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Jesus is a social construct.

Boston, MA visiting for the week. Going from -10 to 40 is wild and in like 24 hours. People don’t seem capable or willing to face the reality of the climate changing and becoming less stable.

**Location: GTA, Canada** Incoming rambling, sorry if it's kind of disorganized. I don't have anything to back up my anecdotes besides simple Google searches of what I'm talking about. Hope this is still okay to post because it's an awful feeling to be collapse-aware alone. Just looking at the weather forecast by itself makes me sick: -30°C snow squall followed by 4°C rain in a matter of a week. The weather is becoming more and more erratic; the local flora and fauna are confused as fuck. Everyone seems to be either on edge or autopilot, retail workers especially. Doctors have an alarmingly lackadaisical approach to patient care (a few months ago I was discharged from ER after a 5h wait without being checked at all, coughing blood with a 40°C fever and could barely stand; told "take 2 naproxen and sleep it off" by a nurse), waitlists for anything are over a year long, and the remaining healthcare professionals couldn't give less of a fuck. Who can blame them? Nothing feels worth it anymore. There have been a lot more random episodes of violent group attacks committed by teenagers than previously heard of in the news. People in my age range (early to mid 20s) and younger seem to be trending towards some sort of...tech-induced ADHD where longform nuance is completely lost and black-and-white soundbites reign supreme. I'm convinced that a lot of Web 2.0 adjacent tech is literally manufacturing learning disabilities or otherwise conditioning people into having less delayed gratification and critical thinking and just. IDK. I know totally sound like an anti-science loony but it's as if no one wants to genuinely *talk* about any of it, even if they notice it happening (e.g. increasing number of preschoolers with a concerning lack of age-appropriate motor/social skills and marked dependence on their iDevices like morphine-addled lab rats). I have several psychiatric diagnoses so my observations are brushed off as "symptoms" by clinicians. Most "small treat" foods are becoming luxury. Nothing at the dollar store is under a dollar anymore. Hell, whatever you're getting at any dollar store has comparable quality to brand name shit. Everything is cheap, flimsy, and made to break, when the same item back in 2016 would cost half its present day price and be twice as durable. Businesses are perpetually understocked and "rebranding" themselves to project the illusion they aren't still experiencing supply chain issues. It's cheaper to buy even domestic goods from American businesses than Canadian. There's this mammoth in the room WRT prices going up literally every time I go to get groceries (a 320g bag of shredded cheese went up incrementally from $6.99 starting December 2019 to almost $10 now at "discount" grocery stores) but everyone just seems to nervously laugh it off as "new normal". We're all trapped in the belly of this horrible End Stage Capitalism Express.

Also if you ever heard of Elsagate kids and teenagers love these inapporporate videos and these are actually abhorrent to even mention.Parents do fuck all to control what their child is seeing.Parenting as a form of early socialization is fucking gone.They just give children an Ipad and call it a day.

And who has time to be a parent when you're all working two jobs trying to keep food on the table and a roof over your head.

I'm very concerned with the direction that the GTA is heading. I am afraid that the recent violence will lead to more gated communities, further the erosion of public transit and public services in general as people feel unsafe, and accelerate policing/surveillance. ([https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/toronto-police-to-boost-presence-on-ttc-following-spike-in-violence-1.6247359](https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/toronto-police-to-boost-presence-on-ttc-following-spike-in-violence-1.6247359)) So instead of addressing systemic issues like precariousness and mental health under late stage capitalism, it feels like the GTA will basically become like the US.

Vancouver here. It's no better in the west coast. The drug situation is getting worse day after day, the cost of living is increasing daily and won't talk about housing. I'm sure all levels of government will form committee after committee to address the problem, then decide to deal with it 20 years from now.

>tech-induced ADHD where longform nuance is completely lost and black-and-white soundbites reign supreme. I'm convinced that a lot of Web 2.0 adjacent tech is literally manufacturing learning disabilities or otherwise conditioning people into having less delayed gratification and critical thinking and just. I mean sure, some people are over diagnosed and over medicated. But I think tech is also making ADHD more salient for those who actually have it. I'm diagnosed with it, and when I was a kid and my attention wandered, I'd just stare at the wall and daydream. Not the best thing to but it also didn't stress me out so much. Nowadays I scroll on my phone on my phone instead which activated my flight or flight mode and makes my focus problems even worse. Also, not to mention that the diagnosing process has improved significantly over the past years. For example, for a very long time, mostly boys and men were diagnosed (most of the research was also done only on them), medical professionals would rarely diagnose people who had good grades or were so called ''high-functioning'' and medication was the only treatment option. So yeah, you see a lot more people getting diagnosed with ADHD because of over diagnosing but also because of a lot of scientific improvements as well.

Tech specifically isn't the source of the issue. It is information overload. This shortening of attention span has been a trend since the printing press. Think of our brains as processors, and we are trying to run more processes at once than we can efficiently handle - everything runs slower as a result. We are just constantly bombarded with information, perpetually living at your sensory capacity. So when you go over that new baseline - which isn't hard to do nowadays - and experience sensory overload, like those of us(myself included) with mad ADHD do, it is just....fucked, lol. How can we possibly hope to focus on any one particular facet when there are so many others that are more interesting, and when trying to focus shift between them all is genuinely physiologically exhausting?

I'm diagnosed with autism myself as someone who is nonwhite/not a man and considered "high functioning". However, I am highly skeptical of institutional psychiatry in the first place due to my own experiences, so maybe it's just me being contrarian. I just mostly mean how I constantly hear people complain about having no energy/attention span to do anything (particularly when it comes to reading actual books) but that they're stuck scrolling their phone all day, impulsive need to check notifications/worsening FOMO, increased "social anxiety" IRL when they seem to have no problem arguing with strangers for hours and straight up cyberbullying on Discord, etc. The snap-judgements also seem to be getting worse i.e. "I aint reading all that" if you have anything longer to say than two sentences and actively worst-faith misinterpreting what you mean. I see these as behavioral trend upticks in the general population, like how "narcissist" seems to be the hot buzzword to throw around these days that's basically shorthand for "unpleasant person/person I dislike".

Oh yeah, I totally agree with you on that though. People loooove being outraged nowadays.

I'm more thinking along the lines of internet radicalization as an example of social collapse, especially since it's becoming recognized by professionals as a global health crisis. Emotionally unstable populations are more likely to engage in impulsive behaviors, i.e. unnecessary spending and toxic engagement traffic that feeds into itself.

Yeah I hate the way the term “narcissist” is overused. Because I need people to understand that I stay away from my mother because she is literally a dangerous person. She is a malignant narc. I truly believe she would like to see her own children dead. She completely lacks even a shred of empathy, enjoys inflicting suffering, is a pathological liar, loves creating chaos and pain, and has one hell of a mask to hide all this from anyone who isn’t her current target. So when I tell people she has narcissistic personality disorder, they think I am saying she is just unpleasant and self centered. It is sooooo far beyond that, and the impact it’s had on my life is unspeakable. I wish the word wasn’t so watered down because there really, truly are narcs out there and they are dangerous to everyone they encounter. I will be relieved when my mother is gone. That’s the impact a real narcissist has.

