collapse of the old society

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41398455

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41398454

Climate Collapse Satire for us all.

This is why Venezuela and Greenland are the two sides of the same coin. It's not just me saying this. It's none other than Macron saying it as well (no matter how you feel about him). https://www.politico.eu/article/france-emmanuel-macron-us-is-turning-away-from-allies/

If you do like this weekly collapse satire, please consider subscribing!!! Thank you!!

... And why we're all fucked by it.

Tldr: the entire US economy is propped up by NVIDIA and the companies that buy its GPUs for generative AI applications. But generative AI is not and will never be profitable. All that investment is a gamble on future profits that will never actually happen. It is a scam. It is a bubble hyped by analysts and marketers to keep stock prices going up.

Once the market figures that out, everything burns. The market collapses. Shareholders, investors, and anyone with a retirement account loses everything. And (the article doesn't say this explicitly, but I think it's obvious) a significant fraction of that lost wealth is transferred to the hyperbillionaires running the AI companies who see this collapse coming and cash out ahead of time.

This is fourth stage enshittification: where technofeudal megacorps, having leeched all value from users (stage 2) and business clients (stage 3), now turn on their shareholders, stripping value from the stock market and their shareholders for the benefit of their hyperbillionaire owners.

This may be the actual end game of end stage capitalism and is almost certainly the beginning of the next Great Depression.

I realize this is basically a novel, but if you want to understand why the US economy is fucked, read it.

Navdanya International has released the report Seeds of Resistance, which documents the global spread of both old and new GMOs and the dismantling of biosafety regulations across continents. The publication comes as the European Union moves toward deregulating next‑generation GMOs, paving the way for gene‑edited organisms to enter fields and dinner plates without labeling, traceability, or proper risk assessment.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31525039

• Extreme droughts, human interventions and growing boat traffic are contributing to riverbank collapses that endanger riverside communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
• Four public river ports in Amazonas state have been damaged by riverbank collapses in the past decade, prompting concerns about the safety of Amazon port infrastructure.
• Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry is investigating alleged failures to prevent collapses at regional ports that connect riverside communities and provide access to essential services.

And before you shrug and go "great, jobs are bullshit":

Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:

•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),

•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),

•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),

•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).

Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.

Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”

That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.

Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.

EDIT: for people who didn't pay attention to my "think about Appalachia" comment.

Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn't mean the people around you can too.

Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn't know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.

And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of "grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family" - and who suddenly won't be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.

And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that's how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.

Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because "free trade" and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.

You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I'm afraid you're going to.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30754984

A new study published in Nature Sustainability warns that India’s largest cities are slowly sinking. Using eight years of satellite radar data, researchers found that parts of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru are subsiding due to groundwater extraction and soil compaction, a process where the ground compresses as water is drawn out from underground layers.

As our evolution slows and industrialization and technology accelerates, a growing body of research suggests that human biology is struggling to keep pace. Many of the chronic stress-related health issues we face today aren’t personal failings or modern inconveniences – they’re the predictable result of forcing Stone Age physiology into a world it was never built for.

A fascinating new study from University of Zurich researchers has investigated whether the rapid and extensive environmental shifts of the current Anthropocene have compromised the fitness of Homo sapiens. In less-evolutionary speak: if the world most of us experience daily is having a profound impact on mental and physical health as a species.

Synthesizing data concerning industrialization and urbanization and health, the researchers argue that there are many signs that humans haven't had time to adapt to the rapid changes in the world over the last century. They cite declining global fertility rates, rising chronic inflammatory conditions and other chronic health trends as signs that we've been struggling on Earth since the Industrial Revolution.

We live in a society, and it's killing us.

To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.

State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.

They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.

With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.

“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”