This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then there was the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.
Remain in a constant state of some sort of war, and you can rationalize militarizing all your multi-redundant law enforcement agencies over every square inch of the map.
Well accroding to Congress the second World War also ended with the defeat of the Viet Cong
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.
I love 3rd rock from the sun
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.
Even in 1998 they knew a black president was more likely than a woman making it into the office.......
Well, they were right, the people definitely elected one.
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
Nothing about socialized healthcare. Pathetic.
That's because everyone knew it wouldn't happen.
Will America have socialized medicine by 2050? Upvote for yes downvote for no.
Nothing about Palestine either. Obviously this means something.
Insurance was better (at least where I was) and overall prices for many things was not as awful. It's not to say there weren't problems, there were and they got roasted in various comedy skits and such, but it was less awful for many. There also probably wasn't as much knowledge of other systems in a lot of the population yet. I don't recall knowing how any other country did it then.
It absolutely was not better. It was the same system we have now but only offered through employers and if you ever switched jobs (and therefore insurance), nothing you'd previously been diagnosed with was covered under the new insurance.
Today (or at least when I last lived in the us) has much higher-deductable plans and a host of other things that wind up taking more out of pocket. I used to joke I got better insurance working at a Wendy's in 1999 than I had working in healthcare in 2013
"illicit drug use such as marijuanja and cocaine"
Yeah just throw those two together into the same question! That makes sense!
Yeah, the zeitgeist of 1998 was... different. D.A.R.E. really did a number on folks.
It’s still wild seeing billboards for weed, even though there’s people still in jail for selling it. :/
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.
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.
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
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