"illicit drug use such as marijuanja and cocaine"
Yeah just throw those two together into the same question! That makes sense!
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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It’s still wild seeing billboards for weed, even though there’s people still in jail for selling it. :/
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In 1988 the public perception was that they were equally bad. There were people who tried to claim that marijuana was harmless, but they were "crazy pothead druggies".
The line my shitty parents would always give was "all the people we know who do a lot of marijuana are burn outs and don't go anywhere in life" to which my internal mental response has evolved into "CORRECTION all the people you know who are stupid enough to let your judgemental-ass know they smoke marijuana you mean".
Some of my parents best friends regularly smoked marijuana when I was growing up and neither me nor my parents knew because those adults knew how childlike and intellectually unserious my parents' judgements were around drug use.
Yeah, the zeitgeist of 1998 was... different. D.A.R.E. really did a number on folks.
Loitering, littering, and mass murder will be on the rise.
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Even in 1998 they knew a black president was more likely than a woman making it into the office.......
Well. Half black anyway.
...............
Person: My great-grandfather was Korean.
The Asian Council: spends two minutes deliberatingPerson: I'm 1/8th black.
The Black Council: instantly You're black.
College Humor had it right. (Catbox alt)
Is that Rose from Star Wars?
Ya know, my first thought was "I see the resemblance but I don't think they're the same person." And then I checked Wikipedia and there she is! Television, 2014, CollegeHumor, 'Full Asian.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Marie_Tran
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Well, they were right, the people definitely elected one.
That last one is a trick question. Depends on how you define "war". By some accounts we never stopped being in a state of war somewhere since well before 1998. But if you ask congress, last time was WWII.
It's not a trick question. It's obviously referring to a war on the scale of WW2. A total war that requires major government intervention in the economy and everyday life. That's why it says "full scale war," not merely "war." The last full-scale war we had was WW2.
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There were probably more questions on that Gallup poll that had below 50%. Curious to see what those were.
The actual poll is here, but it's locked behind membership; I can't find any additional downloads. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31088367
The original article that the graphics came from is here, though: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/29/politics/americans-predictions-1998-2025
1998 feels like a completely different world. I’m watching through 3rd Rock from the Sun, watched S03E21 which aired in April of 1998. In the episode Dr Albright, a college professor, hires Sally, one of the main characters who is an alien posing as a human, as her research assistant. In the episode Albright hands Sally a handwritten speech and tasks her to fact check the speech by visiting the library. 📚 Can’t imagine a situation like that occurring today.
Oh snap, are you at the episode with Randy yet? (Season 3, episode 27) It ends in a cliffhanger to end off Season 3,
Spoiler
wherein Harry gets kidnapped to be put in a carnival.
You'll notice, in the start of Season 4, that Randy never returns. This is because Randy was played by Phil Hartman, who died only 8 days after the last episode of Season 3 aired on TV.
When I first watched the series, I was a kid and didn't know why his character was abandoned. Learning about it later, and knowing what a key figure he had in animation (voicing characters on The Simpsons, and being the person that Futurama's Zapp Brannigan was designed to be played by), watching that arc felt very different.
RIP Phil, you're still missed.
I love 3rd rock from the sun
Hurts to see being able to work from home. We're starting compulsory RTO starting next week.
We've had the ability to work from home since the 90s. It took a pandemic to make it acceptable. Now it's rubber banding back.
I never would have expected in 1998 just how many of these would come to pass, how close we are on AIDs and Cancer, and that we still would not have elected a woman president
I mean, the issue with the female president thing is that people keep pushing too hard for it. At this point we've had multiple female vice presidential candidates, multiple female presidential candidates, and a female vice president. The Dems had a big influx of female congresspeople in the last few years, and some of the most prominant GOP voices are women. While there are still non-negligible barriers to women assuming leadership roles, there are certainly fewer than there used to be, and there is no obvious reason why a woman couldnt be president. Which is essentially what a reasonable person would want - a woman should be president because there are no female specific barriers for entering the role, and then via a normal statistical distribution, eventually one will be elected.
