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Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

dream9!bed!! posted:

If that poo poo is true, then why are any of you working still (except to fund your resilient commune or bolthole or whatever)?

Because when I read things like that, it makes me want to cash out some of my retirement

this makes some poor assumptions about the finances of other people on this thread

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Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Oxxidation posted:

this makes some poor assumptions about the finances of other people on this thread

vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011

dream9!bed!! posted:

If that poo poo is true, then why are any of you working still (except to fund your resilient commune or bolthole or whatever)?

Because when I read things like that, it makes me want to cash out some of my retirement, buy a van or RV, and commune with nature while I still can instead of putting up with my boss in the hopes of staying on track with my career.

Seriously though, I'm very close to cutting all my spending down to the bone, figuring out how much money I need to literally survive, and loving off into the woods or somewhere beautiful because that's what recharges me and I won't want to live if that's not there anymore anyways. Sure it'll gently caress my resume, but if the timelines we're talking about are real that doesn't matter.

For me there's two reasons.

One, there's still a little hope. If there's even a 5% chance that we avoid that scenario and instead transition into a future of renewable socialism, that's worth fighting for and we can still avoid the worst parts of what I posted. And in that case it's worth remaining a part of society so you can be part of the fight.

Two, there are a lot of good things about modern civilization and I want to enjoy them while I can, because we may be the last generation that gets to do so.

Accretionist
Nov 7, 2012
I BELIEVE IN STUPID CONSPIRACY THEORIES

vyelkin posted:

...

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

I'm responding with unproductive hedonism.

Don't know about you lot

redleader
Aug 18, 2005

Engage according to operational parameters

Feranon posted:

but also literal loving bc we might as well get some public orgies going in case that doesn't work or makes things worse somehow

"in case" lol

General Dog
Apr 26, 2008

Everybody's working for the weekend

vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

Well when you put it like that it doesn't sound so scary

double nine
Aug 8, 2013

what are the bottlenecks for creating large-scale azola production? I'm assuming lack of interest and fresh water shortage, and maybe unsolved question what to do with the dead plants, but I might be missing stuff?

Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

double nine posted:

what are the bottlenecks for creating large-scale azola production? I'm assuming lack of interest and fresh water shortage, and maybe unsolved question what to do with the dead plants, but I might be missing stuff?

The rich

Wakko
Jun 9, 2002
Faboo!

Extensive Vamping posted:

Horribly depressing but concise and detailed. Exactly what I wanted, thank you.

if you want a novel-length documentary from 2040 check out "The Water Knife". it's set in Arizona after the aquifers in the southwest dry up and at least 35 million americans become climate refugees.

Complications
Jun 19, 2014

double nine posted:

what are the bottlenecks for creating large-scale azola production? I'm assuming lack of interest and fresh water shortage, and maybe unsolved question what to do with the dead plants, but I might be missing stuff?
How do you make money off of it?

Bass Concert Hall
May 9, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo

Wakko posted:

if you want a novel-length documentary from 2040 check out "The Water Knife". it's set in Arizona after the aquifers in the southwest dry up and at least 35 million americans become climate refugees.

I heard this was mostly the author’s set dressing for writing about nonconsenual teen sex. Which, having read The Windup Girl, would not shock me.

snoo
Jul 5, 2007




Streak posted:

Lol people ask me what I want to do when I'm retired and I keep telling them I don't really think it's going to matter by then and they don't get it

snoo
Jul 5, 2007




vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

dream9!bed!! posted:

If that poo poo is true, then why

quote:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.

Bass Concert Hall
May 9, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo

double nine posted:

what are the bottlenecks for creating large-scale azola production? I'm assuming lack of interest and fresh water shortage, and maybe unsolved question what to do with the dead plants, but I might be missing stuff?

1) You need to cover nation-sized areas of the earth with azolla to make a meaningful contribution to carbon capture
2) This area needs to be covered in freshwater that's relatively nutrient rich (or at least phosphorus rich - Azolla can fix nitrogen)
3) You need to be able to store all that Azolla somewhere it won't rot in order to actually sequester the carbon

All of these conditions were met 50 million years ago because the continents had walled off the Artic ocean in the same way the Black Sea is land-locked now. This meant the water wasn't being mixed by deep sea currents and could form a stratified water column. This allowed silt-filled runoff from rivers to form a "lens" of low-density freshwater sitting on top of the seawater. The azolla, growing into this freshwater, formed mats several inches thick over the ocean that further limited waves/mixing, allowing the lens of freshwater - and Azolla - to slowly spread across the Arctic ocean. Finally, the depth and the lack of mixing allowed the Artic to develop a dense anoxic enviornment at the bottom, meaning that as the Azolla blooms died and the plant material sunk to the bottom of the ocean, it couldn't be digested by microorganisms to release the carbon back into circulation.

