And it's not just declining birth rates. Religion has been heavily politicized in the last 10 years and it's tanking attendance at churches.

I also suspect that the absurd cost coupled with the affordability crisis in general is a problem. I put my kid through college a while ago now and I have no idea what I would do with instead of paying 500 or 600 a month for rent it was $1500. Never mind that every year more subsidies get pulled.

We're basically making College a luxury for the rich and the people favored by the rich.

Nothing happened. The people who are better than you, you're betters, want this and you are too busy freaking out about whatever they're telling you to freak out about this week that has no bearing on your civil rights or the economy to do anything about it.

And if by some miracle you've realized this is a bad idea and you're looking for a way to stop it your Fox News loving Grandpa is going to fuck shit up at the elections.

What amazes me is that this is all happening out in the open right where we can see it and we can't do anything about it because about 46% of the country is too stupid to understand why this is bad or too busy freaking out about violent video games or trans girls in sports or Satan possessing children or whatever the hell it is TV is telling them to freak out about and then all you have to do is stop about 5% of the rest of the country from voting using common voting suppression tactics...

I don't think our species has a future but I would love to be proven wrong

It is never to protect kids. If it was people would listen to childhood development experts and implement dozens and dozens of policies they have been calling for since the 70s.

This is probably just about control. For one thing foreign governments are going to gradually force Facebook and Twitter out of their markets. The United States is threatening to invade greenland. You cannot have a huge media presence from a potentially hostile foreign Nation in your country. Billionaires and the wealthy elite in general are also hoping to use this and other think of the children bullshit laws to lock down the internet for their own Financial benefit.

So a little bit of geopolitics in a little bit of big business assholes and absolutely nobody giving a shit about the future or well-being of children.

You're thinking it's too constrained. You can't consider systemic problems that might impact your life. Everything in the world is you and you alone.

You are using right wing extremist propaganda in your post. The fact that you're using the word victimized tells me that you're so steeped in right-wing propaganda that you can't think beyond yourself and your most immediate surroundings.

Somewhere in the back of your mind I think you know this and it's eating away at you but like a lot of right wingers you can't give it up because it's become a huge part of your identity and how you virtue signal.

Whatever the case you absolutely reek of imposter syndrome.

Anyway good luck. Survivor bias is still a thing so who knows maybe you'll be one of the few people who make it.

I'm not suggesting that Trump will pay for tech company's power plants, instead we just not going to get power plants to meet demand and the price of electricity is going to skyrocket. I would expect in the next 5 years for our power bills to double. Gas bills will shoot up too because people will switch electric heat to gas.

This is going to wreck your income. Guys like me who may be aren't the best in the world that it stuff and aren't experts in math aren't currently pushing ourselves to compete with you.

20 or 30 years ago I was working in low end low paying jobs and suddenly needed more money. I had credentials and I had skills but I also had a lot of anxiety and self-esteem issues.

Economic reasons forced me to step up and I did and I compete with a significantly higher level of employee than I did 20 years ago. Maybe I don't compete at your level but I guarantee you there's guys out there like me who can and will.

I don't know why you think supply and demand don't affect you but you're about to get a rude awakening. Because there's going to be a shitload of guys who step up and get the skills you have or who already have those skills but are coasting in easier jobs and they're going to be forced whether they like it or not to compete with you and that's drives your wages down.

Maybe you'll get lucky and retire and die before it hits you. But it's not far off so let's see. You're about to find out whether or not you get to be one of the I got mine fuck you crowd or if you get to be one of the ones on the other end of getting fucked.

Good luck out there kiddo. Hopefully you're at least 60

When you have permanent 25% unemployment all that money is gone and no longer circulating in the economy. A billionaire can only buy so many yachts. Trickle down does not work

This means that as sales dry up for companies they're going to do layoffs and that's going to increase unemployment so they're going to do more layoffs and so on so on so forth.

It's the end of capitalism. But without the cool Star Trek luxury gay space communism.

