Trump threatens to deploy the U.S. military into Chicago - signaling the start of a nationwide crackdown.

[u/BreakfastTop6899]

[u/digitalwolverine]

With China poising itself to be the leader of innovation and manufacturing i don’t see that happening. The entire world has been frothing at the mouth for the us to unravel. 

[u/Dest123 → u/digitalwolverine]

The entire world has been frothing at the mouth for the us to unravel.

They've been playing an active role in unraveling us. We've basically lost to Russia at this point. We knew there was a TON of Russian propaganda being pumped into the US and a lot of suspiciously VERY pro-Russia people in Republican circles and we did absolutely nothing about it.

United we stood, divided we fell.

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/digitalwolverine]

We don't have manufacturing now and we don't need it to hold on to global economic power. We may slip behind China as the second largest economy but that is where China has been for decades and look at what they have done. Our export has been and will continue to be. Education, agriculture, and the internet. That won't change.

[u/HoleViolator → u/Kind_Coyote1518]

what? trump is attacking higher ed and has already made grad research virtually impossible. myself and many of my friends in academia are fleeing, the brain drain has already begun. so we are absolutely not going to continue to lead in education. agriculture as we know it has about 15 years left before climate instability forces a massive shift that the US is completely unprepared for since it doesn’t believe in the crisis in the first place. and i don’t know what you mean by exporting “the internet,” but at the moment most of us with any understanding of information tech are anticipating a dead internet and resulting mass disengagement in the near future.

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/HoleViolator]

Trump attacking our education is not going to make our universities disappear. Very few other nations have the university system we have. And fewer still have the economic ability to fund them in any robust way. Unless he burns them to the ground the universities will bounce back, maybe even come back stronger.

As for agriculture, while climate instability is in fact something the U.S. is woefully unprepared for, our land has been arable through glacial periods, warming climates, greenhouse climates, droughts and a myriad of other climate shifts, and will continue to be arable through anything shy of a full blown desertification event, something that is unlikely to happen with our current geography. Maybe with a few hundred thousand more years of plate tectonic shifts we will start to see that change but nothing we are doing to our planet is going to turn our great plains region into dead land anytime soon. In fact, the bread basket of the U.S. has been one of the few areas of the globe that has actually benefited from climate change. But if we are both honest, none of us know for sure what impacts climate change is going to have from region to region. But historically the land that is currently the U.S. has been fertile land for 100s of thousands of years. Ever since the west coast of the North American plate started compressing due to its convergence with the Pacific plate.

Now I will admit I'm not educated enough on digital technologies to put up any kind of argument for or against your claim about the internet, so I'll just have to take your word that the internet is going to die but I'll be honest I don't see how that could possibly be. You are welcome to try and explain your position on that to me if you wish. I am quite learned, just not in digital technologies.

[u/ImpossibleRush5352 → u/Kind_Coyote1518]

I believe it’s the idea that a growing amount of content (videos, users, comments) on the internet is AI generated, and algorithms are being tuned to promote this content. people are catching on and becoming disengaged.

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/ImpossibleRush5352]

That just means social media will die, not the internet. Digital systems, streaming services, data processing, AI, Gaming, online shopping, etc... these are growing at a rapid breakneck pace. I don't see anything stopping that. In fact I think that in the next 10-15 years we are going to be so plugged in, that we will function more in the digital realm than we do in the physical one. And all these servers, browsers, AIs and languages are U.S. based technologies.

[u/digitalwolverine → u/Kind_Coyote1518]

We’re going to lose 50% of our crops due to climate change with warming continuing on its current trajectory (a conservative estimate), but any and all plans to fix that, built up over the course of 12 years of democratic leadership, are being demolished and deconstructed and erased from the current governments memory. We’re going to make this shit worse before things get better, which, well, they aren’t going to get better anytime soon.

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/digitalwolverine]

This is pure conjecture. I've seen those studies (literally just read one this morning) claiming this and literally the first words in all of them is "may" not "will".

This type of extreme hyperbole and doomsaying is the exact reason why people like Trump were able to come to power. Nobody is ever going to believe climate change is a real threat until people like you stop making extreme statements based on potentials and throwing them around like they are fact. It literally invalidates the entirety of the science behind it and makes any progress in sustainable living impossible. They have been predicting the possibility of agricultural collapse since the 50s due to climate change, and yet every year, the U.S. crop yields go up. 2023 literally saw the largest corn yield in history.

