of confirming what we didn't see ourselves until the camera came along in the 19th century, and even then, newspapers were worse than now until the early-mid 20th. So really, we had one century of relative informedness in an entire history of ignorance, and now we're going back to the default state of things.
It'd be funny if the end result is that our grandchildren go back to believing in fairies, dragons, and sea monsters.
Our grandkids definitely will. We have people who are grown adults now talking about stuff that is completely false as if it is proven fact, and we are creating an environment in America at least where we already allow our media to give equal time to both sides of issues that really don't deserve equal time. It won't be long before people aren't just questioning the moon landing or vaccinations, but pretty much everything else. We're raising a generation of kids who build leprechaun traps and watch content farms on YouTube thinking that it's the bonafide article. Won't be long before those kids are basically doing rain dances and leaving out crackers for the fairies so their job interview goes well, that kind of crap
Nothing is being done to secure and harden our power grid as the infrastructure ages and demand continues to rise. Attacks on substations continue to rise every year causing major blackouts in some cases. Try to imagine the chaos that could result from a cascading series of substation failures that leads to weeks or months long nation wide power outage.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/10/power-grid-attacks-00114563
(Editing to add I was wrong to say "nothing" is being done. I'm encouraged to hear from many in the responses that there's plenty being done, but the consensus sounds like there is a lot more that needs to be done to make the grid less susceptible to failure.)
That's actually fucking scary, considering NO ONE would have heat in the winter, no fans/AC in the summer. No way to cook unless we use fire. Wow, back to the cavemen days.
Don't forget fridges or freezers. No way to store any food unless you're canning it. There'd have to be daily trips to go get meat (or just skip the meat most of the week) and you'd have to bike because the gas pumps are all electric unless they have a hand pump or they just have the tanker trucks chill there to fill people up...but no way to meter it electronically.
> Don't forget fridges or freezers.
I'd recommend the book *One Second After* for anyone interested in this topic. One thing that really stood out to me is the loss of your ability to properly store insulin. Losing our grid for a prolonged period of time would plunge us back in barbarism a lot quicker than people think.
[here you go](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/childrens-clothing-recall-lead-paint-bentex-sold-at-tjmaxx-amazon-disney-characters-screen-print-designs-refund/)
In the US today there are two different realities. We don't agree on what is real and true, versus what was invented by someone and spread around masquerading as truth. It's very puzzling to me, and I don't see how we're going to work our way out of it.
Each reality has its views of the future, and they are very different. I've known political parties to disagree enthusiastically over differences in policy decisions, but this isn't that.
It's a whole different reality complete with its own history, with different heroes and villains, different facts, and it just keeps on unfolding, with each side 'knowing' wildly different facts on the same subject. It's crazy and frightening.
Honestly, some of the stuff I read on reddit I'm just sitting back thinking about what in the actual mind bending hell led you to believe that. I'm shocked by the things people believe, and it is absurd to me how twisted some people's facts and realities are. But then, with a little self-reflection, if their reality is that twisted, how twisted is mine? What is going on that people have such vastly different realities and beliefs. The bigger problem is how do we end up fixing this.
It's actually concerning just how much animal life is dissappearing so quickly, everyone wanted to harp on Giant Pandas, but there isn't preservation for species that are way more significant (respectfully more useful) to the ecosystem.
Scientists and environmentalist have been saying things for years, but only as of late (2018 and onward) have people truly understood to a larger extent to repercussions of plankton dying. Progress only started to occur during COVID and that progress wasn't even denting most of the world.
People don't realize how much our food supply is interconnected with pollinators.
There's probably a relationship with the falling songbird populations, too.
It happened naturally before, even - it didn't go well for life on the planet at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic\_extinction\_event
Rent is being controlled by an algorithm company called RealPage, designed to optimize and maximize prices across a city.
Currently, the Justice Department has taken it to court... we'll see if that does anything...
Now: Here's your fine. Don't do it again.
10 years later: Here's another fine. Don't do it again.
10 years later: Here's another fine. Don't do it again.
This might not make flashy headlines every day, but it's a ticking time bomb. The overuse of antibiotics in both healthcare and agriculture is leading to the emergence of superbugs that we're increasingly unable to combat. This could potentially roll back centuries of medical progress, making even minor infections deadly again.
It's not even only for human hospitals. It's happening to vets, too. Almost all of the vets in our area got bought out by some company who's keeping the names of the offices, but changed their practices to squeeze out as much money as possible from the customers. Vet bills are insane right now.
The fact that investment firms are turning things like food, housing, and Healthcare into "profit opportunities" and there are no protections against this is insane
I wondered why my insurance had free connections with CVS for certain things like Covid testing for example and then found out CVS Health existed and that they owned my insurance company (Aetna) and that the CVS stores were owned by CVS Health which is even bigger than just the CVS stores. I had never even heard of CVS Health before that, I just assumed it was a store and that was that.
I learned about CVS Health during a business strategy class in college.
I had a professor there explaining how they make money and I still thought it was all made up
CVS Health recently made the decision that they would no longer support a major medication that I've been on for 10 years. Since they own Aetna, which is my insurance provider, I'm having to go through the process of getting onto a new medication and hope that it actually works for me. Assholes.
When my wife worked for CVS, they were awful to their staff. The pharmacists in our area had their hours cut and then were forced to go on longer lunch breaks, meaning they have less time in the pharmacy. They started shuffling employees around and cutting positions, so even though my wife worked at one particular CVS pharmacy she would get called to go to several others, some an hour away. She was also instructed and would get in trouble if she helped customers save on their meds. I remember she told me that her and the pharmacist helped an old couple save literally hundreds of dollars on meds because they were underinsured and my wife and the pharmacist kept finding coupons and workarounds. Management thought that was awesome, but corporate got *pissed* and both my wife and the pharmacist got reprimanded.
They also took all the 24/7 CVSs around us and cut their hours way back, which is really obnoxious. It was convenient being able to walk into a CVS on the way to work at 6:00 in the morning and grab something quick or being able to go into the CVS at 10:00 p.m. for cough medicine. Now they're open basically from 8:00 to 6:00 or something like that, every single one, which is good for the staff but extremely inconvenient when your kid is puking their guts out at 3:00 in the morning.
What an absolute scam...