The problem is that the two female presidential candidates we've had have been bad candidates. They were establishment politicians running in an anti-establishment climate, where the Democratic party was hoping that the identity politics of running a female candidate would outweigh the unpopularity of the candidates themselves. And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
We can contrast the Harris and Clinton campaigns with the Obama campaign. Obama had a popular (if fluffy) message and was a legitimately charismatic and appealing candidate from outside the party establishment. His campaign was "Hope and Change", not "Look, he's black! Everyone vote for him or you're racist!" But the overemphasis on Clinton and Harris' sex was actively off-putting to voters. Everyone can implicitly tell if you are get votes from identity politics, and they don't like it.
And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
That the thing - those two aren't mutually exclusive. Harris's platform was flimsy and constructed out of bullshit. But if she instead had been a white male, it's very possible trump would have lost. His platform was ALSO flimsy and constructed out of shit.
One day we may very well achieve actual equality. But today, a woman of mixed ethnicity has more barriers to overcome than a loud rich old white man.
I don't think so, I believe Biden is the real reason Harris lost. She had too much ground to make up for Biden's stubbornness to realize he was a weak candidate. Trump's entire strategy was based on how weak Biden was and the party turning against him in the 11th hour only reinforced Trump's claims. Kamala was doomed from the start, I believe she could have won if she had taken the lead from the start of the race. She wouldn't have been my first or even my second but I still think she could have won if Trump didn't have a head start and Dems taking so long to pull their heads out of their asses.
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Not having a woman president, I blame the wife of the man that Trump blew.
Yeah, she really did blow it. It felt like her entry into the race convinced women I would have much preferred as candidates not to enter. A lot of people don't share my feelings about Warren in the 2020 election (mostly that her alleged betrayal is overblown, and that I thought she was the best fit as a compromise candidate between progressives and centrists), but she didn't enter in 2016 and neither did several other high profile women, I think probably because of behind the scenes pressure from Clinton's people in the DNC. Hell even Kamala Harris should have been in the primary in 2016. I don't like or think either her or Warren are good people to be clear, but they're each better than Trump or Hillary and maybe if Kamala had actually run in the 2016 primary she wouldn't have been so bad at it by the time she was up in 2024.
Hillary's power in the party and intimidating name recognition robbed us of a term's worth of qualified candidates, many of them women, who didn't want to publically go against her.
how close we are on AIDs
I mean, technically we DO have cure right now for HIV. Only 7 (maybe 8) people have had it though because the cure is worse than the disease. These folks only got the cure because they were trying to cure something worse and curing their HIV infection was just a bonus.
Yeah, that's what I mean. AIDs felt insurmountable as a disease when I was younger. You mean its an illness that just fucks up your immune system so bad almost everything can kill you?, but these days we have PREP and drugs that can push you into Untransmissable territory, which is a stunning achievement. It went from 'I don't know if there will ever be an answer' to 'the answer feels like it's just around the corner' in 27 years
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Whoever made the poll asked the right questions.
I cant help but think these are just some of the questions asked but the irrelevant ones got removed.
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I don't why people are bent over the woman president prediction not happening. It has almost nothing to do with it being a female candidate, and way more to do with actually having a quality candidate, hence why it's still a 66% "Will have happened".
Obama actually wasn't the DNC favorite, but he had a popular campaign which is why he succeeded.
Hillary and Kamala's campaign can be summed up as a flaming pile of garbage that wouldn't have made any difference in polls had they been males.
Because it's obvious that Kamela would have won if she were a man.
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Cancer will be cured
This one sticks out to me because the question is too vague. If it said, "All forms of cancer will be cured," which is logically equivalent to the one given, then the only answer for anybody who knew anything about the subject is "no."
So, it seems that either people misunderstood the question, or don't know enough about cancer to realize that it's really a collection of terrible diseases that, at our current level of understanding, seem to need different treatments.
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I'm curious about a reverse poll. What do Americans in 2025 expect to happen in 1998?
Everyone can afford an apartment in New York on a barista salary if they have an aspiring chef as a roommate.
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- US americans?
- How much full scale wars was US involved in since then?
Imagine being more confident that cancer will be cured than the US going to war. That is some optimism I truly envy
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I remember having a good deal of optimism about the future back in the late ninety's. Reality has mostly destroyed that.
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