collapse of the old society

And before you shrug and go "great, jobs are bullshit":

Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:

•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),

•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),

•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),

•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).

Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.

Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”

That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.

Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.

EDIT: for people who didn't pay attention to my "think about Appalachia" comment.

Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn't mean the people around you can too.

Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn't know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.

And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of "grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family" - and who suddenly won't be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.

And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that's how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.

Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because "free trade" and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.

You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I'm afraid you're going to.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30754984

A new study published in Nature Sustainability warns that India’s largest cities are slowly sinking. Using eight years of satellite radar data, researchers found that parts of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru are subsiding due to groundwater extraction and soil compaction, a process where the ground compresses as water is drawn out from underground layers.

As our evolution slows and industrialization and technology accelerates, a growing body of research suggests that human biology is struggling to keep pace. Many of the chronic stress-related health issues we face today aren’t personal failings or modern inconveniences – they’re the predictable result of forcing Stone Age physiology into a world it was never built for.

A fascinating new study from University of Zurich researchers has investigated whether the rapid and extensive environmental shifts of the current Anthropocene have compromised the fitness of Homo sapiens. In less-evolutionary speak: if the world most of us experience daily is having a profound impact on mental and physical health as a species.

Synthesizing data concerning industrialization and urbanization and health, the researchers argue that there are many signs that humans haven't had time to adapt to the rapid changes in the world over the last century. They cite declining global fertility rates, rising chronic inflammatory conditions and other chronic health trends as signs that we've been struggling on Earth since the Industrial Revolution.

We live in a society, and it's killing us.

To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.

State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.

They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.

With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.

“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28875587

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28875492

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere soared by a record amount in 2024 to hit another high, UN data shows, deepening the climate crisis that is already taking lives and livelihoods across the world.

The Amnesty International report they talk in the article is here

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28551625

NZ$180bn worth of housing and $26bn of infrastructure at risk of flooding and storm damage, new government report finds

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28375563

A host of powerful interests want to take more out of the system rather than prepare for drier times," the authors wrote, adding that "human intransigence" is a bigger threat to the river than climate change.

To be fair the latter is caised by the forner so it's all human intransigence

It may sound drastic to physically manipulate entire biomes rather than, say, stop extracting fossil fuels, but in recent years, these kinds of ideas have grown more prevalent. Other so-called “climate solutions” have envisioned removing carbon from the atmosphere by planting 1 trillion trees (which would have uncertain climate benefits and require an unrealistic amount of space), cultivating carbon-munching bacteria, or “managing” global sea level rise by building giant underwater curtains. At least one scientist has put forward the idea that we “manipulate the orbit of asteroids,” hitching them to the Earth to nudge the planet to a cooler zone farther away from the sun, despite the risk that this would eject us from the sun’s orbit.

In their new book The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, the Swedish academics Wim Carton and Andreas Malm attempt to explain what’s going on. As they see it, these complicated ideas have arisen from society’s unwillingness to challenge “fossil capital,” the extensive network of infrastructure, assets, and systems owned by companies intent on preserving business interests associated with fossil fuels. That includes pipeline companies, auto manufacturers, electric utilities, banks, and more. Those seeking to address climate change have imagined fossil capital as an “unassailable background condition,” Carton and Malm write, which means they’ve had to assail something else — anything else, even if it’s the oscillation between day and night.

“Deference to the political status quo translates into reckless experimentation with ecosystems or an entire biome,” Carton and Malm write. “Because the former is unbreakable, the latter must be broken.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28249663

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28249659

In the name of ‘pragmatism’, green measures are being ditched, net zero derided. Be very clear: without slashing emissions we are in deep, deep troubl

Sealing America's borders isn't enough for the Trump administration. They want to seal everyone's borders - and destroy the post-WWII global consensus that at least gave lip service to people fleeing dictatorships and failed states and genocide - not to mention, more recently, climate change and natural disasters.

And do we take one more step to a world run on lifeboat ethics - where the developed West builds itself enclaves of "civilization" and leaves the rest of the world to fend for themselves in the climate collapse it caused.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27377775