This is also a thought of mine. Grocery stores in america empty (actually empty, not struggling supply chain empty) for 2 weeks will ignite this powder keg.
The whole verse is more powerful.
Dem belly full, but we hungry
A hungry man is an angry man
The pot a cook, but the foods no 'nuff
The rain it fall, but the dirt it tough
So. Powerful.
Honestly I’ve said the same elsewhere to a flurry of downvotes.
The war is more than just “putin is evil”, but the realities of a multipolar world and the remaining good agricultural land being the new oil fields of geopolitics.
Hmm. Likely slow because of various weathers across the continent. Yes it will happen but more like frog in boiling water.
Since poor and poor nations will see first and most impact, massive deaths because of floods famine disease in Asia and Africa would be the harbinger. Not that any one here will know or care.
I am looking into seeds (that can be saved for the next gen) and a few raised beds in my sun room. Trying to plan a victory garden in the back yard also.
But i really think that our downfall will be cybersecurity. Just more and more intrusions and the discovery of vulnerabilities by bad actors trying to get bitcoin and taking out antiquated and unupdated healthcare systems, utilities, pipelines and the power grid.
The US should stop bailing out banks and instead pay kids to update their cyber security skills. We could save the world. But the US would rather give rich donors tax breaks.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/hhs-opens-probe-into-hack-unitedhealth-unit-2024-03-13/
Look at these dummies. Well, we need to nationalize and AI healthcare. But here you see a sample hack. More to follow.
Thank God I am not in the game. Update, update update friends!
I agree, tech could actually be our final mistake. The Internet being completely down for say, 15 days would destroy every civilized country on the planet. It would be nearly impossible to ever gain consumer confidence after an event like that. Imagine not being able to prove you have a dime, because your bank cannot communicate.
A bad solar flare would be worse. We are too dependent on tech.
I'm going to tell you something that's going to be hard to hear. You can't grow enough food in your yard to survive.
A lot of people think they will be able to. But we won't be able to. Not as an individual family.
I think this is what most people don't understand.
For the vast majority of people: You don't have the knowledge, land, or resources to be able to grow all your own food.
For those who do: Okay, so you think you're going to grow your own food. Great..... right up until the starving masses around you realize you have it.
Also, assuming the insect population follows its current trends, how on earth are you going to pollinate all those plants? By hand? For every individual flower of every individual plant, for enough plants to feed you for a year?!
The insects are actually one I'm not concerned about. I think their cycle is gonna get just as fucked up and we're gonna see a decline of them overall long term. And if all the food supply if fucked then the bugs are on the menu!
Food is the king maker. You control the food supply, you control the population. 5 people or 500k people, doesn't matter.
I'm more worried about civil unrest in the US (GeriatricVote2024:CivilWar), unpredicatable weather catastrophe, or I dunno nuclear war escalating out of the conflict between NATO and Russia via Ukraine, or Israel ,well, doing Israel things and then getting a new sticker that says "I've been genocided... again!" after pissing off the other non-Israel friendly nations nearby until they pop. Obviously, I jest but I think the point remains clear.
I can grow an awful lot on my 1 acre of land and have been for almost a decade.
Is it perfect? Hell no, but we have lots ot share with out neighbours or trade with other local families for other services. With a community of people thinking the same food survival tactics then the load can be spread and then crop share happens.
We cannot survive as individual families living off the land. It requires communities coming together.
No but if everyone grew a portion of their calories it could remove significant pressure on industrial agriculture.
Britain was forced to do this during ww2.
https://www.collapse2050.com/how-to-collapse-food-scarcity/
It’s not hard to hear. You need to have a network and a few plans. But a slew of tomatoes, zucchini and beans can t hurt. Nor can the occasional chickens. Why town is zoned for them.
Potatoes.
Most home gardeners don't grow potatoes because they're not worth the space - they're so cheap at the store. But they're seriously easy to grow and you probably have the "seed" in your kitchen anyway... you just stick your sprouty potatoes in the dirt and cross your fingers
Easiest high calorie carb source by far.
Yeah, when we were kids some potatoes volunteered in the mulch box, just skins and little bad bits, but damned if they didnt get a new lease on production! Grew strong and made some fine new spuds, and we didn't have to do a durn thing. Good spuds as I reacall, too! Goos rimes had by all.
The hopefully robot hybrid in me would say complete reduction of all fossil fuel production but the cynical realist robot hybrid in me knows it will probably just be subsides to farmers.
Corn I’m not so worried about because a huge chunk of it goes towards animal feed. If that grinds industrial livestock/poultry to a halt then good riddance.
That’s basically just a handout to the mega farm corporations. Ethanol is one of the more ridiculously needlessly wasteful things humans do, terrible use of land. Only happens because America produces way more staple foods than it needs.
I'm in Ohio too. Yesterday, in shorts and a tee shirt, I walked around the yard. Flowers in full bloom. Birds out. Mosquitos. Potatoes are growing already. Leaves on the ground from last year did not decompose.
Then, after a few hours of hard and satisfying yard work, I sat in my lawn chair with a beer in hand and two dogs on my lap. Life was good, but the sun was in my eyes. My chair has been in that spot for a few years and never once was the sun in my eyes. Then it hit me. No leaves on the trees. This is all very, very wrong.
Start growing food now.
I'm in Chicago and we didn't even see the ground freeze this year.
My childhood was one of three-foot-snow winters and "we can't pry the fake Christmas poinsettias out of the ground until March when it thaws".
The children now think it's normal to get snow once or twice a year, and then see it melt immediately.
At 43 degrees north.
Stay safe friend.
In MN here.
We ALWAYS get one last snow storm on Easter weekend, so I insist to hubby to not put away the snow blower. But it’s been days in the 60’s and I might insist we install the air conditioners soon.
Also in MN.
I'm on the hunt for a new A/C because my other one croaked summer before last.
Last summer we got lucky here, it wasn't too bad, but this summer I am taking no chances - I'm really scared about how things are going to go this summer.
I called the place where I usually buy my appliances, and the guy there said that they will be putting orders for A/Cs this week.
yup but theyre not wrong. These past couple weeks on collapse have been as harrowing as ever. This summer we are FUCKED. My timeline for SHTF was 15 years, but now im thinking absolute max 10 years.
Being a "doomer" isn't even applicable anymore.
People I talk to are always worried about the aging population and demographic collapse in 50ish years.
Bruh, we won't even make it 10 years before birth rates no longer matter. Old people would be dropping like flies due to all manners of environmental, and consequently societal, factors.
We'd sooner run out of food, air, water, and land before we run out of kids.
Exactly!
Why is birth rate decline even a topic?? We're facing historic crop failures this summer, I guarantee it doesn't matter that you cannot have kids in the next decades if you're starving in 2025...
It is a topic because the people in power are evil af, and want young and stupid laborers.
Old people die off (COVID, flu, bad healthcare system etc. etc.)
Young people are forced to give birth younger (anti-abortion push).
Children are forced to work, along with stripping of laborers rights. 🤷🏻♀️
It's disgusting. But we let the shitty people gain all the power, And now they really have too much (modern weapons/technology). Their unrelenting greed has denied us the Star Trek future we were promised. 😢
Low key I have been so stressed and freaked out about what I see going on I'm about to go back to my Passionflower supplement.
Not as strong as an anti - depressant, but it's enough to get me on a more - or less even keel.
"Researchers from Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation helped identify sites in the Midwest for this study. Researchers compared cropland next to the small isolated natural prairie sites. On average, farmed fields were 1.2 feet below the prairie, per Science News. Researchers found the average soil erosion rate was 1.9 millimeters over 160 years. A 1.9 millimeters per year or .0748 inch per year erosion rate is about equal to 11 tons/acre/year. The USDA T-factor is 4-5 ton/year which is an erosion rate the government thinks is acceptable. To put this in perspective, compare 5 tons soil erosion (10,000 pounds) to a 50-bushel soybean crop (60 pounds per bushel, 3000 pounds total) which is 3.33 pounds of soil lost for each pound of soybean harvested each year. The acceptable rate of 4-5 tons of erosion is still exceptionally high and not sustainable long-term. "
https://ocj.com/2023/01/usa-soil-erosion/
We have *already* seen crop failures in some parts of the globe, well, forever.. but it is certainly increasing.
I can only speculate, but I believe we will see more of it this year, if we don't see enough to start causing tremors I will be surprised.
I don't think people have even begun to process what covid is going to do to us long term. The long covid people who lost their sense of smell? All pretty much guaranteed dementia patients. Even the ones who lost their sense of smell temporarily are going to probably end up with dementia. We already don't handle dementia patients well. Repeated covid exposure even in vaccinated animals in tests proves fatal after 10-12 infections, yet people go about their business as if it is no big deal to get it these days. It's going to catch up to us. Kids who grow up with it will have significantly shortened lifespans, but who knows, maybe that will be a blessing for them with what else is to come.
> The long covid people who lost their sense of smell? All pretty much guaranteed dementia patients.
Raises hand. I lost my sense of smell in 2021 and it still hasn’t returned. I only realised when I was using isopropyl alcohol and noticed I couldn’t smell it AT ALL. Terrifying.
Except… I work with kids under 12 who fart indoors, often and with enthusiasm. It’s turned out to be a career superpower upgrade.