Instead you get feudalism but the peasants are treated even worse. And you're going to be one of the peasants. You have a better chance of winning the lottery then you do even being one of the boot lickers for the ruling class. We're talking about a couple hundred thousand people on the entire planet out of 8 billion.

The scale of this is in the trillions. The ruling class are planning on replacing all of our jobs.

We can debate how successful they're going to be but the reality is that they're going to do it to a large extent and we are looking at a high degree of permanent unemployment. And no we can't all be plumbers the economy can't sustain that many plumbers and if everybody learns to do blue collar work the demand for Blue collar work is going to drop substantially. When was the last time you took your computer to a shop? If you're a blue collar guy you don't hire other Blue collar guys unless it's a bigger job than you can do yourself...

Remember that the problem AI solves is paying wages.

What's worse is that billionaires really really do not like being dependent on employees and consumers and ai and automation offers a way out.

This means that they will spend way more money than is profitable to build out AI in order to get the benefit of not being dependent on your labor or your consumer spending.

And that means AI does not have to be profitable. It's the end of capitalism. Billionaires are not capitalists they are a parasite on capitalism. They do not like capitalism just because they benefit from it. A tick does not like the dog it's sucking blood from.

Again you are correct smog is technically the shit that comes out of your exhaust and because of that technically tire particulate is not included in that definition.

But colloquially smog is air pollution caused by cars and again you can do a simple Google search and find plenty of studies. Honestly you don't even really need to studies you just need to stop and ask yourself where the hell are your tires going when they wear down? Because they're not on the road because if they were we would have to constantly clean tire off our roads not just when a teenager does a peel out.

Tires basically atomized into incredibly small particles and they're so small you can't see them with the naked eye but they do stay in the air. So every time you go out you are breathing little bit of tire.

This actually took a long time for scientists to figure out and prove because the particulate is so tiny that we need it special filters to catch it and detect it. You can read about this in the articles and studies that talk about it.

I suspect that the reason people freak out when they are presented with the fact of tire particulate pollution is because there really isn't any solution for it. And like most problems that there is no solution for our solution is to just pretend the problem doesn't exist.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on a military we only need so that we can invade Greenland and Venezuela. Meanwhile single-payer healthcare would give everyone better care and better outcomes and save half a trillion dollars a year according to the Congressional budget office. That's 10 times your 52 billion dollars.

The problem is billionaires and trickle down economics not spending. Your worldview is too simplistic and constrained and you need better news and information sources and you need to think more critically and Google more competently. Be better.

One that takes my comments out of context because it was trained on them.

But yeah if you do a simple Google search about tire particulate you can find that most of the air pollution in any modern city is tire particulate.

People will point out that technically the word smog refers specifically to exhaust emissions and therefore I shouldn't be using it but potato/patoto. I am using the word smog like you used the word Kleenex as a generic term to cover something, in this case air pollution in a city.

Also all of this just distracts from my main point above which is that cars are rapidly becoming completely unaffordable.

We are either going to build out public transportation or we are going to cut 25 to 40% of the population out of regular transportation.

Honestly I expect we are going to do the latter and just leave those people screwed but the problem is those people aren't going to just go quietly into that good night. They're going to cause all sorts of social and economic problems. Which we will blame not on the systemic problems they are facing but on their own personal failings and get angry at them and start fighting with them uselessly.

Basically this is one facet of our collapsing civilization. I don't know an actual solution to any of this because I don't know anything anyone will accept. The only viable solution is walkable cities and public spaces but we are so addicted to suburbs and big honking SUVs and trucks that I don't think any of the viable solutions are on the table.

We need to start planning for when regular people can't afford cars anymore.

The price of cars keeps going up but wages aren't doing the same. Eventually the supply of used cars that are affordable is going to be sufficiently low that the prices for those are going to be beyond what people can afford with two or three jobs. Right now we are papering over that by forcing people to drive Uber to pay for the car they used to get to their day job but self-driving cars are going to take those jobs in the next 10 or 15 years tops.