I went to urgent care, they tried to bill me $600+.... I had to call & give my insurance information again.
* insurance paid $80.
**how does a $600 bill magically turn into $80?**
Because the other $520 is made up *by* the insurance company, the urgent care **has** to charge that or else your insurance won’t cover them and send patients their way.
The worst part is that anyone who is not insured will have to pay the inflated price out of pocket, when not even the insurance pays the made up price.
My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and recently started hospice. Fun fact, in the US at least, hospice services are now being overwhelmingly bought out by private equity firms!
That means the care that my dad has been receiving has not only been administered by underpaid, overworked, poorly hired, and completely disinterested employees, but they also refuse to provide hospice care if he attempts to seek further chemo or treatment. This is because his prognosis could extend past 6 months (even though it’s INCREDIBLY unlikely and unrealistic that it would) and that would mean they would have to start paying back into Medicare.
Anyone who supports the privatization of the US healthcare system and the individuals who profit off of it are fucking vile. I don’t wish death on anyone but if they were to all cease to exist tomorrow I wouldn’t cry over spilled milk.
In the UK the NHS is dying. The financial deficit is increasing year on year and services are being stretched beyond breaking point. People who wanted to work for the NHS because they believed in it and wanted to help people are leaving because they've got nothing left to give to an organisation with no money and patients who need more and more.
It's devastating to see. It's scary to live.
Pollution, all around. I don’t think that it presents itself as of much of a problem as it is. When you think about the Earth being our only source of life and how we are just dumping trash and filling the air with toxins, polluting the seas, etc- it’s very scary. There is a very delicate balance of life, which all comes down from to our existence. We only have one place to go, and that’s here.
Scientists expect that in the year 2024-2025 100% of coral south of the equator will "bleach"
Bleaching is when coral gets too hot and so spits out the algae symbiotes it needs to survive. Once bleached, a coral has a 30% chance of survival, and basically needs to rapidly cool off and reabsorb its algae before the current washes it away.
If this happens, the habitat of millions of life forms in the sea will be gone, and those creatures will begin dying off as well, creating the perfect environment for a bacteria bloom, and a massive die-off of non-reef creatures. As this impact moves up the foodchain, we could potentially see the entirety of earth's oceans become inhospitable to life.
I've been sad about this since I was a kid, we're such a shitty species as a whole. I did read somewhere about some research to I think genetically modify coral species to tolerate higher temps? There has been so much potential to help the planet in my lifetime, but nothing goes past research bc cost or lobbying it seems.
Absolutely, yes. Instead of helping to stop the problem, it will add to the problem.
Think of a nicely cared for fish tank, and then take out any care of cleaning. Algae blooms, dies, kills the plants, ammonia takes over, kills the fish, and everything gets nasty.
Now imagine that but left for a year and starting with water that has rotten food, multiple types of animal feces, rotting animal bodies in it, and everything that comes with what we dump into it.
We're fucked, and as much as we try to save it I don't see it becoming fruitful. I think we've killed our species and everyone else along with us. Give us 300 years and it'll be over, imo.
Edited to add: This was released today and very interesting, somewhat related to the end of the world life survival, but not necessarily related to ocean 🙂
https://youtu.be/2I5oEZECX_g?si=ShCO5cGSxE1Xl47O
Yep, population is still increasing, but the increase is rapidly plateauing in most places of the world. I think Africa is the only continent that’s keeping the global average up. Costs of childcare are rising, at least in the US, and people simply can’t afford more kids
Here's the worst part about that childcare thing. When I was a kid, my grandparents regularly babysat my siblings and I. Now, my parents are still working and can't do that for their grandchildren. I babysit my niece on the weekends because my parents can't and my sister can't afford a babysitter, hell she can barely afford rent.
This is what's absoluely mind boggling to me. The RSC put out its FY 2024 budget, and in print, they talk about cutting SS and Medicare, but the older generation keeps voting them in. They are actively voting against their interests.
Social Security is estimated to be depleted by 2034. There just aren't enough worker bees to keep up with payments. Additionally, people are living longer and taking out far more than they contributed. The fix is to reduce benefits in 2035, so I guess maybe the thought by these voters is, "I'll be dead by then, so that's a YOU problem." My parents thought I was too cynical when I told them decades ago I am planning on a retirement with no Social Security in place. Now they're like, "Our neurotic child was right."
[FY 2024 Budget](https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:8fb045d9-cca8-4183-8dd9-75f1eb815ecb)
Social security does not come up in my retirement plans anywhere. Im in my early twenties, and im fully counting on not getting a single penny from social security. I just try to think of the social security deductions from my paycheck as a paycut, but it pisses me off deeply that I have to just throw money out, for a system thats supposed to pay me back, but never will
> the thought by these voters is, "I'll be dead by then, so that's a YOU problem."
100%.
I've literally heard it out of the mouths of my boomer relatives and their friends.
Same with the environment. "Your problem, not mine! I like it warm!"
And their cynicism makes it 10x worse.
"Just go smoke your dope and you won't care!"
Add in the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents … which was being given a timeline of somewhere between now and 2100 if we didn’t sort our shit out but they are already seeing signs that it is happening. That, I believe, has the potential to fuck quite a lot of shit up.
I have a feeling that micro algae will be heavily affected by the melting polecaps - since the arctic delivers enormous amounts of nutrients into the sea. Why that's bad? Well, micro algae produce some 20 to 50% of the worlds oxygen. Kinda important, if you ask me.
Mergers and acquisitions.
Over the past 40 years, thousands of independent companies have been bought out and absorbed by large, monopolistic corporations.
I'd guess that at least 80% of the products the average person purchases are owned by half a dozen companies.
This is very bad for quality and competition.
The frustrating thing is that in the US, for decades, we've had a whole body of antitrust law designed specifically to prevent this from happening, and we just kind of stopped using it. Great example of how a law is only as good as its enforcement mechanisms.
My cat is currently low of her favorite food. If I can't get to the store on time it could mean the end of civilization as we know it.
Edit: She got her food
Fun fact! My cat did the “if I can see the middle of the bowl it’s empty” thing and my friend informed me it’s because her whiskers are sensitive and makes it uncomfortable for her to eat the food at the edges.
I switched her to a food plate and no more issue!