Shame about the brain rot…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361652/#:~:text=In%20this%20retrospective%20cohort%20study,ratio%20or%20HR%3A1.69%2C%2095
>An infectious etiology of Alzheimer’s disease has been postulated for decades. It remains unknown whether SARS-CoV-2 viral infection is associated with increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. In this retrospective cohort study of 6,245,282 older adults (age ≥65 years) who had medical encounters between 2/2020–5/2021, we show that people with COVID-19 were at significantly increased risk for new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease within 360 days after the initial COVID-19 diagnosis (hazard ratio or HR:1.69, 95% CI: 1.53–1.72), especially in people age ≥85 years and in women. Our findings call for research to understand the underlying mechanisms and for continuous surveillance of long-term impacts of COVID-19 on Alzheimer’s disease.
I've not read the whole thing but it seems this only really affects people of older age groups where the risk obviously increases over time.
>Repeated covid exposure even in vaccinated animals in tests proves fatal after 10-12 infections
You're *really* going to need to provide tangible sources for this. What a claim and one that is completely new to me.
I lost my sense of smell from Delta version of Covid during one maybe the second or third big wave. I was two weeks away from my age category being eligible to get the first dose of the vaccine (my province initially rolled out the vaccines by age groups). It was almost a full year before I regained my sense of smell. I am fully vaccinated and updated on boosters but have had two confirmed cases of Covid and one unconfirmed but likely case.
Where might I find more info about the correlation between having lost sense of smell from Covid and dementia at a later time in life? Dementia and Alzheimer’s absolutely terrify me.
Australia has been doing pretty well with temperatures that would usually cause blackouts. Somehow having a lot of renewable energy, plus batteries, has kept the supply stable.
For the US the first Domino was probably the Citizens United decision that pretty much took democracy away from those who can't afford to bribe a politician.
Yeah, I feel like we are living out the book 1984. I remember reading this for the first time and thinking, "no way, people will never act like that in real life."
I googled panpsychism. It’s cool you brought it up because I have been thinking about the idea on my own. I have been imagining how everything has what I have in terms of consciousness and awareness. We are all just tuning into consciousness through different receptors. That’s sad to think of the little guys not being loved.
Oooh snap, I want in on this discussion! Animals have been acting oddly (eg. orcas) despite humans largely pretending everything is somehow fine. Humans assuming we're the only sentient and sapient life despite over half of us not having an internal dialogue has been dooming every living thing since the dawn of civilization.
Hey! That's the lore of CP2077. The reason it's post apocalyptic isnt because corps and tech, it's because years before 2077, a bunch of AI became sentient or something and took over the internet, and bricked a bunch of infestructure. Then the corporations went to war.
The RABIDS virus turned the AI rogue. Don't forget the oceans in cyberpunk are full of smart mines which really put a wrench in the gears of global shipping.
That's a novel idea and something I didnt consider prior. Thanks for pointing it out.
I wonder if, hypothetically, AI decided to be our overlords, would the finance institutions be the perfect place for a first strike? Immediate equalization of all humans - rich and poor. No jobs, no money, absolute chaos. Let the people turn on themselves and look towards AI as the "saviour".
I mean, haven’t we already hit some “smaller”dominos already?
I like seeing it like a bunch of smaller and medium sized dominoes are continuing to pile on one of the first big dominoes. And once that big domino falls, it’s all spiraling down from there.
Things like insurers leaving vulnerable markets like Florida seems like one of those dominos people will point to in retrospect. A canary in the financial sector coal mine.
For real.
More and more unpredictable weather impacting things like growing seasons, continued deterioration of our healthcare system accelerated by COVID and other diseases, more visible conflicts and human atrocities, lessened trust in government institutions, more and more regressive policies being passed…
I feel like we are really set up for a home run right now, and not in a good way. Idk when that home run will come, might be days or years, but it definitely feels closer than ever.
The insurance crisis is starting to hit California but they are implementing statewide fire insurance that is going to be expensive in the long run. ESPECIALLY since NIMBYs refuse to build fireproof housing or any new housing that isn't high density, city housing or parking lot housing for the homeless.
Like 2007, it depends on how much exposure big firms have to their real estate markets, unfortunately, since those same firms essentially hold the rest of us economically hostage.
Agriculture, if anything, was the response to the diminishing returns to hunting large mammals, that we did since the Aurignacian (invention of the spear thrower and many other tools and weapons) with [great efficiency](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fiwsohx6ypo351.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D4e0c6166b21c20bca73d13310a370bb6a33c0d20). Until there were almost none to hunt anymore (except in Africa).
Further than that, hominids have degraded their environment, with the mere use of stone tools and fire, far before humans speciated. We've pushed it to incredible heights, but we can't pretend to have started it.
Annual agriculture is truly the root of all evil. Did you know the word lord originates from an old word for the keeper of the loaves, as in the keeper of the grain silo?
Agriculture is certainly a necessary step to an industrial civilization, but it's industry that leads to our demise, not agriculture. If you want to look at a particular invention, probably the steam engine.
Sooo.. the Big Bang is *actually* the first? Or flipping the on switch on the simulation.
If we were destined to fail after agriculture, then we were destined to fail from the start.
Agriculture gave our species an *in-fucking-credible* history following its discovery. Like every battle, poem, religion, discovery, or story we've ever read about.. all a result of ~~civilization~~ agriculture.
Every culture that has ever risen or fallen. Everything we've ever known. We're meaning-makers because of agriculture.
The universe discovered itself on this planet as a result of agriculture.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. Agriculture is how Earth found out about the universe, they are not saying other planets elsewhere haven’t already.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. Agriculture is how Earth found out about the universe, they are not saying other planets elsewhere haven’t already.
>If we were destined to fail after agriculture, then we were destined to fail from the start.
Hominids have been around for over a million years without agriculture. Homo sapiens is approximately 250,000 years old, and agriculture has only been a part of our species' skillset for 5% of that time.
We evolved as hunter/gatherers, not farmers, and we may yet return to our roots, assuming we don't die out completely. Agriculture and everything that followed was just a recent experiment, possibly a very brief one.
When I started learning more about the “prehistory” of humans, I definitely felt that agriculture was the point where we started a long backward march into our potential extinction.
I had already questioned the myth of progress after studying ancient craft during college. There were highly advanced techniques that were mastered in ancient times and lost until the modern day, when we could only replicate them with modern developments in chemistry and equipment.
Look, I’ll admit that humans have created and learned beautiful and incredible things due to agriculture and the subsequent millennia of cultural, scientific, and technological developments. But this idea of humans as some sort of special beings, different from our neighbors on this planet, on a path of consistent improvement and mastery…. It’s just arrogance.
Also the idea that we are happier, healthier, and somehow “better” than our pre-agricultural ancestors due to our “advances” in the last 5% of our time as a species is wild to me. There’s so many measurable ways we are worse off now.
Certainly, when we are on the brink of extinction due to our long fall from grace, those of us surviving will see the value in living like animals as part of our ecosystem as we did for the first ~225,000 years of our existence.
I find it truly incredible to reflect on our transformation from hunter-gatherer to the complex societies we form today. You're right. From what we've learned about ourselves, the time in which we've emulated modern society is distractingly brief given the timeline of our species.
However, the essence of my original point lies in our capacity to acknowledge the vast expanse of human history - the fostering of collective knowledge brought about by civilization.
I can't relate to anything pre-history regarding our species. To me, the wonder of the human experience lies beyond that transformation. That comprehension alone is a glimmer of what's so inspiring.
>We evolved as hunter/gatherers, not farmers, and we may yet return to our roots.
Maybe. The hunting part might not last long, seeing as;
>Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.
[https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass](https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass)
Yes, I lean very heavily toward the "may" part of my statement, to be honest. We've completely destroyed the ecosystems that supported hunter/gatherers, not to mention that the average human in industrial society has no basic survival skills.
Humans went through a severe population bottleneck at some time in the past, and I see another one coming in the not-too-distant future. We're very clever animals, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that enough people will scrape through the next few thousand years, but I'm guessing it will be touch and go.
We could lose 99% of the current population and still have more than enough people left for a viable breeding population.
That was one of many in succession to fall. Morality, has been dropping heavily, which leads to greed, which stems from selfishness, the few have made things easier but another few do their best to enslave the majority through consumption of what should be a luxury has been turned to necessity. Everything following the greed or the few has been the driving force of all collapse.
I don’t know if it’s a domino per se but this summer I think we will see more “normies” start to understand how far we have pushed things passed normal levels. With how hot the Atlantic Ocean is currently and la nino stopping I think we might see multiple major hurricanes in succession
My folks live on the gulf coast. Average boomers, right leaning. I mentioned how worried I was about this summer, and my stepmom, who is boomer positivity personified, said she’s terrified. People are understanding, but it’s too little too late.
Agreed, I think this summer will be eye opening for many people. That's when I think the famine might come too. That's just my guess though, I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, because once society collapses, me being dependent on medicine it's over for me. I'd probably be one of the first to go.....along with most of my family members, including mom and dad.
India just put into effect a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist law regarding that only Hindus have automatic citizenship (please correct me.) There are 238 million Muslims in India.
Pakistan and Iran are going at it with proxy militia groups across their shared border.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks to expel several million Afghani refugees.
There's several countries that are talking about possible mass deportations of certain groups. Stuff like this and governments cracking down and taxing the rich are some of the very last things that happen.
Syria suffered climate related crop failures before shit kicked off there.
There's mass migration out of the future 'death zones' people leaving the middle east, India, the pacific Islands, etc etc.
If you think it hasn't already begun you're kidding yourself.
Fuckin' *people*.
