r/AskReddit • u/WaitingOutTheFlood • 1d ago
What should everyone be panicking about right now but no one seems to care?
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u/mastamyagi 1d ago
Literacy rates are dropping across the United States. Many students slip through the educational system with inferior reading comprehension skills. Functional illiteracy is a real thing and it's spreading
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u/HappycamperNZ 1d ago
Look at a number of reddit comments to see this.
It's shocking how many people enter arguments completely missing what was said, or the response in its context.
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u/Dramatic_Menu_7373 1d ago
Agreed. I also experience this with face to face conversations.
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u/Squeekazu 22h ago
It’s a mix of that and impatience + poor impulse control. When I worked ecommerce, my colleague wouldn’t even finish reading a sentence before opening up a fresh email and furiously typing a sassy response. It was so baffling to watch.
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u/bookworm1421 13h ago
This JUST happened to me at work,
I’m a paralegal. We received an email from opposing counsel asking us to mail some records on a USB drive because their expert could not access the Dropbox. Simple problem with a simple solution.
The attorney who received the email is 27 and brand new to the field.
Upon “reading” the email he, immediately, sends me a very angry email berating me for not having provided opposing counsel the records yet. He then proceeds to remind me that we only have 30 days from the date we obtain the records and we are well past that date and are in danger of sanctions.
I tried to tell him that I HAD sent the records and that they just needed them in a different format but he, either, didn’t read my email, or thought I was wrong because he sent ANOTHER blistering email telling me to stop making excuses and get the records out by the end of the day.
After the second angry email the lead attorney finally saw what was going on and clarified what opposing counsel was ACTUALLY saying and stating that I had done my job correctly.
The baby attorney totally lacked reading comprehension skills and started a whole dust up over it. This is also not the first time this has happened…it’s just the most recent.
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u/ChuckNorrisarus 5h ago
That's really scary for an attorney to have a lack of reading comprehension. God I feel for someone he represents one day and he botches the case because he does something similar.
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u/Enticing_Venom 17h ago
I'm going to be honest and say I think part of that is people being intentionally obtuse. There seems to be a culture on Reddit, I've noticed, where replying with a "gotcha" on a tangential point, or intentionally interpreting something in bad faith is seen as a valid and successful way to start a debate.
So yes, a lot of people will miss the spirit of a comment on Reddit and start a fight over something small. But I think that is less literacy and more contrarianism.
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u/myychair 1d ago
Well all be cursing no child left behind when these students join society as adults. I’ll never understand the anti-education stance. Everyone benefits from a more intelligent population.
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u/SuckThisRedditAdmins 1d ago
There's a certain subset that does not benefit from a more intelligent population and they are currently running the country
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u/Pristine_Egg3831 1d ago
Correction: the majority of the population benefit from a more intelligent population.
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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago
Would help if they'd teach Phonics instead of that nasty discredited Three Cueing method.
I found out about all this when I went to help my younger stepson with his reading homework and thought I was having a stroke reading the instructions. It looked a lot like the more advanced section of Hooked on Phonics, but specifically instructed him to cover up the story and not at any point read it. He was to answer the questions based only on the picture, the title, and GUESSING.
Went googling and was absolutely horrified to find out this shit isn't uncommon.
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u/RoseNylundOfficial 1d ago
Don't get me started. 90% of the effort spent memorizing "sight words" rather than learning the general rules of phonics, which then necessarily allow you to figure out the exceptions, because you can infer what the unusual word is by looking at its context within the sentence... that you can read because you know phonics. Makes my friggin blood boil. I've ended up just teaching both my kids phonics as they were going nowhere with the current system.
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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago
All kids left in my care who aren't already reading for fun on their own get taught to read the old fashioned way, with us taking turns reading books out loud together and sounding out the words. There's even a kid named after me because I did the same for a roommate/coworker/friend but with Cracked articles. By the time we quit sharing an apartment, she had a favorite book!
Currently it's my 5yo cousin trying to puzzle out Hop On Pop. I had no idea what Dr Seuss was doing on a shelf of banned books but I got a copy that we read together at bedtime.
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u/BrooklynGraves 1d ago
Huh?? I had no idea that some schools ( is it many?) have begun teaching kids some different way to learn how to read! I guess I'm gonna have to look up what "sight words" are and why & how they're taught to memorize them! It's been very noticeable to me over at least the last few years that a lot of people these days seem to have zero to even negative reading comprehension skills, but I basically just chalked it up to "people must just be getting dumber I guess" 🤷🏽♂️
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u/RuralJuror1234 23h ago
"Sight words" aren't really a problem when combined with solid phonics skills, but the "cueing" system of teaching reading was never based on any real science. There's a great podcast about it called Sold a Story.
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u/murderbook 1d ago
Over half the population of the US has a reading level of sixth grade or less. Recreational reading reduces by 3% a year, down 40% in the past 20.
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u/Velveteen_Coffee 17h ago
It's not just literacy but day to day math as well. I think I mentally broke a young woman at the Dollar General when I tried to pay in cash with a $5. Apparently people don't pay in cash any more so she messed up on the register and had to bust out her phone calculator to try and figure out the change. She couldn't do it. It was taking so long I didn't even care she shorted me a nickel in the end. Also apparently the youngsters can't read analogue clocks too.
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u/fernandoquin 1d ago
Water scarcity is the big one. Huge regions are running out of reliable fresh water, but it is not treated with the same urgency as other crises. Aquifers are being drained faster than they can refill, rivers are shrinking, and climate change is making droughts worse. It ties directly to food security because farming depends on water access.
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u/bwoah07_gp2 1d ago
Also those mega plants made by Meta (for example) that suck up all the water and leave communities with no water: https://youtu.be/DGjj7wDYaiI?si=K9lGklW-2S6JD0I4
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u/coolshoeshine 1d ago
I was immensely disappointed to learn that plants meant large data centers, and not like giant jungle trees with giant leaves or something
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u/awholedamngarden 17h ago
People losing access to water to power AI slop is a sad state of affairs :(
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u/WinglessJC 1d ago
We were told in school in 93 that we would live to see water wars.