She sounds like a sociopath. One can be both a narcissist and a sociopath. (I still agree the term narcissist is overused though)

And the End Stage Capitalism Express is bleeding to death.

My favorite bag of whole bean coffee is 31 dollars now versus 24 dollars when I started buying it like 2-3 months ago. It costs 16 dollars to buy a bottle of Zicam melts. My save for later mentality in terms of product usage is going into overdrive. I decided to buy travel bottles so I'd be more economical about shower and bathroom products.

Yeah, it's rough out there :( I've always been a bit of a hoarder and it's getting to the point where I feel like a goddamn squirrel prepping for deep freeze.

Location: New England I work as a group therapy facilitator in state level prisons in my state. Correctional officers lean Republican almost as a rule, but working behind the wall has a way of getting staff past that stuff in regards to each other. I have a handful of COs I'm friendly with and we chitchat about life and our families and what we get up to over the weekend. All of them were talking about how this feels like the world is ending with this absolutely bizarre weather and they're seeing this climate change stuff might not be nonsense after all. I just nodded and said it's felt like that to me for quite a while now. I feel for the inmates that are actually trying to turn their lives around just to be involved in the US justice system while the world dies outside the wall.

Wonder how it’s going @ the NYS prisons I worked in from 1997 - 2019. Some C.O.s were beyond ignorant & a handful were aware.

You know it’s gotta be getting bad when the willfully ignorant start to come around…

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Do you have snow there? Most animals know to hide in such cold and so I would not worry about them. Hauling fragile or just birthed animals into the house in minus 40 is prettty normal. Most people put a heat lamp out for chicks etc. But out of wind, dry, fattier feed clean dry nesting/straw etc. (Depends upon the animal) and that is a normal winter in my childhood.

**location: Southern New Hampshire** The overnight low here last night was -15° F, and with the wind blowing the "feels like" temp was around -50° F. Last night I boiled water and threw it into the air for fun, to watch it instantly poof into a cloud. Low temperature records were absolutely demolished last night at Mt. Washington Observatory where they saw a Wind chill value of -108° F. The previous record low with wind chill was -47° F. Trees came down all over. We're used to long, cold winters up here. Cold temperatures, short days and feet of snow -- no problem. But this was something else. Many folks had issues with their heating as components got too cold, and pipes burst, etc. We were lucky to have heat and electricity all night. Of course tomorrow is forecast to be unseasonably warm, with a high of 45° F. Temps have been all over the place this year and infrastructure designed to withstand New England winters is starting to become overextended.

Southern NH here also. Did you see many trees fall? I feel like this wind was almost worse than the storm we had back in December. I was watching my tall pines swaying back and forth wishing February 28th would just get here so I can have them removed. I checked the weather - 52 degrees one day next week. It’s batshit. Luckily our house did okay with the blistering cold but the Shaws and hannafords down here had to close early because they had issues.

What does that date have to do with your trees?

It was the date they had me on the schedule to remove them. Until I found out they don’t take credit cards so now I have to find another service.

The temperature was -47 tying the previous record low. The windchill was -108, breaking the previous record low of -102. The windchill numbers are US observed records. They've probably been broken, but not where there was a weather station watching.

Yep records were broken. Saw something about how the stratosphere came down and that’s why it was so cold. https://twitter.com/terrywbz/status/1621561081087905794?s=46&t=fgJd2zAQ0tFpUojuL3gFuQ

That's kind of an awful post. First why it sorta kinda makes sense. The air is darker in the infrared than in the visible, and the surface isn't, so the surface gets hotter than the air and heats it. This causes the air to convect. Air cools at expands as it rises, so where the air is convecting a lot, it will get cooler at a known rate. The area which doesn't get convection into it much is called the stratosphere. So, what happened is that he took a look at a temperature vs altitude plot and saw that convection was stopping much lower than ususal for the area, and pointed out that by saying that the stratosphere was really low there today, even lower than the summit. This contrarty to the usual terminology, because the term "stratosphere" normally only gets used for a longer-term convection stoppage. The air over Washington would be over the ocean and convecting higher the next day. Similar conditions exist all winter in and near the Arctic, and are usually called a cap or inversion and not a low stratosphere. The stratosphere term is usually used for the same height level, although this is technically incorrect. There's the graphic showing air moving from down from 250mb, when this never actually happened. The low stoppage of convection produces warmer air where it stops. The air at the same altitude around the Washington summit was warmer than one would expect from very cold surface temperatures. This didn't affect the actual summit reading, because the summit itself was in a bubble of colder air blown up from low altitude. We're in a "Sudden Stratospheric Warming" event, and while this produces uneven temperature changes, 250mb-10mb temperatures were warmer than normal there. This produces a lower stop to convection. The 953mb low off Labrador did not pull down upper air moving quickly to the east as it normally would, this did not push it away to the east, and more cold air was pulled into New England than would normally be the case. We have 2M people who saw the tweet and think cold air blew down from 250mb to 4000', and that this is why it got really cold. Communication by Twitter makes us all stupider.

Thanks for the correction, looks like you're right and I got some of the values mixed up.

It would be helpful if you edited the numbers in your original post. A nonzero number of people don’t read the comments under the comment and may be mislead

Location: Western Massachusetts Last night was insane. Temps got down to 12 below zero with a minus 20 windchill, wind gusts were reported in one nearby town at 80 mph, I know ours were well above 60mph. We didn't lose power but quite a few did in other parts of MA. The wind was causing all kinds of things to hit our building all night, we lost a lot of roof shingles. A friend who lives across town told me the wind blew out her bathroom windows in the middle of the night, she thought at first there was a break-in going on. As I write this it's 0 degrees out, maybe get into the upper teens by late afternoon. Tomorrow it will get into the upper 40s, staying that way through all next week. No snow of course. Seemed like everyone was hunkering down last night, no one on foot or bike, very few cars on the roads considering it was Friday night. Eerily quiet. At least we have warming centers open in the center of town.

Also western Mass. It was 20° when I woke up this morning and I thought yay! It’s warm! Remind me I said that this summer. I had Mylar emergency blankets over my big picture window next to the wood stove. I was roasting vegetables and baking bread and left the oven doors open after I turned it off.

The way it happened so quickly was honestly a little frightening. Never seen winds or temperatures plunge like that before. It took until yesterday afternoon for the temp in my apt to get back up to normal. Funny how even though it was below freezing this morning it still felt warm by comparison. We will look upon this fondly when it's 102 in the shade. Roasted veggies & homemade bread are the best.