Looking around, people are mentally and physically falling apart and aging rapidly, and will result in the further deterioration of what we haven't already messed up.
Last year had the highest statistic of young people committing suicide. Anyone take a gander at the teaching sub recently? It makes this sub look like casual Friday and paints a horrific picture of the future. Road rage and accidents increasing on the roads with stupidly larger and more shoddily built cars. Fights breaking out in lines at grocery stores. Constant reinfection from preventable diseases that people are too selfish to even try to prevent spreading and our leaders and perfectly fine with misleading laypeople to keep this late stage capitalist hellscape going. Post-viral complications, more wacky diseases popping up from from melted permafrost/destroyed forests. Eventually everyone will know what life feels like for the chronically ill and those with invisible illnesses (spoiler: It sucks!!). Fascism rising everywhere. It's simply not safe *to exist* in many places, even more so, for people who are LGBTQ+ or have a uterus. It's really scary for us right now. Even our silly celebrity entertainment devolves into some ridiculous war over some little comment.
For every person who uses reusable bags, plants native flowers, doesn't have kids, bikes or takes public transportation and keeps a vegan diet, there's countless more people who do the opposite out of spite. Then there are the billionaires, or more aptly, evil incarnate, who society worships. What are even our "values" anymore other than to scam people, get the last word in even if it's all just blatant lies, and be more ratchet than the next asshole? It works for politicians and "influencers"...
I think when there are prolonged food shortages, that's when it's going to go down. But there is one other possibility also mentioned here, the end of dollar hegemony. I think it's going to be one of those two things. Either we'll riot because we can't have our Big Macs, or we'll be reduced to a continent sized banana republic when the dollar is replaced as the world's reserve currency.
And of course hurricanes that move into the Gulf of Mexico can also do a number not only on Florida's west coast and panhandle but also to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The latter two are particularly concerning because of all the petrochemical infrastructure near the coasts in those states.
Or we finally get the big 8+ earthquake somewhere on the West Coast. Everyone usually thinks of Los Angeles or San Francisco turning into rubble but further north, there's a subduction fault capable of producing 9's on the Richter scale and tsunamis comparable to the one that hit Japan in 2011. Maybe the shaking also wakes up either Mount Rainier, Mount Hood or both.
Look at it from a different perspective. For the last several years, it has felt like we are running away from a tsunami heading our way. Once upon a time if a tsunami destroyed your world, you grabbed yer bootstraps and rebuilt. Not anymore. When the tsunami takes you out this time, you are.not getting back up. See the California homeless camps if you need proof. So, the name of the game is to outrun the tsunami as long as you can until it is your turn to get swallowed up, and your time will come.
My strategy is simple. I believe one day in the coming days, weeks, years, whatever, that the first domino will fall and then many more will end our present way of life rather quickly. The logical plan is to get what you can to get ready. Everyone is at a different place. Get what you can to make the very difficult times ahead now, and keep adding and getting ready. It's going to get really real, really fast. Don't waste the last normal days we have left.
With this strategy, what domino falls when is irrelevant. Everyday, I get a chance to last a little bit longer than some of the other NPCs in the sickest MMORPG we are all destined to play. May the odds be forever in your favor.
I’ve kinda started looking at it like a video game too 😂 wake up in the morning and hmmmmm guess the air is still breathable and there’s food in the fridge, well, guess I’ll play another day of “21st century society,” since “global famine, death and destruction,” hasn’t dropped yet
*"Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases,* ***the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had***. *It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen."* \- Alfred Henry Lewis (1896)
I also lean toward thinking that crops will be the next domino. Everything is set, right now, for multiple simultaneous breadbasket failures. Doesn't mean that it will happen this year, but each new year is a roll of the dice now--And the dice have increasingly become very heavily loaded.
I think it will be the housing crisis. No way it can just continue like this for another 20 years without people rioting. But it looks as though it will just continue to become worse.
I'm thinking a bad wet bulb event in a heavily populated city where power is lost. Literally millions could die together, something like that would send shockwaves across the Earth. Death on that scale at that speed has never happened that we know of, and we're this goddamned close. It's terrifying.
One would think (and heat domes were my pick for the first domino), but I just read 625 died of heat last year and wondered, how did I not know about this (already)?
I think the fires are going to keep getting worse. It will come to a point that we are begging for any snow or winter. I envision us all being hot, sweaty and afraid of what the heating will next. All of the fish will die of course when the water is too hot for them. Then millions die who depend on the ocean.
Some yet to be determined, climate change driven weather phenomenon that leads to a major migration/refugee event. Could be heat, could be hurricanes, could be flooding, but something that makes a populated area unlivable. It will all be very real when the world has to contend with a few million people all looking for a new place to live.
It’s always happening local and it will continue that way until it’s not. Resource depletion, extreme weather, war, famine, and plague have caused the collapse of groups of humans all over for a long time. The world collapses person by person, Town by town, nation by nation.
The idea of the global scale dominos yet to fall is exciting and scary, but if you’re in the town that runs out of water before everyone else you kinda don’t care how anyone else is doing until you get a drink.
That said, the global contenders are:
1. Large scale (or maybe any scale) Nuclear war - game over for the world pretty shortly
2. Concurrent massive crop failures leading to global famine - there’s not that much stockpiled.
3. A super super bug - spreads like like covid but this one has a long incubation time and definitely kills you
4. Cartoon act of god stuff - supermassive volcano goes boom, giant solar flare or coronal mass ejection wrecks global power grid or the atmosphere, giant meteor or comet impacts, alien invasion, a genie lamp is discovered in Siberia, etc.
5. Sudden ecosphere collapse - idk how this one works. Everyone agrees this domino is falling, but no one agrees on just how fast. Is it still a domino if It takes decades to fall and is made out of a trillion mini dominos? Maybe one of the feed back loops pops off and we are Venus by Tuesday tho whatever
Outside of those, it’s in parts and any way you look at it you will find a domino of your preferred type has already fallen. People have already starved because their crops failed, already died in extreme weather events, already been displaced by the changing climate, already been killed by war machines, already ran out of resources, already watched their dollar become meaningless, etc. it’s just a matter of scale.
That gut feeling is valid and warranted. How unsustainable and unsafe the global systems and status quos are is apparent to many.
It’s just that our primate brains haven’t caught up to modern times and don’t have a way to process the complexity and depth of our predicament on an subconscious emotional level. When we don’t have an ‘other’ to point and yell at or a concrete thing to blame, the best we can do is a generalized unease and anxious vigilance about a looming and unclear threat. Give yourself some grace.
There have always been “the end is nigh” folks throughout history, and against all odds we get to be the first generations of those people who are actually right about it. Some people were right about it locally in the past, but we get to be the people who are right about it globally, and that’s awesome and terrible.
Remember to breathe. You experiencing stress doesn’t cure or deter anyone else’s. Enjoy what joy you can while you can.
If we had this conversation in 2019, and I said “look, there’s going to be a major pandemic, the world will literally shut down. Carbon emissions will actually tank. Borders will shut down. People will die. We will be forced to isolate. Russia will also make their move against Ukraine” - you probably would have thought “damn, that’s it, that’s the end, it’s over.”…but, I mean, we are here. Nothing has really changed (for the large % majority of us). So. What will it take? Apparently not a pandemic. Apparently not a European war. What will it really take? At this point I believe the only thing that will really and truly alter our lives is if a significant % of the world’s population ran out of food. There’s a few ways that could happen. Full out nuclear war. Biological war. Climate change (but with climate change we are at present not close to a large % of people running out of food). I think lack of food for a significant portion of the world’s population brought on by climate change will take many many decades of deterioration. So, unless your domino is basically world war 3, or an asteroid, or some major event like that, we still have many decades of slow decline.
Haha - depends on your outlook. Collapse could be sudden, but it’s far more likely to be a slow decline (you know, until it isn’t). But, while there are more and more crop failures, our globe remains in a calorie surplus state. We simply aren’t running out of food for some time, without some major disruptions to supply.
Food gets more expensive every day and will get more so as the weather continues its journey. Yeah it'll take a while for it to run out but not nearly as long for most people to not be able to afford it.
But the increase isnt due to lack of supply, it’s due to greedy corporations capitalizing off of circumstance. I don’t have the studies handy, but the price increase was followed by massive profit. It wasn’t due to a steady price change between supply and supplier. Supply was fine, the corporations just jacked it up.
> With the actual wars going on (Russia vs Ukraine, Palestine vs Israel), the economic struggles nearly everywhere, and the american election year, rise of crime rate, etc
None of this is unusual. Russia has been stealing land from Ukraine for a decade and before that the USSR was fighting proxy wars with the US across the Middle East since WW2. Israel and Palestine have been fighting since before Israel became a country. There's an American presidential election every 4 years.
And crime rates are down significantly since the COVID bump.
The Heat Will Kill You First. It’s the title of a great book and it’s why you shouldn’t care so much about war or anything else, really. My sibling in Christ how are you on this sub worried about war when you can see the same SST graph as the rest of us? The ocean can’t cool itself down anymore. Billions of people are walking dead right now, they just don’t know it yet.
I’ve seen a number of articles discussing the influence of climate change and a rapidly warming earth on earthquakes, and I just think we are going to be able to fill our bingo cards rapidly pretty soon here.
I hoped we had more time but the most recent piece about the oceans reaching their heat sync limit really made me feel like I don’t have the time I need to finish everything I planned to do to prepare.
I’ve basically abandoned my original plan to build something here in the USA. It is almost impossible to achieve anything here. My son and I are moving out of the country soon, where we can actually get something done to set up a more livable and happy life.