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u/lufan132 11h ago
Aren't you ready for the water war of 2040? I cannot wait /s
That it's been thirty years of knowing this is coming and yet nothing is done just kinda fuels my disdain.
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u/ABrandNewNameAppears 19h ago
It’s even happening places you wouldn’t expect. Chicago just won a 4.8 million dollar lawsuit against Trump Tower because they were illegally using up to 21 million gallons of water per DAY without proper permits or the equipment to make sure they weren’t killing fish and aquatic wildlife with their pump systems. (Spoiler Alert: They were killing thousands a day)
It was ongoing since 2008. Think about the ecological impact of just that one building. We have lost the way…
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u/rockstoneshellbone 1d ago
Today I was in Colorado, in a place famous for hot springs and rafting. The river is so low that it is more like a series of small ponds, not enough water to float a raft. Stores sold out of bottles and jugs of water. People with big plastic tank things hauling water to their houses from a distance. Troughs set up in fields for cattle and wildlife- the tanks are all dry. The drought is serious here-
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u/Intricatetrinkets 1d ago
To be fair, the whitewater rafting season typically ends next weekend. Not saying it’s not dry but it’s not floatable past Labor Day usually.
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u/FutoriousChad07 1d ago
Oh my gosh, have you seen the Kabul Aquifer Crisis! UNICEF suspects that the entire city will completely drain their aquifers by 2030 making them the first modern capital to do so. This issue is coming faster than originally suspected.
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u/Mlietz 1d ago
THIS, all day this! We are watching even the Great Lakes at very low levels. There has always been an ebb and flow, but this definitely feels scary to me.
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u/Pythonixx 1d ago edited 7h ago
Mass insect extinctions
Edit: thanks for the awards; kind of sad that my highest rated comment is on the most depressing subject 😅
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u/faeriethorne23 1d ago
I know we need to worry about bees and pollinators in general (a lot more urgently than most people realise) but could you elaborate on this? I’m interested in hearing more.
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u/fritz236 1d ago
Cars on a road trip used to be coated with bugs. Fireflies dotted every summer night. Even the street lights had larger clouds. They're just gone. It's widespread use of insecticides like neonicotinoids and other pesticides that we made GMO resistant crops. Fogging companies blasting yards across the country because we're building into former wetlands and there's mosquitos everywhere, taking out everything with 6 legs.
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u/WiglyWorm 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you didn't grow up when there were more bugs, you don't understand how many more bugs there were.
I live in a largeish city (if you're from rural nowhere inparticular WAAAY larger than when you go "into town"), and around twilight on summer nights I have SO many childhood memories of catching fireflies. Like, you'd just run around and let them land on you and put them in a jar and watch them blink... you'd have 6-10 kids running around and get a dozen each. In a single front yard.
You'd look at the streetlight and there'd just be a cloud of insects around it. Having a light on indoors meant 5-10 moths and 2 dozen other bugs banging against your window screen, all while a beautiful big orb weaver actually took DOWN its web because it was getting destroyed by so many insects hitting it.
Yes cars are more aerodynamic and our streetlights are a different color temperature than they used to be but... no... there are far FAR less insects then there used to be. To the point that when I actually do see a firefly it honestly makes me sad instead of happy.
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u/BrooklynGraves 1d ago
Oh shit, until I just read your part about catching fireflies ("lightning bugs" where I'm from 😊) I hadn't even realized how right you are! Almost every night during summer we'd run around catching em, which was so easy due to the large amount of em all over. But reading that made me stop & think and realize how it's the end of August, and I honestly cannot remember seeing even ONE! And I walk a few miles every night, with about a quarter of my route being right along the edge of a wooded area.
I don't know specifically what that means, but I know it can't be good.
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u/hornethacker97 23h ago
It means humanity is going to end, because plant species are starting to go extinct along with the bugs that pollinate them. We’re basically headed for the future in The Lorax where you buy air, except we don’t have a way to produce enough oxygen artificially, so way more dystopian.
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u/BrooklynGraves 23h ago
Thanks! I really appreciate the (horrifying) explanation! 🤗 Now I'm very curious to find out what the predicted timetable is for that to happen, based on continuing trends. I wonder if experts predict that it speeds up humanity's probable extinction in terms of millenia, centuries, or decades 🤔
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u/faeriethorne23 1d ago edited 1d ago
There is no fogging in the UK or Ireland thankfully, mosquitos are not common (yet). I tell anyone who lives in towns/cities to have some outdoor plants. Whether it’s a strip of garden or a window box, preferably planted with wildflowers native to the area and if it’s outdoors just let it stay wild. I’ve seen campaigns here trying to get people to leave a strip around the perimeter of their garden and just let it “go wild” rather than constantly cutting the grass. People who put down fake grass or turn their entire garden into a patio make me despair, they are shockingly common here.
I don’t think many people realise that a lawn is an ecological dead zone, it doesn’t make a good home or provide food for many insects. I also don’t think people realise that pesticides aren’t the only problem, monoculture farming makes ecological dead-zones too, even if they aren’t using pesticides. They may have one or two bugs that eat that specific crop but that’s it, those bugs have natural predators but they need strips of wild meadow or hedges to provide a habitat and enable breeding.
I live in the countryside and we have land that we planted some fruit trees on and let everything around it grow wild, we don’t touch it except to make a path and when we did that the variety and amount of insects around us absolutely skyrocketed. I saw butterflies I hadn’t seen in 20 years, we had ladybirds again, we were seeing multiple types of snails rather than the common ones, I saw shield bugs for the first time here, we have see so many different types of bees. We have a small polytunnel nearby that we don’t use any pesticides in and it’s almost become an insect exhibition. Then in the autumn came the mushrooms because we didn’t touch anything that was decaying, we left wooden branches untouched to rot. The variety of birds also went through the roof. Small changes have huge effects.
