As the planet plunges into a Trade War generated by Trump’s God Complex, I wonder what will destroy us first?
AI? Solar Flare? War, Climate Change, Pandemic or Christian Zionist Billionaires?
AI:
Ummmm, this is deeply concerning…
Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’
Tech boss suggests move to self-learning synthetic data though some warn this could cause ‘model collapse’
…so AI has consumed all human knowledge and is now creating synthetic data, but this sometimes manifests in the AI ‘hallucinating’ as if it is dreaming?
Jesus wept.
How soon does this bloody thing become sentient?
Before we need to start worrying about Terminator, the impact of AI to cause massive job losses has not been fully comprehended. The ruthlessness of AI redundancy makes us all horse and carriage operators in an age of uber.
Mass job losses are looming as corporations manage to get their heads around AI in their individual industries.
The breakthroughs AI will also manage will allow those with the skill set to become a new uber elite.
The distance between those on the bottom of the human scrap heap vs the god like powers of the AI enabled elites will become dangerously disconnected.
Solar Storms:
I know, all this shit to worry about AND SOLAR FLARES?
SAY IT AIN’T SO!
I’m afraid it be so…
Inevitable solar storms will be catastrophic for energy supply
Exploding transformers and crippling worldwide power outages: NZ’s disaster experts say the threat posed by solar storms is comparable to nuclear war
…we will face the Solar Maximus by July this year so if we are to face a Carrington Event, it will be this year.
War:
Once Trump inadvertently implodes the entire global economy with his Tariffs and Crypto gamble, then the world will turn slowly to open War. Conflict will become the norm as climate change and failed states combine to generate a desperation only violence can sate and fuel.
Open conflict between China and America will come to the surface once the economic pressures become impossible to contain socially.
The Military Industrial Complex will make an enormous profit this year.
Climate change
We are so outside the norm now that the scale of shut down and speed of it will terrify even the most staunch climate denier…
Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries
The global economy could face 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.
Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.
At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.
…we simply do not appreciate the cascade risks of collapse that face us economically, politically, environmentally and socially from run away climate change.
It is going to spark a level of climate change refugees fleeing to the relative safety of the West while the West starts to burn as well…
This Paris theatre gave free tickets to hundreds of migrants five weeks ago. Now they won’t leave
…the resentment this breeds will empower the global right to build higher walls, not longer tables.
Next Global Pandemic:
We thought Covid was bad, it ain’t nothing compared to what a new Bird Flu could do if it spills over to humans in 2025…
Bird Flu Is Raising Red Flags Among Health Officials
On January 6, the Louisiana Department of Health announced that a patient hospitalized last month for H5N1 avian influenza had died, becoming the first U.S. death from the virus. To make matters worse, samples taken from the individual suggest that the virus mutated within the patient after infection—meaning it had begun to adapt to infect humans better—raising new questions about H5N1’s pandemic potential.
…research shows us that the antivaxx community have been so successful with their disinformation campaign that people won’t heed the warnings of a new pandemic…
Inquiry warns distrustful public wouldn’t accept COVID measures in future pandemic
The government-appointed inquiry into Australia’s COVID response has warned public trust won’t be so high in a future pandemic and people would be unlikely to accept again many of the measures taken.
…let’s watch how this unfolds with stupid people dying first.
Christian Zionist Billionaires
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
The Christian Zionist Billionaire Plutocracy that surrounds Trump wants him to plunge the planet into apocalypse.
This from the Intercept:
J.D. Vance wants voters to think of him as a rags-to-riches Appalachian kid who believes in small-town values and working-class populism.
But to understand the real J.D. Vance, you have to follow the money — and the money leads directly to Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel.
Thiel hired Vance at his venture capital firm after Vance graduated from Yale Law School, then poured $15 million into Vance’s successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. He was also among the strongest voices pushing Donald Trump to pick Vance as his running mate.
So why is Peter Thiel so enamored with J.D. Vance? And what do tech moguls expect to get in return for acting as Vance’s political patrons?
Peter Thiel made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. In the Trump era, he has emerged as a major right-wing political funder, spending $35 million in the 2022 midterm election cycle alone.
His political philosophy has been described as “super-nationalistic” and “closer to authoritarianism” than libertarianism. For instance, in 2009, Thiel declared in an essay explaining his political vision that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
But Thiel isn’t the only tech billionaire with close ties to Vance. Other prominent backers include former PayPal COO and Yammer founder David Sacks, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Elon Musk, who called Trump’s selection of Vance an “excellent decision.”
