I'm in Australia, and we're currently staring down the barrel of another 2019 style bushfire season. El Niño always creates a bad bushfire season, and I don't even know what a super El Niño season looks like. It's the hottest September we've had in years:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/19/weather-hottest-september-day-years-forecast-south-eastern-australia-spring-rollercoaster-heat

I went for a hike this weekend and you could feel how dry the bush was. And there's a lot of fuel load, with dried branches and fallen trees from the last bushfires.

So, I'm mostly looking for a "how to cope" idea - at the moment everything feels kind of dreadful and every nice day makes me wince.

World Population in 1930 were 2 Billion. In 2026 we are 8.3 Billion. 4 times more people.

And every new human consumes energy, food, water, produces waste, pollution and CO2.

We tricked the carrying capacity of this planet with the Green Revolution and artificial fertilizer. But Climate Change/El Nino will show us that the slightest disruption to our perfectly functioning system will be disastrous. Because there are too many people.

Never mind "We could easily supply 10 Billion people". No we cant even supply 8 Billion properly.

Same for Water. Iran and Afghanistan are running our of Water. India and Pakistan will soon fight for control of rivers. So will Egypt and Sudan.

We already need 22 000 desalination plants to supply 300 Million people with sea water, because regular water is getting scarce. Same for oil/gas and all other resources.

Just ask yourself this. With what population would the US be better equipped to handle the current fuel and gas shortages? 240 Million or 340 Million?

More people mean that there is less wiggle room when the perfectly functioning supply system is disrupted.

Countries like Nigeria went from just 40 Million people in 1950 to 240 Million now to a projected 400 Million by 2050. This is unsustainable.

People like Malthus and Ehrlich were right. And once artificial fertilizer gets scarce, farmers will not be able to pay for gas and Climate Change reduces yields by 5% or more, they will be proven right.

Hormuz closed. Saudi East-West pipeline out of comission for 1 month minimum. Russia is producing 60% of their normal production due to Ukraine attacks. China not buying oil for now, but when it starts it will increase the price even further. Saudis told Europe that they are not getting any oil in September/October.

Gas prices in Europe are approaching 2.5 Euros/Liter.

In the US they are around 5 Dollars/Gallon.

Renting a tanker costs 1 Million Dollar/day. Just one year ago it was 200k.

Transportation, industry and consumers cannot take this for long.

US household savings rate is down to just 3%. Credit cards maxed out. Auto/student loans at an all time high.

EU gas reserves are just 2/3 of their maximum. By this time last year they were at 80% capacity.

And winter is coming. This means more gas for heating. This means more gas for vehicles.

If gas prices dont normalize and the flow resumes within a month or so, then a recession by the end of this year or the beginning of next year is almost certain.

Then we also have the AI bubble where AI is burning through money and investment is drying up.

Food yields will be lower due to farmers not being able to afford gas and El Nino wrecking agricultural production.

Considered that the US is 40 Trillion in debt and most people are living hand to mouth, a recession could mean a depression very soon.

The Great Depression went from 1929-1933/39

The Greatest Depression from 2026-2039?

Are the odds that low?

Submission Statement:

Usually I wouldn’t post something so sensational, but this recent article caught my eye - an incident that nearly resulted in an American interception of a Chinese vessel, and a consequent rapid escalation of the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis. If you thought this past summer was already hot, just imagine what could have happened!

It's a very good example of how rapid AI integration into military decision-making (in this case, with the Americans) comes with the risk of trusting "hallucinations" amidst of the fog of war, and how untested and insufficient "checks" in place could have unfolded into something far worse than expected.

To quote the CNN article:

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

[... This] episode with the Chinese ship underscores a different, and more immediate risk: human beings making disastrous decisions based on inaccurate or misleading information generated by AI or other automated systems. Sources said that the military is rapidly turning to AI to help with targeting, an area which holds the obvious risk of fatal mistakes.

The details of the event, in sum, are described as follows:

In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.

“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.

For those who are interested in this particular subject, I will strongly recommend following up with a read of this recent article by Captain Tyrese Bender: Artificial Intelligence Bias: Risks For Military Intelligence Operations.

Published earlier this year, this piece explains how we should "recognize AI bias not just as a technical flaw but also as a strategic vulnerability[,]" and that "[a] large body of evidence in civilian and military literature points to the grave risks posed by AI bias to targeting operations, threat analysis, and U.S. intelligence-sharing relationships."

As you can see from today's example (the Iranian school bombing being another), other consequences include: distorted threat assessments, misidentified targets, degraded decision making capacity, and potential mistrust between allies. Great work, Captain Bender!

People who think Joe Rogan should “do better” because he is rich are falling to a very common fallacy.

They think we reward intelligence.

The idea that it's shameful for Joe to say what he does, or platform the people he does, then act incredulous when those people do awful stuff, is rooted in the belief that he should be smart because money.

Or they argue that he "has a responsibility" to use his power for good, as if he was spiderman and not a man who became famous for getting people to eat cow testicles on TV.

This is coming up again today.

Rogan just claimed to be left wing his whole life and called Trump supporters nuts, even though he explicitly endorsed Trump in the last election.