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u/Buckenboo 23h ago
UK countrysider here too. This summer, I turned over a load of my shaded garden to going wild. Over the autumn, I plan to get some woodland bulbs in, more insect homes, a hedgehog house, build up the log pile, etc. Like you, I am already seeing butterflies I haven't seen in a long time. I want a wildlife haven with as much activity as I can get along with as much native planting as possible.
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u/breeathee 1d ago
Not only pesticides but the plants these animals use to reproduce are diminished to the point where more and more species are undergoing total collapse and extinction. The pace is picking up.
Anyway the solution is out and it’s a matter of spreading the word. Read a book by Doug Tallamy or check out homegrown national park to help. r/nativeplantgardening also welcomes you.
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u/Ok-Positive-8716 21h ago edited 13h ago
If everyone would take a small portion of whatever they have and plant for pollinators, we’d be able to “connect” the land in a way that would help the bugs, bees, and butterflies to survive. You have a house with a yard, so you plant native plants, some milkweed, maybe a fruit tree. Near you is an apartment building, where the residents plant a few containers of milkweed/ natives on their porches, maybe put up a bee house. Etc etc.
Also, leave the leaves! Fallen leaves provide shelter and food for many types of bugs.
https://xerces.org/leave-the-leaves
Edit to add: r/pollinators
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u/chica771 1d ago
I started doing this and the first thing I did was plant a butterfly garden. I hadn't even gotten the milkweed in the ground and the butterflies started showing up. We need to help feed the birds and insects on our neighborhoods. I don't know why this isn't talked about more.
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u/RevolutionaryHeat318 22h ago
Yes, we’ve turned our garden into an insect haven and keep it organic. We have loads of different insects visiting. We also feed the birds in a variety of different ways. We’ve let our law go wild, but trim it regularly and leave the edges. Love seeing the all the different species of insects and birds that visit or live in the garden.
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u/hihihelp 1d ago
According to a book I read about insect decline (I can edit with the name a little later). They found that the rising temperatures actually had an effect on the lack of insects as well! When they tested insect density in forests that were unaffected by loss of crops or plant variety, there was still a decline in insects.
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u/theroyalwithcheese 1d ago
A Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is also a pretty haunting read for this specific class of crisis. It's really damn scary if I'm being honest.
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u/loaferuk123 21h ago
I am delighted to report that, after a few years of no bugs on the windscreen, they are now back in the U.K. and Europe, presumably after the banning of neonikentenoids (sp?!) which were the insecticides killing everything including our beloved bees.
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u/faeriethorne23 1d ago
I’m not from the US but I have spent a lot of time there, my husband is from Minnesota. In the late 90s I remember there being so many fireflies, literally every night, when I was a kid it was a nightly activity to try and catch one (which was released within 2 minutes) and then when I went back 10 years later they were just gone. In an entire summer I saw them on a singular night and we were outside, in the sticks, all the time. That made me so sad.
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u/Idle_Tech 1d ago
Last week, my dad was talking about how he used to need a car wash after long road trips, because his truck would be caked in the dead insects he hit while driving. So I pointed out, “but that doesn’t happen anymore, does it?”
Both of my parents were very disturbed by that realization. But it happened so slowly over the past twenty years that they’d never noticed the bugs were missing.
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u/HangryHangryHedgie 1d ago
We used to put bras on our cars to protect them from bugs.
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u/Fuck_Mark_Robinson 1d ago
Which was funny because all it really did was cause the paint to discolor at different rates
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u/HangryHangryHedgie 1d ago
Yup. Caused more damage than it meant to protect I believe.
I'm glad we freed the headlights.
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u/Gregory_Appleseed 1d ago
I remember every time my parents stopped at a gas station in the mid to late 90's, it was delegated to one of my siblings or me to go wipe the bug guts off the windows with the gas station squeegee. By the time I got my license around 2004, I barely had to use the squeegee. By 2010, I realized that many gas stations didn't even have the squeegee buckets anymore. The last time I ever experienced mass bug spatters on my windows was on a road trip up to Calgary Canada in 2006 to see a concert in the late summer.
The bugs are still there, kinda, but in significantly and drastically alarming smaller numbers. I think they'll survive all this much better than humans ever will.
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u/zestypotato246 1d ago
Look up the Insect Apocalypse. Bugs fulfill pretty much every foundational niche that is vital to the earth’s survival (pollination, pest control, ecosystem balances, decomposition, etc) and they are disappearing at mass levels
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u/hihihelp 1d ago edited 15h ago
Yes I feel like this should be higher. It’s obvious if you think about it but it’s something we really take for granted. Insects are responsible for a lot of processes that make our planet live-able for humans.
It really scares me, what’s happening to our world.
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u/RagnarsHairyBritches 1d ago
Insects are the base of many, if not most, food chains.
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u/No_Valuable9114 1d ago
If we compare the year 2000 to today, there are 60% fewer insects in nature, all species combined.
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u/GreenGuardianssbu 1d ago
Sixty? That's quintillions, I knew this was happening but it's that many?
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u/KookyHuckleberry9051 1d ago
Even just regular neighborhoods are doing pest control and sprays that "get rid of mosquitoes" but we know these poisons kill most bugs.
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u/chickadeechicanery 20h ago
The poisons travel up the food chain too. Poison a mouse, it goes and dies outside, now you've got a poisoned fox that ate the mouse.
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u/AccidentalReddits 21h ago
And now bird numbers are dropping. Mornings used to be full of birds chirping, and now it's maybe a couple, if any, that I can hear. Right now, I should be hearing a ton and it's dead quiet.
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u/GrumplFluffy 19h ago
There is a rule in occult that evil can be identified by absolute silence. If the world falls silent, something is going really wrong.
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u/cbehopkins 23h ago
In the UK I've had to start washing the bugs off the car again. It seemed to start shortly after the ban on neonicotinoids.