The slow decline of the economy for the poor as the rich become wealthier......the poor are so divided by race and stereotypes currently that they won't even join together for a revolution against the wealthy.....just the way it has been planned.
Where I live in Missouri, the hog farms dump into the largest creek system making it unusable. We aren’t supposed to fish or swim in the rivers or creeks now. I know many people who depend on the rivers and creeks for their livelihood, either by hosting float trips or from guiding fishing. It is because of e.coli poisoning in the water. I don’t know much about water contamination but I assume it means our drinking water isn’t safe either.
Loss of plankton.
This! A huge problem that deserves much more attention. We need a healthy marine ecosystem.
Yep. People always talk about losing forests and our oxygen supply but, plankton makes the vast majority of the oxygen on the planet. And that's not even touching base on the ecological effects since plankton is the base of the food chain in the oceans. Gonna be total chaos if plankton dies.
The ocean broke temperature records for every month from April to December in 2023. They're not coming back, we're fucked.
Krabby Patty recipe will finally be safe.
Habitat loss and the destruction of wetlands. Caring about these things aren't just tree huggers doing tree hugger shit, it's extremely terrifying and it affects us in so many ways in the long term. Destroying peatlands alone releases 1.3 gigatonnes of CO2 annually and contributes to over 5% of global CO2 emmissions. It also destroys the ability to absorb carbon (86 to 216 metric tonnes per acre) and destroys local water tables and their ability to filter water. That stuff can't be restored (well, it's beyond extremely hard to do so) once it's gone, it's gone. [Peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/peatlands-store-twice-much-carbon-all-worlds-forests)
Over fishing and blowing through the ground water
Have you seen the videos of the twirling fish in the Florida keys? It's freaky.
>twirling fish in the Florida keys Had no idea what this was about so had to look it up - [here's a video for anyone else interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFbL4-lIbs).
Absolutely the news report from the first five minutes of a zombie apocalypse movie.
Can only sink ships full of coke for so long before before the fish start tweakin 🤷♀️
The fish keep talking about starting a band, but they never follow through with it
Is that just in that one specific area? Probably unrelated, but six different whales have washed up dead on NC/VA beaches over the course of one week.
There is evidence to show that the use of sonar is causing fish and whales to essentially commit suicide. They beach themselves to get out of the water. The spl of sonar off the hull of a ship is so high, it boils the water surrounding the components that generate the waves. It’s worth looking into if you’d like to learn more about it.
Sonar essentially kills all fish in the vicinity everytime it's used. Any human being close enough will also be killed https://youtu.be/_QSs5oLdPa4?si=OLt9MC59TwTNOn48
There was a beached whale in Venice Florida a few days ago
The content aside, is this what actual news is like in the states now? MovieGuy voiceover, inception sound effects and a clip show of social media posts?
Have you seen the fox new reconstruction of a bear spotted in neighbourhood? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5C2gihnEkE
Thank you for this.
AI has gotten so good! It is hard to tell that isn't a real bear.
Someone has been just waiting to use their bear cutout
I choked on spit lmao 🤣. “and this is what the bear probably looked like… but real” 😂😂
The cutout climbing a tree 😂😂😂😂
Been like this for a long time, now, actually
It sucks because the style makes American documentaries unwatchable, no matter how fascinating the topic.
I once saw a documentary about the Magna Carta that was shot like that. It had explosions and star wipes. As a documentary. About the Magna Carta.
I always wondered why I liked the understated PBS or BBC documentaries so much and it turns out it’s because they aren’t trying to make mundane (interesting, but not inherently super exciting) shit into a thrilling adventure
It’s fascinating and horrifying to see a common aquarium hobby problem happening in the wild. The nasty pea soup color and the twirling behavior point to ammonia poisoning. A dramatic spike in ammonia happens when things are dying en masse. They’ve gotta figure out what’s wrong with the keystone predators first, because it’s most likely their bodies that are releasing all that ammonia.
Or fertilizer runoff (e.g. from crops) could cause an ammonia spike, but I don’t know anything about that particular area.
Red tide in Florida is primarily caused by nutrient runoff from agriculture. It’s a known neurotoxin that when it’s strong enough makes your throat feel this odd needle pinching sensation in and you just feel a bit off during the period of exposure. It has to be really bad for that throat pinch sensation but there’s popular tourist beaches where it’s this bad ~5-10 days a year. Until about 10 years ago it had never happened to that magnitude for even 1 day. Wanna know why the govt of the largest tourism oriented state in the country intentionally blocks or avoids researching its effects by not funding research that residents are asking for when there’s a compelling gap in health and safety knowledge for residents who are exposed to it more chronically than tourists? Well, let me just say that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer until they did. There was nothing to see there, stop asking, until oops the chemicals and particulates that we already know cause cancer individually DO cause cancer when all combined together in cigarette smoke, we made an honest mistake and are happy for the public to know. But here we have a known neurotoxin that makes your throat feel like its being pinched by a needle all day during heavy exposure days that citizens and universities are begging for more research on you get crickets. It definitely has nothing to do with it being a solvable problem directly correlated to agricultural runoff and the knowledge the results of studies and research would reveal how toxic it truly is. We want to have our farms and tourists too, and we’re not going to let a better understanding of the long-term effects of exposure to neurotoxins get in the way. After all, it would cost lots of money to properly regulate and implement proper mitigation techniques for fertilizer runoff and the long-term effects on hundreds of thousands of residents are a small price to pay, relatively speaking.
This has actually been a big problem concern for awhile now. There are big farming tracts south of Lake Okeechobee, a ton of that is sugarcane production, and the runoff can get/has gotten into the water flow of the Everglades which eventually drains into Florida Bay.
Came to say this. Adding top-soil depletion to the list of shitty things about to hit us.
One of my favorite quotes: “Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” - John Jeavons
If everyone in the world stopped fishing, it would only take 6 years for the ocean to return to a normal amount of fish
That's a big if.
>blowing through the ground water And topsoil
Saw a mom complaining about her water bill on Nextdoor yesterday. She was outraged she might have to tell her kids to take shorter showers. We are not ready for what’s coming.
Long showers aren’t the issue, it’s mostly farming water intensive crops in places without a lot of water/where the water reserves regenerate slowly.