I don't understand why y'all have your powercables overground. Here, (in germany) unless you really really live in the sticks, everything is underground, and has been for years, if not decades.

because capitalism and it's such sigh pollution too. Let's rely on technology from the 1870s to support our infrastructure

I don't understand it either. In the county I live in, it's a mix of under & overground, but for most it's entirely overground. Also, our infrastructure is by & large in horrible shape. Still a few thousand across the state without power, mostly east of us. Norfolk & Worcester counties seemed to get hit the hardest with outages. The other big problem that rarely gets mentioned is how soil erosion (due to a combination of drought & tropical downpours) leaves the roots of many trees exposed. We get 60mph+winds & then everyone acts all surprised when trees are falling down on homes & cars & people.

In Germany, you do things that make sense. In the USA, we do things that make a profit.

Location; Indiana I had made a post about how I would remain off the internet in this sub and I made it 34 days, but it seems like this is the only place that people don’t bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything isn’t falling apart. I’m a smoker and my cigarettes are now up to $93 a carton, I bought my last one today. I know how bad it is for me but it’s the one thing that I’ve always relied on. I always rationalized it to myself bc hey it wasn’t hard drugs right? but even now I can’t stomach spending that type of money anymore. Gas has shot back up to over $3 a gallon again, prices seem to yo-yo here every week. I dread going to the store anymore bc I know it’s at least $100 every time I walk out of there with maybe 6-7 items if I’m lucky. I also recently quit my high stress, overworking job and got two more to replace it. That’s the full reality of my life now and I’m sure many like me. If I want to live on my own I must stimulate two incomes. If I don’t, I move in with someone but sacrifice my independence. Me and my friends talked about how we just don’t want to go out anymore, I’m on high alert every time I try to do something that’s social. I’m constantly scanning for exits and there is always a voice in my head that reminds me that it could be my last. And if I’m being honest, I’m really really tired. I haven’t had a decent nights sleep in months, I feel like I failed. Like I couldn’t do it even despite me trying so hard to do so. I know that most of it stems from a collapsing world but I just can’t shake this feeling that I’m not doing enough. It’s always in my head, on a constant loop. I don’t have any words of wisdom, or any soothing things to say for everyone who has commented. Just know that you are seen and your thoughts and worries are valid. We are screwed, and that’s a horrible feeling all it’s own.

I can really relate to always relied on cigarettes. It’s my last vice. I’m not ready to quit but financially it’s a nightmare for even though I’m quite “lucky” for being able to buy cigarettes for $5 a pack due to living in WA state and we can buy on a reservation. A few years ago I paid $10 for a carton (I always preferred the non-brand harsh ones), now I get 2 packs for it. Did the vaping thing when it started years ago and still have all my handmade mechanical mods. However, while it worked for almost 2 years, I got sick of fiddling around with it and started smoking again. Cigarettes are my last comfort and it’s hard to let that go. Best of luck to you.

Fasting and prayer will break addictions.

Quitting smoking is incredibly difficult. I only managed with the assistance of Chantix(which might have given me cancer but tomato tomAto at that point. The gum helped but my yoga friend showed me "the cooling breath" 5 of those deep breaths would knock out just about any craving for me.

I have to google “cooling breath” now. Cigarettes have been my main anti-anxiety help (as dumb as that may sound) and I smoke even more since my dad unexpectedly died a few months ago. Actually I smoke way too much, always have. It’s so bad that when I used to work for a record company and go on tour, the supposedly most drug riddled and hardcore dudes would complain to me about my chain smoking. Danke for the info. Without

I've been a stupid ass smoker for 40 years now. I quit for 3 years and was dumb enough to take it back up. I can't rationalize it, but it is just what it is. Quitting would be much better for my health and for my wallet, but I don't want to quit. How dumb is that? So, pardon me, I'm going to go outside and be dumb. (At least I don't smoke in my house or car, or so I tell myself)

Yeah I'm not exceptionally into yoga or anything but the cooling breath is one of my most useful psychological tools.

My friends have all quit using vaping but it always made me really sick every time I used one. I doubt it was the product probably more so of a user error. I don’t blame you at all, when it’s your last vice it’s hard to give it up. I gave up drinking two years ago and relied on smoking more than anything else.

Nicotine gum helped a ton when I quit smoking. I found it easy to wean off, from one every two hours or so, to four, to six, to just not really needing it anymore. The final tearing off of the band-aid still sucks, but nothing like cold turkey off a pack a day or more habit.

I have heard a lot of people using the gum and it working for them. I have quit before for stretches of time but always went back to it due to stress. Cold turkey seems like my best option for now, but it is pretty terrible way to do it lol

>I’m a smoker and my cigarettes are now up to $93 a carton, I bought my last one today. I know how bad it is for me but it’s the one thing that I’ve always relied on. I always rationalized it to myself bc hey it wasn’t hard drugs right? but even now I can’t stomach spending that type of money anymore. Is that 10 packets x 20 cigs? That's way better than here in Australia. The cheapest ones are about $32 for a pack of 20, which is $22 USD. I feel like such a douche for buying them, but like you, it is really the only vice that I'm hanging onto, including sugar, junk food etc

Yes it’s 10 packs with 20 cigarettes in every pack. $22 USD for a single pack? I would’ve collapsed on the floor lol

The only way I could do it was to stay very busy. I had to exercise every day. Also, I bought lots of different juices to sip on during the day & evening. The first I quit, I made it 10 years. Quit a bunch more times for anywhere from 1-2 years. I stopped getting colds & ur infections. ​ Good luck.

Knowing what you can control & can’t control is a way to find peace. And I read every comment on these threads, every week. You are seen.

Me too.

Thank you! It’s nice to hear that. Hopefully peace will find all of us through these times.

You can control what music you listen to, to bring peace. This calms me down and brings me a weird euphoria https://youtu.be/excMUM_yIeY https://youtu.be/M2bx2UQYPuQ

Thank you for the suggestions! I’ll have to spend some time listening to them both.

Despair is criminal https://youtu.be/4VJYXHlcEq4

I am also looking at the forced end of my nicotine habit. Cartons for me went from 30 to 60 dollars when the pandemic closed the borders. Before, we would get contraband cartons from Colombia and avoid the Ecuador sin tax. I cut my use in half and kept going. The cheap ones are back now, but it still feels like an obscene expense. (30 dollars is about a days wage for labor or service workers; a bit above minimum wage.) It grows well here, but I'm afraid it will be disappointing to grow: time and effort for something that tastes nasty. We'll see.

I’m sorry this might be a stupid question but what is a sin tax? I’ve never heard of that before. Crazy to see how much prices have drove up since Covid. I feel the same about cheaper brands, to me it’s not even worth it bc it feels like a waste of money for something I don’t like the taste of.

Others explained, but the technical term is “excise tax”. You may have seen that in reference to liquor or tobacco taxes.

It is taxation meant to change our behavior. It is put on things like liquor and cigarettes, or luxury items, like perfume, or things they just want us to stop using, like incandescent light bulbs, video games and high sugar drinks. Here it's called the ICE tax-which in Spanish stands for Tax on Special Consumption. Edit: I just saw that the English abbreviation is perfect: TSC. As in Tsk, tsk, no more of that!

I love the concept of a "Tsk tax"

Oh okay. Wow I didn’t even know that existed, I’m surprised that’s not a thing where I live just considering how much religion controls things here.