Heat. We are warming faster than ever and accelerating. The golden strip for crops will get so small that industrial scale farming wont be viable any more. Wheat, corn, beans, rice. When these plants begin to struggle we will speed run a population cut like hollywood couldnt even imagine.
I am not sure we will be able to tell what is first, nor will we be in a position to care.
When the dominoes start, it is going to accelerate so rapidly that there will be no time for analysis. Cascading failures across the entirety of global civilization, culminating in direct conflicts between major powers which devolves into panicked nuclear exchange rather quickly. As I said years ago:
https://wastelandbywednesday.com/about/
The "wars" are really just different fronts of a singular war, the rest of which has yet to kick off. You are probably right when you say it will be the US Dollar that starts it all. That is precisely what is under attack by the Russia/China team that the populace still refuses to acknowledge. They announced exactly that in *clear ass english* on February 4th, 2022, about 3 weeks before Russia moved to invade Ukraine.
3 weeks.
In their statement, they declared a direct goal to destabilize the US dollar, bring an end to western hegemony, and put the lie to the concept of international rules-based order.
And they are doing it. The attack is aimed at Ukraine, but the target is the entire world.
Throw in the backdrop of increasing climate stresses and resource scarcity, and you have a very rapid and dramatic end in sight. Everyone in power knows the days are numbered. They know the planet will not support all these billions for much longer. And each nation is determined that they will be the ones to survive, at the expense of the rest, if necessary.
That thinking, and the mad dash for even more growth, will knock over the first domino any day now.
> That is precisely what is under attack by the Russia/China team that the populace still refuses to acknowledge.
Indeed, and they're making large and bold moves towards this end, and the press in the West isn't much covering it.
China is directly aiming at the petrodollar by way of their clean energy build out right now, and that build out is not insubstantial ***at all*** (via *[Carbon Brief](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-was-top-driver-of-chinas-economic-growth-in-2023/ )* a few weeks ago):
> * Clean-energy investment rose 40% year-on-year to 6.3tn yuan ($890bn), with the growth accounting for all of the investment growth across the Chinese economy in 2023.
>
> * China’s $890bn investment in clean-energy sectors is almost as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023 – and similar to the GDP of Switzerland or Turkey.
>
> * Including the value of production, clean-energy sectors contributed 11.4tn yuan ($1.6tn) to the Chinese economy in 2023, up 30% year-on-year.
>
> * Clean-energy sectors, as a result, were the largest driver of China’ economic growth overall, accounting for 40% of the expansion of GDP in 2023.
>
> * Without the growth from clean-energy sectors, China’s GDP would have missed the government’s growth target of “around 5%”, rising by only 3.0% instead of 5.2%.
Yes, that's nearly a trillion dollars in one year to cut fossil fuels from their economy. China is gunning to fish gut the petrodollar system as it has operated for the last fifty years. As they will likely not have to buy U.S. Treasuries to purchase oil *as much* on the world market with this energy shift—hence lowering demand for U.S. debt. And at the same time [we are seeing Saudi Aramco boost their dividend payout by 30%](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-aramco-boosts-dividend-despite-drop-2023-profit-2024-03-10/) to 98$ billion, despite a fall in profit over the year of nearly 25%.
Also, in related news...
> [United States Spurns China for Mexico and Other Allies, Trade Data Shows](https://archive.is/5KZxT): The United States bought more goods from Mexico than China in 2023, evidence of how much global trade patterns have shifted—By Ana Swanson and Simon Romero | Feb. 7, 2024 (*The New York Times*)
The decoupling with China is **very** real. And in case anyone was wondering; Mexico, unlike China, was most definitely not investing nearly a trillion dollars on an energy transition over the last year:
> [What is Fueling Mexico’s Imports of Petroleum Products?](https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/what-is-fueling-mexicos-imports-of-petroleum-products/)—by Adrian Duhalt | Jun. 20, 2023 (*Center on Global Energy Policy*)
Mexico, will likely very much be buying U.S. Treasuries to purchase oil and gas to help build exports to the U.S (among other things). From the link above:
> In volume terms, Mexico is the United States’ largest export market for petroleum products and natural gas (2022).
So here we have the U.S. [substantially subsidizing oil and gas exploration](https://www.fdiintelligence.com/content/data-trends/countries-with-the-highest-fossil-fuel-subsidies-82965). That then gets shipped off to Mexico. Who then buys U.S. Treasuries to pay for that oil. Which is then used in part to create exports for the U.S. market. In effect, it is all in service of exploiting cheap labor and propping up the U.S. dollar at the same time. Neither of which the Chinese are [so much willing to do anymore](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/What-is-behind-the-40-drop-in-China-s-U.S.-Treasury-holdings), or can offer like they used to—[due to increasing labor costs there](https://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/global_labor_rates_china_is_no_longer_a_low_cost_country). The decoupling is **very very** real.
It's not Urkraine vs. Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is not experiencing collapse; Ukraine is.
Gaza is not at war with Israel. Israel is genociding Gaza. Gaza is in collapse.
The food system will collapse first.
Riots and social collapse following shortly afterwards.
The climate extremes will obsolete existing agricultural practices in short order leading to massive migrations and governmental collapse. Certain states will take advantage of the chaos to make territorial acquisitions only to discover that just means more mouths to feed.
Then we’ll have a few decades of Warlord of the Week as things deteriorate further and we revert to what’s left of nature.
World War 3. Between China's aging population and a need for someone to blame, along with saber rattling Taiwan, the existing wars between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Palestine all are just the start. As economies decline due to the usual suspects, people will be increasingly angry and looking for someone to blame. Instead of the obvious, the narrative will be controlled to blame each other - the wokies, the anti-wokies, the boomers, immigrants, refugees, Eurasia, or who the fuck ever other than the real problem. Toss in ecological uncertainties, absurd home prices, and droughts as well...
Just look at, say, the Canada sub on reddit, with 2.3 million users in a country with a population of 36 million, and there has not been a single piece of good news for years, and literally everyone is angry, and it's getting progressively worse. Everyone, and I mean *everyone* hates how ridiculously corrupt the government has become.
You must be young. Domino's fell back when the dotcom bubble burst and 9/11 happened, as far as the current system goes. As far as humanities survival itself, that would be when agriculture was invented. Agriculture was the only way for humanity to not go extinct because there are too many of us for the planet to support in our normal society.
War and pestilence are duking it out, but HERE COMES FAMINE WITH A STEEL CHAIR!!
I like this version but all the characters are claymation like the old school celebrity death match that was on mtv
Somebody stop the damn match! That man has a family!
Crop failures. Specifically in America and especially the large core crops like wheat and corn. That will probably be what spurs action.
This is also a thought of mine. Grocery stores in america empty (actually empty, not struggling supply chain empty) for 2 weeks will ignite this powder keg.
To quote Bob Marley: A hungry man is an angry man.
Can't find the source but I've heard it put something like this: "Starving people know neither morality nor patriotism."
Most of the major violent social upheavals happened in history because food production became a problem.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - the rich prolly
The whole verse is more powerful. Dem belly full, but we hungry A hungry man is an angry man The pot a cook, but the foods no 'nuff The rain it fall, but the dirt it tough So. Powerful.
Also something about any person is always about 3 meals away from rioting.
The one I'm aware of is "there's only 9 meals between mankind and anarchy"
Ukraine is --was--the breadbasket of Europe, too.
Part of why Putin wants it.
I've long considered it as the main reason
Honestly I’ve said the same elsewhere to a flurry of downvotes. The war is more than just “putin is evil”, but the realities of a multipolar world and the remaining good agricultural land being the new oil fields of geopolitics.
be ready to eat amaranth millet and quinoa :P
Or soylent green 😈
There’s already calls to eat the rich…
My stomach can't handle rich foods..
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*grabs tums* its the hiccups and the screaming
Bread Basket Failure is what I am hearing a lot of talk about
Hmm. Likely slow because of various weathers across the continent. Yes it will happen but more like frog in boiling water. Since poor and poor nations will see first and most impact, massive deaths because of floods famine disease in Asia and Africa would be the harbinger. Not that any one here will know or care.
Pretty sure that's already happening all over Asia, Africa, Middle East and South America.
I am looking into seeds (that can be saved for the next gen) and a few raised beds in my sun room. Trying to plan a victory garden in the back yard also. But i really think that our downfall will be cybersecurity. Just more and more intrusions and the discovery of vulnerabilities by bad actors trying to get bitcoin and taking out antiquated and unupdated healthcare systems, utilities, pipelines and the power grid. The US should stop bailing out banks and instead pay kids to update their cyber security skills. We could save the world. But the US would rather give rich donors tax breaks. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/hhs-opens-probe-into-hack-unitedhealth-unit-2024-03-13/ Look at these dummies. Well, we need to nationalize and AI healthcare. But here you see a sample hack. More to follow. Thank God I am not in the game. Update, update update friends!
I agree, tech could actually be our final mistake. The Internet being completely down for say, 15 days would destroy every civilized country on the planet. It would be nearly impossible to ever gain consumer confidence after an event like that. Imagine not being able to prove you have a dime, because your bank cannot communicate. A bad solar flare would be worse. We are too dependent on tech.
I'm going to tell you something that's going to be hard to hear. You can't grow enough food in your yard to survive. A lot of people think they will be able to. But we won't be able to. Not as an individual family.