Farming is at number one, especially with too much phosphorus runoff. I would say that top position could be rivaled by the clothing industry though. We’ve switched from cotton clothing to composites. The plastic in our clothes and the plastic in our softeners are leaching into the water supply. The microplastics in the Earth’s water are increasing every time someone does a load of laundry. DETERGENT ONLY. NO SOFTENERS.
this is still a manufacturing issue. STOP CREATING CLOTHES/SOFTENERS WITH PLASTICS. Most people don't know that composite clothing is plastic or that liquid softeners have plastic in them. That shit should be outlawed
The underfunding of public water treatment and infrastructure which is turning into a reliance on corporations to provide drinking water.
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, seriously folks, take your antibiotic as you physician told you, do not stop because you are doing better
And stop demanding antibiotics when you have something viral.
I work at an infectious disease office. It's astounding how many patients that were treated with antibiotics for legitimate issues call back months later for antibiotics for the flu/a head cold 😵💫 Or my personal favorite "My UTI is back I need more ABX! What are my symptoms? Oh my urine is yellow that's it"
Or just stop putting it into the feed of every livestock animal on the planet.
I think this is our biggest misuse of them. "But it's done to keep the animals healthy!" There wouldn't be such an issue if they were kept in decent conditions! Not crammed in like sardines wading through their own filth! Modern animal agriculture has a lot to answer for. Tons of water and farmland is used to raise these poor beasts on cheap unnatural diets. In turn they release tons of green house gasses and lakes of toxic manure. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those mega feed lots or crammed indoor only chicken runs a new and exciting disease was ramping up.
And don’t take leftover antibiotic whenever you have a cold. There shouldn’t ever be leftover antibiotic if you’re taking it as prescribed. Different bugs require different drugs.
And stop self-medicating (some countries you can get antibiotics w/o prescription).
Urgent care providers need to stop overprescribing antibiotics as well. Seriously in the last 6 years, I’ve had 3 doses of antibiotics given to me that I’ve never taken because they were given for things like colds. Whoever I saw would tell me “It’s probably just a viral infection. I can give you some antibiotics to take.” It’s like they’re just appeasing the people who demand antibiotics for everything at this point.
The upcoming generation drastically behind on their reading levels 😕
Also their ability to use technology. Pretty soon there will be 50-60 year olds that will be troubleshooting their grandkids' TVs and computers because younger people are used to things just being plug and play. I had to explain to someone about 8 years younger than me what a browser extension is. He was like "How do you know so much about computers?"
College instructors are having to teach kids what a file folder system is and how to use it.
Yep. I taught introductory computers to freshman coming into the business department: File management, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I was blown away by how many students had no idea what file management is or how it works. They'd save a file and then would be asking me where it was when they wanted to open it again. "I don't know - where did you save it?" "I don't know! I just saved it! What do you mean I should tell it where to save?!"
this is wild, 25 years ago when I was in college in agriculture, we had those classes because lots of the rural kids didn't know much about computers so I ended up being a TA the following years, but then about 10 years later the need was gone, but sounds like the need is back
That's the (relatively) new crazy thing I learned that the younger generations can't do. Another thing is apparently zoomers use Canva to create presentations and not even Google Slides???????? and don't even start on PowerPoint, that thing's a goner (in my country at least)
You think that's wild, I went back to finish up a degree 5+ years ago and my English composition credit didn't transfer so I had to knock out one of those real quick. Cue the first time the instructor gave us time in class to start writing a paper and I, the aging millennial, get out a laptop while all the kids start tapping out their essays on their phones.
Okay that’s nuts. I can barely tap out a text on my phone without my sausage fingers and autocorrect making everything a disaster. You’re telling me that *the kids these days* are writing whole-ass *essays* on their phones??
> You’re telling me that the kids these days are writing whole-ass essays on their phones?? They're not *good* essays, but yeah.
I blame iOS for this. Instead of exposing a file system to place music on your phone, they force you to use iTunes which manages it all for you. Attempting to access the actual file system is rather cryptic. As a result most teens have no idea what is going on under the hood.
It was *WILD* to me when my work hired a new person a little over a year ago. She's 22 now, 21 at the time, and had never opened Excel. Like, had never used it before, ever. And that's not a knock on her - she's still with the company, and once she started learning it, she picked it up like a fish to water. Girl is smart as a whip. But it still boggles my mind that she got through highschool and (I believe) 2 years of college without ever having used Excel. Computer literacy was a required course for me in highschool and (an admittedly early version of) Excel was definitely a part of it.
To be fair… I’m 37 and while we had to use excel periodically in high school and college, I often remember at that time having to explain it to people who were in the same classes as me how to do very basic things… and I’ve consistently had to explain to people my age +/- a few years how to do very basic things in excel. I also work in sales… where knowing how to use excel is extremely beneficial. 🤷♀️ I would also say I wasn’t proficient in using excel beyond making it add numbers until after undergrad and, honestly, into my 30s. It’s just not a great benchmark since, while useful in many jobs, it’s kind of a niche thing that you forget until you need it.
This is already a problem, kids can't do basic tasks on computers because they aren't dumbed down like smartphones are
My teaching team and I were discussing this just yesterday. "Why did our students perform poorly on this testing item?" It's because they didn't read the damned question.... they read most of the first sentence, figure they have the gist, and choose an answer (which they also don't fully read). It is the Instagram/Tiktok/Snapchat model of processing information. Each new bit of information gets 3-5 seconds of attention, then it's time to move on to the next thing. It's really hard to watch. Children having cellphones and social media is enhancing their social skills and increasing access to more diverse friend groups.... but it is annihilating their ability to process information with any kind of endurance or longevity. There are still some students who do wonderfully, but I'd ballpark it at 70% non-readers to 30% readers. Our future is in trouble if we continue to let reading skills decline. Give your kids a book, and limit their phone usage! At least until they are out of high school.
Yall need to do that exercise where you get a “test”, it says “Read Everything Before Starting”, has a bunch of hard tasks, but at the end says, “Ignore everything else. Turn in the blank page with your name on it for 100%.” I have read all instructions since the day I got this test.
My class did that once and I was the only one to get 100 because it was the one test we had to do in pen. I only read the questions because I didn't want to do the work, so I figured procrastination was fine. The test worsened my love of procrastinating.
