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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   212 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are some of your predictions for the five years, and why do you think you're going to be right?

Hard mode engaged

  1. No politics
  2. No war
  3. No AI
  4. No immigration

I'm confident that low waisted jeans are going to make a raging comeback in the next couple of years. Not only is the cyclical nature of fashion heading in that direction, but the prevalence of GLP-1 products and will negate the unspoken reason that high-waisted mom jeans got popular.

I think self-driving cars will become a massive new culture war battleground. Industries that stand to benefit from human drivers (e.g. taxi drivers, Uber drivers etc.) will be relentlessly pushing every story they can find about how dangerous self-driving cars are, and we will see "scientific" "studies" with the headline finding that self-driving cars actually get into more accidents than human-driven cars per mile driven (and then you dig into it and you find that the severity of the accidents in the former case is vastly lower than in the latter). Meanwhile, Waymo et al. (along with car insurance providers) will be relentlessly touting the safety of their own vehicles and pushing stories about other kinds of dangers associated with human drivers (e.g. expect to see a lot of stories about women getting raped or sexually harassed by Uber drivers).

Eventually some city will experiment by rolling out self-driving taxis and refusing to issue any new taxi licenses for human drivers. This city will have a vastly reduced rate of automobile deaths and insurance payouts compared to peer cities, and the battleground will be ceded in self-driving cars' favour.

I very nearly took a job with a self driving car startup a decade ago. After seeing a little about how the sausage was made, I've been happy to live so far out in the sticks that it'll be decades before self driving gets any traction.

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