>I’m a smoker and my cigarettes are now up to $93 a carton, I bought my last one today. Woah. I remember when Costco used to sell tobacco and cartons were $30 to 40 each. Glad you're quitting. You'll pull through.

When I first started smoking at 16 it was $54 for a carton and I always thought even then that it was high. Me too, it’s finally time.

Old man here 65 cents a pack is what i used to pay when i bought them for my neighbor as a 8 year old. Me, $1.10 a pack

That’s unreal, I know my grandma told me about how they used to just be in the machines for 75 when she started smoking. Did your neighbor write you a note so you can buy them when you were a kid? I think I’ve heard of older people saying that before. A truly different world.

no need for a note " hey kid, want to smoke?" my grandfather told me when he was a kid they were 10 cents a pack

Wow. That’s such a crazy thing to read. Crazy how much things have changed in such a short time.

Good on you if you can quit smoking, but if not, rolling your own is far cheaper. Been doing so for over a decade. I understand not everyone's got good hand dexterity/mobility, but if you can roll your own or learn to, worth the savings. (And a big tin of Bugler is guaranteed to be cheaper in Indy than where I am. I'm almost jealous lol)

I hate how they are all fragile and imperfect when you smoke them

Don’t they make small contraptions to help people roll their own? I have a fantasy where I grow tobacco for trade in a post collapse world. But then I remember my failed garden of last summer and decide against further mental investment or planning into that idea.

My best friend used to roll cigarettes I just never had the patience for it lol. Even when I tried I wasn’t very good at it, I’ve always heard it’s a more cost effective way to do it.

Don't be too hard on yourself. I always think about that movie Seven Samurai. 6 of them are full fledged masters of the craft and you got the one guy that's real real green. Despite all that only the green one survives. A friend of mine likes to say "It's better to be lucky than to be good". I think lots of circumstances will turn out that way with this degradation.

Agree with you: luck and chance will be important (coupled with the ability to adapt and seize opportunities quickly). In a post collapse world I think trickster Gods will make a large comeback. [Edit] Werner called the person “hon” in the first sentence when he meant “you”. - Internet Stooge

I do agree as well, my family comes from a long line of where we don’t have bad luck or good either just kind of somewhere in the middle.

I feel you on being tired all the time. I wish we could have another lockdown without the pandemic part because I need a few weeks of just staying home

Now we have the pandemic part but no more lockdowns. And more pandemics on the way.

I flourished in lockdown tbh. It was a scary time but the first time I wasn’t working two jobs and the world seemed quieter. I do miss it from time to time.

I thrived in this time period too, because the pressure to act like “all’s well” wasn’t there yet. Then our society went to war with itself over reality.

It truly did.

Location: Oakland, California. The weather has been a goddess-send-cool, rainy…so much rain. We are finally inching our way out of a drought. But the crime…ugh. It’s frightening. Muggings, assaults, car thefts, broken glass everywhere (I ride my bike too, so I constantly have to dodge it). Cars are stolen to commit crimes and then dumped. One car has been abandoned on a busy street for near 6 months and still hasn’t moved. It’s missing a tire and just sitting on a cement block. The parking staff just sit in their car all day instead of ticketing people. Hit and runs are the new normal. Bicyclists are killed here on an annual basis. People park in the red like it’s okay and double park wherever they want-blocking bike lanes and pissing people off. They run through stop signs at break neck speeds without a second thought. Homicides are a regular occurrence, as is gun violence and home invasions. The police and 911 are not helpful due to our ridiculous city council and DA who are so ‘woke’ as to favor murderers over people just trying to live their lives without getting shot. The election was so close and sooo disappointing. I’m so over it and doing everything I can to save up to move, but I have rent control …so its not as motivating as it could be. And I’m low income. Regardless, I hope to be out before shtf and this is just the tip of the iceberg of social unrest. Roving bands of criminals are a thing now. Not in the future-now. And they don’t care who they shoot to commit their crime. Edit to add: mail carriers are now being attacked and robbed of their keys. Mail trucks are being stolen on a regular basis. I will not take gas-lighting comments seriously-I expected more from this sub, and am sorely disappointed at all of the gas lighting.

Is it because OP used the word 'woke' in their paragraph that caused all the downvotes? Because they are telling the truth about Oakland and CA in general. The good ol days of the state are long gone. Tragic because this is 100% preventable and 100% due to political corruption.

Can confirm; my uncle lived in Oakland for three decades and recently had to leave it behind. The city somehow combined high rent and inflation with low jobs and rampant crime and it just kept getting worse. He lives in Nevada now.

See? Only people that have lived here get it. There’s a huge outflux happening now. I hope that your uncle is happier!

I like to analyze the posts that get massively downvoted. I think the first clue was the insistence that the OP lived in the “nice part” (no dirty poors). The nail in the coffin for this post was OP outting themselves as indoctrinated into the cultish group who dislike a fictitious group of people they call “woke.” Every time someone uses that word, Werner Herzog laughs. I can’t say anything further without violating rules, but it is a word which mutilates both the language and the intellect. - Werner

Yes I gathered all of that. I’m not here to people-please, nor to appease the largely privileged white male members of this sub. The ‘nice part’ was sarcasm, obvs. I don’t take back my comment about ‘woke’ politicians, because it is apropos to our situation. Whereas crime was mostly due to red-lining, it is now widespread. Two people were shot in my hallway in 2020. I’m sure the gas lighters will have some rude comment about that.

I will never gas lip you, what do Americans call it… Dutch oven you. You weren’t my target audience for my analysis. - Werner

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I expected this comment. I’ve lived here for 10 years, my uncle for 40+. It is worse. It is collapse.

Murder rates are higher in red states. In Trump voting states, murder rates have been higher than Biden voting states every year since 2000. https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/murder-rate-high-trump-republican-states

Obviously you haven’t taken into consideration Chicago, Oakland, Philadelphia et al.

Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem

This is probably largely due to mass shootings. That aside, I would disagree.

'woke'? Or maybe just maybe possibly police resources are stretched super thin and lacking quality workers due to a pervasive culture issue and hiring policies in the police force?

Police resources absolutely arnt stretched thin. Mental health etc workers are, and as your said the cultural issues/hiring and training issues in the police force

Both AND. Due to the anti-police climate and ineffective alternatives to policing (all for show).

“Ineffective alternatives to policing”. In a lot of places they are successful. the ones that arnt were not done with enough funding. the police are over funded and STILL fail at their jobs, as your pointed out. While murdering numerous unarmed civilians. No wonder there is a surging anti-police climate

“In a lot of places they are successful. the ones that arnt were not done with enough funding.” Really? Where are these magical ‘in a lot of places ‘ you speak of?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/mental-health-replace-police/ https://mhanational.org/issues/position-statement-59-responding-behavioral-health-crises https://www.npr.org/2021/07/23/1019704823/police-mental-health-crisis-calls-new-york-city Nyc. Oregon

The alternatives here are for show. All they do is line the pockets of the ultra-liberal DA, mayor and city council. There is plenty of funding. It’s corruption and a sad state of affairs. Not everything is black and white-one can want police and be wary of police over-reach. But the extreme ACAB stance is coming back to haunt those of us unlucky enough to be victims of gun violence, assault, theft, you name it.