And a second Trump administration would be positioned to provide tremendous benefits to all of these Silicon Valley tycoons through good old-fashioned tax cuts, subsidies, and deregulation.
JD Vance appeals to white pain, white poverty and white grievance in a way that builds Trumps muscular theatre into a political dynasty.
This is Nascar for Brown Shirts, Wrestling for Incels.
The machismo of Trump in a United States of Wounded Masculinity.
Thanks to woke social media activists, the white working poor have been enlightened by how much that middle class elite hate them and social media hate algorithms and loneliness does the rest.
Trump politically understands resentment as well as Hitler did and he has understood the resentment of the white working poor who have had their American dream traded in for free market trade deals and neoliberal capitalism.
To date the pain of the white working poor has been murdered by opiate addiction, an addiction that JD Vance hilariously understood and profited from…
…this is the power and the pain that JD Vance understands and channels…
…middle class identity politic activists benefit from the capitalist system, the white working poor are victims of it.
Vance is a client candidate of NZer and Global Libertarian Super Criminal Peter Thiel, he who created the mass surveillance Eye of Mordor Palantir and progresses an anti-democratic agenda to bring about a free market stateless utopia.
Vance sees the state as a betrayer and Thiel’s agenda as a means to punish and break that betrayer and remake American Capitalism in the image of those white working poor who do the actual manual labour.
Trump/Vance represents white poverty, pain and grievance welded onto a Libertarian Billionaire anarchist capitalist class who’ve agreed to amputate America last.
Conclusion:
Shit goin’ to git cray.
Try and stay alive in 2025.
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Way out there in the realms of possibility but a meteor strike – a smallish localised one – would be an unwelcome addition. Not unprecedented I believe.
AL brings worse than job losses. It exacerbates the societal dehumanising of eg call centres and bots replacing face-to-face engagements; interaction with AL-reliant ISPs can be a mental health challenge.
Apocalypse Who? What will destroy us first?
And the answer is….
Indifference
Why aren’t we having the same sort of massive protests against the genocide in Gaza, like we did against the war in Vietnam?
The sad thing is the genocide in Gaza as terrible as it is, is not the worst genocide in the world that title goes to Sudan. And we see the same players, MSF backed by Russian mercenaries and the Sudanese Army backed by Western proxies.
If we can’t stop war, a solely human endeavor, we definitely can’t stop climate change, or ever have the will or resources to spend on working to avert the other disasters natural or man made that will do us
War? Us humans have been at it for some time, ever since hunter-gatherers started to form more complex societies. I don’t really know if conflict existed in hunter-gathering groups but in the transition there must be something about the appropriation/protection of resources and the dynamics of political power. And surely the psychology of it all plays a big part. Why do men become soldiers? And what psychological forces turn them into brutal killing machines devoid of all humanity? Even if we knew the answers would it put a stop to it all.
It’s arguable that living under Roman Rule is more preferable than living under a nuclear umbrella. That said every culture is shaped by the material necessities of their age. It’s completely feasible that somebody who would disdain modern values just doesn’t understand that our values are better in a 20th century environment than they have been a 21st century environment or a 10th century environment.
But most importantly culture and ethics are shaped by necessities in the context of their age. While events may horrified today, it’s also because we have a different set of circumstances. Adultery is an issue today, but these days it’s a personal issue between individuals rather than one that calls for a handmaid’s tale because we have DNA testing so if all else fails we can find out who the father is. Well, that and succession these days is a lot less tied to inheritance which means bastards are not necessarily going to rob their trueborn half-siblings.
While I have doubts about certain aspects of modern society (I’m increasingly sure by the day that Twitter was a mistake, and I mean that society would have been notably worse due to twitter still existing, not that kids these days can sense these things), there’s an idea that goes around sometimes that it’s virtue that makes society weak. That a society that’s cruel is also strong, that virtue is measured against efficiency.
And that’s both dangerous and wrong. If past societies are better equipped than we were, it’s probably because of virtues that we fail to emulate, not the vices that we’ve overcome.
Actually we may have already reached solar maximum last year.
https://www.space.com/the-universe/sun/is-solar-maximum-over-solar-cycle-25
@Martyn- Good to see that you are starting to realise that Silicon Valley runs the Republicans now, and boy do they have some warped creeps in charge – the “New Zealander” being the one with his foot firmly on the idealogical accelerator. The current NZ Government is firmly backing these madmen – don’t forget it- and they seem to have found upwards of 5 Billion dollars for defence spending when they couldn’t find any money for the ferries and health. They are nothing but corrupt criminals working against the interests of New Zealanders, that should be abundantly clear by now.
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