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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   877 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

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Oddball future predictions, anyone?

Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.

More hippos in South America than Africa in 2100. Trophy hunters shooting them are a notable thing; periodic rumblings about introducing lions, saltwater crocodiles, tigers, bears to try to control their population have enthusiastic support from the dwindling number of locals but are opposed by everyone else.

Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.

Someone, probably China, introduces affirmative action for mothers in the workforce, 2040, and the idea spreads like wildfire. It is promptly used mostly for fraud, both on a corporate and individual level.

Faking AI-generated video/images. In other words someone somewhere will film/capture something but for reasons of legality, morality, or popularity will claim that the captured moment/thing is AI-generated, when it is not, in fact, AI-generated. To some degree you already have people pretending to be robots, so this, only more so.

I guess the play would be to release an actual AI generated version of the same picture, so that everything is confused as to what they're looking at and what was the original.

Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.

I'll do you one better: Kilts become a thing in the Blue Tribe by 2030, and by 2050 the kilts that came into fashion in 2040 are Red coded, the ones like that are "Youth Pastor Kilts" and show that you are hopelessly out of date in NYC or whatever. There's a type of skinny jean today that I would have been scared to wear in seventh grade for fear of being called a faggot, and that when I see them today it's a lame real estate agent or something.

My predictions:

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

Major legislation on electric bikes is going to become necessary in the United States, either at the state level becoming standard across most states or at the federal level. I'm noticing a huge surge in biking in my area, as electrical assist bikes make it easier to get up hills. At the beach I started seeing a ton of electric bikes though, and a few electric adult tricycles. People are going to get themselves hurt, and it's going to result in legislation.

The USMNT will continue to protest that the NEXT world cup cycle is "our year" through at least two more times that the US hosts the world cup before ever making the final four.

Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.

In imitation of Ronald Reagan, within five years the US will take part in a Panama or Grenada type tomato-can war to prove something or other. It won't go as planned, first as tragedy second as farce.

An NFL team will be accused of using AI for major coaching decisions this season. It will never be exactly clear the extent to which AI was used, and the results will ultimately be mixed.

Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.

This seems unlikely to me, the DC area has gentrified a lot and they are one of the main beneficiaries of the federal government money printer. A serious effort to relocate core government functions to other parts of the country would kneecap the city, but look how DOGE turned out...

DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

It's interesting because women vulnerable to cults mostly do not want to 'just get laid', they want a committed affectionate relationship. Obviously, the psychologically healthy reaction is to enter committed, affectionate, sexual relationship with a man. But for cults that's dangerous because it reduces dependence on the leader.

A cult feels a lot like a "committed affectionate relationship" to people who are vulnerable to or already in a cult.

And, for that matter, a lot of cults have used assigning or controlling partnerships that are otherwise "normal" as a method of control. In our future cult of incels and femcels, zoomers incapable of forming relationships will submit to the will of the Master, who will assign them a fellow initiate as a partner, on pain of having the partner revoked if you misbehave. Which, after all, isn't that far from a normal religion anyway.

Wasn't there a matchmaking cult which forced a bunch of members to gender transition because the gender balance was off?

Yes, you are probably thinking of Twin Flames Universe. Leadership encouraged several cisgender women, who had no prior indication of being trans, to transition to men.

ETA: I did some brief searching on Twin Flames Universe to determine why members are mostly women. It seems like the marketing and messaging about spiritual counterparts, inner healing, emotional transformation, etc. appeal to women more than men.

It seems like there is an opportunity to improve upon this model. Once you have a lot of lonely single females in your cult it seems like you could pivot the marketing/messaging to attract lonely single men to keep the gender ratio in balance. You need to have different roles for the men that are more appealing, instead of trying to force all members into a model that appeals mostly to females.

Uh, not to be too indecorous but what was the typical BMI of a member? I suspect that most of these single women were not very appealing to men.

From what I remember seeing the members were basically normal in terms of looks, just wildly over-invested in the idea/ideal of One True Love romanticism and the childish wish that the way to get what you want is to really really really want it. You don't have to be fat and ugly to to be dissatisfied with being judged solely for your looks.

Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.

There are already a number of corporations working on adding wingsails to cargo ships for fuel savings, some of which have seen actual use. This article, for instance, gives figures like the following:

On one of its latest transatlantic voyages, Canopée recorded even higher fuel savings of 2.2 tons per day per wingsail. This corresponds to about 510 kW of equivalent engine power saved per wingsail, or 2 megawatt (MW) in total engine power equivalent. The ship even clocked a speed of 13.7 knots under sail power alone, a figure that underscores just how far wind propulsion technology has come.

Now, I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether this translates into actual cost savings or if it’s just an elaborate scheme to collect subsidies for being green. But I see it as evidence for the prediction coming true, and relatively soon at that.

Bunker fuel seems to be something like $500/MT -- so 6 tonnes saved per day is ~$3k I guess?

Not nothing, but the NPV might be a bit tough; not sure how much these sails cost?

That's also probably the ideal vessel for a sail system. Transporting bulky rocket parts below deck makes mounting the sails/masts straight forward, the low density cargo doesn't require a large displacement hull, and the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule. Container ships would have much more trouble finding room for the sails, and with more draft comes more hydrodynamic resistance, and so a requirement for much larger sails.

But maybe bulk carriers could get foils mounted cheaply and quickly. Even 0.1% fuel savings are a big deal in the industry.

Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...

I know on repositioning cruises (where the goal is to keep costs low) they travel at about 16 to 18 knots so 13 under sail power would be a pretty substantial portion of the propulsion fuel needs.

Similar to this, I'm always surprised more US goods aren't long hauled by trains, too. It seems crazy that it's worth 50 people to haul two containers each rather than one train to hail 100 cars but the busy interstates suggest I must be missing something.

USA actually uses way more freight rail than comparable countries. It's just mostly a different basket of goods getting hauled that way- and partly to different places, the rail system was built when population distribution was way different.

People become more religious, but legacy religions decline because people start new religions. We probably see AI religions and more psychedelic religions.

Using nootropics/folk medicine to enhance the well-being of healthy people becomes more common.

Roland Griffiths was probably on to something about creating brain stimulation devices that are able to produce mystical/spiritual experiences that are more reliable and specific than psychedelics.

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