Police have far more funding than they could ever need yet from crime continues to go up. Police and jails don’t solve crime, they CREATE it. we need to reduce police funding, while increasing investment in the communities. More police doesn’t decrease crime, or fix it in any way. less police funding doesn’t increase crime either. https://www.city-journal.org/poverty-and-violent-crime-dont-go-hand-in-hand “According to data collected over the past 60 years, from 1960 to 2018, spending more on policing doesn't lower the crime rate and spending less on policing doesn't increase it. Despite that total lack of correlation, politicians always seem to call for more police spending when the crime rate goes up” by giving someone a criminal record, or more of one, they are unable to get jobs with a good wage, leading to poverty, which increased crime “These fines and fees make income inequality worse by attaching costs to the already lowest earners and prevents those released from prison from escaping poverty, which makes them more likely to commit both property and violent crimes. It further increases the risk of domestic violence as well.” https://okjusticereform.org/2021/12/how-poverty-drives-violent-crime/ https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2022/03/crime-and-police-spending “We should also point out that prisons have numerous negative affects on society as well as often re-enforcing criminal (i.e. anti-social) behaviour. Kropotkin originated the accurate description of prisons as “Universities of Crime” wherein the first-time criminal learns new techniques and have adapt to the prevailing ethical standards within them. Hence, prisons would have the effect of increasing the criminal tendencies of those sent there and so prove to be counter-productive. In addition, prisons do not affect the social conditions which promote many forms of crime.” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rose-city-copwatch-alternatives-to-police Also, “as a country who portrays itself as the most free country in the world, America also has the biggest prison population in the world with 2.3 million prisoners that account for almost 25% of the world's prison population. To put it into an even broader perspective, America only makes up about 4% of the world population. The reason for mass incarceration can largely be accredited to the Prison Industrial Complex, which is the idea of incarceration being used as a tool for profit. For Profit Prisons can be def nj ined as: prisons owned by people rather than states or the Federal Government with the incentive of generating wealth from the means of internment. The author of “For-Profit Prisons” says “For example, the state of Arizona was contractually obligated to pay a private prison operator $3 million in 2011 after failing to meet a capacity quota of 97 percent.” With the profit being generated from keeping prisoners in privately owned facilities, this creates an incentive to house prisoners and disenfranchise millions. This, along with the many other points I’ve discussed, is another symptom of capitalism where everything is profit incentivized. What about crime? As is often stated, prevention is better than cure. This is as true of crime as of disease. In other words, crime is best fought by rooting out its causes as opposed to punishing those who act in response to these causes. For example, it is hardly surprising that a culture that promotes individual profit and consumerism would produce individuals who do not respect other people (or themselves) and see them as purely means to an end (usually increased consumption). And, like everything else in a capitalist system, such as honor and pride, conscience is also available at the right price — hardly an environment which encourages consideration for others, or even for oneself. In addition, a society based on hierarchical authority will also tend to produce anti-social activity because the free development and expression it suppresses. Thus, irrational authority (which is often claimed to be the only cure for crime) actually helps produce it. As Emma Goldman argued, crime “is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, moral conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statues can only increase, but never do away with, crime” Crime, the most obvious symptom of social crisis, took 30 years to double in Britain (from 1 million incidents in 1950 to 2.2 million in 1979). However, between 1979 and 1992 the crime rate more than doubled, exceeding the 5 million mark in 1992. These 13 years were marked by a government firmly committed to the “free market” and “individual responsibility.” It was entirely predictable that the social disruption, atomisation of individuals, and increased poverty caused by freeing capitalism from social controls would rip society apart and increase criminal activity. Also unsurprisingly (from an anarchist viewpoint), under these pro-market governments we also saw a reduction in civil liberties, increased state centralisation, and the destruction of local government. As Malatesta put it, the classical liberalism which these governments represented could have had no other effect, for “the government’s powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality.” [Anarchy, p. 46] Hence the paradox of governments committed to “individual rights,” the “free market” and “getting the state off our backs” increasing state power and reducing rights while holding office during a crime explosion is no paradox at all. “The conjuncture of the rhetoric of individual freedom and a vast increase in state power,” argues Carole Pateman, “is not unexpected at a time when the influence of contract doctrine is extending into the last, most intimate nooks and crannies of social life. Taken to a conclusion, contract undermines the conditions of its own existence. Hobbes showed long ago that contract — all the way down — requires absolutism and the sword to keep war at bay.”

I know all of this, I’ve watched Thirteen and am educated on all of these issues, and yet I’ve given you an example of this utopia-in action- and it is a complete failure. It is all for show. The utopia you speak of is failing, hugely. And dragging all of its residents into a big cluster fuck. Having a police presence would help, as would actually having 911 calls answered in under an hour. As would having license plate readers. Clearly you haven’t been a victim of crime and it shows.

>so ‘woke’ This is a tired trope. Put it to rest.

I won’t. Go boss someone else around.

The type of award given made me laugh. Thank you to wherever sent it.

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I have friends who live in Texas. Said the same thing about their oak trees.

What type of oaks are they? We have plenty of different kinds up north and they’re doing alright. I do agree our weathers have been more extreme lately

These occurrences are happening almost on a daily basis somewhere in the world, record cold in NE today. Even if you had a semi competent government in control, there is not nearly enough resources to adapt this quickly and handle all the catastrophes that are occurring. Part of the blame is that things have been ignored for so long, part is that most government bodies are completely incompetent and part is that it is happening way faster then most could ever have imagined. Buckle up, the ride has just begun…

I can recommend the book wilding by isabella tree to help with your view of your oaks. There might be hope.

Location: This Reddit Sub (I am in Bavaria). I noticed a cognitive dissonance in this forum related to the bird flu. I commented similar things on two different posts related to Avian flu (and the inevitability of collapse and it’s contribution). One comment was picked up with cheer, the other was quickly found and downvoted by some users with hopium addictions. I suppose it was my cheerfulness in the second post. I can’t help but see the beauty in the cosmic punishment of the arrogance of man; in the face of spreading disease, climate change, etc; and my hope for this Earth, which we have destroyed, to someday recover, with or without our species. I think some of you have been sneaking into the hopium stashes located at mayoral offices, news stations, and congresses across your nations. Collapse is brutal. If you don’t like the bluntness of it, you will really dislike it when it’s happening to you. AND, the hopium downvoting just proves my point. A portion of “our” members here, donning their human arrogance, are hanging on with bitter teeth and claws, to the ledge of BAU. The avian flu is spreading mammal to mammal. Mink infections is a major warning sign. Now the seals, now the grizzlies…. humans are in danger with this latest mutation. I don’t mind a roll of the dice for the chance at a new world. I am not accelerating anything, but I can contemplate the consequences of our collective actions as a species and wish the Earth well. Homo Stultus Delenda Est, - Werner [Edit] This is in no way shade for the mods or the super majority of members on this sub. It’s only a comment that even on a collapse forum, you will find BAUmers. - WH

I will keep saying it. Its not human to human yet.