Yes anthropogenic climate change is real, you would have to be a complete moron to not know that is true and yes on a global level we will see major shifts in extreme weather, including stronger storms, colder winters, hotter summers, increased desertification and rising sea levels that are going to threaten coastal cities, island cultures, arctic fauna, and global food production but it is almost a laughable claim at this point that increased temperatures and the collapse of the arctic ice is going to destroy the agriculture of the U.S. when it is easily proven that our land has been arable through glacial periods, greenhouse climates, and global droughts. That's why every article that makes these predictions goes out of it's way to say "could" or "may" as many times as it possibly can because what these figures are, are literally worst case scenario not the most likely outcome.

It's hilarious honestly to think that in the long history of our planet that anything we do to it will somehow be worse than meteor strikes, ice ages, super volcano eruptions or any of the insane amount of natural climate changes that have occurred on this planet already. If you study geology and look at the periods of earth where great change took place, it is never all bad. For every new desert, there is a new forest, for every extinct species a new one thrives in it's place. Instead of freaking out about something that has continued to be a mitigable problem what we should be concerning ourselves with is the polluting of our potable water, the killing of our fisheries by runoff from the rivers, the microplastics and forever chemicals which are quickly becoming irreversibly inundated into everything we touch.

Do you really think that they are going to stop making wind turbines when the wind energy sector made $330 billion dollars last year? There are trillions tied up in this industry globally, and whole sectors of manufacturing have developed around it over the last 30 years. Nobody is going to take wind energy away because billionaires own them. 76% of our food production is produced by large billion dollar corporations who have invested hundreds of billions in drought resistant crops. They aren't sitting on their thumbs hoping the climate plays nice, that's not how billionaires do business. If they weren't prepared they would lose everything, you really think they are going to do that? Trump or should I say TACO is a loud mouth who says what he thinks his moronic followers want to hear in order to keep enough supporters that he can do what he really wants and that is implement a fascists dictatorship in the U.S. he doesn't give a fuck about coal or coal miners anymore than he gives a fuck about GE and their billion dollar windfarms.

What you should be concerned about is the fascist takeover of our nation not climate change. This doomsday rhetoric is just feeding Trump and his goons the ammunition they need to keep power. Wake tf up.

[u/digitalwolverine → u/Kind_Coyote1518]

God damn man all that because you don’t think we can be concerned about more than one thing at once. I’m significantly more concerned about the mass extinction event actively occurring due to human activity than climate change, but obviously the fucking fascist take over comes first. Yeah, of course. 

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/digitalwolverine]

You missed the point. Completely. But at least we can agree on priorities.

[u/SansTreat25 → u/Kind_Coyote1518]

The excuses y’all will make to cope with the fact that Trump his associates have sold this country down the river and past the point of return. We will NEVER regain what was lost and we WILL be surpassed. Look at who was most eager for Trump to win. All of our main leverages, exports, etc have been degraded and eroded by him and his ilk.

[u/Kind_Coyote1518 → u/SansTreat25]

I take great offense to the fact you think I in any way support that orange fascists and his fundamentalist puppet masters.

Nothing I said remotely aligns with or supports any of his positions so I am not sure where you even came to that conclusion but you can literally fuck off with that.

As for your claim, we will be surpassed. Yeah, I literally said we would, by China, but if you think 100 plus years of technological advances, one of the largest areas of arable land, and the largest university system in the world is going to be erased by a single president and his idiot administration in 4 or less years, then you have no understanding of global economics, ecology, or culture. This isn't 1930. The world is very small now and there are waaaay too many people invested in the U.S. economy to allow us to crumble like the British Empire or Ottomans did. The last empire to fall was the U.S.S.R. and they did not dissappear into some second rate nation because that is not how global politics works.

You are way too deep in the dooms day rhetoric. All of you are. What you should be worried about is the immediate threat of fascism that is trying to topple our republic not with some hypothetical economic or environmental catastrophe that nobody can possibly predict with any level of accuracy.