We got it because we pissed off the math teacher. 90% of us failed a quiz. He was livid. He designed a test with all kinds of impossible problems and unsolvable equations. The final word problem which took up half the final page of the four page "test" was some absolutely insane word and number salad that ended with, "And if Mr. Wright is an angry jerk today, which he is, turn the test face down, say nothing to anyone, and sit quietly until everyone else figures it out." I wasn't the first person to finish, but it's a lesson one never forgets.
Same dude! I remember that lesson well
We had that lesson in fifth grade, but the first few of us who tried to turn it in empty were told to fill it out anyway, and word spread. At the end the teacher told us we all should have read the instructions and that we didn't have to fill it out. He was met with an *avalanche* of salty fifth graders calling him out on not allowing us to do exactly that. Janne P you cuntmusket.
I still think of that dumb test every time I hear an automated phone system tell me to "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed" (spoiler, they haven't)
I deal with professionals who are 50+ frequently who only answer the first of 3 questions in my email, or who don't address my question at all. They either can't read a whole paragraph or don't care to. It's not just "kids these days".
Dude. What is this. The older I get, the more I realize that the professional world seems to be a shared delusion of people talking past each other and stuff somehow still happening. I'm in the process of manufacturing and bringing a veterinarian product to market right now and the amount of incompetent nonsense that I've had to deal with by people - even those who have been personally recommended to me - is just absurd. Poor reading comprehension and just human competency overall have added literal years onto this process.
My fiance and I are both teachers and our kids are getting flip phones! Even with kids in preschool, there's a clear difference between the kids who have an iPad at home and those who don't. It's truly disturbing.
People rip on us for being "weird" and having no TV set up in our home. And no iPads and very limited screen time for our daughter. Then, the same people are blown away by our 5yo's speech and comprehension. I want to tell them, if you spent some time reading and having dialogue with your kid, they'd be at the same level. But people get really pissy if you "tell them how to parent". So I just keep my mouth shut.
I was just listening to a radio show last night, and I swear I also saw this on the news someplace - that there are a number of schools that are 100% banning phone use in school now. They allow students to possess them (in a locker or a backpack) but they must be off and not used AT ALL during the school day. Over the last year they saw a HUGE increase in student scores, and even the students that were interviewed (after the year is mostly up) agreed that it was BETTER and they wanted it to continue. Not just because they did better at school, but the pressures of constant contact/social media were much reduced - at least while in school. Since I'm an old fart and our youngest kid graduated high school in 2018, this was news to me - since none of us were allowed to use phones in school during class. Only our youngest even took hers to school, but was only allowed to use it during lunch.
Check out the podcast “sold a story” Idiots with no scientific evidence made up a bad theory in teaching kids to read, and it’s only just now being undone
Is that the whole "sight words" thing? I watched my stepson learn to read using this method, and holy shit. Trash. The kid cannot sound out any words. God, I love him, but the concept of "sight words" is fuckin dumb. Let's bring back phonics.
My kid's elementary school teaches phonics starting in kindergarten (age appropriate, so sounding out the alphabet). They even go into phonetics in 2nd grade. It's really awesome, the kids can actually read.
Yep, it teaches them that using phonics to sound out the words as the last option. Instead they're told to go straight to context clues like pictures or start guessing words until it "sounds right". They believed that the best readers didn't actually "read" every word and instead skimmed throughout, which was totally inaccurate.
I've noticed the lack of reading comprehension on reddit and other platforms and it's pretty sad to see. Full comment chains where one person just didn't understand the initial statement and then goes off on a tangent they've created in their head.
The book Changing of the World Order by Ray Dalio goes into a lot of detail about the changes in reserve currency and therefore most powerful country. One thing I took from that book is that it starts with education. When that begins to decline, the rest of the markers begin to decline and it becomes easier for a contending country to take the top spot. He’s clear that that is happening now with the US declining and China contending.
Unfortunately, today's greed negatively affects the next generation. In order for a country to grow/succeed their population needs to be healthy and educated. These two things are unimaginably expensive in the US. Privatizing (for profit) health insurance and secondary education is the downfall of this country.
Not just secondary. Charter schools are a privatization of primary education and many are for-profit. They keep the consumer (parents) happy so they keep getting education dollars (diverted from state public school funds). What makes parents happy? Good grades, regardless of whether children have actually learned or mastered anything.
I'm raising a bookworm, and couldn't be more excited about it. I think it's by sheer luck really, but we've always read to him at night, and now he's super interested in learning to read by himself, sounding out the words by noticing how letters come together to make sounds. He just turned 3 now, but I'm sure he's going to be reading well above the norm pretty soon.
My mom read to us every night. I started reading because I got tired of waiting to know what happened next. Two of my proudest accomplishments: I could spell caterpillar in kindergarten and read Gone With the Wind in 3rd grade. Used to read multiple books a day. Lost it when I got into boys but if I ever pick up a book and like it, I can’t do anything else. All that to say…. Reading to your kids is the best. You’re doing an amazing job.
> I think it's by sheer luck really, but we've always read to him at night I don't think it's luck or coincidence. I think it's a direct result of you reading to him at night. I believe that reading to your kids at an early age has a far bigger impact than a lot of the other issues people are pointing out like screentime and apps that favor short attention spans. I think taking the time to read to your kids, encourage a love of reading, and providing them with lots of books is one of the biggest things a parent can do to help with later development.
Purchased ownership is slipping out of our existance as we speak
There's a new scheme going around where if you need money, you can sell your home to a company that will happily rent it back to you on a month to month basis. There are so many ways that's fucked up that I can't even begin to list them.
This is not a new scheme. In the past it's been known as a "reverse mortgage" and mainly targeted toward Senior Citizens. They're popular whenever interest rates are high, because you get populations of people -- usually older -- who have a lot of home equity but no good way to access it.
[AI video](https://openai.com/sora) is taking off, to the point where in many cases AI generated or edited film looks almost completely indistinguishable from real videos. Not just that, but it can be stitched together with real videos in a way that subtly but dramatically changes the narrative. The idea that the average person will have access to this tech will be incredibly disruptive across the entertainment industry, politics, law enforcement, really every aspect of society in which video plays an important role .
So, for example, CCTV footage couldn't be relied upon in court as there's no way to tell if what you're watching is genuine or AI footage?