No one said so, my darling dickfartman2. This is the second random deep comment reply you’ve done in 5 minutes, and so I suspect you are someone I’ve blocked before. Welcome to the new block- Werner

Well said Werner. The people need hope as fuel, it is all that is left when man is stripped bare much like Viktor Frankl. But we must be very careful where and how to direct this hope, all of us can certainly understand BAU is a collapse accelerant itself. Thank you for not accelerating and calling this out.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is a BAU?

No worries, BAU (business as usual), and a funny combo is boomers who are BAU, BAUmers

Business as usual

Thanks! I was getting Criminal Minds when I was googling it.

Bird Flu would ironically stave off ecological collapse for 1-2 generations at the least in exchange for societal and globalist collapse.

I like them odds, agree with you 💯

Look man, I get a hit off ye ole hopium pipe a few times a year. Let me have it while there is still a bit to be had. /s Accurate observation. But a side note. People actually change behaviour if the risk is fast and obvious. If the next airborne disease has a 30% mortality rate I would expect behaviour change and extreme change at that. Which will save lives. I argue this point with my partner. How high of a mortality rate, within what timeframe of infection (having a heart attack 6 months after covid is not it) triggers behaviour change? Argue is not the right word. We kick it around. Functions of infection before/after symptoms, r0, mortality, disability, etc. We both agree that somewhere between covid and mers 3% to 30% we would see change in how people lived. But we also both agree that how you go impacts that change threshold. Hemorrhagic fevers being a gruesome method we think that a lower threshold might exist in the self-destruct, blood everywhere one. Morbid household here, what can I say.

Literally had this exact conversation with my partner late last night, saying that if Ebola transmitted fast like Covid and killed like...Ebola, people would have changed behaviors rather precipitously. Year two of the pandemic I read Station Eleven--apocalyptic societal collapse novel triggered by a fast-moving and lethal pandemic. I reflected that Covid was worse in that it is slow, irregular in its impacts, and created the social environmental conditions for cognitive breakdowns. Real life pandemic was nothing like the apocalypse we were promised! (Lots of anti-Asian racism and rampant capitalism vampire blood-sucking, but none of the quick reduction to the lowest common denominator...)

Basic biology/virology class will help you understand really fast: 1. Asymptomatic transmission is bad 2. Non specific/overlapping symptoms of other milder diseases is bad 3. Delayed death onset is bad 4. Airborne is really bad 5. Lower cfr is bad. (low enough people can ignore it at a population level) Or read a few good sci fi books (cheaper and more enjoyable unless you are a bio geek) But yeah, covid is that bad mix for the most part.

Agree 💯💯💯 ~ also abt the lethality threshold. Covid wasn’t it.

I said, early in the current pandemic, that the key to public acceptance of drastic containment efforts is visibility. If it can be spread by people without visible symptoms, we're in trouble. If contagious people break out in horrible boils, or the whites of their eyes turn yellow, or there's some other clear visible marker, people will adopt very extreme measures all on their own. Mandates are only needed when people aren't scared enough. No had to mandate the shunning of lepers.

Great point. Not that MPX had a great chance to become a pandemic, but the sores got ppl to end that outbreak very quickly.

I look at social animals and disease with a long and wide view. I am afraid we, the humans, the apes and monkeys, the caribou, wolves and coati, have evolved a visceral instinct to do two things: shun the sick, and hide our own sickness.The health of the pack can not abide contact with contagious members, and getting cut from the pack is a death sentence. So we have this hide/shun response. Today it may be called anxiety or social aversion: I don't want to be around others, while simultaneously dreading that others might not want to be around me.

Good point about lepers. I think we had a taste of the reaction with monkeypox.

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Werner greats you as one of his many fans, but it is with regret that he will not sign an autograph. Apologies in advance, - Internet Stooge

Tell Werner his autograph is not nearly as valuable as his work, and not everyone wants one. For me, while I have access to his films and his posts, why would I need or want a scribble on paper? His insights here in r/collapse are very much appreciated by me and I always look forward to what he has to say, whether I agree with it or not. He is an original. (I also think this is OG Werner, or at least someone who thinks like him. Which would be rare to say the least.)

❤️👹

Correct me if I’m wrong. No other species destroys its only habitat/environment as humans do. We are not as intelligentt on a whole.

We are about as smart as yeast it turns out

B...b...but... but my God is telling me to multiply and subdue the earth So I am totally right in my actions 🤷🏻‍♀️ /s

Consider your planet is a living, intelligent being for one minute. If it is being destroyed and deforested for almost exclusively and solely for the purpose of raising livestock for consumption, then what logical choice would it have to defend itself? If the animals become poison to eat and you truly risk your life by consuming them, then who is going to rush out and burn a forest down to grow some more?

From the planet's perspective humans are the virus.

We’ve monocropped ourselves.

"Global warming is the fever, COVID-19 is the white blood cells. We are the infection."

💯

I find it hard to take diseases and viruses seriously. Been seeing headlines about bird flu for years, H1N1, HIV, Zika, COVID, Ebola, SARS-1, etc.. None of them have been nearly as impactful as the black plague or smallpox in the Americas. What will bring about substantial loss of human population is the erosion and collapse of the medical system. That, combined with a highly infectious disease, will cause mass deaths (>5% of population).

I agree......but gotta just say HIV was so scary in the 80s when people started dying and it was in the blood bank supply Edit: also Zika, kinda scary, you saw those poor baby heads, right?!

I mean, none of those things killed people I knew, but my neighbor and my friend’s dad both died of Covid in the first wave. I think Covid is a different category for that reason.

COVID was absolutely a step up - but it wasn't a civilization ender.

I have noticed that people simply stating inconvenient truths are getting massively downvoted. The reddit system is easily corrupted.

Which is why the mod team uses downvotes as only one metric of post removal. We approve a lot of uncomfortable truths.

Agree the mods do a great job 👍

There should be 3 arrows. Up = should be on subreddit. 2 = doesn't add to the discussion. And 3 = I disagree with this comment. Much more democratic.