We don't have those conditions now. Even if you could convince every involved government to convert the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Seas into an Azolla garden (which, lol), that wouldn't be nearly the same surface area that was covered during the Azolla event. Which also, by the way, still only reduced atmospheric CO2 levels by 1ppm every couple of centuries.

dream9!bed!!
Jan 9, 2019

by VideoGames

vyelkin posted:

For me there's two reasons.

One, there's still a little hope. If there's even a 5% chance that we avoid that scenario and instead transition into a future of renewable socialism, that's worth fighting for and we can still avoid the worst parts of what I posted. And in that case it's worth remaining a part of society so you can be part of the fight.

Two, there are a lot of good things about modern civilization and I want to enjoy them while I can, because we may be the last generation that gets to do so.

I can still be "part of the fight" in whatever insignificant way that entails from my forest hovel. I don't see how continuing to find inventive ways to obscure the fact that I'm using my phone in my cubicle helps that.

And to your second point, replace "modern civilization" with "nature" and I guess we're really at the same place.

As for that koan, I don't really get it. Some say it's about being present and enjoying that sweet berry despite the tigers about to eat you, others say it's about how you're supposed to consider the person foolish for thinking berries in such a difficult time.

Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Just leguslatively take chicken carbonara off the menu at olive garden, problem solved, wine moms be damned

Crazypoops
Jul 17, 2017



dream9!bed!! posted:

I can still be "part of the fight" in whatever insignificant way that entails from my forest hovel. I don't see how continuing to find inventive ways to obscure the fact that I'm using my phone in my cubicle helps that.

And to your second point, replace "modern civilization" with "nature" and I guess we're really at the same place.

As for that koan, I don't really get it. Some say it's about being present and enjoying that sweet berry despite the tigers about to eat you, others say it's about how you're supposed to consider the person foolish for thinking berries in such a difficult time.

Dude no one's giving you permission to go off yourself Into the Wild style.

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

dream9!bed!! posted:

As for that koan, I don't really get it. Some say it's about being present and enjoying that sweet berry despite the tigers about to eat you, others say it's about how you're supposed to consider the person foolish for thinking berries in such a difficult time.

Life is poo poo and then you die, might as well enjoy a berry before that happens.


If the berry to you is living in the wild as much as possible and enjoying nature then go do that. You're not asking the thread why it doesn't cash its retirement out and go enjoy life, you're asking yourself. I know why I'm doing what I do.

Moridin920 has issued a correction as of 22:51 on May 6, 2019

dream9!bed!!
Jan 9, 2019

by VideoGames
Fair point. But I'd argue that nobody in this thread really believes that this stuff is actually that dire, since nobody is really DOING anything based on that info, only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
Well, a lot of people have posted various things they've done. Something that sticks out in my mind was the dude helping random E European schools set up recycling programs in their towns and whatnot. Is it going to make a difference in the end? Who knows. It'll make a difference to those kids for some amount of time, at least.

A lot of other stuff can't be posted because this is after all a public forum. There's people on SA who know me irl, and etc.

Admiral Ray
May 17, 2014

Proud Musk and Dogecoin fanboy

dream9!bed!! posted:

Fair point. But I'd argue that nobody in this thread really believes that this stuff is actually that dire, since nobody is really DOING anything based on that info, only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

What do you think an appropriate response would be?

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
If you want something more specific, monkeywrenching is a cool and good way to turn things unprofitable which is what they really care about in the end. If you can spike a ton of trees from your hovel and gently caress up the machinery then great. If there's a pipeline near you then you can often take a wrench start turning things. It's illegal, obviously.

