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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   2813 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 quietly ceded in self-driving cars' favour.

It will probably be very easy on a long-enough timescale to mostly eliminate driving. Your kids won’t want to learn. Governments will make licensure increasingly onerous. The economics will lead to many people selling their cars and giving up driving altogether. In certain places.

There will also be a geographical and class component here too. Self-driving cars that work well for urban commuters will not reliably serve rural folk with big trucks and cargo towed up on the back. Imagine the city folk who control all the laws trying to make it difficult for move your RV or boat between your house and your cabin. I expect there will be a lot of that.

Kids are already not particularly interested in learning to drive. Uber is ubiquitous.

I'm uninformed about youths these days. How do young men pick up women and go on a date in non-urban areas if not with a car they drive? Call an uber for a multiple pickup? Maybe the uber driver is like a third wheel?

They meet at the destination, Uber, or the girl will drive if she drives.

I see. In my time, the girls who met me at a location instead of me picking them up weren't seriously interested in me. Things are different now I suppose. I feel that if the guy picks the girl up the start of the relationship it just feels more normal/correct, it's a sign of female interest and trust in the guy with her physical safety. How times change.

Things are pretty different. And a lot of young women don't have any comprehension of how much stronger young men are, so there wouldn't be any implication of trusting the young man if he did drive them somewhere.

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