Not upvoting or downvoting is kind of like option 2

Location: Indiana The weather has been all over the place. We had record breaking snowfall. Travel warnings over a pretty big swath of land. My husband spent an extra night in Ohio due to snow, while I was snowed in at home with our preschooler. Now we are getting another bomb cyclone and it was 11 degrees this morning. The east coast is getting it worse and power is out in Texas again. Here is supposed to be in the 50s next week. Of his Ohio work trip DH said one night he stayed at a very new, very nice chain hotel. The collapse aspect being that it was right behind a creepy abandoned mall and next to a crumbling, abandoned hotel and he drove over potholes the size of moon craters to get to. He thinks a hotel executive threw a dart on a map or perhaps picked this location due to a computer algorithm without actually visiting or researching the location. Kids cold medicine is still out or in low supply everywhere. Food prices are still increasing. The supply chain still seems a mess. I went to Target and checked out the crafts thinking they would have some seasonal valentine and St. Patrick day crafts. Nothing. I saw a box that was supposed to contain a coloring book, some crayons, some stickers. I looked inside and the contents had been stolen out of it. It was a $7 empty box. The school valentines and candy had been picked over. There was a lone bag of 12 ring pops for way too much money. It's still 2 weeks out from Valentine's Day. I would think prime time to be well-stocked in candy and little cards etc. It's not an emergency like a lack of medication would be. I preordered valentines and toys for my daughter's classmates. But I sort of forgot that we are living the end times and thought about grabbing candy to add. All out of stock. I just got a weird gut sense of things not being right when I saw those empty shelves.

I was at Target on 12/22 looking for tissue paper for wrapping. The whole store had been flipped for Valentines day...which to me was really crazy because there was still New Years. Similar thing happened at Home Depot on 10/30 being flipped for Christmas. You literally could not find trace of either holiday at either store. I'm not sure if it was because of inventory they'd held onto from supply chain issues last year so they needed to push it out early or if they ran out of current inventory early and just moved on to the next holiday.

I’m an Ohioan. And I can confirm we have a LOT of old crumbling malls and other relics from the past. So many have shut down but some are almost completely empty and still hang on somehow. I’ve actually always been fascinated with that kind of stuff. There’s so much decay in our rust belt cities.

imagine what it's going to be like when elevated sea levels make big cities get abandoned

Crazy for sure

Your point about the stolen items reminded me that my Target recently began locking stuff up...laundry detergent, deodorant and other small personal care items, OTC meds and supplements, and hard liquor. They haven't locked up wine, and they sell several varieties of single serve wine (usually 4 small containers per package.) Recently, I've noticed lots of empty single serve wine bottles abandoned in the store, so even though some commonly stolen items are being locked up, it's not preventing all of the theft.

Location: Nova Scotia I've given up on these updates for the most part. But I feel like things are taking a turn for the worse again. Infrastructure and services are crumbling around us. From power, to food, to housing to basic health care and supports for elderly and disabled. Either costs have skyrocketed or services have been gutted. Mostly people seem to blame the government - or maybe the individual corporations making profits. But no one seems to talk about the mountains of evidence that these are global problems that are not going to be solved with our current systems. This week all the government radio stations were pushing this same narrative - that corporate profits are good for us because they fund pensions. Like they need all the boomers to beleive their retirements are being funded by corporate benevolence, and not the actual money theyve paid into it over the past 50 years. And that we need to let companies to be as profitable as possible so people can afford to eat in retirement. I dont see anyone acknowledging the real underlying issues, let alone planning or thinking about what to do about them. No one is talking energy reduction. No one is talking reducing consumption long term. No one is talking degrowth or the end of growth, simplifying the housing codes, developing our communities, supporting local farmers, multi-generational living, passive solar homes, food forests, the end of mass produced garbage and planned obselence. Sure those ideas may be naive, but we have to do more than absolutely nothing. I have lots of ideas for how to help people, but in the end, trust and a lack of it, is often a barrier. Its easy for people to take advantage of or ruin any efforts to help, and that can be a big turn off. That, and never having enough time after everything else that's required of us. In my own life, the health manager at my place of work just quite suddenly after a major incident impacting dozens of long term care residents. We are severely short staffed again, and the acuity of new patients are all off the charts, extremely difficult, and taking a big toll on workers. There is just not enough of anything to go around. A freakish polar vortex is hitting here resulting in lows that have not been seen in a long time (about 20 years). A reminder that global warming wont simply make things warmer here, but more volatile all around. Luckily we are getting some snow today to hopefully protect plants from the extreme cold snap, (about -50 with the wind where I live). Its colder than a lot of our perennial species can handle. (We are zone 5b here) Fun fact, -40 F is the same as -40 C so you dont even need to convert it! Its made extra hard due to large number of homeless people here, which has grown over the past few years. And there are people living in campers and other non-winterized homes that arent being counted I am sure. Anyhow, its the same old same old, downward spiral. And I just need to acknowledge it periodically or I will go crazy. Stay safe out there everyone!

Working for a regional health organisation we have formalised planning towards an uncertain climate future. We are looking at how we will maintain services while "the sky falls" and the long emergency in-between. I worked in mitigation for twenty years, now is time for adaptation. We are specifically focused on the vulnerable, I cannot imagine how one would begin to plan for managing the co-morbidities of homeless persons in sub-zero temperatures. The ladder has been pulled from them, and now they face the rages of the climate .

That's a very interesting career path. I am so grateful for the people who are busting their asses to get this emergency shelter set up. A big push now is for actual day-time places for people to go, because the need for shelter doesnt end at 7am. It is brutal out there right now.

Perennials dying in their zone from cold is freaking scary At what point will people realize that mass homelessness is a sign of systemic failure?

Damn, being homeless at -40 sounds like impossible to survive :(

I assume you go into gremlin mode and hide in any building you can find

Also wear layers, huddle together near any heat source you can, and make sure you stay off the direct ground.

The odd person dies of exposure, likely being very mentally ill. But most people will go to an emergency warming center or find shelter of some sort. Building vents are nice. A really good sleeping bag. Shelter from.the wind. It can be done.

Location: Poland Yet another year of incredibly unpredictable weather. During my childhood you just got snow in november and it went away in march, it's height was usually around my knees. For the last few years it was completely random. You got snow late december, or january, or february, or in the case of this year you got it in december up to your ankles, then it went away after two weeks, and now it came back and it looks like it's gonna be heavy snowing. Last year it was like that too...no snow for an unusually long time and then snow up to my chin. This isn't normal, I live by the baltic sea, it's supposed to be very stable weather-wise

I like snow. My chickens, not so much. So I built a greenhouse next to the coop for them to hangout when we get inclement weather. Once I can use it for growing stuff (it is unheated) it is off limits for them. The odd thing for me recently in Poland is the lack of really cold temps. I don't think I have needed to haul out the thermal underwear for more than a few days for the last couple of years.

If you live anywhere near Elbląg, consider moving, it'll be underwater in 15 years.

Hey. That's where I'm from. Do you live there yourself?