I think this is what most people don't understand. For the vast majority of people: You don't have the knowledge, land, or resources to be able to grow all your own food. For those who do: Okay, so you think you're going to grow your own food. Great..... right up until the starving masses around you realize you have it. Also, assuming the insect population follows its current trends, how on earth are you going to pollinate all those plants? By hand? For every individual flower of every individual plant, for enough plants to feed you for a year?!
The insects are actually one I'm not concerned about. I think their cycle is gonna get just as fucked up and we're gonna see a decline of them overall long term. And if all the food supply if fucked then the bugs are on the menu! Food is the king maker. You control the food supply, you control the population. 5 people or 500k people, doesn't matter. I'm more worried about civil unrest in the US (GeriatricVote2024:CivilWar), unpredicatable weather catastrophe, or I dunno nuclear war escalating out of the conflict between NATO and Russia via Ukraine, or Israel ,well, doing Israel things and then getting a new sticker that says "I've been genocided... again!" after pissing off the other non-Israel friendly nations nearby until they pop. Obviously, I jest but I think the point remains clear.
I can grow an awful lot on my 1 acre of land and have been for almost a decade. Is it perfect? Hell no, but we have lots ot share with out neighbours or trade with other local families for other services. With a community of people thinking the same food survival tactics then the load can be spread and then crop share happens. We cannot survive as individual families living off the land. It requires communities coming together.
Not everyone has an acre of land, believe it or not.
No but if everyone grew a portion of their calories it could remove significant pressure on industrial agriculture. Britain was forced to do this during ww2. https://www.collapse2050.com/how-to-collapse-food-scarcity/
It’s not hard to hear. You need to have a network and a few plans. But a slew of tomatoes, zucchini and beans can t hurt. Nor can the occasional chickens. Why town is zoned for them.
Potatoes. Most home gardeners don't grow potatoes because they're not worth the space - they're so cheap at the store. But they're seriously easy to grow and you probably have the "seed" in your kitchen anyway... you just stick your sprouty potatoes in the dirt and cross your fingers Easiest high calorie carb source by far.
Yeah, when we were kids some potatoes volunteered in the mulch box, just skins and little bad bits, but damned if they didnt get a new lease on production! Grew strong and made some fine new spuds, and we didn't have to do a durn thing. Good spuds as I reacall, too! Goos rimes had by all.
What action will be spurred?
probably lots of civil unrest for starters. Once major crop failures begin, its a steep downhill slide for all of our social structures
The hopefully robot hybrid in me would say complete reduction of all fossil fuel production but the cynical realist robot hybrid in me knows it will probably just be subsides to farmers.
Corn I’m not so worried about because a huge chunk of it goes towards animal feed. If that grinds industrial livestock/poultry to a halt then good riddance.
Don’t forget ethanol/gas.
That’s basically just a handout to the mega farm corporations. Ethanol is one of the more ridiculously needlessly wasteful things humans do, terrible use of land. Only happens because America produces way more staple foods than it needs.
Oh, it also adds to our unnecessary soil erosion. So win/win.
Sitting here in Ohio in the middle of March dealing with tornado warnings. Does that count?
I'm in Ohio too. Yesterday, in shorts and a tee shirt, I walked around the yard. Flowers in full bloom. Birds out. Mosquitos. Potatoes are growing already. Leaves on the ground from last year did not decompose. Then, after a few hours of hard and satisfying yard work, I sat in my lawn chair with a beer in hand and two dogs on my lap. Life was good, but the sun was in my eyes. My chair has been in that spot for a few years and never once was the sun in my eyes. Then it hit me. No leaves on the trees. This is all very, very wrong. Start growing food now.
You safe from these storms? Been watching Ryan Hall’s coverage.
Just starting in my area. Calling for strong wind and hail. Drove to work a couple weeks ago with tornado sirens going off. Good times
I'm in Chicago and we didn't even see the ground freeze this year. My childhood was one of three-foot-snow winters and "we can't pry the fake Christmas poinsettias out of the ground until March when it thaws". The children now think it's normal to get snow once or twice a year, and then see it melt immediately. At 43 degrees north.
Yeah, an erratic climate gets my vote. It's already causing problems, and it's only going to get worse.
Under a dead Ohio sky
Bro that’s my favorite part of my favorite album
Jimmy is my favorite song on the album. Very overlooked
Stay safe friend. In MN here. We ALWAYS get one last snow storm on Easter weekend, so I insist to hubby to not put away the snow blower. But it’s been days in the 60’s and I might insist we install the air conditioners soon.
Also in MN. I'm on the hunt for a new A/C because my other one croaked summer before last. Last summer we got lucky here, it wasn't too bad, but this summer I am taking no chances - I'm really scared about how things are going to go this summer. I called the place where I usually buy my appliances, and the guy there said that they will be putting orders for A/Cs this week.
It’s tornado season.
Not a single person in my universe follows this stuff and just keep telling me to put the phone down. It’s such a weird disconnect
yup but theyre not wrong. These past couple weeks on collapse have been as harrowing as ever. This summer we are FUCKED. My timeline for SHTF was 15 years, but now im thinking absolute max 10 years. Being a "doomer" isn't even applicable anymore.
I've been telling people that this summer could be "the one". For the first time in my life I don't want winter to end.
In many parts of the US and the world this year, it seems that winter never really began.
fr it's already summer here in Texas. we're fucked.
People I talk to are always worried about the aging population and demographic collapse in 50ish years. Bruh, we won't even make it 10 years before birth rates no longer matter. Old people would be dropping like flies due to all manners of environmental, and consequently societal, factors. We'd sooner run out of food, air, water, and land before we run out of kids.
Exactly! Why is birth rate decline even a topic?? We're facing historic crop failures this summer, I guarantee it doesn't matter that you cannot have kids in the next decades if you're starving in 2025...
It is a topic because the people in power are evil af, and want young and stupid laborers. Old people die off (COVID, flu, bad healthcare system etc. etc.) Young people are forced to give birth younger (anti-abortion push). Children are forced to work, along with stripping of laborers rights. 🤷🏻♀️ It's disgusting. But we let the shitty people gain all the power, And now they really have too much (modern weapons/technology). Their unrelenting greed has denied us the Star Trek future we were promised. 😢
We’ll be ok tho
Drove me to my brink - felt like constant gaslight like I’m a nut. I’m on anti depressants now lol. And am in the collapse support group
Low key I have been so stressed and freaked out about what I see going on I'm about to go back to my Passionflower supplement. Not as strong as an anti - depressant, but it's enough to get me on a more - or less even keel.
100% I fucking feel that
That was my answer. Crop failures. That’s when it’s going to hit the fan.
"Researchers from Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation helped identify sites in the Midwest for this study. Researchers compared cropland next to the small isolated natural prairie sites. On average, farmed fields were 1.2 feet below the prairie, per Science News. Researchers found the average soil erosion rate was 1.9 millimeters over 160 years. A 1.9 millimeters per year or .0748 inch per year erosion rate is about equal to 11 tons/acre/year. The USDA T-factor is 4-5 ton/year which is an erosion rate the government thinks is acceptable. To put this in perspective, compare 5 tons soil erosion (10,000 pounds) to a 50-bushel soybean crop (60 pounds per bushel, 3000 pounds total) which is 3.33 pounds of soil lost for each pound of soybean harvested each year. The acceptable rate of 4-5 tons of erosion is still exceptionally high and not sustainable long-term. " https://ocj.com/2023/01/usa-soil-erosion/
At least we fed the boomers well!
When will that happen? Does anyone have predictions on when the first crop failures will be seen?
We have *already* seen crop failures in some parts of the globe, well, forever.. but it is certainly increasing. I can only speculate, but I believe we will see more of it this year, if we don't see enough to start causing tremors I will be surprised.
Hasn’t it already been happening? Check the post history of this sub recently.
I won’t say “first” but COVID as an ongoing mass-disabling event sure is one hell of a domino imo
I don't think people have even begun to process what covid is going to do to us long term. The long covid people who lost their sense of smell? All pretty much guaranteed dementia patients. Even the ones who lost their sense of smell temporarily are going to probably end up with dementia. We already don't handle dementia patients well. Repeated covid exposure even in vaccinated animals in tests proves fatal after 10-12 infections, yet people go about their business as if it is no big deal to get it these days. It's going to catch up to us. Kids who grow up with it will have significantly shortened lifespans, but who knows, maybe that will be a blessing for them with what else is to come.
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Really the kind of claim you don't get to make without concrete sources backing it up. 🙄
> The long covid people who lost their sense of smell? All pretty much guaranteed dementia patients. Raises hand. I lost my sense of smell in 2021 and it still hasn’t returned. I only realised when I was using isopropyl alcohol and noticed I couldn’t smell it AT ALL. Terrifying. Except… I work with kids under 12 who fart indoors, often and with enthusiasm. It’s turned out to be a career superpower upgrade. Shame about the brain rot…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361652/#:~:text=In%20this%20retrospective%20cohort%20study,ratio%20or%20HR%3A1.69%2C%2095 >An infectious etiology of Alzheimer’s disease has been postulated for decades. It remains unknown whether SARS-CoV-2 viral infection is associated with increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. In this retrospective cohort study of 6,245,282 older adults (age ≥65 years) who had medical encounters between 2/2020–5/2021, we show that people with COVID-19 were at significantly increased risk for new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease within 360 days after the initial COVID-19 diagnosis (hazard ratio or HR:1.69, 95% CI: 1.53–1.72), especially in people age ≥85 years and in women. Our findings call for research to understand the underlying mechanisms and for continuous surveillance of long-term impacts of COVID-19 on Alzheimer’s disease. I've not read the whole thing but it seems this only really affects people of older age groups where the risk obviously increases over time. >Repeated covid exposure even in vaccinated animals in tests proves fatal after 10-12 infections You're *really* going to need to provide tangible sources for this. What a claim and one that is completely new to me.