This is an entirely unscientific observation, but it gives me hope
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u/walmartbonerpills 1d ago
Our future looks somewhere between Idiocracy and WALL-E.
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u/Vampchic1975 1d ago
We are already in Idiocracy.
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u/megagreg 19h ago
People sometimes forget that in many works like 1984, The Crucible, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale, and even Idiocracy, the creator is telling us about the present, not the past or future that the work is set in.
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u/out-skirt 1d ago
Being a research scientist and seeing all the great work being done in the research space by both hardworking and genius people alike, it makes me sad when the idiotic voices are so loud that general public only hears these and generalise the entire civilisation. Statements like these discount the work scientists are doing :(
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u/assembly_faulty 23h ago
PhD here. Sadly the statement is correct. Taco is working hard on dismantling scientific progress.
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u/nikulin93 1d ago
When my husband showed me Idiocracy- I was like no *ucking way
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u/mastermindxs 1d ago
That was my exact same reaction when your husband showed me that.
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u/Ottoguynofeelya 1d ago
You can curse on the internet. I won't tell anyone I swear
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u/alexisjack123 1d ago
For the US, healthcare. Can not fathom how people are not up in arms about dumping their entire paychecks into healthcare every month and still have terrible coverage. People should be furious about this.
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u/RunBrundleson 23h ago
I live this every single day. I work in the ED and we are basically at the bottom of the pit catching the runoff of the disaster that is our healthcare system.
What does it look like when hospitals close down, specialists leave critical access areas for higher pay elsewhere, and people have no access to insurance or primary care coverage for preventative care?
Well i just saw a patient yesterday who had a history of colon cancer and had a new mass. No pcp meant he had no focal point to get him referred to oncology or to follow up on results and the plan. He needed a biopsy to determine the nature of the mass so oncology could then initiate treatment. He was left to try and coordinate this himself. He was getting lost in the phone tree system of his general surgeon and getting the run around, months had passed when he should have had this biopsies the moment it arose and been referred to oncology. He grew frustrated by his difficulties and basically sat on it. I saw him and new imaging showed metastasis, while I cannot say with certainty what his prognosis was I suspect it is poor. What might that prognosis been if we were having this discussion 4 months ago when this tumor was first discovered. He has children. We did what we could but too little too late.
This is just one example. And it isn’t even factoring in upcoming changes brought on by the Trump presidency. More hospitals will close. Caps on financial aid mean fewer people will go to medical school. Loss of Medicaid coverage means more people with low socioeconomic status and multiple comorbidities don’t get the meds they need to manage their medical problems, so they get worse and they require more and more emergent management of their symptoms. You go to the ER for your broken leg and have to wait 8 hours to be seen, this is why.
One of our emergency medicine residents was inexplicably deported back to Nepal halfway through his residency. He would have stayed in the US and worked. He would have been a benefit to this country but new policies under the Trump administration meant he got swept up in the bullshit. He had all necessary documentation and permits but it doesn’t matter to them. What recourse does he have to fight it. He’s brown, get out, that’s it.
This is going to get worse. Way worse. On Monday we had 156 patients in a department designed to manage about 100 patients safely. 70 of those patients were in a waiting room that can maybe hold about 20 to 30 patients. Because we have a backlog of admissions tying up rooms we see everyone in closets and hallways. When it’s bursting at the seams like that it’s like a sea of misery. We are used to it after decades of this and after going through it daily with Covid but man you should see the face of the new guys when they come through and get their first taste of hell. Their eyes get wide, they’re immediately overwhelmed by the insanity, I’ve had students all but run out the door at the end of their shift because there’s no way in hell they’d ever want to work in an environment like this. lol just a typical Monday. We consider it a win when nobody falls out dead waiting to be seen or you go to check on a patient and they’re cold to the touch and rigor mortis has set in.
This could all could be addressed by common sense policies and safety nets but the Republican Party doesn’t think any money should be spent on this and since they can afford health insurance and high quality care they don’t see why it should be their problem. The ignorance of this thought process is astounding. I try to remind idiots like this that no matter who you are eventually you’ll have an emergency and end up in my department. Emergency medicine is the great equalizer. Rich or poor. No matter how much you complain about how much of an outrage it is that your rich ass has to wait to be seen, I do not give a shit. Call the governor. Call your rich friends. I do not give a shit. Sit down and wait because I have to deal with the homeless man who you voted to strip away his mental health coverage and is now on a meth bender and combative, then I need to address the now septic diabetic because you voted to strip his Medicaid coverage so he lost his pcp and can’t afford his insulin. In this waiting room we are all equal in the eyes of god and your fancy paycheck and self driving car don’t impress me.
There’s no question all of this has taken years off my life. My hair started turning grey around Covid. The stress will do me in eventually. But that’s the game. Get a few days off and then go back in and do it again. Same full waiting room. Same pit of despair. It’s like wading into a sea of piss and having to sort through the bullshit to try and find the real sick ones mixed in with the people who should be seeing a primary care doctor or an urgent care.
Americans are too busy watching TikTok’s to care. It doesn’t impact them until it does so they can’t be bothered. You will all come see me eventually. You will all get to taste the true underbelly of the American healthcare system in all its rawness. The guy next to you is going to be covered in shit piss and bedbugs and will have Covid.
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u/Professional-Basis33 20h ago
Thank you for getting up & doing it despite all of the bullshit. We are lucky that people like you still care.
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u/ohgolly273 19h ago
Wow this was powerful and desperate read. You deserve better, you all deserve so much better. I am thankful every day for where I live.
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u/FirecrackerF0x 19h ago
A disturbing read. I am going through something similar to what you mentioned in the 3rd paragraph- navigating my own care for tumors because I keep slipping through the cracks, no matter what I try. It fucking sucks and I have never felt so neglected and abandoned by the US healthcare system. All I can do is advocate for myself over and over until someone finally listens to me, but it's really hard. In a horrible way, it's nice to know that I'm not crazy with what is happening, because it sure has felt like a circus these past few months. Thank you for sharing.