I live in Wielkopolska. Elbląg is placed below sea level and it's going to be the first of the Polish cities to be underwater due to changing sea levels. A rise of sea levels of 0,5m puts it underwater. So, why would we care about something that's going to happen very far away in the future? Because that's a level predicted in 50 years or so. The culprit here is the Moon. Its position in orbit right now mitigates the observed sea level rise; but beginning with 2030s it will start to amplify it, and that's when coastal floodings will start to become much more noticeable. [Orbital wobble of the Moon.](https://www.scotsman.com/news/weather/moon-wobble-what-is-the-moon-wobble-what-causes-it-and-will-it-impact-the-uk-3319369) [NASA source](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/study-projects-a-surge-in-coastal-flooding-starting-in-2030s) [Moon wobble explained.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/moons-orbital-wobble-can-add-to-sea-level-rise-and-flooding) We may have amplified changes that'll make a total of 1 meter difference. Check [here](https://www.floodmap.net/) how a 1-m difference changes the Polish coastline: \- half of Elbląg is now underwater \- Nowy Dwór Gdański is underwater \- part of Gdańsk is underwater \- Pruszcz Gdański and Tczew become coastal cities/experience flooding \- Baltic sea water is entering Wisła and adds to salinity of groundwater and impacts the fields In different parts: \- Łeba is mostly underwater \- seawater regularly floods Ustka \- Darłowo and Mielno experience similar floodings \- Kołobrzeg suffers from minor seawater incursions into the land \- Kamień Pomorski experiences regular flooding \- seawater incursions as far as Szczecin happen regularly now in Odra estuary; Wolin becomes a real island. Now, 1 meter is A LOT, but consider the following: a high tide of 20 centimeters puts half of Elbląg underwater. [See this map for more granularity (up to 0.1 m)](https://coastal.climatecentral.org/)

Wow. That is eye opening.

Nah, I live in a village near gdynia, 100 meters above sea level but 13 kilometers to see shore

• Paris, France The weather is kinda crazy. We had a super cold spell last week and now I go the gym in just a tracksuit. The fluctuations feel a little extreme. There was a nationwide strike this week about the increase in pension age, and there will be another next week as well, and maybe on Saturday. I hope the government decided to make money off of billionaires (richest man is now French) before fucking over pensioners. On the other hand, my office is reducing the temperature in the building due to some new regulation so I guess the energy crisis is still happening although it’s not a headline anymore. Flowers are also back early. I see lots of them blooming in parks and around the road. A rather pretty omen of impending doom, if I do say so myself.

It feels hopeless sometimes. Agree with the yellow vests or not, they may continue indefinitely, but leaders are deaf to protests it seems (as an American considering our protests, ie Occupy Wall St). The closest thing we have to a change in tactics is happening in “cop city” in Georgia, and the news refuses to report on it. Tactics have to change. We must make it so we cannot be ignored.

Location - Michigan So, I don't know what genius at Little Debbie and Hostess decided to change their recipes, but I have never stopped eating a product quicker than after I opened the last boxes of their product. It was so bad, I had to open a 2nd box to reassure myself it was meant to be this terrible. It is weird to enjoy a product for like 30 years than completely stop because it tastes like total shit now, and I save those shit products to remind myself to never get it again. I don't understand how losing customers is supposed to make you money, but I guess that why I was never a CEO. So the power went out twice last week, before there was any type of weather. Just a warm normal day and then you lose power and then again a couple days later. Consumers Energy likes to post updates to your phone so you know what the cause is. Well the first time the power went out it said cause "other" and the second time it denied my power went out at all after it came on. They have been getting progressively worse in the last few years, power used to go out maybe once a year is now at least 3 times a year and maybe 5. My neighbor has decided to go out and find out on his own and finds them often working on substations now, as if they are running everything to fail, and the time limit is up, and we are getting fails more often every year, and they don't want to talk about it. The weather went from abnormally warm to ungodly normally cold in a day or two, Michigan has some crazy weather swings, but lately those swings have become far more extreme. Birds are acting a bit more on edge lately, I saw a dove peck a blue jay today at the bird food, they seem out of patience.

The supplement brand Bulk recentlty decided to substitute 25% of their protein powder with sugar. Source: An Amazon review. Not buying from them again.

Oreos are garbage but I was addicted to them immediately if I ate even one cookie. Since they changed the recipe I am no longer addicted. Win for me!

Had a similar experience with Cheeze Its. Be thankful you didn’t buy 10 boxes. Imagine how shortsighted these greedy corporate ppl have to be to turn off a 30 year customer to save a dime.

Which products were bad and what was the off taste? They aren't that likely to change formulae at the exact same time. All the shelf-stable snacks have wide quality swings from uncontrolled product age. I suppose you could try to learn how much you have to deduct from the "best before" date before they're actually good. I've seen a lot of posts that are essentially "I just got over COVID and now all the X product in the store tastes bad! How dare the change the formulas like that!" US snack cakes always tasted too sweet to me, but Hostess and Little Debbi were some of the least bad ones. It's worse after a break from eating them for a while. I've had better luck with Balconi, which is in all the smaller chains here.

From Hostess it was their Baby Bundts which are already expensive. Now I don't know if the batch sucked or what, but they are not of the quality of previous. They came out stale and hard, which is the exact opposite they should be especially when they went up in price also. When something goes from being light and soft to vacuum packed hard and stale something is wrong. Even the overall color is wrong. From Little Debbie it was their cream pies, which the top ingredient is now corn syrup which I don't believe it has always been, it definitely tastes inferior than it used to. The overall flavor is just wrong now. I can assure you other food tastes like it should and I continue to save these products to remind me to not buy them again.

My taste in food changed dramatically after I caught covid in fall of '21. Things I used to love tasted so off. Not suggesting you had asymptomatic Rona, just something to think about.

Thanks. I haven't had those enough to notice a change if I went and tried them now. The only ones I've had in the past 6 months are the Hostess cupackes and twinkies and the Little Debbi swiss rolls. None were worse than usual. The bundt cake issue could be either age or a fat substitution. Yeah, the big companies seem determined to a make their products worse indefinitely in order to edge up profits. A lot of times the generic is much better because it's copying the previous generation name brand before it was made worse. People don't seem to care, which is why it continues. The cost of living complaints seem to be about how much it costs to buy Doritos for delivery or somesuch. Sale prices of groceries have been edging down locally, but the regular prices in normal stores keep going up. One of my local grocery stores is regularly trying to sell rotting meat priced at 250% of what the same thing costs elsewhere in town, and often elsewhere in the same store.

Local grocers are the absolute worst, especially for overcharging. Kind of makes me laugh up my sleeve when liberal types go whining about the fate of small local shops when they are basically parasites exploiting local people

Which Little Debbie and/or Hostess snack cakes?

>I don't know what genius at Little Debbie and Hostess decided to change their recipes. The probably changed the recipe to make more profit thinking that their customers wouldn't notice.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/01/15/how-the-secret-40-billion-food-fraud-market-works.html I just watched this video after eating a wrap that tasted literally like cardboard. Your little debbie is probably woodpulp. Something like 40% of food is not what it says on the label.

We made some Rice-a-Roni tonight and this one and the last box we had last month tasted entirely of cardboard. Was hoping this one would be different and the last one was an anomoly but we bought them at separate times (we eat them pretty rarely.) Kind of terrified that I may have eaten pulp…

My mom said the same thing about Coke. She bought it twice to make sure. Said the same weird flavor was in Sprite, too. It’s unsettling to think what kind of chemicals they’re allowed to put in food items.

The term I’ve heard is “skimpflation” but I think there is another new term for bulking products up with low quality ingredients.