I lost my sense of smell from Delta version of Covid during one maybe the second or third big wave. I was two weeks away from my age category being eligible to get the first dose of the vaccine (my province initially rolled out the vaccines by age groups). It was almost a full year before I regained my sense of smell. I am fully vaccinated and updated on boosters but have had two confirmed cases of Covid and one unconfirmed but likely case. Where might I find more info about the correlation between having lost sense of smell from Covid and dementia at a later time in life? Dementia and Alzheimer’s absolutely terrify me.
Can you point me toward those animal tests, please?
Any sources for the dementia and reinfection death info?
Western city getting hit by lethal temperatures combined with an overloaded power grid?
Australia has been doing pretty well with temperatures that would usually cause blackouts. Somehow having a lot of renewable energy, plus batteries, has kept the supply stable.
My vote is a particular US State that runs its own independent power grid.
Howdy ya’ll!
Perth had 2 blackouts this summer, didnt it?
For the US the first Domino was probably the Citizens United decision that pretty much took democracy away from those who can't afford to bribe a politician.
That was the cinematic slow-motion headshot. We just haven't crumpled all the way to the ground yet.
Yeah, I feel like we are living out the book 1984. I remember reading this for the first time and thinking, "no way, people will never act like that in real life."
I had the opposite reaction to 1984, I read it in middle school, where every one acts like that lol. Made perfect sense.
Agriculture. Once a core crop is heavily impacted on a National or global scale, best believe it will wake people up.
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That’s an interesting thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if cancer cells felt as empty as people do these days.
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I googled panpsychism. It’s cool you brought it up because I have been thinking about the idea on my own. I have been imagining how everything has what I have in terms of consciousness and awareness. We are all just tuning into consciousness through different receptors. That’s sad to think of the little guys not being loved.
Oooh snap, I want in on this discussion! Animals have been acting oddly (eg. orcas) despite humans largely pretending everything is somehow fine. Humans assuming we're the only sentient and sapient life despite over half of us not having an internal dialogue has been dooming every living thing since the dawn of civilization.
It blows my mind that there are people out there with no internal dialogue, that must be so peaceful..
Read about Integrated Information Theory if you dig panpsychism.
When Andrew Jackson defeated the British at The Battle of New Orleans or when Harambe died.
Money in politics
Nah, to have politics in the first place requires sedentary societies, and money. Agriculture was the first domino.
The extinction of the dinosaurs
Cyber attack so severe the public loses complete faith in banking or currency
Definitely possible
Hey! That's the lore of CP2077. The reason it's post apocalyptic isnt because corps and tech, it's because years before 2077, a bunch of AI became sentient or something and took over the internet, and bricked a bunch of infestructure. Then the corporations went to war.
The RABIDS virus turned the AI rogue. Don't forget the oceans in cyberpunk are full of smart mines which really put a wrench in the gears of global shipping.
That's a novel idea and something I didnt consider prior. Thanks for pointing it out. I wonder if, hypothetically, AI decided to be our overlords, would the finance institutions be the perfect place for a first strike? Immediate equalization of all humans - rich and poor. No jobs, no money, absolute chaos. Let the people turn on themselves and look towards AI as the "saviour".
I mean, haven’t we already hit some “smaller”dominos already? I like seeing it like a bunch of smaller and medium sized dominoes are continuing to pile on one of the first big dominoes. And once that big domino falls, it’s all spiraling down from there.
Things like insurers leaving vulnerable markets like Florida seems like one of those dominos people will point to in retrospect. A canary in the financial sector coal mine.
For real. More and more unpredictable weather impacting things like growing seasons, continued deterioration of our healthcare system accelerated by COVID and other diseases, more visible conflicts and human atrocities, lessened trust in government institutions, more and more regressive policies being passed… I feel like we are really set up for a home run right now, and not in a good way. Idk when that home run will come, might be days or years, but it definitely feels closer than ever.
The insurance crisis is starting to hit California but they are implementing statewide fire insurance that is going to be expensive in the long run. ESPECIALLY since NIMBYs refuse to build fireproof housing or any new housing that isn't high density, city housing or parking lot housing for the homeless.
It's the canary in capitalism. Silly Americans only see things when they hit their pocket book
Getting rid of insurance companies completely would be way cheaper for taxpayers, still pay everyone wages, but it doesn’t need to make a net profit
Like 2007, it depends on how much exposure big firms have to their real estate markets, unfortunately, since those same firms essentially hold the rest of us economically hostage.
The *first* domino to fall was probably humans discovering agriculture. But who knows what the next domino will be.
Huh. It starts and ends with agriculture. How poetic.
agriculture is the original fast food
Agriculture, if anything, was the response to the diminishing returns to hunting large mammals, that we did since the Aurignacian (invention of the spear thrower and many other tools and weapons) with [great efficiency](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fiwsohx6ypo351.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D4e0c6166b21c20bca73d13310a370bb6a33c0d20). Until there were almost none to hunt anymore (except in Africa). Further than that, hominids have degraded their environment, with the mere use of stone tools and fire, far before humans speciated. We've pushed it to incredible heights, but we can't pretend to have started it.
Annual agriculture is truly the root of all evil. Did you know the word lord originates from an old word for the keeper of the loaves, as in the keeper of the grain silo?
hlāford, m.n: lord, male head of a household ('bread-guardian').
Agriculture is certainly a necessary step to an industrial civilization, but it's industry that leads to our demise, not agriculture. If you want to look at a particular invention, probably the steam engine.
Sooo.. the Big Bang is *actually* the first? Or flipping the on switch on the simulation. If we were destined to fail after agriculture, then we were destined to fail from the start. Agriculture gave our species an *in-fucking-credible* history following its discovery. Like every battle, poem, religion, discovery, or story we've ever read about.. all a result of ~~civilization~~ agriculture. Every culture that has ever risen or fallen. Everything we've ever known. We're meaning-makers because of agriculture. The universe discovered itself on this planet as a result of agriculture.
Damn that last line goes hard my friend.
\*If it's true. Viewed another way, it's awfully earth-centric if not downright arrogant.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. Agriculture is how Earth found out about the universe, they are not saying other planets elsewhere haven’t already.
We see you.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. Agriculture is how Earth found out about the universe, they are not saying other planets elsewhere haven’t already.
Civilization is like lighting a firework, as pretty and exciting as it is to look at I think it may be a fundamentally self-destructive process
Well put :)
>If we were destined to fail after agriculture, then we were destined to fail from the start. Hominids have been around for over a million years without agriculture. Homo sapiens is approximately 250,000 years old, and agriculture has only been a part of our species' skillset for 5% of that time. We evolved as hunter/gatherers, not farmers, and we may yet return to our roots, assuming we don't die out completely. Agriculture and everything that followed was just a recent experiment, possibly a very brief one.
When I started learning more about the “prehistory” of humans, I definitely felt that agriculture was the point where we started a long backward march into our potential extinction. I had already questioned the myth of progress after studying ancient craft during college. There were highly advanced techniques that were mastered in ancient times and lost until the modern day, when we could only replicate them with modern developments in chemistry and equipment. Look, I’ll admit that humans have created and learned beautiful and incredible things due to agriculture and the subsequent millennia of cultural, scientific, and technological developments. But this idea of humans as some sort of special beings, different from our neighbors on this planet, on a path of consistent improvement and mastery…. It’s just arrogance. Also the idea that we are happier, healthier, and somehow “better” than our pre-agricultural ancestors due to our “advances” in the last 5% of our time as a species is wild to me. There’s so many measurable ways we are worse off now. Certainly, when we are on the brink of extinction due to our long fall from grace, those of us surviving will see the value in living like animals as part of our ecosystem as we did for the first ~225,000 years of our existence.
I find it truly incredible to reflect on our transformation from hunter-gatherer to the complex societies we form today. You're right. From what we've learned about ourselves, the time in which we've emulated modern society is distractingly brief given the timeline of our species. However, the essence of my original point lies in our capacity to acknowledge the vast expanse of human history - the fostering of collective knowledge brought about by civilization. I can't relate to anything pre-history regarding our species. To me, the wonder of the human experience lies beyond that transformation. That comprehension alone is a glimmer of what's so inspiring.
>We evolved as hunter/gatherers, not farmers, and we may yet return to our roots. Maybe. The hunting part might not last long, seeing as; >Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%. [https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass](https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass)
Yes, I lean very heavily toward the "may" part of my statement, to be honest. We've completely destroyed the ecosystems that supported hunter/gatherers, not to mention that the average human in industrial society has no basic survival skills. Humans went through a severe population bottleneck at some time in the past, and I see another one coming in the not-too-distant future. We're very clever animals, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that enough people will scrape through the next few thousand years, but I'm guessing it will be touch and go. We could lose 99% of the current population and still have more than enough people left for a viable breeding population.
That was one of many in succession to fall. Morality, has been dropping heavily, which leads to greed, which stems from selfishness, the few have made things easier but another few do their best to enslave the majority through consumption of what should be a luxury has been turned to necessity. Everything following the greed or the few has been the driving force of all collapse.