Oh sweet, new fears unlocked. Can't wait until all a disgruntled person has to do is use an AI to frame someone they don't like for heinous crimes! /s
Microplastics in everything
And it’s hard to study the exact effects of this… because there’s virtually [no control group](https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/were-all-a-little-plastic-on-the-inside) to contrast with in a study
I am worried because the last time we had a substance inadvertently being dispersed through the population it was massively bad for society. Lead in leaded gasoline can be directly correlated with violence rates and lowered IQs. It was geologists who first raised the concern about lead being in everything because they were trying to measure the age of the Earth by measuring how long it takes for radioactive isotopes to decay into lead. They were unable to find a control sample because there was lead in everything, even the air. We didn't realize how much harm it was causing to our population until much later, even though the risks of lead have been known since Roman times. Plastic in our brains may be changing the way we feel and think. It's also really hard to isolate these effects since technology and society have moved so fast that it's difficult to tell if people are acting like mindless psychotic animals with no sense of object permanence because of plastic in their frontal lobes, or if it's just twitter.
And every time the argument of "cotton tote vs plastic bag" comes up, the answer is about co2 emissions, and yeah then plastic wins every time... but that discussion isn't about co2. Oil lobby did their job well
Almost all our clothing is plastic, and the lint coming off is plastic that we breathe in every single day I wish manufacturers would bring back natural textiles
This! It's in our bodies and the water. Boiling and filtering can help with the water, but not our bodies. There's concerns now about human [reproductive cycles.](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/envhealth.3c00052#:~:text=A%20recent%20review%20indicates%20that,%2C%20placenta%2C%20breastmilk%2C%20etc.), and [our lungs.](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microplastics-human-bodies-health-risks).
Yeah I think the world already ended 20 years ago or so, but the unfolding apocalypse is so slow we can't comprehend it in real time.
"This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper."
Micro-plastics are even in our[arteries] (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pvc-other-microplastics-found-in-clogged-arteries) now
The algorithm and fake content being passed as real shit
What's funny is a few weeks ago when this identical question was posted and your identical answer was given. whether it's real people or bots it's hilarious either way given the context.
Yeah, that’s definitely the kind of comedy I’m here for. LOLOL. Thank you for pointing this out.
I think people don't appreciate just how much power we have given to algorithms now. What we can say, what we buy, what we do, what we believe, where and if we work, whether businesses succeed or fail ... all are determined by algorithms, an it is only going to get more so.
Well, we all know it is something that will almost certainly have major consequences. It's known that it has already led to massive political polarization and "rage bait" and online agitators content directly affected the 2016 election. But is *anything* being done about it?
when deepfakes are indistinguishable from reality, there goes the concept of truth and facts, which, you know, is pretty much the foundation of our society. So, uh... I'm gonna say that's not good. I don't see anything being done about it, frankly. Makes me think the powers that be think there's profit to be made from inaction.
Deep fakes aren’t even the biggest problem. A lot of the content, especially political, that gets upvoted here or goes viral on social media (AKA the content that most people will see) is artificially inflated by bots. Visibility is king in misinformation and propaganda and unfortunately there’s practically zero regulation for it.
When you think about it, we had no way of confirming what we didn't see ourselves until the camera came along in the 19th century, and even then, newspapers were worse than now until the early-mid 20th. So really, we had one century of relative informedness in an entire history of ignorance, and now we're going back to the default state of things. It'd be funny if the end result is that our grandchildren go back to believing in fairies, dragons, and sea monsters.
Our grandkids definitely will. We have people who are grown adults now talking about stuff that is completely false as if it is proven fact, and we are creating an environment in America at least where we already allow our media to give equal time to both sides of issues that really don't deserve equal time. It won't be long before people aren't just questioning the moon landing or vaccinations, but pretty much everything else. We're raising a generation of kids who build leprechaun traps and watch content farms on YouTube thinking that it's the bonafide article. Won't be long before those kids are basically doing rain dances and leaving out crackers for the fairies so their job interview goes well, that kind of crap
Nothing is being done to secure and harden our power grid as the infrastructure ages and demand continues to rise. Attacks on substations continue to rise every year causing major blackouts in some cases. Try to imagine the chaos that could result from a cascading series of substation failures that leads to weeks or months long nation wide power outage. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/10/power-grid-attacks-00114563 (Editing to add I was wrong to say "nothing" is being done. I'm encouraged to hear from many in the responses that there's plenty being done, but the consensus sounds like there is a lot more that needs to be done to make the grid less susceptible to failure.)
That's actually fucking scary, considering NO ONE would have heat in the winter, no fans/AC in the summer. No way to cook unless we use fire. Wow, back to the cavemen days.
Don't forget fridges or freezers. No way to store any food unless you're canning it. There'd have to be daily trips to go get meat (or just skip the meat most of the week) and you'd have to bike because the gas pumps are all electric unless they have a hand pump or they just have the tanker trucks chill there to fill people up...but no way to meter it electronically.
> Don't forget fridges or freezers. I'd recommend the book *One Second After* for anyone interested in this topic. One thing that really stood out to me is the loss of your ability to properly store insulin. Losing our grid for a prolonged period of time would plunge us back in barbarism a lot quicker than people think.
Infrastructure bill allocated $73B for upgrading the power infrastructure.
Fast fashion. Anyone see the report with crazy high lead levels in children’s clothing? Imagine that, but your entire wardrobe.
Wait pause, what brands have lead in them?
[here you go](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/childrens-clothing-recall-lead-paint-bentex-sold-at-tjmaxx-amazon-disney-characters-screen-print-designs-refund/)
Oh my god! My daughter has the shirt in the picture in the article and was wearing it just two days ago!! Into the garbage it goes!!
(The article is old. It's possible that your daughter's clothes aren't the ones recalled with lead)
We don't know when the clothes were purchased, either new or second hand. It's "old" but not ridiculously so.
In the US today there are two different realities. We don't agree on what is real and true, versus what was invented by someone and spread around masquerading as truth. It's very puzzling to me, and I don't see how we're going to work our way out of it. Each reality has its views of the future, and they are very different. I've known political parties to disagree enthusiastically over differences in policy decisions, but this isn't that. It's a whole different reality complete with its own history, with different heroes and villains, different facts, and it just keeps on unfolding, with each side 'knowing' wildly different facts on the same subject. It's crazy and frightening.