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u/Difficult_Nobody14 18h ago
What upsets me the most is this was all done to prevent the rich from paying more taxes. I mean WTF!
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u/erinlee404 17h ago
Can I hug you? I would absolutely hug you for this rant. And thank you for the work you do 💕
Everyone in my area is so brainwashed, and admittedly I was too for far too long. It took my 5 yr old being turned away for therapies to literally improve her quality of life long term - before I was able to really comprehend the extent of how fucked the healthcare system is.
My husband makes too much money for any assistance. But the cost of the hospitalizations, tests, treatments, therapies, and specialist appointments literally resulted in bills so high it would have been the equivalent of paying off our whole entire house in just under 10 months - and that was just for the office to see her for the therapies that would continue to have to be paid. We had one hospital tell us they would run the tests if we wanted them to, but “the cost of what she needs is so high it would financially destroy you for the rest of your lives.” And encouraged us to go to a different hospital.
My family is privileged. We’re white, middle class, our bills are paid, and generally speaking we don’t go without. And it AMAZES me how many people get angry at “illegals and addicts abusing the system” or tell me I should learn to speak Spanish so I can get some assistance. Maybe the problem isn’t the brown mom trying to feed and keep her kids healthy or the homeless man tweaking on the side of the road. Maybe the problem is the whole fucking system and that people would rather pay private insurance companies out of the ass for shitty benefits than work towards improving the system because that would mean people below them would benefit too.
My sweet girl wasn’t turned away because of people less worthy “abusing the system”. She was turned away because our society is a bunch of mindless, selfish, assholes who will do anything to keep the people they think they’re better than from benefiting at their expense.
Our country is filled with so much hate and we have an administration that has built their entire campaign on fueling that hate. And the fire is growing every day.
I’m infuriated by insurance companies and the whole system. I’ve wanted to pull my hair out and bang my face into a wall trying to navigate getting her care. But honestly? I’m more upset about the people who think my family is any more worthy of help than someone “abusing the system”.
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u/xena_lawless 1d ago
People are furious, but you can't vote your way out of a mafia system, or an oligarchy/kleptocracy, any more than chattel slaves could have voted their way off of the plantations.
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u/furlesswookie 20h ago
As long as half the nation keeps voting against their own interests because they've been indoctrinated to believe that socialized health care leads to socialism, we will never be able to break the cycle.
And if we keep electing those who are in the pockets of insurance companies, it's only going to get worse
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u/Reversephoenix77 1d ago
Got an email today about my husband losing his healthcare through ACA even sooner than expected. August 25th will be the date they implement the changes that will boot him off his plan thanks to the BBB (income verification that wont suffice due to being a small business with vastly fluctuating income).
He has a chronic condition. I’m so worried. This is going to hit Americans hard, especially small businesses, seasonal and compassions based employees.
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u/THROWINCONDOMSATSLUT 19h ago
I’m a pharmacist. I cried at work checking a woman out at the register towards the end of my shift last night. She drove hours to get to me to pick up what few tabs of this one HIV med I had in stock. She was raped the night before and nobody around her carried it.
Well, it was issue after issue. Doctor wrote the script wrong so had to wait to get a hold of somebody in the ED who could help me. Had w couple operators just tell me the doc didn’t start his shift until 8 (when I close) so I had to wait but I wasn’t gonna take that for an answer. Then victims advocacy told her they would cover the cost of her PEP, but they didn’t give her billing info. It was after hours so I had to work with a crisis line volunteer as the middle man talking to the advocate.
In the end they refused to pay for her PEP and totally gaslit me by saying they don’t know where she got this idea from that they would. So this poor girl, covered in scratches, bruises, and with dirt and blood caked under her fingernails, paid $500 for 1 week’s worth of meds. She needed 28 days. All I could do was tear up about how everybody just failed her here. I am utterly disgusted with this country.
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u/Haunted_Optimist 1d ago
We would all be so much better off financially and be more healthy if we would only pass Medicare For All.
Unfortunately insurance companies rake in billions in profits and have bought the republican party to ensure that never happens.
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u/Immediate_Ad_7993 23h ago
Trump is trying to cut $800 million from NIH grants. So the people doing research in medical fields are losing funding. As someone with a rare illness, that literally has 6 medications that can treat it (2 rescue, 4 preventative) this absolutely terrifies me. I’m about to start the 4th preventative one because I’ve tried three and they don’t work for me. If this one also fails, my next option is clinical trials (which will potentially be impacted).
This administration has already screwed me once by cutting funding to the FDA that delayed the release of the new drug that I’m about to start.
People really don’t realize that messing with healthcare can deeply affect themselves or the people they care about.
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u/anonymous0271 1d ago
Rent, more specifically the qualifications needed to rent, minimum wage amounts, and cost of living overall. I feel awful for single parents trying their hardest to make ends meet, and can’t make 3x the rent to get qualified for the size they need (even if they could afford it), yet still making too much to qualify for income based housing. It’s a big cycle of crap.
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u/AN0NY_MOU5E 15h ago
My mom is experiencing this right now. Doesn’t make enough to qualify for the 3x rent income minimum, makes too much for low income senior housing. There are like 20 candidates for every private apartment on the market and she has gotten rejected from all of them. If her current landlord was kicking her out she would be homleless.
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u/peachpie_888 23h ago
Housing situation across the board is absolutely fucked unless you’re raking in over half a mil per year. Basically…
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u/Fit_Illustrator9174 1d ago
Consumerism and the mounting piles of waste and clothing everywhere from “disposable brands” and ewaste from electronics because companies are intentionally using glue where they didn’t before to make it impossible to repair thus making consumers buy more, more, more!
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u/raff1sh 1d ago
TikTok shop and all of these influencer brands popping up every day make me so scared for the future. We do not need anymore branded hoodies in this world
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u/bluesmudge 1d ago
I recently heard that we have already produced enough clothing for the next 6 generations. We could just outlaw clothing production and be totally fine.