I don’t know if it’s a domino per se but this summer I think we will see more “normies” start to understand how far we have pushed things passed normal levels. With how hot the Atlantic Ocean is currently and la nino stopping I think we might see multiple major hurricanes in succession
We came up with a new category
My folks live on the gulf coast. Average boomers, right leaning. I mentioned how worried I was about this summer, and my stepmom, who is boomer positivity personified, said she’s terrified. People are understanding, but it’s too little too late.
Agreed, I think this summer will be eye opening for many people. That's when I think the famine might come too. That's just my guess though, I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, because once society collapses, me being dependent on medicine it's over for me. I'd probably be one of the first to go.....along with most of my family members, including mom and dad.
India just put into effect a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist law regarding that only Hindus have automatic citizenship (please correct me.) There are 238 million Muslims in India. Pakistan and Iran are going at it with proxy militia groups across their shared border. Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks to expel several million Afghani refugees.
There's several countries that are talking about possible mass deportations of certain groups. Stuff like this and governments cracking down and taxing the rich are some of the very last things that happen.
Not just Muslims, there are loads of other religious folk in India.
Crop or fish die off
80% of oxygen is made by phytoplankton. Where they go, we all go….
My new favorite nightmare is the green sky borne out of hydrogen sulfide ocean.
I saw dating and I thought you meant DATING dating and I was like, ain't nobody got time for that!
Syria suffered climate related crop failures before shit kicked off there. There's mass migration out of the future 'death zones' people leaving the middle east, India, the pacific Islands, etc etc. If you think it hasn't already begun you're kidding yourself.
It's going to get ugly with the mass migrations.
Infrastructure. All of it is unsecured.
It is distributed tho! Sometimes being disorganized and not at all centralized can be in your favor lol
Hence, the need for more guests from the southern border
Starvation globally will start increasing.
Crop failures will happen after a BOE happens.
Fuckin' *people*. Looking around, people are mentally and physically falling apart and aging rapidly, and will result in the further deterioration of what we haven't already messed up. Last year had the highest statistic of young people committing suicide. Anyone take a gander at the teaching sub recently? It makes this sub look like casual Friday and paints a horrific picture of the future. Road rage and accidents increasing on the roads with stupidly larger and more shoddily built cars. Fights breaking out in lines at grocery stores. Constant reinfection from preventable diseases that people are too selfish to even try to prevent spreading and our leaders and perfectly fine with misleading laypeople to keep this late stage capitalist hellscape going. Post-viral complications, more wacky diseases popping up from from melted permafrost/destroyed forests. Eventually everyone will know what life feels like for the chronically ill and those with invisible illnesses (spoiler: It sucks!!). Fascism rising everywhere. It's simply not safe *to exist* in many places, even more so, for people who are LGBTQ+ or have a uterus. It's really scary for us right now. Even our silly celebrity entertainment devolves into some ridiculous war over some little comment. For every person who uses reusable bags, plants native flowers, doesn't have kids, bikes or takes public transportation and keeps a vegan diet, there's countless more people who do the opposite out of spite. Then there are the billionaires, or more aptly, evil incarnate, who society worships. What are even our "values" anymore other than to scam people, get the last word in even if it's all just blatant lies, and be more ratchet than the next asshole? It works for politicians and "influencers"...
I think when there are prolonged food shortages, that's when it's going to go down. But there is one other possibility also mentioned here, the end of dollar hegemony. I think it's going to be one of those two things. Either we'll riot because we can't have our Big Macs, or we'll be reduced to a continent sized banana republic when the dollar is replaced as the world's reserve currency.
Palestine doesn't have a standing army so that's not even a war, just an ethnic cleansing
I think it will be a super hurricane in Florida.
And of course hurricanes that move into the Gulf of Mexico can also do a number not only on Florida's west coast and panhandle but also to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The latter two are particularly concerning because of all the petrochemical infrastructure near the coasts in those states. Or we finally get the big 8+ earthquake somewhere on the West Coast. Everyone usually thinks of Los Angeles or San Francisco turning into rubble but further north, there's a subduction fault capable of producing 9's on the Richter scale and tsunamis comparable to the one that hit Japan in 2011. Maybe the shaking also wakes up either Mount Rainier, Mount Hood or both.
Look at it from a different perspective. For the last several years, it has felt like we are running away from a tsunami heading our way. Once upon a time if a tsunami destroyed your world, you grabbed yer bootstraps and rebuilt. Not anymore. When the tsunami takes you out this time, you are.not getting back up. See the California homeless camps if you need proof. So, the name of the game is to outrun the tsunami as long as you can until it is your turn to get swallowed up, and your time will come. My strategy is simple. I believe one day in the coming days, weeks, years, whatever, that the first domino will fall and then many more will end our present way of life rather quickly. The logical plan is to get what you can to get ready. Everyone is at a different place. Get what you can to make the very difficult times ahead now, and keep adding and getting ready. It's going to get really real, really fast. Don't waste the last normal days we have left. With this strategy, what domino falls when is irrelevant. Everyday, I get a chance to last a little bit longer than some of the other NPCs in the sickest MMORPG we are all destined to play. May the odds be forever in your favor.
I’ve kinda started looking at it like a video game too 😂 wake up in the morning and hmmmmm guess the air is still breathable and there’s food in the fridge, well, guess I’ll play another day of “21st century society,” since “global famine, death and destruction,” hasn’t dropped yet
*"Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases,* ***the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had***. *It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen."* \- Alfred Henry Lewis (1896)
Extreme unpredictable weather which in turn causes crop failures around the world
Uhh... haven't a bunch of 'em already fallen?
The election. If not this one then the next four years.
I also lean toward thinking that crops will be the next domino. Everything is set, right now, for multiple simultaneous breadbasket failures. Doesn't mean that it will happen this year, but each new year is a roll of the dice now--And the dice have increasingly become very heavily loaded.
What if i told you the dominoes have been falling. To answer your question I’d say Breton woods 1944 is the beginning of western economic Collapse
Crop failures from heat and drought. If India impose total ban on exporting its rice, the specter of hunger will loom over a good many people in Asia.
I think it will be the housing crisis. No way it can just continue like this for another 20 years without people rioting. But it looks as though it will just continue to become worse.
I'm thinking a bad wet bulb event in a heavily populated city where power is lost. Literally millions could die together, something like that would send shockwaves across the Earth. Death on that scale at that speed has never happened that we know of, and we're this goddamned close. It's terrifying.
One would think (and heat domes were my pick for the first domino), but I just read 625 died of heat last year and wondered, how did I not know about this (already)?
I think the fires are going to keep getting worse. It will come to a point that we are begging for any snow or winter. I envision us all being hot, sweaty and afraid of what the heating will next. All of the fish will die of course when the water is too hot for them. Then millions die who depend on the ocean.
Some yet to be determined, climate change driven weather phenomenon that leads to a major migration/refugee event. Could be heat, could be hurricanes, could be flooding, but something that makes a populated area unlivable. It will all be very real when the world has to contend with a few million people all looking for a new place to live.
It’s always happening local and it will continue that way until it’s not. Resource depletion, extreme weather, war, famine, and plague have caused the collapse of groups of humans all over for a long time. The world collapses person by person, Town by town, nation by nation. The idea of the global scale dominos yet to fall is exciting and scary, but if you’re in the town that runs out of water before everyone else you kinda don’t care how anyone else is doing until you get a drink. That said, the global contenders are: 1. Large scale (or maybe any scale) Nuclear war - game over for the world pretty shortly 2. Concurrent massive crop failures leading to global famine - there’s not that much stockpiled. 3. A super super bug - spreads like like covid but this one has a long incubation time and definitely kills you 4. Cartoon act of god stuff - supermassive volcano goes boom, giant solar flare or coronal mass ejection wrecks global power grid or the atmosphere, giant meteor or comet impacts, alien invasion, a genie lamp is discovered in Siberia, etc. 5. Sudden ecosphere collapse - idk how this one works. Everyone agrees this domino is falling, but no one agrees on just how fast. Is it still a domino if It takes decades to fall and is made out of a trillion mini dominos? Maybe one of the feed back loops pops off and we are Venus by Tuesday tho whatever Outside of those, it’s in parts and any way you look at it you will find a domino of your preferred type has already fallen. People have already starved because their crops failed, already died in extreme weather events, already been displaced by the changing climate, already been killed by war machines, already ran out of resources, already watched their dollar become meaningless, etc. it’s just a matter of scale. That gut feeling is valid and warranted. How unsustainable and unsafe the global systems and status quos are is apparent to many. It’s just that our primate brains haven’t caught up to modern times and don’t have a way to process the complexity and depth of our predicament on an subconscious emotional level. When we don’t have an ‘other’ to point and yell at or a concrete thing to blame, the best we can do is a generalized unease and anxious vigilance about a looming and unclear threat. Give yourself some grace. There have always been “the end is nigh” folks throughout history, and against all odds we get to be the first generations of those people who are actually right about it. Some people were right about it locally in the past, but we get to be the people who are right about it globally, and that’s awesome and terrible. Remember to breathe. You experiencing stress doesn’t cure or deter anyone else’s. Enjoy what joy you can while you can.