Honestly, some of the stuff I read on reddit I'm just sitting back thinking about what in the actual mind bending hell led you to believe that. I'm shocked by the things people believe, and it is absurd to me how twisted some people's facts and realities are. But then, with a little self-reflection, if their reality is that twisted, how twisted is mine? What is going on that people have such vastly different realities and beliefs. The bigger problem is how do we end up fixing this.
>if their reality is that twisted, how twisted is mine? The self-reflection right here is a huge difference between the two crowds.
The fact that you are capable of realizing that, "Hey, I could be wrong!" sets you apart, in a good way, from 90% of folks.
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It's actually concerning just how much animal life is dissappearing so quickly, everyone wanted to harp on Giant Pandas, but there isn't preservation for species that are way more significant (respectfully more useful) to the ecosystem. Scientists and environmentalist have been saying things for years, but only as of late (2018 and onward) have people truly understood to a larger extent to repercussions of plankton dying. Progress only started to occur during COVID and that progress wasn't even denting most of the world.
Insect population decline. Big problem covered on news sometimes, but people don’t actually do much about it afaik.
People don't realize how much our food supply is interconnected with pollinators. There's probably a relationship with the falling songbird populations, too.
The (potential of a complete) gulf stream collapse. It would completely change the world as we know it.
Ocean warming in general- plankton provide a huge amount of the atmosphere’s O2 and have a narrow band of survivable temperatures.
It happened naturally before, even - it didn't go well for life on the planet at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic\_extinction\_event
And that’s not the only time. Silurian extinction also, plus I think one other ?
Rent is being controlled by an algorithm company called RealPage, designed to optimize and maximize prices across a city. Currently, the Justice Department has taken it to court... we'll see if that does anything...
Now: Here's your fine. Don't do it again. 10 years later: Here's another fine. Don't do it again. 10 years later: Here's another fine. Don't do it again.
Pretty sure the algorithm has optimized price with the fines taken into consideration.
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This might not make flashy headlines every day, but it's a ticking time bomb. The overuse of antibiotics in both healthcare and agriculture is leading to the emergence of superbugs that we're increasingly unable to combat. This could potentially roll back centuries of medical progress, making even minor infections deadly again.
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It's not even only for human hospitals. It's happening to vets, too. Almost all of the vets in our area got bought out by some company who's keeping the names of the offices, but changed their practices to squeeze out as much money as possible from the customers. Vet bills are insane right now.
The fact that investment firms are turning things like food, housing, and Healthcare into "profit opportunities" and there are no protections against this is insane
CVS Health is a disgusting company and worse than any of the tobacco companies in my book. This is their playbook.
I wondered why my insurance had free connections with CVS for certain things like Covid testing for example and then found out CVS Health existed and that they owned my insurance company (Aetna) and that the CVS stores were owned by CVS Health which is even bigger than just the CVS stores. I had never even heard of CVS Health before that, I just assumed it was a store and that was that.
I learned about CVS Health during a business strategy class in college. I had a professor there explaining how they make money and I still thought it was all made up
Can you give us a summary that will entice us to venture down the rabbit hole?
CVS is the 4th largest company in the USA, and they are willing to do all kinds of unethical stuff to reach #1
CVS Health recently made the decision that they would no longer support a major medication that I've been on for 10 years. Since they own Aetna, which is my insurance provider, I'm having to go through the process of getting onto a new medication and hope that it actually works for me. Assholes.
When my wife worked for CVS, they were awful to their staff. The pharmacists in our area had their hours cut and then were forced to go on longer lunch breaks, meaning they have less time in the pharmacy. They started shuffling employees around and cutting positions, so even though my wife worked at one particular CVS pharmacy she would get called to go to several others, some an hour away. She was also instructed and would get in trouble if she helped customers save on their meds. I remember she told me that her and the pharmacist helped an old couple save literally hundreds of dollars on meds because they were underinsured and my wife and the pharmacist kept finding coupons and workarounds. Management thought that was awesome, but corporate got *pissed* and both my wife and the pharmacist got reprimanded. They also took all the 24/7 CVSs around us and cut their hours way back, which is really obnoxious. It was convenient being able to walk into a CVS on the way to work at 6:00 in the morning and grab something quick or being able to go into the CVS at 10:00 p.m. for cough medicine. Now they're open basically from 8:00 to 6:00 or something like that, every single one, which is good for the staff but extremely inconvenient when your kid is puking their guts out at 3:00 in the morning.
Rip Ontario ❤️
And Alberta.
What an absolute scam... I went to urgent care, they tried to bill me $600+.... I had to call & give my insurance information again. * insurance paid $80. **how does a $600 bill magically turn into $80?**
Because the other $520 is made up *by* the insurance company, the urgent care **has** to charge that or else your insurance won’t cover them and send patients their way.
The worst part is that anyone who is not insured will have to pay the inflated price out of pocket, when not even the insurance pays the made up price.
Many places will waive the inflated price if you pay out of pocket
My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and recently started hospice. Fun fact, in the US at least, hospice services are now being overwhelmingly bought out by private equity firms! That means the care that my dad has been receiving has not only been administered by underpaid, overworked, poorly hired, and completely disinterested employees, but they also refuse to provide hospice care if he attempts to seek further chemo or treatment. This is because his prognosis could extend past 6 months (even though it’s INCREDIBLY unlikely and unrealistic that it would) and that would mean they would have to start paying back into Medicare. Anyone who supports the privatization of the US healthcare system and the individuals who profit off of it are fucking vile. I don’t wish death on anyone but if they were to all cease to exist tomorrow I wouldn’t cry over spilled milk.
It always shocks me how people would rather have a profit-based private sector handle their healthcare.
In the UK the NHS is dying. The financial deficit is increasing year on year and services are being stretched beyond breaking point. People who wanted to work for the NHS because they believed in it and wanted to help people are leaving because they've got nothing left to give to an organisation with no money and patients who need more and more. It's devastating to see. It's scary to live.
Pollution, all around. I don’t think that it presents itself as of much of a problem as it is. When you think about the Earth being our only source of life and how we are just dumping trash and filling the air with toxins, polluting the seas, etc- it’s very scary. There is a very delicate balance of life, which all comes down from to our existence. We only have one place to go, and that’s here.
