The fire rises

[Dolan]

Generally speaking

[harcha]

and water falls

[Dolan]

The US stock market is one flick away from collapse, after years of artificial AI hype. And the country is one major incident away from civil war.
France is going down the drain.
China is in a deflationary spiral and heading for Japan-style lost decades.
Russia is headed for a financial crunch.
Ig the only ones hearing some potentially good news are those in Gaza.

[Goodspeed]

During a time when what we need most of all is strong democracies, to prevent a future where AI excludes humans from the economy and we have no political recourse to implement UBI.

Unfortunate

[iNcog]

as crazy as things are in the USA, there won't be a civil war here lmao

[Dolan]

Maybe not like the 1860s one, but there already are signs of tension, federal power being used to send troops to states for political gain.
For now, judges can still hold it, but for how long.

[Dolan]

I mean, one conceivable scenario would be increased political segregation. Commercial boycotts, one state refusing to allow water going to another state and diverting it. Some farmers refusing to ship produce to a certain state. Families not moving to an area or city because it's too red or blue. Etc.
A lot of things could happen without shots getting fired.

[RefluxSemantic]

What's particularly interesting is that many different, diverse countries are facing very similar issues. Somehow vastly different cultures experience similar difficulties, vastly different economies and demographics deal with almost identical issues, and greatly different democratic systems are all under similar pressure.

When discussing politics, we often focus on the internal state of affairs, blame specific policies, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if we're missing the bigger picture.

[iNcog]

The bigger picture being that huge megacorps and their donors are artificially increasing tensions between social categories so that they can continue their gilded age unhindered?

[Dolan]

Some of the common factors might be aging demographics, urbanisation and universal education, leading to human agglomeration in areas where most jobs are, because everyone wants a career and access to public services.

Then the effect of people getting chained to the career treadmill is that they have a sense of loss of autonomy, they're more stressed, living under pressure, demoralised. That explains the tang ping 躺平 phenomenon in China. They are aware of it: Xi told the youth to move to the countryside and "eat bitterness". He's right but who wants to follow such advice, they all want to hang around at the coffeshop, play vidyagames, consume.

[Dolan]

that's why it's called the canary in the coal mine. they know.

[Goodspeed]

What's particularly interesting is that many different, diverse countries are facing very similar issues. Somehow vastly different cultures experience similar difficulties, vastly different economies and demographics deal with almost identical issues, and greatly different democratic systems are all under similar pressure.

When discussing politics, we often focus on the internal state of affairs, blame specific policies, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if we're missing the bigger picture.

Social media. People are lonely, being pulled to the political extremes, and comparing themselves to the picture perfect lives of influencers. If I had to point to one thing that all countries have in common and is causing political and mental health issues, it's that.

But we are also at the end of 45 years of neoliberal policy (this doesn't apply to every country), which is clearly only working for the richest whatever%. As the sun sets for the neolibs, it rises for the populists who pretend to have answers, even though nobody does. And there might not be an answer. Moloch be praised.

[Dolan]

re: potential civil war in the usa. fed troops currently cracking down on protesters on the territory of certain states, bypassing local police. and state elected leaders passing decisions to block the use of city property by ice agents.

it's basically legal civil war. they're fighting over who controls a state using decisions, laws, deployment of troops. what could this lead to, down the road?
escalation. this won't wind down on its own. what could it escalate to? idk, some kind of civic uprisings. on both sides maybe.
and then the prospect of an "amicable divorce" will sound like a good idea to them.

in fact, i wonder if trump is not trying to instigate exactly that. he's quite good at this kind of maneuvres of indirectly making someone do something he wanted, but after 2-3 turns of events.

[Dolan]

Advice: save offline versions of whatever you rely on to be online (programs, files, resources).
As the AI bubble will go bust, megacorps will start cutting costs aggressively on what they host for free.
Google is already starting to block using Youtube with adblockers (it happened today).
Going forward they will block a lot of things if they can't extract something from you: paid account or data mining.
Prepare for a self-hosted internet in the next decade and beyond.

[fightinfrenchman]

Google is already starting to block using Youtube with adblockers (it happened today).

Just pay for premium and don't be a cheap-ass bitch

[Dolan]

Google is already starting to block using Youtube with adblockers (it happened today).

Just pay for premium and don't be a cheap-ass bitch

I don't use it that much to justify a sub and, for whatever I use it, I already paid with years of them getting a lot of analytics on my internet presence

[Dolan]

Also @fightinfrenchman I'm trying to meme into reality an internet that is owned by the grassroots, instead of the corposhits.
Weirdly enough, history might circle back to the late 90s and the internet could return to being again an assemblage of local, neighbourhood networks.
Instead of being owned by some gigantic Borg structures.

[Jam]

The earth is running out of resources in 2030, starting with selenium.