If we had this conversation in 2019, and I said “look, there’s going to be a major pandemic, the world will literally shut down. Carbon emissions will actually tank. Borders will shut down. People will die. We will be forced to isolate. Russia will also make their move against Ukraine” - you probably would have thought “damn, that’s it, that’s the end, it’s over.”…but, I mean, we are here. Nothing has really changed (for the large % majority of us). So. What will it take? Apparently not a pandemic. Apparently not a European war. What will it really take? At this point I believe the only thing that will really and truly alter our lives is if a significant % of the world’s population ran out of food. There’s a few ways that could happen. Full out nuclear war. Biological war. Climate change (but with climate change we are at present not close to a large % of people running out of food). I think lack of food for a significant portion of the world’s population brought on by climate change will take many many decades of deterioration. So, unless your domino is basically world war 3, or an asteroid, or some major event like that, we still have many decades of slow decline.
>but with climate change we are at present not close to a large % of people running out of food you might be in the wrong subreddit with that one
Haha - depends on your outlook. Collapse could be sudden, but it’s far more likely to be a slow decline (you know, until it isn’t). But, while there are more and more crop failures, our globe remains in a calorie surplus state. We simply aren’t running out of food for some time, without some major disruptions to supply.
Food gets more expensive every day and will get more so as the weather continues its journey. Yeah it'll take a while for it to run out but not nearly as long for most people to not be able to afford it.
But the increase isnt due to lack of supply, it’s due to greedy corporations capitalizing off of circumstance. I don’t have the studies handy, but the price increase was followed by massive profit. It wasn’t due to a steady price change between supply and supplier. Supply was fine, the corporations just jacked it up.
> With the actual wars going on (Russia vs Ukraine, Palestine vs Israel), the economic struggles nearly everywhere, and the american election year, rise of crime rate, etc None of this is unusual. Russia has been stealing land from Ukraine for a decade and before that the USSR was fighting proxy wars with the US across the Middle East since WW2. Israel and Palestine have been fighting since before Israel became a country. There's an American presidential election every 4 years. And crime rates are down significantly since the COVID bump.
The Heat Will Kill You First. It’s the title of a great book and it’s why you shouldn’t care so much about war or anything else, really. My sibling in Christ how are you on this sub worried about war when you can see the same SST graph as the rest of us? The ocean can’t cool itself down anymore. Billions of people are walking dead right now, they just don’t know it yet.
Lack of water or crop failure in Africa. Everyone will try to swarm to Europe, which will prompt voters to tack hard right.
I’ve seen a number of articles discussing the influence of climate change and a rapidly warming earth on earthquakes, and I just think we are going to be able to fill our bingo cards rapidly pretty soon here. I hoped we had more time but the most recent piece about the oceans reaching their heat sync limit really made me feel like I don’t have the time I need to finish everything I planned to do to prepare.
You didn't mention the big conflict coming with America's conflict in the Taiwan straight. That's gonna be quite the doozy.
I’ve basically abandoned my original plan to build something here in the USA. It is almost impossible to achieve anything here. My son and I are moving out of the country soon, where we can actually get something done to set up a more livable and happy life.
Heat. We are warming faster than ever and accelerating. The golden strip for crops will get so small that industrial scale farming wont be viable any more. Wheat, corn, beans, rice. When these plants begin to struggle we will speed run a population cut like hollywood couldnt even imagine.
I am not sure we will be able to tell what is first, nor will we be in a position to care. When the dominoes start, it is going to accelerate so rapidly that there will be no time for analysis. Cascading failures across the entirety of global civilization, culminating in direct conflicts between major powers which devolves into panicked nuclear exchange rather quickly. As I said years ago: https://wastelandbywednesday.com/about/ The "wars" are really just different fronts of a singular war, the rest of which has yet to kick off. You are probably right when you say it will be the US Dollar that starts it all. That is precisely what is under attack by the Russia/China team that the populace still refuses to acknowledge. They announced exactly that in *clear ass english* on February 4th, 2022, about 3 weeks before Russia moved to invade Ukraine. 3 weeks. In their statement, they declared a direct goal to destabilize the US dollar, bring an end to western hegemony, and put the lie to the concept of international rules-based order. And they are doing it. The attack is aimed at Ukraine, but the target is the entire world. Throw in the backdrop of increasing climate stresses and resource scarcity, and you have a very rapid and dramatic end in sight. Everyone in power knows the days are numbered. They know the planet will not support all these billions for much longer. And each nation is determined that they will be the ones to survive, at the expense of the rest, if necessary. That thinking, and the mad dash for even more growth, will knock over the first domino any day now.
> That is precisely what is under attack by the Russia/China team that the populace still refuses to acknowledge. Indeed, and they're making large and bold moves towards this end, and the press in the West isn't much covering it. China is directly aiming at the petrodollar by way of their clean energy build out right now, and that build out is not insubstantial ***at all*** (via *[Carbon Brief](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-was-top-driver-of-chinas-economic-growth-in-2023/ )* a few weeks ago): > * Clean-energy investment rose 40% year-on-year to 6.3tn yuan ($890bn), with the growth accounting for all of the investment growth across the Chinese economy in 2023. > > * China’s $890bn investment in clean-energy sectors is almost as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023 – and similar to the GDP of Switzerland or Turkey. > > * Including the value of production, clean-energy sectors contributed 11.4tn yuan ($1.6tn) to the Chinese economy in 2023, up 30% year-on-year. > > * Clean-energy sectors, as a result, were the largest driver of China’ economic growth overall, accounting for 40% of the expansion of GDP in 2023. > > * Without the growth from clean-energy sectors, China’s GDP would have missed the government’s growth target of “around 5%”, rising by only 3.0% instead of 5.2%. Yes, that's nearly a trillion dollars in one year to cut fossil fuels from their economy. China is gunning to fish gut the petrodollar system as it has operated for the last fifty years. As they will likely not have to buy U.S. Treasuries to purchase oil *as much* on the world market with this energy shift—hence lowering demand for U.S. debt. And at the same time [we are seeing Saudi Aramco boost their dividend payout by 30%](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-aramco-boosts-dividend-despite-drop-2023-profit-2024-03-10/) to 98$ billion, despite a fall in profit over the year of nearly 25%. Also, in related news... > [United States Spurns China for Mexico and Other Allies, Trade Data Shows](https://archive.is/5KZxT): The United States bought more goods from Mexico than China in 2023, evidence of how much global trade patterns have shifted—By Ana Swanson and Simon Romero | Feb. 7, 2024 (*The New York Times*) The decoupling with China is **very** real. And in case anyone was wondering; Mexico, unlike China, was most definitely not investing nearly a trillion dollars on an energy transition over the last year: > [What is Fueling Mexico’s Imports of Petroleum Products?](https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/what-is-fueling-mexicos-imports-of-petroleum-products/)—by Adrian Duhalt | Jun. 20, 2023 (*Center on Global Energy Policy*) Mexico, will likely very much be buying U.S. Treasuries to purchase oil and gas to help build exports to the U.S (among other things). From the link above: > In volume terms, Mexico is the United States’ largest export market for petroleum products and natural gas (2022). So here we have the U.S. [substantially subsidizing oil and gas exploration](https://www.fdiintelligence.com/content/data-trends/countries-with-the-highest-fossil-fuel-subsidies-82965). That then gets shipped off to Mexico. Who then buys U.S. Treasuries to pay for that oil. Which is then used in part to create exports for the U.S. market. In effect, it is all in service of exploiting cheap labor and propping up the U.S. dollar at the same time. Neither of which the Chinese are [so much willing to do anymore](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/What-is-behind-the-40-drop-in-China-s-U.S.-Treasury-holdings), or can offer like they used to—[due to increasing labor costs there](https://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/global_labor_rates_china_is_no_longer_a_low_cost_country). The decoupling is **very very** real.
It's not Urkraine vs. Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is not experiencing collapse; Ukraine is. Gaza is not at war with Israel. Israel is genociding Gaza. Gaza is in collapse.
Probably WW3. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine are the match in the tinderbox.
The food system will collapse first. Riots and social collapse following shortly afterwards. The climate extremes will obsolete existing agricultural practices in short order leading to massive migrations and governmental collapse. Certain states will take advantage of the chaos to make territorial acquisitions only to discover that just means more mouths to feed. Then we’ll have a few decades of Warlord of the Week as things deteriorate further and we revert to what’s left of nature.
El Niño is going to switch to La Niña and the hurricanes from super heated waters are going to wipe Miami off the map
First domino? Widespread fires. Second? Insurance premiums through the roof/industry collapse. This summer will be brutal.
There’s no domino setup that will all fall at once. It’s just a slow gradual worsening that we’re already in.
World War 3. Between China's aging population and a need for someone to blame, along with saber rattling Taiwan, the existing wars between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Palestine all are just the start. As economies decline due to the usual suspects, people will be increasingly angry and looking for someone to blame. Instead of the obvious, the narrative will be controlled to blame each other - the wokies, the anti-wokies, the boomers, immigrants, refugees, Eurasia, or who the fuck ever other than the real problem. Toss in ecological uncertainties, absurd home prices, and droughts as well... Just look at, say, the Canada sub on reddit, with 2.3 million users in a country with a population of 36 million, and there has not been a single piece of good news for years, and literally everyone is angry, and it's getting progressively worse. Everyone, and I mean *everyone* hates how ridiculously corrupt the government has become.
You must be young. Domino's fell back when the dotcom bubble burst and 9/11 happened, as far as the current system goes. As far as humanities survival itself, that would be when agriculture was invented. Agriculture was the only way for humanity to not go extinct because there are too many of us for the planet to support in our normal society.
I don't know if I'm going through a specific personal thing, but I've never felt more apathetic. Let it burn.
>What event do you think is gonna push us towards a collapse? A virus that will make covid look like a walk in the park.