Shipon
Nov 7, 2005

Moridin920 posted:

If you want something more specific, monkeywrenching is a cool and good way to turn things unprofitable which is what they really care about in the end. If you can spike a ton of trees from your hovel and gently caress up the machinery then great. If there's a pipeline near you then you can often take a wrench start turning things. It's illegal, obviously.

if you really think about it spending all day on your employer's dime posting instead of working is basically monkeywrenching so we're helping demolish the system

Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
:qqsay: Won't someone please think of the capital

mandatory lesbian
Dec 18, 2012

dream9!bed!! posted:

Fair point. But I'd argue that nobody in this thread really believes that this stuff is actually that dire, since nobody is really DOING anything based on that info, only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

I believe it's dire in the sense that we are all very hosed, I just also see mass extinctions as a regular occurrence in the Earth's history, and don't see humanity as some super special thing that needs to exist. So I'm pretty chill about the whole thing

Notorious R.I.M.
Jan 27, 2004

up to my ass in alligators
I'm eating some delicious berries

Bass Concert Hall
May 9, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo

dream9!bed!! posted:

Fair point. But I'd argue that nobody in this thread really believes that this stuff is actually that dire, since nobody is really DOING anything based on that info, only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

Isn’t that because such talk got the prior threads closed?

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

dream9!bed!! posted:

Fair point. But I'd argue that nobody in this thread really believes that this stuff is actually that dire, since nobody is really DOING anything based on that info, only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

got the title, used the money to buy a fixer upper condo, in a walkable neighborhood, across the street from a train station, in cash. then went ahead and retired* now, since its not gonna be an option in 2050. besides retiring in your late 60s was always a poo poo deal anyway. you just got to lay around and suffer some illnesses for a few years till you die.

* i still freelance a bit to cover health insurance & food but my 'career' is super over

edit: i'm sure as poo poo not funding a 401k or ira either

StabbinHobo has issued a correction as of 00:09 on May 7, 2019

Slutitution
Jun 26, 2018

by Nyc_Tattoo

vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

This is fake news. RussiaGate is the real danger. According to corporate media.

But seriously, start investing in vans and mobile homes now.

Trainee PornStar
Jul 20, 2006

I'm just an inbetweener

Slutitution posted:

But seriously, start investing in vans and mobile homes now.

Vans & stuff will be easy to come by... As this thread has said over & over, better investing in having some friends.

Notorious R.I.M.
Jan 27, 2004

up to my ass in alligators
Climate Change? Better invest in having some friends

Addamere
Jan 3, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
friends are op

TeenageArchipelago
Jul 23, 2013


lmao you fucks are really investing in climate change? that shits gonna be all over the place in a couple decades, and you're gonna feel mighty silly when your investment becomes worthless. supply and demand, folks! you should be buying up this good not climate change while it's still around, gonna be able to sell it for a fortune after the market switches!

Shipon
Nov 7, 2005

StabbinHobo posted:

got the title, used the money to buy a condo in a walkable neighborhood across the street from a train station in cash, and then went ahead and retired* now since its not gonna be an option in 2050. besides retiring in your late 60s was always a poo poo deal anyway you just got to lay around and suffer some illnesses for a few years till you die.

* i still freelance a bit to cover health insurance & food but my 'career' is super over

edit: i'm sure as poo poo not funding a 401k or ira either
Retirement is dead and quite honestly given how the Boomers and the generation before them behaved/behave after they retire, it's probably for the best. If you have nothing to do all day your brain slowly rots to nothingness.

Trainee PornStar
Jul 20, 2006

I'm just an inbetweener

Shipon posted:

Retirement is dead and quite honestly given how the Boomers and the generation before them behaved/behave after they retire, it's probably for the best. If you have nothing to do all day your brain slowly rots to nothingness.

serious question.. I've got a retirement fund at work I could cash in, so far it's got about 15 years paid in.
Would it be worth using it to pay off as much of my mortgage as possible so I could go semi-retired now?

*edit*
I know the answer already... I'll be speaking to HR on tuesday.

Trainee PornStar has issued a correction as of 00:25 on May 7, 2019

Kunabomber
Oct 1, 2002


Pillbug
Why dump money into a house that might be worthless when you don't know if you'll be forced out of it in the future?

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
being debt free is huge and owning a home is an excellent overall hedge (nothing is risk free)

but do not pay the mortgage on a single family detached house in a car-dependent neighborhood, you'd be better off spending it on blow

dream9!bed!!
Jan 9, 2019

by VideoGames

Trainee PornStar posted:

serious question.. I've got a retirement fund at work I could cash in, so far it's got about 15 years paid in.
Would it be worth using it to pay off as much of my mortgage as possible so I could go semi-retired now?

*edit*
I know the answer already... I'll be speaking to HR on tuesday.

What does semi retirement look like to you? Having your home paid for, and then just working to cover the tax/insurance/food/etc?

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Ayn Randi
Mar 12, 2009


Grimey Drawer

dream9!bed!! posted:

only despairing and trying to get that Director title.

lol director of smoking weed studies maybe

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