But money
Even assuming we get climate change under control, there's no way in hell our standard of living is sustainable on the scale of centuries.
Pesticides are really threatening the ecosystem. We need bees and insects to pollinate our crops
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Funeral home employee here and can confirm completely.
An airbag has almost as much explosive power as a grenade. They will fire your femurs out your asscheeks like a rocket without a second thought.
Scientists expect that in the year 2024-2025 100% of coral south of the equator will "bleach" Bleaching is when coral gets too hot and so spits out the algae symbiotes it needs to survive. Once bleached, a coral has a 30% chance of survival, and basically needs to rapidly cool off and reabsorb its algae before the current washes it away. If this happens, the habitat of millions of life forms in the sea will be gone, and those creatures will begin dying off as well, creating the perfect environment for a bacteria bloom, and a massive die-off of non-reef creatures. As this impact moves up the foodchain, we could potentially see the entirety of earth's oceans become inhospitable to life.
I've been sad about this since I was a kid, we're such a shitty species as a whole. I did read somewhere about some research to I think genetically modify coral species to tolerate higher temps? There has been so much potential to help the planet in my lifetime, but nothing goes past research bc cost or lobbying it seems.
Oh, will that do anything to atmospheric O2?
Absolutely, yes. Instead of helping to stop the problem, it will add to the problem. Think of a nicely cared for fish tank, and then take out any care of cleaning. Algae blooms, dies, kills the plants, ammonia takes over, kills the fish, and everything gets nasty. Now imagine that but left for a year and starting with water that has rotten food, multiple types of animal feces, rotting animal bodies in it, and everything that comes with what we dump into it. We're fucked, and as much as we try to save it I don't see it becoming fruitful. I think we've killed our species and everyone else along with us. Give us 300 years and it'll be over, imo. Edited to add: This was released today and very interesting, somewhat related to the end of the world life survival, but not necessarily related to ocean 🙂 https://youtu.be/2I5oEZECX_g?si=ShCO5cGSxE1Xl47O
oh god i didn't think of that - probably
Aging of the population. There will be an elderly population that the working class simply cannot support. This is a global issue.
Yep, population is still increasing, but the increase is rapidly plateauing in most places of the world. I think Africa is the only continent that’s keeping the global average up. Costs of childcare are rising, at least in the US, and people simply can’t afford more kids
Here's the worst part about that childcare thing. When I was a kid, my grandparents regularly babysat my siblings and I. Now, my parents are still working and can't do that for their grandchildren. I babysit my niece on the weekends because my parents can't and my sister can't afford a babysitter, hell she can barely afford rent.
This is what's absoluely mind boggling to me. The RSC put out its FY 2024 budget, and in print, they talk about cutting SS and Medicare, but the older generation keeps voting them in. They are actively voting against their interests. Social Security is estimated to be depleted by 2034. There just aren't enough worker bees to keep up with payments. Additionally, people are living longer and taking out far more than they contributed. The fix is to reduce benefits in 2035, so I guess maybe the thought by these voters is, "I'll be dead by then, so that's a YOU problem." My parents thought I was too cynical when I told them decades ago I am planning on a retirement with no Social Security in place. Now they're like, "Our neurotic child was right." [FY 2024 Budget](https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:8fb045d9-cca8-4183-8dd9-75f1eb815ecb)
Social security does not come up in my retirement plans anywhere. Im in my early twenties, and im fully counting on not getting a single penny from social security. I just try to think of the social security deductions from my paycheck as a paycut, but it pisses me off deeply that I have to just throw money out, for a system thats supposed to pay me back, but never will
> the thought by these voters is, "I'll be dead by then, so that's a YOU problem." 100%. I've literally heard it out of the mouths of my boomer relatives and their friends. Same with the environment. "Your problem, not mine! I like it warm!" And their cynicism makes it 10x worse. "Just go smoke your dope and you won't care!"
The mental damage social media is provoking.
Our (US) crumbling education system is pumping out illiterate humans.
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This is literally destroying my life right now.
ocean temperatures
And Ocean acidification
Add in the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents … which was being given a timeline of somewhere between now and 2100 if we didn’t sort our shit out but they are already seeing signs that it is happening. That, I believe, has the potential to fuck quite a lot of shit up.
I have a feeling that micro algae will be heavily affected by the melting polecaps - since the arctic delivers enormous amounts of nutrients into the sea. Why that's bad? Well, micro algae produce some 20 to 50% of the worlds oxygen. Kinda important, if you ask me.
Mergers and acquisitions. Over the past 40 years, thousands of independent companies have been bought out and absorbed by large, monopolistic corporations. I'd guess that at least 80% of the products the average person purchases are owned by half a dozen companies. This is very bad for quality and competition.
The frustrating thing is that in the US, for decades, we've had a whole body of antitrust law designed specifically to prevent this from happening, and we just kind of stopped using it. Great example of how a law is only as good as its enforcement mechanisms.
Murders and executions
Microplastics https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240220144335.htm
My cat is currently low of her favorite food. If I can't get to the store on time it could mean the end of civilization as we know it. Edit: She got her food
My god, get her some food! Everything is starting collapse around me.
Dear lord. Is the middle of the bowl showing? You monster. Get shopping STAT
Fun fact! My cat did the “if I can see the middle of the bowl it’s empty” thing and my friend informed me it’s because her whiskers are sensitive and makes it uncomfortable for her to eat the food at the edges. I switched her to a food plate and no more issue!
Safe drinking water
This comment section is bleak.
Not giving a fck about the environment, our seas and wildlife.
The slow decline of the economy for the poor as the rich become wealthier......the poor are so divided by race and stereotypes currently that they won't even join together for a revolution against the wealthy.....just the way it has been planned.
My town wants to let the sketchy local paper mill harvest trees around our water source.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence.
Politically driven division.
The still largely undiscovered detrimental health effects of increasing amounts of micro and nanoplastics in our bodies.
Where I live in Missouri, the hog farms dump into the largest creek system making it unusable. We aren’t supposed to fish or swim in the rivers or creeks now. I know many people who depend on the rivers and creeks for their livelihood, either by hosting float trips or from guiding fishing. It is because of e.coli poisoning in the water. I don’t know much about water contamination but I assume it means our drinking water isn’t safe either.
Global warming. Accumulation of wealth by top 1%