Somebody making 3500 a month and paying $1,000 a month in rent with roommates is not going to be able to come up with another $1,000 a month for an entry level car, Insurance gas and maintenance.

Something has to give.

What do you use them to do is make programmers 20 or 30% more productive so you don't have to hire. The Salesforce story posted here describes that.

Automation isn't all or nothing. The PlayStation 5 is made by about five people who feed components into machines because there's one step where it's hard to make a machine to move the components from machine a to machine b. But you still have literally five people making millions of consoles.

Automation has basically wrecked the middle class and there's no coming back from it. Ubi isn't on the table because people resent getting handouts and they resent giving handouts and it's easy for billionaires who want to keep all that money for themselves to exploit that resentment.

Factory automation devour the jobs from 1980 until today and it's still doing it. Donald Trump's commerce Secretary admitted on TV that even if they could bring back the factories the jobs weren't coming because they would be automated. And now that same automation is coming for White collar work

We still have more people being born every year and more people hitting the job market every year. Even though birth rates are in decline because of the way population Dynamics work we are 50 years out from a global population decline even at current rates. That might be as little as 30 years though because it turns out it's probably closer to 2.7 birth rather than the 2.1 we usually hear but still it's decades away.

We are going to have too many people and too few places in society for them and traditionally when that happens the people who need handouts resent getting handouts and the people who give the handouts resent giving them. So you have a nice big war between those two groups.

Ubi isn't on the table because of that resentment. Never mind all the other social and economic problems like how we don't police monopolies anymore so they can just jack up prices to absorb Ubi money. You can't even implement it in the first place because the billionaires won't let you and the public at large won't get behind it because of the resentment I mentioned above.

When we hit 25% unemployment that's about where we were at when world War II started, only this time we have nukes. We also have idiots in charge threatening to invade Greenland. I don't care what your political party affiliation is or what identity markers are important to you the United States shouldn't be threatening to invade Greenland and you know it.

Best case scenario your kids get drafted to fight. Also if you have medical training they will draft you too and they don't care how old you are.

Worst case scenario the war goes nuclear and that's the end of it for everyone. Doesn't even matter if the nukes work there's enough of them to fuck up the entire environment and end our species. Yeah we've survived a few bottlenecks here and there but nothing like nuclear war.

I legitimately do not know a solution to this. The billionaires aren't going to stop automating all the jobs away because they do not like capitalism they do not like consumers and they do not like employees. It is incredibly frustrating how their wealth and prestige is entirely dependent on us filthy filthy consumers and employees.

But then for everybody else I don't know what you do when you have 25 to 30% permanent unemployment because we just don't need people and everyone involved in that resents everyone else. You can't explain away feelings and resentment is a feeling.

Our species just isn't set up for this. If anyone has any answers I'm open to them but I think we're fucked

In our collapse than you are. There is still some places in the UK with functional public transportation for example. Outside of New York and San Francisco you won't find anywhere that has functional public transportation here. If you're using public transportation you can plan on a 20 minute drive taking over an hour and a half here. Kids just don't have that much time in the day with the amount of homework we dump on them.

We do have Parks but like I mentioned if you hang out in them too long the cops are likely to hassle you especially if your parents aren't with you. And just double especially if you are black or brown. It's just not safe. At the very least they will force you to go home and it's not outside the realm of possibility for them to arrest or shoot you. In particular if you're in one of the states being used as a political prop by Donald Trump you know have to worry about ice.

Pubs are obviously a no-go for kids but the spaces where they would hang out in the past like malls just won't let them hang out anymore. If you are an unaccompanied minor they will very quickly eject you from the mall. If you're buying something you're expected to show up buy it and leave.

Biking really isn't an option because suburbs mean everything is so damn spread out. I couldn't tell my kid to go bike to their friend's house because it was a 30-minute ride on a bike at least. One of them was a 30-minute drive-by-car for fucks sakes. There wasn't even a bus route to get there.