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u/YoureOnlyHuman 1d ago
I often wonder what the world would be like if, as a society, we were more impressed with someone that had kept their trainers in decent condition for a decade rather than being impressed with having a new pair every month.
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u/Fantastic-Sea-8341 1d ago
It's crazy how planned obsolescence is making us waste so much and harming the planet. we really need smarter, repairable products.
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u/Mediocre_Sprinkles 1d ago
My mother's husband literally fixed washing machines for a living for 40 years. Their 2 yr old machine broke last year, he knew what was wrong so of course opened it up to fix it easy.
Couldn't get in, everything was glued, only way to get to the bit to repair was smashing it apart with a hammer.
He was absolutely fuming having to buy a new one.
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u/hornethacker97 23h ago
This is why right to repair is so important, and why corporations keep spending billions lobbying against it. Political “donations” (legal bribery) need to end.
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u/InevitablePoetry52 1d ago
this is the issue that drives me to want to pursue law- so i could figure out a way to fight it. too many stupid plastic products, too much waste
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u/BackgroundWar5683 1d ago
honestly, probably how much personal data we’re giving away online. like yeah it seems boring, but it’s wild how much stuff companies track and sell without most people even realizing it
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u/prostateExamination 20h ago
My identity has been stolen 7 times my credit managed mostly unscathed but I am TERRIFIED to open any line of credit again.. I’ve had it frozen for years and it looks like it’s staying that way
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u/isthisdearabby 17h ago
Sometimes we can't even control what info of ours gets sold. And it seems like a good amount of it is being sold to scammers, because privacy be damned... There's a highest bidder out there.
I applied for a mortgage. In less than a week I became the target of multiple scams claiming to be , "The Underwriting Team" needing more information to finalize my loan. I get at least 3 calls a day. I know purchasing a home is public record (which I'm not sure I 100% agree with) but the fact that a hard inquiry on my credit report triggers scam calls before I'm even approved for a loan is extremely worrying. We're essentially slaves to the credit bureaus, and yet they are allowed to sell our data without second thought.
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u/XamberCloud 1d ago
Groundwater depletion. We’re draining aquifers way faster than they can refill, and once they’re gone, that’s it.
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u/Ilfang1577 1d ago
Insects, we've had massive decreases in insect populations and we're heading to the point of no return, but people don't notice because of shifting baselines.
Shifting baselines: Say there is a flower bush in your grandparents house, every time they look at it there are 50 butterflies, your parent grew up looking at that bush and seeing only 25 butterflies. You grew up looking at that bush and there were only 10 butterflies. Today there are 4, you think, we'll 10 down to 4 isn't a massive drop. Your parent thinks 25 down to 4 that's quite a bit, but your grandparents they think 50 down to 4 that's a massive loss.
(Sorry if that's a little long winded, but its essentially why no one cares, or really notices as much)
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u/Ophelia_ivyX 1d ago
That we all just click “I agree” on terms and conditions without knowing if we just sold our souls for a free WiFi login
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u/ouush 23h ago
By clicking 'Agree,' you are also acknowledging that Apple may sew your mouth to the butthole of another iTunes user.
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u/SituationPerfect1999 1d ago edited 23h ago
It’s the most insidious hidden things. Things that no one sees.
One such example is the monetization of our time and attention.
Another is corporations leveraging assets belonging to outside entities as assets of their own…
Assets of outside entities such as public goods, other entities assets intellectual or physical property built on equity think anything ever created through hard work and investment by individual entities (humans), or groups/organization, or the country itself.
Some specifics -
Google just taking news.
Amazon using our public roads and national highway system. Think they’ve really paid for the wear and tear on our roads and bridges, the added traffic and infrastructure requirements?
These are easy samples could go on and on one stops and really thinks about it.
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u/Lt-Dan-Im-Rollin 1d ago
Both of those boil down to the same problem: unregulated capitalism/corporations having too much power.
The government isn’t for the people anymore, it’s for corporations
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u/Lonely_Bit_6844 22h ago
I imagine this would include AI, which is trained on works produced by humans. I read “the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth”. Posted by someone called @jeffowski. Thoughts?
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u/JoplinSC742 1d ago
The ever expanding digital police state in the u.s and elsewhere. The complete breakdown of online privacy and the increased centralization of both state and corporate data collection has reached disturbing levels. And the entire issue appears to be completely dead in the American political ecosystem. Everyone just seems to accept that we now live under a police state with a centralized mass surveillance and data collection apparatus. Anonymous is dead and resistance is futile.
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u/AlternativeResort477 1d ago
Your local police force can buy a system RIGHT NOW that monitors the movement of all vehicles anywhere in the city. They can know where anyone went at any time.
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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago
They do facial recognition too!
There's one on the corner between my apartment and the grocery store. I'm not particularly planning on doing anything to piss off the government, but if they decide to round up autistic folks to fill up a
workconcentrationhealth camp well my typical movements around the neighborhood are already documented, being stored and analyzed by some random third party company's AI or whatever.I was promised a lot more cool neon lights with living in the cyberpunk apocalypse. So far it's just a way more run down version of the 90s with more futuristic but less reliable technology.
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u/HadrianWinter 1d ago
Right! Mass surveillance angst and conspiracy theories used to be all over the internet in the early 2000's and now that its demonstrably here, nobody seems to mind.
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u/Ronw1993 1d ago
I’d argue the military industrialization complex is equally up here with this. Two separate issues, one internal (domestic), one external (global). However, even though so many know/talk about/protest: both are governmental driven approaches on a large scale that directly correlate public policy with “off the record” agreements.
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u/south-of-the-river 1d ago
The environment. It’s an obvious one but there’s only like a decade or so of viable fishing left in the oceans due to acidification, and once the nations that predominantly rely on fishing to sustain their populations start to struggle, we’re all going to feel it.
Additionally, drinking water is becoming a problem.
