ShittyBeatlesFCPres

I’ll go by (very broad) regions:

The United States experiences a brain drain and Trump’s death (all but inevitable in 10 years, whether by natural causes or other means), will cause a major rift in the Republican Party. Democrats will somehow fail to capitalize on it and then blame online leftists, famously the kingmakers of American politics.

Canada will become a de facto part of Europe. Bike lanes will be added.

Europe will experience an economic boom as it’s basically forced to develop new industries, becomes the default destination for scientific research, and the Euro begins to replace the dollar as the currency of choice for international trade contracts. France, especially, will benefit as it isn’t reliant on the U.S. for military support, space launch capabilities, etc. and will become the default NATO weapons supplier.

Russia will have a deep post-war depression even if it takes Kyiv due to brain drain and sending so many young men into a meat grinder.

China will have a medium-sized economic crisis but ultimately (after Xi) enact long needed reforms (kind of like when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping enacted reforms).

India will have a major crisis as Hindu Nationalism goes too far and people begin to revolt.

Central Asia will keep on keeping on. (I don’t know a lot about Central Asia.)

Latin America will increase trade with China and Europe at the expense of the United States. Bolsonaro will go to the hospital 50 more times and be bit by an even more exotic bird. Argentina will benefit most from the decline of the U.S. as a reliable trading partner.

Israel will annex the West Bank and Arab countries will isolate it. Saudi Arabia’s line city will still be in the planning stages. Iran will develop a nuclear deterrent but the power of the Supreme Leader will be weakened and shift to the elected officials because of economic problems.

The Maghreb will benefit from Europe’s rise and increased trade. West Africa will experience an economic and population boom and become an inexpensive manufacturing hub. The Horn of Africa will probably remain a shitshow (but hopefully I’m wrong about that). Central and Southern Africa will also experience significant growth but at a slower pace than West Africa.

Australia will lose another war with emus as New Zealand wisely allies with the Emus. They will force Australia into a humiliating peace deal that ultimately leads to a third Emu War, much like WWI’s onerous peace terms led to WWII.

Ocean acidification and rising sea levels will begin to fuck everyone and scientists will scream about it but it’ll be the following decades when that sort of thing really wrecks the world economy.

Nintendo will somehow sell me the same games for the 5th time.

I actually emailed my local National Weather Service station awhile back asking if they’d post on Mastodon and even offered them a BlueSky invite and they wrote back saying only Twitter and Facebook were allowed and they’d be everywhere if it was approved by higher ups.

Someone made a BlueSky bot a few months ago for NWS notices and I’m pretty sure they covered every local one. I remember the person who made it asking people to request any missing stations. Not sure if there’s a Mastodon equivalent but you could use a bridge. It won’t help with transit delays or other local government announcements but the weather service stuff is available (via an AtProto <-> ActivityPub bridge if nothing else; it’s not like you interact with the posts so it’d be ideal for a bridge).

There’s always PiHole to block ads at the network level. It takes some setup and a raspberry pi but it can be one of the cheaper ones. And I’m pretty sure the sites aren’t going to do much more than check the User Agent to get the browser so User Agent Switcher will get around 99% of that.

You could, I suppose, block Firefox in other ways (like maybe checking for some random Chromium feature not yet supported in Firefox) but Firefox isn’t usually far behind Chrome so it would almost take an entire new developer to be effective. And there’s probably ways around that too. (I’m a web developer but have never worked on an ad-supported project and never will so I’m not sure but life finds a way.)

In general, there’s the sunk cost fallacy. But I think there’s an additional, related component in politics. Trump in particular but many politicians (and whatever Elon Musk is) are conmen and not particularly smart. They’re just charismatic — I don’t personally get Trump or Musk’s charisma but apparently a lot of people do. (And their tweets alone are evidence enough to prove they aren’t clever.)

And so any time Trump or Musk or whomever does something completely idiotic, supporters compensate by telling themselves it’s all 12 dimensional chess and they’re actually brilliant. It’s just too embarrassing for them to admit they were conned by a fool. So, they double down to compensate. But ultimately, most conmen aren’t smart. That’s why they’re conmen.

Alphabet/Google needs to fire their CEO. He’s an obvious idiot, not good with employees, not good with investors, and not good at lobbying. That’s like 99% of a CEO’s job. Just get rid of him and Google’s stock price will probably jump 20%.

Basic human decency. I did my time in the corporate world and will only work for non-profits now. The pay is always less but competitive enough (and the benefits are often better) but the people you work with are so much smarter and committed. You can sleep well at night.

Everyone who got laid off from a tech company should try out working for non-profits. (The good kind. Not the weird political kind.) It sucks to take a pay cut and there’s fewer career advancement opportunities but sometimes, your soul matters. And I don’t mean “soul” in a religious way. I’ll wake up at 3am to fix a bug for a non-profit with a mission and not even mind. I wouldn’t do that for a defense contractor (which many tech companies are now). Fuck ‘em. Hire people in Australia if you need 24h coverage.

To me, Russia fell into the “natural resources trap” where a country can sell oil, gold, diamonds, whatever and the citizens are fine with low taxes and jobs but it ultimately can doom you to misrule. A country that doesn’t have oil or whatever has to do things the hard way. Like educate everyone and be a knowledge economy. That’s harder than finding oil.

Sochi seems lovely and I’d like to visit St Petersburg once relations normalize but no one associates Russia with tourism like they do Italy or France or Thailand or Bali or wherever your nearest tourism hotspot is.

So, long term, I’d like to see Russia embrace its strengths outside of energy and arms. We’d all be happier. But I’m not in charge so we’ll see what Trump and Putin do instead.

Natural resources. Oil & LNG (which America exports but much of Europe, China, and India import). They have Uranium fit for nuclear plants (so does Mali, which is why it’s a point of contention between France and Russia). Kind of crappy but still explosive weapons sales. The U.S., France, and China will sell you previous generation weapons that are better than Russia’s best stuff.

I mean, to vastly oversimplify, it’s a gas station with nuclear weapons and rocket scientists from the Soviet era. It’s not a diversified economy for a country so large. They export grain and shit like that but it’s a whole continent wide and they aren’t efficient about it.

It’s not a conventional career path but what is in these times of change?

Thank you. I have a masters in headassery from the Advanced School of Clowning at Bologna. And I interned at the Milan Dick Sucking Factory, which is where I met your parents.

Make one if you want that. I doubt many adults are going to make a 4chan clone and deal with all that comes with it.

No offense. I’m just saying 4chan is toxic and bad and and there’s not a lot of experienced developers hoping to recreate it when we can just take a shit on the sidewalk and accomplish more in less time.

Fentanyl is a technology.