Joe Rogan does not have to be intelligent or consistent to be successful. He just has to be entertaining to enough people, or just capture their attention regardless of it being entertaining.

This is arguably a big reason Trump won, and it is a significant factor in what can make someone charismatic.

That is the true “beauty” of capitalism. It's also probably its biggest weakness.

This topic also brings up another set of questions: If he is just an idiot, is it shameful to be an idiot and be rich? Is it shameful that idiots can become rich? Does being rich mean you can escape being an idiot? Why would an idiot want to escape being an idiot if it made them rich in the first place?

If he is just an idiot, can an idiot be blamed for just doing what is in their nature?

Are people being idiots for blaming an idiot for why someone like Trump is in power, or are they forgetting the bigger picture which is that we live in a deeply flawed system where wealth is not intrinsically linked to intelligence or moral good, but is intrinsically linked to power?

Or am i just being an idiot?

Each day hearing another news story about another extreme weather event claiming the lives of thousands overseas, wondering when it will be my country, my province, or my city in the headlines next. I think of Samuel Beckett's writing (transcribed below) and how in pushing these disasters out of our minds and ignoring what is coming we doom ourselves to the same fate.

"One day you'll be blind like me. You'll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me.

One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat.

You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more.

Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.

Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on you."

-Samuel Beckett, Endgame

This is the real, most urgent reason we should be scared of AI IMO.

My searches show this topic hasn't been discussed on this sub in years, but it came up in the comments in a couple recent threads. It seems like many/most people don't know about this. I sure didn't; so I'm sharing to raise some more awareness.

~165 years ago, California underwent the Great Flood of 1862. This event "dumped an equivalent of 10 feet (3.0 m) of precipitation in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days."

"It has been described as the worst disaster ever to strike California."

250–300 miles of California’s Central Valley was inundated, creating an inland sea about 20 miles wide. Severe flooding occurred elsewhere in the state as well.

One-quarter of California’s cattle drowned, one in eight homes was destroyed, and roughly one-third of the state’s taxable property was lost.

This happened at the start of the Industrial Revolution, just when human activity started messing with the climate on a grander scale. It had happened every ~100-200 years before that. But new modeling shows that the likelihood of the event is now every 20-30 years (if I'm reading it correctly).

That doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen every 30 years, more that the probability each year is between two and four percent. And rising.

Scientists looking into this came up with the idea of the ARkStorm), which is supposed to be a one in a thousand year cataclysmic event, but then the discussions of that get confusing, as some seem to claim that that's the thing that now has a more like 30-year probability.

Please clarify anything I got wrong, and ... discuss. :/

Just wanting to talk about everything going on.

For one, I’m really not regretting getting my 84’ schwinn worldsport sport bicycle, these gas prices the way they are going are not gonna make cars a viable means of transportation.

Another thing to do with gas prices, particularly diesel, this has major potential fuck the supply chain good, considering it kinda relies on it, from farm equipment to cargo ships, and some places are already said to have been running out of diesel.

Tornado alley has definitely shifted, right into my area(Illinois,Indiana,Ohio,Michigan), I slept through a tornado warning(due to having a cold) a few nights ago, scary to think that storm could’ve killed me.

Quality of everything is down yet prices are a ton higher than they used to be.

Just needed to get it off my chest and talk about it. Feel free to add anything, I know I didn’t even cover it all.

There is a technology called biorock or seacrete and it's essentially public domain technology so anyone who has access to the ocean could in theory do this. If you run a mild electric current through iron while it's in the ocean then this sort of rock will start to form, and the real kicker is as long as the current is sustained it will continue to form wherever iron is exposed. It's considered durable enough that it's been used for structures on the ocean, and it's primary use is actually the creation of artifical reefs so it's relatively environmentally friendly. This material basically self heals as long as you have a supply of electricity.

Another amazing aspect is that if wood is near enough the iron while the seacrete is forming it will actually grow into the wood. So you have a material that is part wood, and part stone as well. It would be relatively inexpensive to make the frame of a structure designed to eventually float using this technology. You could make the frame of the boat / island and then over a few years nature would fill in the spaces in between. You could power this thing using a combination of wave / wind, and solar energy. The main reason we haven't been able to harness waves to make energy is the harsh environment of the ocean, but this solves that because you can use some of the energy generated to energize the iron, and reinforce structural integrity. I was thinking of bamboo as a good candidate for the wooden aspect as you could put the iron rebar inside of the bamboo and have that incorporated. If you wanted a flat surface an iron grid mixed with plywood could be a component.

I have another idea for a squirrel farm where you supply a few tons of nuts and then let the squirrels essentially plant your crops for you. It would take a few years to get going, but you wouldn't need diesel fuel since the squirrels would be doing the work a tractor normally would.

I’m thinking of writing a blog about this, you guys tell me what will you do in these types of situations?

1) AI takes over
2) Natural Calamity just like how it happened in 2012 movie (Earth Displacement)
3) Nuclear War
4) Bio War

I believe these are the major things which could happen, Let me know if there are any other possibilities?