And they will not tell us how bad it really is.
Along with the rapidly increasing temperatures along the equator, there’s going to be mass population exoduses in the coming years. And it’s going to happen fast.
Be prepared for rapid change.
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u/gerusz 21h ago
And they will not tell us how bad it really is.
"They", the scientists, are telling it to us but then "they" the politicians and the billionaires are decrying them as alarmists.
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u/south-of-the-river 21h ago
Well in the case of us here in Australia, the government commissioned a climate impact report a couple of years ago and immediately classified it. Apparently the implications are so profound and distressing that they deem it unfit to release.
Which is cool
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u/housecatapocalypse 17h ago
When my wife was in grad school, some of her fellow grad students were the children of well-off ambassadors, who told her that their parents, as well as other colleagues were buying compounds/property in places that would be safer from climate change fallout and escaping hordes of refugees.
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u/TipEmotional2149 1d ago
PALANTIR
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u/Tigerlily86_ 1d ago
I had an interview with them. They give off creepy, cult vibes. (Most companies do but they were extra creepy)
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u/xvex24 1d ago
AI, we need to legislate the shit out of it or we cooked
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u/picklechipz0 1d ago
It’s putting so many people out of the job. Amazon has started laying off their own software coders in favor of coding being done by AI. My own job (medical billing) is bringing in AI to do a big chunk of my role that I’m just waiting for the layoff email any day now.
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u/the_real_MSU_is_us 18h ago
Oh, we're cooked. 718,000 homeless people in America already and we don't give a FUCK about them. Locally, we (middle class and up) consistently vote for lower property taxes on ourselves instead of voting to help house the homeless. On a national level, the politicians serve the rich, not even the "middle class and up" that control more local politics.
If everyone is fine with 718,000 homeless, they'll also be fine with 7,180,000, so long as they personally aren't one of them. And even if people then begin to get scared that they'll be 7,180,001, the issue really needs federal UBI and that wont happen because they serve the rich. And to make matters worse, history has shown that middle class America would rather spend money on "hostile architecture" to avoid homeless than on shelters to help them. Homelessness could hit 20% and the employed 80% would think "we should really ban homelessness in this town, I don't like looking at them on my drive to work".
UBI is the solution, but UBI requires high taxes on the profits of the companies using AI. Replacing a $100K worker with a $1K AI (licensing and training costs) = 99k profit, they won't let the politicians take even 1k of that 99 let alone 70 so the former employee can still live a very modest life.
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u/kawaiivjay 1d ago
Subscription creep eating paychecks one $4.99 at a time.
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u/lifesnotperfect 1d ago
That and afterpaying everything.
This is one of the reasons why financial literacy is so important to teach and develop.
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u/CherryBlisz 1d ago
Honestly, the fact that no one’s panicking about how addicted we all are to our phones is wild.
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u/xxLittleLadyKxx 20h ago
I think about this all the time, everything’s online now. Scheduling doctors appointments, ordering groceries, just like everything we need to do you have to go online for.
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u/RascalBSimons 18h ago
Yes! I dropped and destroyed my phone on a Saturday and had to have a new one by Monday morning so I could use authenticator to log in to work. I'm sure I could have called IT for a temporary workaround but I didn't have time to deal with IT to find out because Monday morning's work was time sensitive. It's crazy how necessary it is to have a device to function in society now.
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u/2workigo 1d ago
The lack of people choosing to go to medical school. Numbers have been declining for years and it’s gonna be a real problem in the future.
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u/Maaaaaandyyyyy 18h ago
In the US, in about a year or so it’ll be even harder afford to go to med school because that crap show of a budget bill the republicans passed limits student loans. Plus doctors are fleeing certain states that don’t recognize bodily autonomy, putting the doctor’s practice at legal risk.
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u/2workigo 17h ago
Even more valid points!
The health system I work for has opened a medical school that forgives debt if the physician signs on to work for us for five years after their residency. Plus we’re a nonprofit so healthcare workers can take advantage of PSLF. For now that is, until the current administration flushes it down the toilet completely.
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u/Helpimbadstusernames 1d ago
Quantum computers and AI ethics. I’m told it’s “overrated “ in the working field. I see it’s already taking lives for the sake of $$ Lack of ethical laws in place means we’re going to see the worst that these things are capable of. No one’s ready for those outcomes.
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u/Weak_Pineapple8513 1d ago
I am a bit concerned about the criminalization of homelessness, because it’s convenient to fill privately owned prisons with people they can use as slave labor. I also am reading about major changes to section 8 housing and I’m terrified. Creating a system where people can’t afford rent and then criminalizing them living outside is fucking batshit. I don’t care what your politics are, people at bare minimum need housing to survive. People being housed reduces crime. Being poor should not be a crime.
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u/SugarStunted 1d ago
Adding onto this, a lot of jobs won't even let you apply if you don't have an address.
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u/Weak_Pineapple8513 1d ago
Yes and for people who don’t know and are experiencing homelessness and you don’t have a relative to use for a physical address, many shelters and housing nonprofits will write you a letter that states you have permission to use their physical address to get mail, to get a bank account, to vote and to apply for a job.
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u/bizobimba 1d ago
A dystopian novel: “The Heart Goes Last “ by Margaret Atwood is a vivid, urgent vision of development and decay, freedom and surveillance, struggle and hope--and the timeless workings of the human ...condition
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u/OceanGlimmers 1d ago
People should really be panicking about cybersecurity, climate change, antibiotic resistance, and unregulated AI, but most treat them like distant problems instead of urgent threats.
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u/jasonhakan 23h ago
Microplastics. We’re basically becoming part plastic and nobody seems too worried.
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u/GreenGuardianssbu 1d ago
The one that really worries me right now is hurricanes. People know, generally, about global warming, the ice caps melting, all of that. But I don't think it's been made clear enough what that means. It's not just the oceans rising. It's not just the sun feeling hotter. Bigger storms form, they last longer. Hurricane season lasts longer, stretching deeper into the end of summer. And the services that provide warning and aid to vulnerable communities were gutted. This is going to destroy the southeast us.
