Asklemmy

Ebooks for the book industry

Legalizing weed was supposed to create a bunch of new addicts and turn our towns into slums. Turned out just fine.

The ozone layer hole. Managed to barely dodge that one, just to have fossil fuels eat all the climate benefits that brought us.

Discovery of the Higgs Bosen. People thought it would trigger the end of existence.

Y2K

Oh shit, what year did you just say it was?

Human cloning becoming common. That would be around the time Dolly the sheep died IIRC.

Climate change. We all thought we were gonna have to cut back on consumption, use less fossil fuels, and change our infrastructure entirely to renewable energy.

Thankfully it's not a problem anymore at all. Our wise leaders just decided to stop talking about it and instead just decided we'd speed the process up, burn fossil fuels for glorified chat bots while draining our fresh water resources.

Thankfully it's not a problem anymore. Because a problem would imply it's something that has a solution. We're far past that point. We're essentially watching this generation of our oligarchs committing a mass global genocide of the upcoming generations.

Problem solved.

It might be very country specific. But gambling houses.

They started to proliferate in my country around 10 years ago, and they said they were going to be the end of our youth. I, myself, went to a lot of actions to stop them.

We failed to stop them.

And 10 years after... Nothing happened. There are no mesurable increase in social problems due to the massive increase in gambling I was told it was going to happen. Also the houses themselves are always empty, people gamble mostly online anyway. But they put so much pressure on us to stop the opening of the physical buildings and cause rhe closure of the ones already opened.

I'm in principle against them still. Just because I don't like people making money out of people addicted to gambling. But I'm also kind of mad that I spent to much time, effort, and even got sued for what we tried to do to stop them, just for them not really being as much as a threat as I was told they were. And my efforts would have been much better spent elsewhere.

At least I learned a very valuable lesson.

TV was becoming too good, it was becoming impossible to keep up with all the great stuff coming out. Good thing we managed to avert that, now theres maybe 1 good season of tv every year.

This is going back a bit longer than 15 years but the myth of the Population Bomb was pretty fucking wrong.

It predicted the mass starvation of hundreds of millions of people due yo food production not keeping up with population growth in the 1970s.

Acidic rain.

I don't remember any of the specifics anymore but it boils down to: Trees and plants died in masses, scientists and the general population got together and we changed what caused it.

There are some that were fixed, but fixed with great effort. The hole in the ozone layer for example.

My final answer will be overpopulation. Personally though I think the population should be about 1 billion just so I don't feel quite as much existential dread at my own insignificance.

That my job is too easy. I having too much time to play video games, reading, travelling, watching TV, dating.

That my job pays too good. I having so much money that I not knowing what to buy.

That AI is too well developed and be morally used that I having nothing to do. (Well it kind of is given how easily I could be unemployed)

1. Obesity pandemic

Ever since semaglutide came on the market, it seems like we're slowly getting a handle on it.

2. Overpopulation in Africa/Asia

Automation is causing them to stop having children as more jobs require higher education and there's less jobs around altogether.

3. Poverty in Africa/Asia

Related to overpopulation. China has lifted itself up completely.
India is also doing better every year.
Famines in African nations have severely been reduced these days and all of them are now war related.

[edit]

I'm getting some downvotes.
Is anything wrong here?