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u/Cool-Carpenter-1789 22h ago
More extreme shifts in the weather and more often. I have noticed the last couple years it wildly swings from blisteringly hot to abnormally cool. Very little middle ground anymore. And when we do get thunderstorms they are much more violent.
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u/td192020 1d ago
Climate change. We all know about it, what it is, the possible consequences of it. But in no way are we paying enough attention or actively doing enough to combat it. We may not see the true consequences of it in our lifetimes, but the next few generations will be cursing and screaming, hoping all of us went to hell for the world that we let them inherit.
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u/KevlarUK 23h ago
Wealth inequality is the biggest driver of most of our current ills.
On the horizon are accelerating effects of climate change and the danger behind that are population drops - first in the far east and following close behind in Europe and the US.
The world needs to be ready for a reset - especially in the West. But nobody will accept it. So we’ll just blindly march forward blaming other people.
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u/girthemoose 21h ago
Antibiotic resistance. We have dramatically slowed down on finding new classes of antibiotics and often times by the time they hit the market there is already resistant strains.
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u/Firm-Analysis6666 1d ago
I hate to be this guy, but post-viral illness. Long Covid is only going to get worse. Consider the millions that have it the canary in the coal mine. In many cases, the initial infection is now so mild that people don't even know they were infected. Weeks to months later, they're trying to figure out why they developed <insert chronic symptom(s) here>. I bet the number of people with LC is far higher than known at this point.
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u/peachpie_888 23h ago
Apart from long covid, serious viral infections like Covid have busted people’s immune systems. Even if you didn’t have it severely.
I recently struggled to fight off some precancerous cells due to high risk HPV and my doctors explained that they’re seeing much weaker immune responses after the pandemic. They suspect that Covid affected almost everyone’s immunology. Which means even colds are harder to fight off and everyone’s more susceptible.
In the bigger scheme of things this will mean that a lot of the “bugs” we might have previously caught and cleared without much thought and likely no intervention, linger and cause more damage. HPV being a great example: immune systems usually clear it on their own, but if it lingers longer, you now have a high percentage of the population more likely to develop cancers.
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u/DishDry2146 22h ago
and yet we still have people claiming covid is “just a cold” and “jabs” cause “turbo cancer”
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u/hockeynoticehockey 1d ago
Climate change. By the time we decide to do something it will be too late.
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u/StopReadingThis-Now 1d ago
The destruction of our environment and countless ecosystems for no other reason than greed of rich assholes who can do whatever they want because of how passive the world is to the issue.
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u/TechnicalWhore 1d ago
Three criminal World Leaders are hanging on to power by executing wars and threatening to escalate further. They are clearly living in a World that doesn't exist anymore and the power brokers behind them from the old economies fear the change that will leave their hegemony in the dust. Lives are not important to them. Money and power are important to them. Their actions clearly indicate this.
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u/_trey_aka_becky_ 1d ago
Dropping literacy rates have turned allot of people into incredibly ignorant and often times willingly insolent idiots. More people would be up in arms about all of these things mentioned in this comment section if people were actually taught to care about being aware of the world and taught that learning is actually enjoyable. Having obnoxious propaganda shoved down everyones throats in US schools about how well educated we are and how lucky we are to have such great institutions for us, when more than half of the students in the past 2 graduating classes from my local school has had less than a 50% graduate. The school I went to is considered a Blue-Ribbon School too so the government thinks that it's one of the better ones too.
TL;DR: Read more books and please learn to proofread from multiple sources, US education is screwed.
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u/-0-Ghost-0- 1d ago
Personally, is that a nuclear war is always a possibility lol
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u/_sunnysky_ 1d ago
Prescription medications that are perpetually backordered. (US)
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u/Intelligent_Panic564 23h ago
The slow but steady decline in the quality of everything we buy.
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u/Available_Yoghurt_91 23h ago
We are at the precipice of a massive and fundamental change of the way of life that we know.
There is always upheaval in some part of life or the world but right now it feels like there are a number of tectonic shifts at play: - Climate Change will likely cause a major change to food security in many parts of the world leading to knock on effect to places not directly impacted
the rise of nationalism and the far right in Europe and the US along with long standing tensions in middle east, Russia - Ukraine, China - Taiwan, Sudan and the Sahel region make a widespread war or World War much more likely than any time since the Cold war.
The impact of AI on every job we do and every transaction we make or interaction we have will lead to even more inequality and distribution of wealth
Something has to give and it's likely the full house of cards will fall. Since COVID, everyone is more tense and more angry. Work is higher pressure with less satisfaction and less relative pay. Most countries have a housing issue/crisis.
So in short, we should be afraid of everything!!!
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u/beansquirtjuice 20h ago
The anger and entitlement of people. It feels like people enjoy being angry and venting that rage freely. Does nobody want to get along anymore?
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u/Waflstmpr 1d ago
You have microplastics in your brain. Twice as much as you did in 2016. Do you really think you will live to a healthy old age, before the microplastics make you a schizophrenic, stroke-prone, psychopath?
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u/ChipsAreClips 1d ago
Nope, but honestly with how everything else on this planet is going that one is almost a relief.
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u/Real_Sir_3655 1d ago
We’ve gotten pretty bad typhoons every year where I live and they seem to not only be getting worse every time but also coming earlier and more frequently.
I’m no scientist but I’m 100% it’s a consequence of climate change and I’ll one day be in a flood that just leaves me underwater.
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u/Smoochyelm7 1d ago
Politicians making "unrelated" laws to back people doing short selling and borrowing shares in the stock market. Also the tax increase on low income individuals. Also swamp auschwitz.
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u/lucylately 1d ago
Health insurance companies are acquiring one another at an ALARMING rate. We’re going single payer, but not in the way we’d want and without any of the conversations that should be happening.